24 Hours. Greg Iles

       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 she 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 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

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