24 Hours by Greg Iles Page B

open-air bar to his left. It was Jackson Everett, an old medical school buddy. Everett was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and held an umbrella drink in his hand.
    “Will Jennings!” he boomed. “It’s about damned time!” Everett shouldered his way across the lobby and slapped Will on the back, sending a sword of pain down his spine. “I haven’t seen you since the scramble at Annandale, boy. How’s it hanging? Where’s Karen?”
    “She didn’t make it this trip, Jack. Some Junior League thing. You just get here?”
    Everett laughed. “Are you kidding? I flew in two days ago for some early golf. You’re giving the speech tonight, I hear.”
    Will nodded.
    “Hey, without Karen, you’ll have to hit the casino with me. High rollers, stud!”
    “I’d better pass. I had a long surgery, and then the flight. I’m whipped.”
    “Pussy-whipped, more like,” Everett complained. “You gotta live a little, son.”
    Will gave an obliging laugh. “Let’s get a beer tomorrow and catch up.”
    “How are your hands? Are you up for eighteen holes?”
    “I brought my clubs. We’ll just have to see.”
    “Well, I hope you can. Hey, don’t put us to sleep tonight, okay?”
    “But that’s my specialty, Jack.”
    Everett groaned and walked off gulping his drink.
    As Will waited for an elevator, he saw a few more faces he recognized across the lobby, but he didn’t make an effort to speak. He had twenty-five minutes to get dressed and down to the meeting room, where he would still have to set up the notebook computer for his video presentation.
    On the twenty-eighth floor, he opened the door to his suite and found his bags and golf clubs waiting for him. The manager had not exaggerated. The suite was large enough for permanent residence. He set his cases on the sitting-room sofa, then walked into the marble-floored bathroom and turned on the hot water. As the bathroom filled with steam, he unzipped his suit bag, hung a blue pinstripe Land’s End suit in the closet, and unpacked a laundry-boxed shirt, which he laid out on the coffee table. Then he stripped to his shorts and lifted his sample case onto the bureau beside the television. From it he removed a bound folder and laid it on the desk. The title on the cover read: “The Safe Use of Depolarizing Paralyzing Relaxants in the Violent Patient.” The paper summarized three years of work in the laboratory and in clinical trials, as well as in the conference rooms of pharmaceutical companies. The culmination of that work—a drug that would trade under the name Restorase —represented potential profits on a vast scale, enough to make Will a truly wealthy man.
    Nervous compulsion made him check the other contents of the sample case: a video-adapter unit, which would allow his computer to interface with the hotel convention room’s projection TV, several drug vials, some of which contained prototype Restorase; and some high-tech syringes. Will counted the vials, then closed the case and hurried into the steamy bathroom, pulling off his underwear as he went.
     
    Hickey and Karen sat facing each other across the kitchen table. A few moments before, Karen had picked up the .38, and he had made no move to stop her. She pointed it at his chest as they talked.
    “That gun makes you feel better?” Hickey said.
    “If you tell me we’re not taking the insulin to Abby, it’s going to make me feel a lot better. And you a lot worse.”
    He smiled. “The Junior League princess has guts, huh?”
    “If you hurt my baby, you’ll see some guts. Yours.”
    Hickey laughed outright.
    “I don’t understand why we have to wait until tomorrow,” she said. “Why don’t you just let me empty our accounts and give you the money?”
    “For one thing, the banks have closed. You can’t come close to the ransom with automated withdrawals. Even if the banks were open, just pulling out the money would cause a lot of suspicion.”
    “What will be different tomorrow morning? How do you plan