Shady Cross (3 page)

FOUR

4:07 P.M.

THE ENGINE OF THE BUS
idled soothingly. They’d be pulling away in a few minutes, leaving behind Shady Cross, Stokes’s problems, and problems that belonged to other people, people he’d never even met, like the kid on the phone. Stokes sat in the last row, next to the john. The backpack was on the seat beside him, next to the window. His elbow was resting on the bag, his head was tipped back, his eyes were closed.

He felt comfortable with his decision. Nickerson wasn’t going to worry about $100,000. Stokes would be out of sight, out of mind. He wasn’t worth Nickerson sending anyone to look for him, least of all Nickerson’s batshit-crazy sons. No, Stokes would take his money, take it far, maybe to California, and just disappear. Start a new life. Start a business, something that could make a buck or two but wouldn’t be too hard. Maybe a hardware store, something like that. He didn’t know much about hardware, but how tough could it be? You hang a sign over your door, companies send you hammers and screwdrivers, you hang them up or put them on shelves. Better yet, you hire someone else to do that. Yeah, that sounded OK.

He glanced at his watch: 4:09.

Nine minutes since the dead guy’s phone had rung. Nine minutes since Stokes had ignored the kidnappers’ call. He wondered what that meant, his ignoring the call. He wondered whether—

Forget it. Not his problem. Besides, when they realize they aren’t going to get their money, they’ll probably let the kid go. Leave her somewhere, make an anonymous call to the cops, telling them where to find her.

He forced his mind to move on to other things. Damn, should he have paid off Nickerson? There was a shitload of cash in the bag under his elbow. If he paid Nickerson a hundred thousand bucks, he’d probably still have plenty of money left; plus, he’d have peace of mind. He never should have borrowed from the bastard in the first place. That’s what he got for trying to walk the straight and narrow. He wasn’t used to doing it, so naturally he’d screwed it up, tripped along the way. He should have known he didn’t have it in him. He’d tried it once years before, and he’d suffocated in that life until he couldn’t take it anymore and just walked away. Since then, no real work, at least nothing steady, or even legal. There were a couple of relatively brief stints in prison, too, which didn’t feel all that brief when he was in the middle of them. Then, a year ago he got the bright idea of starting his own contracting business. He knew even less about being a contractor than he did about owning a hardware store, but he figured he could cut wood and pound nails and figure out the rest. So he borrowed $75,000 and bought a retiring contractor’s business from him. Got himself a bunch of fancy new tools, too, to go with the guy’s old ones. He didn’t like the guy’s dented old truck, so he bought a shiny new one and had a sign painted on its door, professional enough to fool a few people into thinking he was the genuine article. And he’d tried to be. Things went OK for a few months. He had a few jobs, did decent work on some, got complaints on a few others, but nothing serious. Then he caused an electrical fire in someone’s house and the fact that he wasn’t licensed or insured became a big deal. The home owner sued him and Stokes lost in court, which wasn’t much of a shock to anybody involved. He had no money to pay the damages awarded to the plaintiff, which was even less of a shock to everyone, so he was forced to sell his tools and his truck and give the money to the son of a bitch home owner.

A year later now, an exorbitant interest rate had turned the $75,000 debt into a $100,000 debt. Stokes shook his head. Stupid. He shouldn’t have gone to Nickerson. But with no assets, a spotty-to-nonexistent employment history, and a prison record, he had no chance of getting a loan from a bank. Once he’d come to grips with that fact, he had two choices: get the money from Nickerson, or try to get it from Leo Grote.

Despite the name Shady Cross, which sounded like it should have been the setting of
Leave It to Beaver
or something, and which brought to mind images of neighbors sipping lemonade under big leafy trees while their kids played hopscotch on the sidewalk nearby, the place was far from idyllic. The city may have grown up around a shady crossroads in the middle of a small town, but in the hundred-fifty-odd years of its existence, Shady Cross had gotten quite a bit bigger and a lot uglier. Sure, it had its upper-middle-class and even upper-class neighborhoods where reasonably wealthy folks lived when they weren’t working in the bigger—and better—cities, like Fort Wayne or South Bend or Gary, but Shady Cross also had plenty of areas at the other end of the spectrum, neighborhoods ranging from lower-class to downright dangerous, where tenements and projects housed poor people living side by side with criminals and criminals-in-training. And if you were one of those criminals, you operated with the implied or express permission of, and often paid a percentage to, one of two men: Leo Grote or Frank Nickerson.

Both guys were bad dudes—guys with reputed mob connections, guys with their fingers in everyone else’s pies, employers of muscle who’d break your legs if their bosses thought you needed a lesson. They each also had legitimate business—funded with ill-gotten gains, of course, but legitimate nonetheless. And they each turned out to be surprisingly good businessmen, investing in the right enterprises—both legal and illicit—and getting richer and richer by the day.

Despite their successes with their lawful endeavors, though, neither abandoned his less-than-legal ones. So for anyone in Shady Cross shopping for a loan he had no chance of getting through legitimate channels, Grote and Nickerson were the only games in town. And dangerous games they were.

But while other people in Stokes’s situation could pick their poison, Stokes had no choice. He’d worked for Grote for a while as one of the people who might be called upon to snap a bone or two for his boss, and the job had gone well enough until he’d been asked to break some old guy’s knees. The guy had missed one too many payments, and Grote wanted his knees pulped. Stokes, who had done a mostly fair job following orders up to that point, had trouble with this assignment. Something about the old guy. Maybe he reminded him of one of his grandfathers, but Stokes doubted that because he couldn’t really remember either of his grandfathers. Who knew what it was? Whatever, Stokes was able to smash only one of the poor bastard’s knees. Took a baseball bat to it. But for some reason, he just didn’t want to do the second knee. The guy screamed and cried, then he puked, then he cried some more, and Stokes had had enough. He walked out, leaving the guy a sobbing wreck with only one good knee. Stokes thought he’d gotten Grote’s message across pretty damn well, but the boss wasn’t happy. He expected his orders to be carried out. His employees weren’t paid to think, just to do whatever the hell he said. And if Stokes was too much of a pussy to use a little muscle on some worthless old piece of shit, then Grote had no use for him. Stokes said a few things he definitely shouldn’t have said, but Grote was in a magnanimous mood, because all he had his guys do was work Stokes over a little before dumping him in the alley behind one of his buildings. Could have been a lot worse. The point was, when Stokes decided to set himself up as a contractor, he couldn’t go to Grote for the money. So he turned to the only remaining option: Frank Nickerson.

Nickerson’s operations were on the other side of town from Grote’s. What Grote didn’t have his hands in, Nickerson did. While they both had boatloads of money, Nickerson probably took in 40 percent of whatever illicit gains were to be had in the city and the surrounding area, while Grote raked in 60. They’d coexisted that way for years, and both were rich, so neither bothered the other. Everyone was happy—except for anyone who wasn’t Leo Grote or Frank Nickerson.

Stokes had gone to high school with Nickerson’s identical twin sons. They were mean, crazy sons of bitches, but Stokes never had any problem with them. So when Nickerson asked his boys whether Stokes would be good for the money, they said they thought he might be. So Stokes got his loan. But when he practically burned down that goddamn house, he lost everything in the lawsuit and ended up in debt for what eventually became $100,000 with nothing to show for it. And unfortunately, he was now just two weeks away from the due date of a $10,000 payment that he didn’t have . . . until now. But he wasn’t going to pay it. He wasn’t going to be around to pay it. He was going to be far from Shady Cross by then. Maybe New York. Or Boston. And the first leg of his journey was going to begin in just a few minutes. He looked at his watch: 4:17. Three minutes until the bus was scheduled to depart. Seventeen minutes since the dead guy’s phone had rung. Since the little girl had called for her father and gotten no answer. Since Stokes had tossed the phone into the trash. He wondered what would happen to her.

He closed his eyes and rested his head on the seat back. Not his problem. He tried not to think for a while. When he looked at his watch again, it was 4:22. They were two minutes late leaving, and the damn driver wasn’t even on the damn bus.

Daddy?

The little voice in his head said it again,
Daddy
, then added,
Are you coming to get me?

Stokes wondered if he should have at least wrestled a little more with the moral dilemma of whether to take the money and run or try to help the girl. Shit, what did it say about him that he barely considered helping the kid? To hell with it. It said that he was a guy who’d been through some shit, gotten knocked around a bit, that he’d never gotten much of a break in his life before now, that he had enough problems of his own. He opened his eyes, looking for the goddamn bus driver, and that’s when he saw two of those problems of his stepping onto the bus. Stokes sighed. There, at the other end of the bus, filling the aisle, were Frank Nickerson’s psycho sons.

FIVE

4:23 P.M.

CARL AND CHET NICKERSON WERE
as identical as twins could be—so identical that
no one
could tell them apart. Not their friends. Not the girlfriends they went through over the years, it was said. Not even their father, or their mother before she passed away. They liked it that way. They got their hair cut together, identically. They went shopping together, buying all the same clothes. If one of them was out alone and saw something he liked—a shirt, a jacket—he bought the identical item for his brother. Every morning, they checked in with each other, made sure they wore the same, exact outfits, right down to their shoes and belts and pinky rings. They had a good reason for doing this. The practice had kept one or the other of them from serving time ever since they were juvenile delinquents. It even let them get away with murder. Literally.

They had a long history of run-ins with the law, going all the way back to elementary school. But as close as they were, they never committed their crimes together. While one brother stayed home—say it was Chet—the other brother, Carl, would do whatever he wanted to do and didn’t care who saw him do it. Eyewitnesses? Screw ’em. If anyone had the balls to admit they saw what he did, and if the cops bothered to arrest him, all his defense attorney had to do was parade the other brother in front of the jury and ask the witness, who was under oath, “Can you honestly say
without a doubt
that
this
isn’t the Nickerson you thought you saw kick your husband repeatedly in the face?” The witness would inevitably stare at the brother, then at the defendant, who looked
exactly
like his brother, both of them wearing the same goddamn blue pinstripe suit and yellow tie with little blue anchors or something all over it, and everyone in the courtroom, including the jury, would know that the witness truly had no idea which Nickerson had committed the crime. Chet and Carl had “reasonable doubt” in their genes, twisted up in the double helixes of their DNA. It made them practically untouchable. Over the years, countless people watched helpless as one or the other of them committed whatever crime he felt like committing. Wouldn’t even matter if he left behind DNA evidence, like saliva or hairs, because, as the brothers learned through a little research, their DNA was essentially identical from a forensic standpoint. As long as the twin perpetrating the crime didn’t leave behind fingerprints, which would
not
be identical to his brother’s, he was in the clear. Everyone knew one of the damn Nickerson brothers committed the crime, but
nobody
could ever say for sure which one it was. And
that
is reasonable doubt. And if you’re a defendant, that’s all you need. It’s the reason one of the Nickersons had been able to walk into a crowded restaurant, beat some poor bastard to death with a crowbar, leave him covered with blood and linguini on the floor next to his table, and walk right out. Two dozen witnesses. No conviction. Drove the authorities nuts. As did all the cases in which a Nickerson was a suspect.

They certainly had to work at it, though. The furthest they ever went to keep their get-out-of-jail-free cards in their back pockets came when they were in their early twenties. After a night of heavy drinking, Carl somehow ended up in an alley behind a bar with three ex-marines who were passing through town but got totally hammered before they’d passed all the way through. The fight was ugly and animal, and one of the soldiers bit off Carl’s left earlobe. The next day, Chet had his brother bite off
his
left earlobe in exactly the same way. After being identical for twenty-two years, there were seven hours or so when someone could have told them apart before they were identical once again. And they’d been that way ever since. Identical. And crazy.

Yeah, Stokes knew the Nickersons well enough. And they all got along OK. Stokes was never stupid enough to cross the psychopaths, and the Nickersons never seemed to think Stokes needed to be taught a lesson. Until now.

Stokes watched the brothers head toward him down the aisle. He saw the passengers instinctively shy away from them as they approached, even those passengers who probably had no idea who they were. They weren’t that big, really. At around five feet ten inches, 180 pounds, they were a little shorter and a little lighter than Stokes. But they were both thicker all around, clearly having spent a good amount of time pumping iron. Also, where Stokes had a normal face with normal eyes, these guys had flint-hard faces with scary goddamn eyes. Imagine the most violent person you’ve ever seen, one given to fits of rage, and someone walks up to him and tosses a beer in his face for no reason. Imagine the look that would suddenly take hold of his eyes just before he started throwing punches or chairs or whatever else was handy. Well, the Nickerson twins had that look in their eyes all the time.

The bus didn’t have an emergency door, and Stokes didn’t have time to kick out one of the rubber-sealed safety windows, and locking himself in the bathroom would have bought him a minute or two, at most, so he just waited for the Nickersons.

“Stokes,” one of them said. Stokes had no idea if it was Carl or Chet, and he knew better than to ask.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” Nickerson number one said. He jerked his head in a “let’s go” gesture and followed his brother out of the bus, never glancing back, never doubting that Stokes would follow. Stokes pulled the backpack onto his shoulder and walked up the aisle. The looks on the faces of the other passengers weren’t very reassuring. He wondered if those were the looks inmates on death row gave to the condemned taking their last walks.

Stokes stepped off the bus behind the Nickersons. One of the brothers nodded to a fat little man in a driver’s uniform waiting nearby. The driver nodded back, scurried up the stairs into the bus, and quickly closed the door behind him. Clearly, he had been instructed not to leave until the Nickersons got there. And not surprisingly, the driver had complied, the fat little shit.

“Come on,” a Nickerson said as he turned away. Stokes followed the two of them back through the station, toward the main doors leading to the street. As he did, he tried, as he’d been doing all his life, to see some difference between the two—a half inch of height, hair parted differently, a longer stride. He saw nothing. They were carbon copies, Xeroxes of each other.

“How’d you know I was here?” he asked. He’d already decided not to act intimidated. To be honest, he wasn’t sure that he was. Maybe they’d beat the hell out of him. Maybe they’d even kill him. As for a beating, well, he’d had those and survived. And if they killed him, so what? He’d be dead and out of his misery. The only thing that really bugged him was the idea of them leaving him alive but taking his money.

He repeated his question. “How the hell’d you know I was here?” Nothing. The Nickersons just kept walking. Stokes kept following. “Come on, how’d you guys know I was on a bus?”

One of the Nickersons said over his shoulder, “Guy at the ticket booth gets a watch list from us. Names, with photos if we have ’em. People we wouldn’t want to see leave town before we got a chance to talk to them. You know what I mean? We got guys at the local cab companies and a few at the closest airports, too.”

“Hey,” the other Nickerson said to the one who’d been speaking, “shut the fuck up, why don’t you? Why’re you telling him all our shit?”

The Nickerson who’d been so chatty shrugged.

Guy at the ticket booth?
That son of a bitch Stokes had beaten up in high school? Shit.

“How’d my name get on your list? I’ve got a motorcycle. You guys must know that. You should’ve figured if I was leaving town I’d just ride out of here.”

Chatty Nickerson said, “Your name’s on the list. Doesn’t mean we expected we’d find you here. Just means we don’t want you leaving town when you owe us a hundred grand.”

“What’d I say?” the other brother said. The first one shrugged again but fell silent. They were nearly to the front doors when the Nickerson who seemed less inclined to talk said to his brother, “Hey, you want some gum? I could use some gum.”

Chatty nodded. “Yeah, gum sounds good.”

They didn’t ask Stokes if he wanted gum. He tried not to be offended as he followed them over to a vending machine. Non-Chatty checked his pockets for change and came up empty. He looked to Chatty, who did the same. They both looked at Stokes. Stokes dug into his pocket, fished out a bunch of change, and handed it over. Neither said thank you as they popped the coins into the machine and got themselves a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. That was almost too much. Stokes thought back to the old Doublemint commercials, the ones featuring different sets of identical twins smiling like idiots as they engaged in a variety of entertaining activities—tennis, boating, whatever. He might have laughed if he wasn’t in such serious trouble here. He watched Non-Chatty try to open the pack of gum, struggling to get his fingernail under the little tab.

“Where are you guys taking me?” Stokes asked.

“Shut up,” Non-Chatty said.

“Lot of witnesses on that bus. Remember, you guys were there together,” he added, implying that they weren’t going to be able to rely on the old “We’re so identical that no one can tell us apart, therefore there’s reasonable doubt” thing. They didn’t say anything, just took turns fumbling with the pack of gum until one of them finally got it open. “Suppose when we’re walking out I just start yelling about how you’re kidnapping me?”

“We’re not kidnapping you,” Chatty said.

“Seems that way to me.”

“Kidnapping’s a sucker’s crime. You never get away with it. There’s always a witness. Unless you kill the hostage after you get the money.”

“Still, it seems—”

Non-Chatty cut in. “We’re not kidnapping you.” He looked at his brother. “And are you gonna shut up or not?” He popped a stick of gum into his mouth and handed one to Chatty. “Here, you gotta work your jaw, do it on this.” He slipped the pack into his pocket.

“Hey, that’s my gum,” Stokes said, just for the hell of it.

The Nickersons looked at him, then nodded for him to get moving again. He started walking. He looked across the expanse of the station and saw the trash can where he’d tossed the dead driver’s cell phone. He thought about what Chatty had said about kidnapping being a stupid crime unless you killed the hostage at the end. He hoped whoever had kidnapped the little girl didn’t think like that. Either way, it was out of his hands now.
Sorry, kid
, he thought.
I couldn’t help you now even if I wanted to
.

A silver Cadillac Escalade waited at the curb in a no-parking zone. Chatty got behind the wheel and Non-Chatty motioned toward the back door as he climbed into the front passenger seat. Again, it never seemed to cross their minds that Stokes would try to run. And frankly, he wouldn’t. Why bother? He wouldn’t get far. He’d rather take his chances face-to-face. Maybe he could talk his way out of this. If not, maybe he’d get in a lucky punch or two.

When they were all in the vehicle, the Nickersons fastened their seat belts while Stokes waited for the car to pull away from the curb. He was thinking hard, trying to come up with a possible scenario that wouldn’t end badly for him. They were pissed he was trying to leave town, that was for sure. Their father would probably be even more pissed. Stokes thought about giving them the ten thousand he owed right then, taking it out of the bag and handing it over, but they’d certainly want to see what else he had in the bag, thinking there might be more money, which there was. And they’d take it all, so screw that.

“Buckle your seat belt,” Non-Chatty said.

“You’re worried about my safety?” Stokes thought that was ironic, which was a word he was never sure he was using correctly, but he thought he knew irony when he saw it.

“Shit no, but if my brother screws up and hits a goddamn tree, you think I want you flying up here and splattering all over me? Now put on your seat belt and stop dicking around. You think we got all day to spend with you? You already interrupted our day by getting on that bus, making us come down here and pull you off of it. So cut the crap. We got places to be.”

Stokes shrugged and did as he was told. He held the backpack tightly in his arms, but thinking that might look suspicious, he put it on the floor between his feet. The Nickersons must not have considered him much of a threat or they wouldn’t have let him sit in the back by himself with his bag. Apparently, the thought that he might be carrying a gun never occurred to them. It should have, but they weren’t terribly bright. Then again, he wasn’t carrying. He never did. He didn’t even own a gun. He didn’t like them. Sure, he’d fantasized as a kid about being a gunslinger, fingers twitching near the handle of his Colt .45 as he stood in the dusty street, staring down the fastest gun in town while tumbleweeds rolled past and frightened townsfolk watched from the safety of their windows and doorways. But then he grew up. Guns were serious. They usually made things worse, not better. He wasn’t scared of them, but he simply didn’t want to do the kind of work or pull the kind of jobs where they were needed. Didn’t think the risk was worth it. So he stayed away from them. Still, if the Nickerson boys had an ounce more brains between them, they would have at least searched him, and the bag, and found no gun but a lot of money. Stokes hoped they wouldn’t wise up en route to wherever they were taking him.

Chatty pulled the Escalade away from the curb. Stokes was thinking hard. How was he going to get out of this with most of the cash and all of his bones intact?

“This about the money I owe your father?”

“What the hell do you think?” Chatty said.

“I think it is.”

“Fucking genius.”

“I have it.”

Silence.

“I have it,” Stokes repeated.

He saw Chatty’s eyes flick up to regard him in the rearview mirror. Non-Chatty turned around. “Bullshit,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

“Then why were you skipping town?”

“I wasn’t. I was going to Akron for a couple of days. Got some friends there who owe me money.”