24 Hours Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the thrillers of Greg Iles

  24 Hours

  “Iles’s latest brilliantly plotted tale walks the razor ’s edge between cinematic excess and bone-chilling suspense. The well-rounded characters are trademark Iles; the plot runs speed-skating smooth... Nasty surprises and perfectly timed terror... A perfect Mississippi setting, a spot-on send-up of FBI assistance and a hair-raising finale complete the package.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Chilling...The seemingly perfect American family is targeted by a madman who has refined the art of kidnap, and roars into their lives like an avenging angel...A memorable trip down paranoia lane.”

  —The Ottawa Citizen

  “A new thriller that is sure to earn even more plaudits. 24 Hours is a taut tale, terrifying in its intensity, compelling in its pace...The finale is an amazing scenario with the cinematic flavor of a Bruce Willis caper...A good old-fashioned thriller, the likes of which are rare...A winner.”

  —The Chattanooga Times

  “An enigmatic crime figure, as brilliant as Hannibal Lecter and as seemingly haphazard as Charles Manson...Iles provides enough twists and turns to keep his hair-raising ending unpredictable and the plot surefire grist for a movie.”

  —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  “Greg Iles displays all the well-honed chops that have made him a bestselling author...He achieves a near-perfect balance of high-tech inventiveness and characterization as the plot rushes to its grand—and violent—finale...Inventive and fast-paced.”

  —The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

  The Quiet Game

  “Suspenseful.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Grabs you fast and keeps you glued.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The climactic unveiling... will spellbind readers.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Incredibly engrossing.”—The Denver Post

  “A deliciously complicated plot.”—Booklist

  “Fast-paced action, surprise tactics, and down-and-dirty legal maneuvering played out below the surface calm of the deep South will transfix the reader to the very last page.”—Library Journal

  “This ably crafted, richly atmospheric legal thriller is engrossing.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Thriller-meister Greg Iles... conveys the darker undercurrents of small-town life, and he doesn’t flinch in handling the racial themes.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The pace is frenetic, the fear and paranoia palpable, and the characters heartbreakingly honest.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  Mortal Fear

  “An ingenious suspense thriller... fascinating.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A chilling roller-coaster ride.”—Library Journal

  “Greg Iles mixes action and suspense like a master!”

  —Stephen Coonts

  “Stay-up-all-night suspense...A relentlessly readable thriller.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “Iles displays a flair by pushing topical hot buttons.”

  —Booklist

  “Jackhammer pacing... addictive... You know you’re in Iles country.”

  —The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS)

  Black Cross

  “On fire with suspense.”—Stephen King

  “A thriller of such accomplishment that it vaporizes every cliché... good enough to read twice.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A truly fine novel...Totally absorbing and ingenious.”—Nelson DeMille

  “A stunning, horrifying, mesmerizing novel that will keep readers transfixed from beginning to end.”

  —Booklist

  “The finest thriller since Eye of the Needle...Vital, compelling, magnificent.”—Romantic Times

  “Henceforth, any recommended reading list of thrillers will have to include this.”—Publishers Weekly

  Spandau Phoenix

  “Masterful action and suspense . . . a sizzling-hot read.”—Stephen Coonts

  “A terrific thriller in the great tradition of Jack Higgins...A remarkable, impressive novel.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  “An incredible web of intrigue and suspense, an avalanche of action from first page to last.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “An irresistible plot...A scorching read.”

  —John Grisham

  “Amazing...A masterwork. A thriller whose depth and scope are sweeping.”—Tampa Tribune-Times

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd,

  Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First Signet Printing, July 2001

  Copyright © Greg Iles, 2000

  Excerpt from Dead Sleep copyright © Greg Iles, 2001

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author ’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04141-3

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Aaron Priest, the Man.

  Phyllis Grann, for paving the way.

  David Highfill, for bearing with the writer’s obsessiveness.

  Louise Burke, for her hard work and support.

  MEDICAL ADVICE: Jerry Iles, M.D., William Daggett, M.D., Noah Archer, M.D., and Michael Bourland, M.D.

  AVIATION: Mike Thompson, Justin Cardneaux, and Stephen Guido.

  MISCELLANEOUS: Lisa Erbach-Vance, Glen Ballard, Jon Wood at Hodder, Michael MacInnis, Rush and Leslie Mosby, Ken and Beth Perry, Susan Chambliss, Simmons Iles, Robert Royal, Brent Bourland, Caroline Trefler, Carrie, Madeline, and Mark.

  READERS: Ed Stackler, Betty Iles, Michael Henry, and Courtney Aldridge.

  To those I have omitted through oversight, my sincere apologies. As always, all mistakes are mine.

  For Geoff Iles,
>
  who’s been there for me

  from the beginning (almost)

  He that hath a wife and children Hath given hostages to fortune.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  ONE

  “The kid always makes it. I told you that.”

  Margaret McDill had not seen the man in her life until yesterday, but he had dominated every second of her existence since their meeting. He had told her to call him Joe, and he claimed it was his real name, but she assumed it was an alias. He was a dark-haired, pale-skinned man of about fifty, with deep-set eyes and a coarse five-o’clock shadow. Margaret could not look into his eyes for long. They were dark, furious pools that sucked the life out of her, drained her will. And now they carried knowledge about her that she could not bear.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said quietly.

  Something rippled deep in the dark eyes, like the flick of a fish tail. “Have I lied to you about anything else?”

  “No. But you . . . you let me see your face all night. You won’t let me go after that.”

  “I told you, the kid always makes it.”

  “You’re going to kill me and let my son go.”

  “You think I’m going to shoot you in broad daylight in front of a freakin’ McDonald’s?”

  “You have a knife in your pocket.”

  He looked at her with scorn. “Jesus Christ.”

  Margaret looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to look at Joe, and she didn’t want to chance seeing herself in one of the mirrors. The one at home had been bad enough. She looked like someone who had just come out of surgery, still groggy with anesthesia. An unhealthy glaze filmed her eyes, and even heavy makeup had failed to hide the bruise along her jaw. Four of her painstakingly maintained nails had broken during the night, and there was a long scratch on her inner forearm from the initial scuffle. She tried to remember exactly when that had happened but couldn’t. Her sense of time had abandoned her. She was having trouble keeping her thoughts in order. Even the simplest ones seemed to fall out of sequence by themselves.

  She tried to regain control by focusing on her immediate environment. They were sitting in her BMW, in the parking lot of a strip mall, about fifty yards from a McDonald’s restaurant. She had often shopped at the mall, at the Barnes & Noble superstore, and also at the pet store, for rare tropical fish. Her husband had recently bought a big-screen television at Circuit City, for patient education at his clinic. He was a cardiovascular surgeon. But all that seemed part of someone else’s life now. As remote as the bright side of the moon to someone marooned on the dark half. And her son, Peter . . . God alone knew where he was. God and the man beside her.

  “I don’t care what you do with me,” she said with conviction. “Just let Peter live. Kill me if you have to, just let my son go. He’s only ten years old.”

  “If you don’t shut up, I might take you up on that,” Joe said wearily.

  He started the BMW’s engine and switched the air conditioner to high, then lit a Camel cigarette. The cold air blasted smoke all over the interior of the car. Margaret’s eyes stung from hours of crying. She turned her head to avoid the smoke, but it was useless.

  “Where’s Peter now?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

  Joe took a drag off the Camel and said nothing.

  “I said—”

  “Didn’t I tell you to stop talking?”

  Margaret glanced at the pistol lying on the console between the seats. It belonged to her husband. Joe had taken it from her yesterday, but not before she had learned how useless a gun was to her. At least while they had Peter. Some primitive part of her brain still urged her to grab it, but she doubted she could reach the pistol before he did. He was probably waiting for her to try just that. Joe was thin but amazingly strong, another thing she’d learned last night. And his hard-lined face held no mercy.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he,” Margaret heard herself say. “You’re just playing games with me. He’s dead and you’re going to kill me, too—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Joe said through clenched teeth. He turned over his forearm and glanced at his watch. He wore it on the inside of his wrist so that Margaret couldn’t see the time.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

  “Again?” He punched a number into the BMW’s cell phone. As he waited for an answer, he muttered, “I do believe this has been the worst twenty-four hours of my life to date. And that includes our little party.”

  She flinched.

  “Hey,” he said into the phone. “You in your spot? . . . Okay. Wait about a minute, then do it.”

  Margaret jerked erect, her eyes wide, searching the nearby cars. “Oh my God. Peter! Peter!”

  Joe picked up the gun and jammed the barrel into her neck. “You’ve come this far, Maggie. Don’t blow it now. You remember what we talked about?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I remember.”

  A hundred yards from Margaret McDill’s BMW, Peter McDill sat in an old green pickup truck, his eyes shut tight. The truck smelled funny. Good and bad at the same time, like just-cut grass and old motor oil, and really old fast food.

  “You can open your eyes now.”

  Peter opened his eyes.

  The first thing he saw was a McDonald’s restaurant. It reassured him after his night of isolation. The McDonald’s stood in the middle of a suburban strip mall parking lot. As Peter panned his eyes around the mall, he recognized the stores: Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, the Gateway 2000 store. He’d spent hours in that store. It was only a few miles from his house. He looked down at his wrists, which were bound with duct tape.

  “Can you take this off now?”

  He asked without looking up. The man behind the wheel of the truck was hard for him to look at. Peter had never seen or heard of Huey before yesterday, but for the last twenty-four hours, he had seen no one else. Huey was six inches taller than his father, and weighed at least three hundred pounds. He wore dirty mechanic’s coveralls and heavy plastic glasses of a type Peter had seen in old movies, with thick lenses that distorted his eyes. He reminded Peter of a character in a movie he’d seen on the satellite one night, when he sneaked into the home theater room. A movie his parents wouldn’t let him watch. The character’s name was Carl, and the boy who was Carl’s friend in the movie said he sounded like a motorboat. Carl was nice, but he killed people, too. Peter thought Huey was probably like that.

  “When I was a little boy,” Huey said, peering thoughtfully through the windshield of the pickup, “those golden arches went all the way over the top of the restaurant. The whole place looked like a space-ship.” He looked back at Peter, his too-big eyes apologetic behind the thick glasses. “I’m sorry I had to tape you up. But you shouldn’t’ve run. I told you not to run.”

  Peter’s eyes welled with tears. “Where’s my mom? You said she was going to be here.”

  “She’s gonna be here. She’s probably here already.”

  Through the heat shimmering off the asphalt, Peter scanned the sea of parked cars, his eyes darting everywhere, searching for his mother’s BMW. “I don’t see her car.”

  Huey dug down into his front coverall pocket.

  Peter instinctively slid against the door of the pickup truck.

  “Look, boy,” Huey said in his deep but childlike voice. “I made you something.”

  The giant hand emerged from the pocket and opened to reveal a carved locomotive. Peter had watched Huey whittling for much of the previous afternoon, but he hadn’t been able to tell what Huey was working on. The little train in the massive palm looked like a toy from an expensive store. Huey put the carving into Peter ’s bound hands.

  “I finished it while you was sleeping,” he said. “I like trains. I rode one once. When I was little. From St. Louis, after Mamaw died. Joey rode up by hisself on the train and got me. We rode back together. I got to sit in front with t
he rich people. We wasn’t supposed to, but Joey figured a way. Joey’s smart. He said it was only fair. He says I’m good as anybody. Ain’t nobody no better than nobody else. That’s a good thing to remember.”

  Peter stared at the little locomotive. There was even a tiny engineer inside.

  “Whittlin’s a good thing, too,” Huey went on. “Keeps me from being nervous.”

  Peter closed his eyes. “Where’s my mom?”

  “I liked talking to you. Before you ran, anyway. I thought you was my friend.”

  Peter covered his face with his hands, but he kept an eye on Huey through a crack between his left cheek and palm. Now that he knew where he was, he thought about jumping out. But Huey was faster than he looked.

  Huey dug into his coveralls again and brought out his pocketknife. When he opened the big blade, Peter pressed himself into the passenger door.