24 Hours by Greg Iles

knees beneath her and used the edge of the table to pull herself to her feet. The gun remained on the floor.
    He walked past her to the opposite wall of the kitchen, where a four-foot-wide framed silk screen hung. It was a semi-abstract rendering of an alligator, brightly colored like a child’s painting, but with the unmistakable strength of genius in it.
    “You’ve got paintings by this guy all over your house,” he said. “Right?”
    “Yes,” Karen replied, her thoughts on Abby. “Walter Anderson. He’s dead.”
    “Worth a lot of money?”
    “That silk screen isn’t. I colored it myself. But the watercolors are valuable. Do you want them?”
    Hickey laughed. “Want them? I don’t give a shit about ’em. And by morning, you’re going to hate every one. You’re never going to want see another one again.”
    He turned from the painting and smiled.

    Forty miles south of Jackson, a small, tin-roofed cabin stood in a thick forest of second-growth pine and hardwoods. An old white AMC Rambler rested on cinder blocks in the small clearing, blotched with primer and overgrown by weeds. A few feet away from the Rambler stood a rusting propane tank with a black hose curled over the valve mechanism. Birdcalls echoed through the small clearing, punctuated by the rapid-fire pock-pock-pock of a woodpecker, and gray squirrels chased each other through the upper branches of the oaks.
    The animals fell silent. A new sound had entered the woods. A motor. An old one, its valves tapping from unleaded gasoline. The noise grew steadily until the green hood of a pickup truck broke from beneath the trees into dappled sunlight. The truck trundled down the rutted lane and stopped before the cabin porch.
    Huey Cotton got out and walked quickly around the hood, the Barbie still sticking out of his pocket. He opened the passenger door and lifted Abby’s limp body off the seat. Cradling her like an infant in his massive arms, he closed the truck’s door with his hip and walked carefully up the porch steps.
    The old planks groaned beneath his weight. He paused before the screen door, then bent at the waist, hooked his sausagelike pinkie in the door handle, and shuffled backward until the screen opened enough for him to thrust his bulk between it and the main door. The main door yielded to one shove of his size-16 Redwing boot. He carried Abby through it, and the screen door slapped shut behind him with a bang.

    Will landed the Baron behind a vintage DC-3 he would have loved to get a look at, but today he didn’t have the time. He taxied to the general aviation area and pulled into the empty spot indicated to him by a ground crewman. The Gulfport-Biloxi airport housed units of the Army and Air National Guard. There were fighter jets and helicopters stationed around the field, and the resulting high security always gave Will a little shock.
    He had radioed ahead and arranged to have his rental car waiting at U.S. Aviation Corp., which handled the needs of private pilots. As soon as the props stopped turning, he climbed out and unloaded his luggage from the cabin. Hanging bag, suitcase, sample case, notebook computer case, golf clubs. Schlepping it all to the blue Ford Tempo made his inflamed sacroiliac joints scream, even through the deadening layer of ibuprofen.
    A security guard told him that Interstate 10 East had been closed due to a jackknifed semi-truck, so he would have to take the beachfront highway to Biloxi. Will hoped the traffic was not too bad between the airport and the casino. He had less than an hour to reach the meeting room, and he needed to shower and shave before he took the podium before five hundred physicians and their wives.
    It took him five minutes to reach U.S. 90, the highway that ran along the Gulf of Mexico from Bay Saint Louis to the Alabama border and Mobile Bay. The sun was just starting to fall toward New Orleans, sixty miles to the west. It would still be light when he began his lecture. Bathing-suited