“Do you remember what I taught you about calling the police? What numbers to call?”
“Nine?” Abby thought aloud. “Nine-nine-one?”
“Nine-one-one.”
“Oh. I know. When I’m nervous I forget. I know our phone number.”
“Good, honey. Don’t be nervous, now. Mr. Huey has a cell phone. If he goes to the bathroom, he might forget it. If he does, you use it to call nine-one-one. Run and hide outside with it, tell them you’re in trouble, and then hide the phone. Don’t hang it up. If you can do all that, people will come and bring you home to Mommy and Daddy early. Do you understand?”
Abby’s eyes were wide. “Will the policeman hurt Huey?”
“No, baby. But don’t even try it unless you can call without him knowing. Okay? It’s like a game.”
Tears shone in Abby’s eyes. “I’m scared, Mom. I want to go home with you.”
“Listen to me, honey. If you have to do number two, you wipe yourself. Don’t ask Mr. Huey for help. Even if he’s nice. You don’t know him well enough.”
Hickey dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with his foot. “Old home week’s over,” he called. “Let’s mount up.”
Abby screamed and grabbed Karen’s neck.
“Let’s go,” said Hickey, walking toward her. “Tell princess bye-bye.”
“Nooo!” Abby wailed. “Noooooooo!”
Karen looked over her shoulder at Hickey, her eyes pleading. “I’m begging you. Let me stay here with her until morning. What can it possibly matter?”
“I told you about this crap.” He held out his arms. “Hand her over.”
Karen backed away, clutching Abby in her arms. She knew it would do no good, but the decision was not hers to make. Two million years of evolution would not let her voluntarily give up her child. Hickey lunged forward and grabbed Abby under the arms, then yanked at her as if pulling on a sack of feed. Abby shrieked like she was being flayed alive.
“Stop!” Karen yelled at Hickey. “Stop it! You’re hurting her!”
“Then let go, goddamn it!”
With a cry of desolation, Karen let go.
A heart-wrenching scream burst from Abby’s lips.
Karen snatched up the ice chest, then ran to Huey and hooked the handle of the Igloo around his huge fingers. There were more syringes inside, and five vials of insulin, including one of Humalog. “Please keep this! If Abby gets sick or passes out, call me and I’ll tell you what to do!”
The giant’s face was a mask of bewildered fear. “Yes, ma’am. I-”
“Shut up!” Hickey shouted. “Get the kid back inside, retard!”
Karen laid both hands against Huey’s chest. “I know you’re a good Christian man. Please don’t hurt my baby!”
Huey’s mouth fell open, exposing his yellow teeth. “Hurt your baby?”
Hickey thrust Abby into Huey’s arms, then grabbed Karen by the elbow and dragged her toward the Expedition.
“I’ll be back in the morning, Abby!” Karen promised. “I’ll be the first thing you see tomorrow!”
Abby continued to shriek with air-raid intensity, so loudly that Karen finally put her hands over her ears to blunt the agony of hearing her child’s terror. But even that didn’t work. Ten yards from the Expedition, she slammed her right elbow into Hickey’s head and charged back toward the other pair of headlights.
She was halfway there when Hickey cracked her on the back of the head with what felt like a hammer, sending her sprawling onto the hard dirt. She heard a door slam, then the squeal of a loose fan belt as Huey’s truck backed slowly down the road.
High in the Beau Rivage Hotel in Biloxi, the phone rang in suite 28021. Will grabbed it before Cheryl could.
“Joe?” he said. “Is this Joe?”
“Will?” said an uncertain voice.
“Karen!”
The sound of weeping came down the line, and it nearly unmanned him. It took a lot to make Karen Jennings cry.
“Did you see Abby?” he asked through the lump in his throat. “Did you get her the insulin?”
“Will, she’s so scared! I gave her eight units and left some extra vials and syringes. It was awful-”
Karen screamed; then her voice was replaced by Hickey’s. “You can calm down now, college boy. Your kid got her medicine. It’s sayonara for now.”
“Wait!”
Will was shouting at a dead phone. He exhaled slowly, trying to control the wild anger swelling in his chest. It was simply not in his nature to endure anguish and frustration without acting.
“Hey,” said Cheryl. “Everything’s gonna be okay. It is.” She reached out to touch his shoulder.
Will slammed the phone into the side of her head. As she fell across the bed, he tried to wrench the gun from her hand, but she held it tight. They wrestled over the bedspread, clawing and fighting for the weapon. Will’s joints shot fire through his limbs and trunk, but they kept functioning. Cheryl was clutching the gun beneath her breasts with both hands. Abandoning caution, he grabbed it blindly with both hands and yanked as hard as he could.
Something ripped, Cheryl screamed, and the gun came away in his hands. He jumped up and pointed it at her. She was cradling her bloody right hand.
“What the hell?”
Cheryl’s dress had torn, exposing her from the waist up. She wore a sheer black bra, but Will wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was staring at a blue and green montage of bruises that covered her abdomen and ribs like stains, one of which continued up into the bra.
“What happened to you?”
She backed against the ornate headboard, the movement instinctive, animallike. “Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing. That’s a beating.”
She picked up a pillow and covered her chest. “It’s nothing. And you just screwed up big-time.”
After venting his rage in the attack, Will found himself puzzled about what to do next. “I want to ask you something, Cheryl.”
“Fuck you.”
“Are you committed to this kidnapping?”
She said nothing.
“Because I have a feeling you’re not. I have a feeling this kind of thing is what Joe gets off on, but not you. I think you tried to talk him out of it. That’s why you got the beating, isn’t it?”
Her face was as closed as a tribal mask. “Don’t need no reason for a beating,” she said, all her earlier elocution gone. “Ain’t never no reason.”
Will flashed back to his days as a resident, working the Jackson ERs. He’d seen more physical abuse in six months than he’d thought existed in the world at the time. And many of the responses he got from women sounded exactly like Cheryl’s. Sullen, angry, resigned. But he couldn’t solve her marital problems in one night. He couldn’t even solve his own. With that thought, a new idea entered his mind. And with it a new fear.
“Why are you here with me?” he asked.
Cheryl looked blank.
“I mean, why isn’t Joe here with me? He obviously resents the hell out of me. If he was here, he could piss on me all night, beat the hell out of me. I’d have no choice but to take it. But he passed up that chance.” Will lowered the gun and stepped closer to the bed. “It doesn’t make sense, Cheryl. Why not man-man, woman- woman? You know? A man has a lot more chance of controlling an angry father than a woman does. Has Joe done it this way every time? Is he always with the wife?”
She wiped her bloody hand on the pillow. “Putting me with the husband avoids the whole macho thing. A type A jerk like you doesn’t feel as threatened by a woman. You’re less likely to blow up and do something stupid.” She gingerly tested her right wrist. “Only you just did. You hurt me, you bastard.”
