Shady Cross (7 page)

TEN

5:57 P.M.

STOKES DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO
think. It looked like the three teens had independently come to the same conclusion—that they needed to run away as fast as they could. Stokes couldn’t allow that, so he sprang from the car with far more speed and agility than the kids could have expected from a guy with one foot in the grave. Before they could move, he stepped right up to them, looked down at them from his solid, six-two height, and held the screwdriver up in front of their eyes.

“See this?” he asked.

They nodded.

“Think I could do serious damage to you guys with it?”

They nodded again.

“Think I could kill you with it?”

More nods.

“Good. Don’t run and I might not have to use it. Got me?”

Emphatic nods that time.

“Look at me.” They did. He knew what they saw. A big guy with a face slick with blood. Intense eyes, probably, because Stokes felt like there was intensity in his eyes. Probably made him look even scarier. And the pointy screwdriver in his bloody hand certainly wasn’t making him seem any more friendly. “Look at me,” he repeated. “You think I’d hesitate to stick one of you boys if you piss me off.”

They shook their heads that time.

“So you’re not gonna run, right?”

They shook their heads again. But Stokes wasn’t convinced. Tall and Shorty looked ready to bolt the second they got the chance. Stokes looked at the three of them in turn, sizing them up. One of them might have been old enough to drive, possibly two, but they were all wispy things. Shorty looked to be thirteen at most. Without warning, Stokes shot his hand out and grabbed his shirt. Pulled him close. Held the screwdriver against his throat. The other kids tensed but didn’t move. Smart kids.

“This is your little brother, right?” he asked Tall. He’d seen a resemblance.

Tall’s frightened eyes were on the screwdriver. He nodded.

“What about you?” Stokes asked Kevin.

“Friend.”

“I don’t wanna hurt anyone,” Stokes said, “but I definitely will if I have to. Now, I want some answers. If I think you’re lying, the kid gets stuck. If you make me stick the kid too much and he’s no use to me anymore, I grab one of you and start sticking again. So don’t lie to me, OK?”

They nodded again.

“What’s your name?” he asked Tall.

“Chris.”

“Chris what?”

“Parker.”

“Address?”

Chris gave him an address Stokes knew was nearby. Sounded plausible.

“You drive?”

Chris nodded.

“Let me see your license.”

The kid pulled a wallet from his back pocket, removed his license, and held it out.

“Hold it up for me. I got my hands full.”

Chris held it up so Stokes could see it.

“A little light here?” Stokes said.

Kevin leaned forward—didn’t step forward, but leaned as far as he could without actually getting any closer to the maniac with the bloody face and the sharp screwdriver—and shined the flashlight on the license. Chris had been telling the truth. Stokes turned to Kevin and was about to speak when the cell phone in his pocket rang.

Shit
. Stokes understood what had driven Paul Jenkins to insist on receiving a call from the kidnappers every hour on the hour until this was over . . . why he felt the need to hear his daughter’s voice every time . . . but goddamn it, these calls could be inconvenient. He wished like hell he just could say, “Hey, guys, I’ve been thinking about it. Calling me every hour is a lot to ask. Maybe just give me a ring every three or four hours. That’s probably enough.” But he couldn’t say that. The real Paul Jenkins would never have said that, and Stokes needed them to believe he was the real Paul Jenkins.

The phone rang again. Shorty looked up at him.

“Mine, not yours,” Stokes said. “Yours is broken.” He pushed the sharp tip of the screwdriver tight against Shorty’s throat, making a slight indentation in the soft flesh.

“I gotta take this call,” he said. “You guys make a single sound, I push this through the kid’s neck, you hear me?” Without waiting for an answer, he looked hard at Shorty. “You move, you die, OK?” Shorty nodded.

Stokes released his hold on the kid’s shirt, kept the screwdriver hard against his neck, and pulled Jenkins’s cell phone from his pocket with his free hand. He flipped it open on the fourth ring, keeping his eyes on the three kids.

“Hello?”

“Why’s it take you so long to answer the phone, Paul?”

“Sorry,” Stokes said.

“Here’s your six o’clock call. The girl’s doing all right.”

Stokes knew what was expected of him.

“Let me talk to her.”

The kidnapper didn’t respond. A moment later, the little girl’s voice came on the line. “Daddy?”

He reminded himself not to call her Baby. “Yeah, it’s me. You OK?”

Silence on the phone for a moment. “Daddy? Is that you?”

Jesus Christ. He had to put a stop to that. He prayed the kidnappers couldn’t hear his half of the conversation. “Listen, kid,” he said quickly, “your daddy’s gonna come get you, but you gotta help him. You gotta pretend I’m him, OK?”

The girl said, “But where—”

He cut her off. “Don’t ask where your daddy is. He’s working hard to come get you. But you gotta trust me. You gotta pretend I’m your daddy, OK? If you don’t, your daddy can’t come for you. You have to believe me.” Stokes heard the urgency in his voice. He was probably scaring her silly, but he had no choice. “You understand, kid?”

A pause. “Yes, Daddy.”

Stokes blew out a breath.

“That’s enough for now, Paul,” the kidnapper’s voice said. “Got the money?”

“I’ll have it.”

“You better. And you’ve got this evidence you claim to have?”

“I do.”

“OK. Talk to you in an hour.”

The line went dead. Stokes shoved the phone into his pocket and grabbed Shorty’s shirt again. Looked at the kids, who were staring at him, questions in their eyes.

“Forget all that. Where was I?” He thought for a moment. “Oh, yeah.” He looked at Kevin. “Don’t suppose you have your driver’s license yet, do you, Kevin?”

To his surprise, Kevin nodded. Christ, had the kid even hit puberty yet?

“OK then,” Stokes said. “You know the drill.”

Kevin took out his license, held it up for Stokes, shined the flashlight on it. Kevin Joseph Shapiro. Also lived nearby.

Stokes nodded. “OK, guys. Last question. You call the cops yet?”

Kevin shook his head. Chris hesitated before shaking his, too. He was holding back.

“Try that again, Chris. You call the cops yet?”

Chris sighed. “I didn’t call them, but when Kevin came to our house a little while ago, told us he found a wrecked car out here, my mother was in the room. The three of us ran out before she could tell us not to. She might call the cops. Especially if we’re not back soon.”

Stokes almost smiled. The kid had made his point. Pretty smart. Mom knew where they’d gone and would start to worry if they didn’t come back soon. And Stokes believed him. Still, just in case the mother hadn’t called 911, he said, “OK guys, here’s the deal. You never saw me here. Understand? No one knows I was here but you, so if the cops find out about me I’ll know it came from you guys. Remember, I know your names. I know where you live. They find out about me, I’ll come for you. And I’ll be carrying something bigger and sharper and a whole lot scarier than a screwdriver, you hear me? You do
not
call the cops. If your mother already did, you tell them nothing about me. You came here, found a wrecked car, end of story. I wasn’t here. The car was empty. Got it?”

They’d been nodding during his instructions, but the last one stopped the bobbing of their heads.

“Empty?” Chris said.

“That’s right.”

“What about . . . him?” He nodded toward the car.

“The car was empty,” Stokes repeated. “Maybe you saw blood, but you didn’t see a body. And you sure as hell didn’t see me. You understand?”

They looked confused.

“I need to know that you understand. That you’ll do what I’m saying. That you understand what will happen if you don’t do what I’m saying.”

Chris and Kevin nodded. Stokes looked down into Shorty’s face.

“You understand?”

Shorty swallowed hard and nodded. He was scared out of his mind. Stokes felt a little sorry for him.

“You do as I say and you’ll be all right.” He released Shorty, who moved quickly to his big brother’s side. Chris put a protective arm around his shoulders.

“You don’t do exactly what I say,” Stokes added, “I’ll be seeing you real soon.”

They looked at him. He could see they believed him.

“Now get the hell out of here.”

They hesitated a fraction of a second, then ran, kicking up leaves as they sprinted toward the road. Stokes turned back to the car. And Paul Jenkins. He groaned inwardly as he walked around to the open driver’s door. He unfastened the guy’s seat belt and wrestled the body from the car. It wasn’t easy. The guy was nearly Stokes’s size. Similar build, which might come in handy if he needed to get close to the kidnappers before they realized that he wasn’t Paul Jenkins. But though their similar sizes might be helpful later, Stokes would have preferred Jenkins to be a dwarf at the moment. He struggled with the big corpse, which was literally dead weight. When the body was on the ground, Stokes retrieved his bag of money and hiked it up onto his back, then picked up the flashlight and stuck it into his rear pocket. He returned to the body, struggled to get it into a sitting position—which was made more difficult by the rigor mortis that had clearly begun to set in—then groaned and staggered as he hoisted it up onto his shoulder for a fireman’s carry.
Shit
, the guy was heavy. Stokes wasn’t exactly a weakling, but he was surprised at how hard it was to carry a dead body. He switched the flashlight on, then stumbled away from the road, farther into the woods, the dead body heavy on his back.

If the three kids didn’t tell the police what they knew, Stokes’s removing the body from the car should confuse the cops. Even if they figured out the car belonged to Jenkins, and even though there was a lot of blood inside it, if Jenkins was missing, they couldn’t be certain he was dead. And if they weren’t sure, the kidnappers couldn’t be sure—especially if Stokes kept posing as the father in their hourly calls.

Stokes trudged through the dark, chilly night, the corpse on his back slowing his steps. Still, he walked as quickly as he could, ever aware of time bleeding away. He still had so much to do, so much he needed to figure out. And he knew the consequences of failure.

He shifted the body on his shoulders, got a more secure grip, and continued his march through the cold woods, the unwanted image of the kidnappers cutting off the little girl’s fingers, the sounds of her screams, playing over and over again in his head.

ELEVEN

6:45 P.M.

STOKES’S FEET WERE FREEZING. IT
had been twenty minutes since he trekked, with a dead body on his back, through the small but mercilessly cold stream in the woods. Fortunately, the woods, which were on land preserved by a conservation organization interested in saving some frog or turtle or something, backed right up to the rear the trailer park on the edge of town, where Stokes kept his Airstream. He knew the woods well, having cut through them on more than one occasion—usually moving quickly to avoid someone or other he’d seen coming down the road toward his trailer, someone looking for him, maybe to arrest him, or to try to hurt him, or to squeeze money out of him . . . money he most likely owed but didn’t have. Stokes had known the stream was there. So he’d hauled Jenkins’s body for fifteen difficult minutes, dying for a rest but pushing on, knowing that his trail wouldn’t be tough to follow until he came to the stream. He stepped into the goddamn cold water, hoped it wouldn’t rise above the tops of his boots, was terribly disappointed in that regard, and slogged downstream for a hundred yards or so, praying he wouldn’t slip and tumble into the frigid water or, worse, snap an ankle on a slime-slick rock. He was doing anything he could to slow down any pursuit of him that might develop. Cops coming upon Jenkins’s car would see the tracks he’d left leading into the woods. They’d think it was Jenkins himself who had, by some miracle, walked away from the crash. They’d probably think he was disoriented, walking farther into the woods instead of walking thirty feet back to the road. The important thing would be that they thought he was still alive. As long as there was doubt, the kidnappers would have that doubt, too, and they might not abandon their plan to trade the girl for the money and the evidence.

Stokes had exited the stream, lugged Jenkins’s corpse up the slope on the other side, and carried him another minute or two until he found a dense growth of evergreens, where,
finally
, he was able to dump the body and the Altima’s license plates. Then he headed toward his trailer park. He’d intended to run there, but someone seemed to have replaced the blood in his legs with cement. So he walked for a while, trotted a little when he could, walked again, and trotted some more. Soon enough, he came to a chain-link fence, which he climbed over, into the rear part of Forest View Trailer Park.

He looked at his watch: 6:51 p.m.

He cut through properties as needed, wending his way past giant tin can after giant tin can, each of them somebody’s home. He had just reached the back of his trailer when he caught a muffled squawk from out front. He knew that sound. He hated that sound. It made him turn and start back the way he’d come. Then he heard the goddamn door of the goddamn trailer behind his bang open, and Charlie Daniels, Stokes’s goddamn neighbor—no relation to the singer—stepped around his trailer with a full Hefty bag in each hand. He dropped one of the bags, noisily tipped the metal lid off a metal trash can, letting it bang off the side of the metal trailer and clang to the ground. He dropped the bag into the can and looked up.

“That you, Stokes?” Daniels said far too loudly. He wasn’t too bad a guy—he asked for a little too much now and then as a neighbor, a favor here or there, but all in all he was OK. Still, Stokes just didn’t need this right now.

“Yeah, Charlie, it’s me.”

Stokes hurried back over to his trailer, peeked around the side, lifted the lid off his own trash can out of sight of Charlie, and placed the backpack in quietly. He replaced the lid even more quietly.

“What are you doing sneaking around out here, Stokes?” Daniels asked.

Stokes ignored him, moved quickly along the back of his trailer, and walked around the other end. He nearly bumped into a cop coming the other way, as he suspected he would after hearing the radio squawk in front of his trailer, and after his neighbor had banged the hell out of his trash can and had spoken to him, calling him by name, loudly enough for everyone in the park to hear.

Stokes tried to look surprised to see Sergeant Millett, who had questioned him at the police station last night and that morning.

“Officer,” Stokes said.

“Sergeant,” Millett corrected.

Millett was a big guy, Stokes’s height, probably a few pounds heavier, those pounds looking like nothing but muscle. He was two years older than Stokes, which Stokes knew because they were both local boys, with Millett two years ahead of him in school. Of course, Millett finished high school, got into the academy, and became a cop, while Stokes dropped out, got into trouble, and would never be a cop.

“Right,” Stokes said. “Sergeant. Sorry. Guess you’re looking for me.”

“That’s right.”

“How come your shirt’s unbuttoned like that? Can’t you get into trouble for being out of uniform or something?”

“I’m off duty.”

“Oh.” Stokes knew that wasn’t good. If he was giving Stokes a hard time off the clock, he must have been really invested in his case.

“Whose blood is that?” Millett asked.

“Blood?”

After stashing Jenkins’s body in the trees, Stokes had trotted back to the stream, dipped his hands into the frigid water, and rinsed Jenkins’s blood and other gory stuff off his face and his leather jacket. But, he now saw, he’d gotten some on his shirt.

“It’s mine. My blood.”

Millett’s hard eyes appraised him for a moment, looking him up and down.

“You don’t look injured.”

“Bloody nose. I’m fine now. Thanks for your concern, though.”

Millett fell silent. Stared Stokes down. Stokes knew what he was doing. He was trying to be intimidating. He wasn’t saying anything, hoping Stokes would get nervous and try to fill the silence and, in the process, say something stupid and incriminating. But Stokes merely stared silently back until Millett finally spoke again.

“Thought you might want to know that the guy whose house you robbed last night, the guy whose head you bashed in with a brass bookend that’s now missing, the guy who spent the rest of last night and all day today in critical condition, well, the doctors aren’t sure he’s going to make it.”

“Thanks for coming all the way here to tell me this, but it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m sorry some guy got his head dented, but it’s not my problem. I didn’t have anything to do with that, like I spent most of last night and all of this morning telling you.”

Millett stared at him for a moment. “Looks like you might have killed the guy.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You smashed his skull in last night and he might die any minute now.”

“Or he might recover. Whatever. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

Stokes didn’t like the look on Millett’s face. He really did seem to be taking this personally, like the injured guy was his father or something. Maybe it was because Stokes had wised off a bit during the interrogation. Who knew? Stokes should have been smarter than that, but Millett had pissed him off. Nothing Stokes could do about that now. But no goddamn way was he going down for this one. They were pretty sure he’d broken into a couple of houses over the past few weeks—and they were right, he had, trying to raise enough money to keep Frank Nickerson and his psycho sons off his back—but he absolutely was
not
going to let them lay this one on him, especially not if the homeowner ended up dying. Shit, there were other people in this town who could have pulled that job. Why were they picking on him? They had nothing but a suspicion. If they had more, they never would have let him go, not with the guy clinging to his life by a thread. And Millett wouldn’t be here right now, in a desperate attempt to make Stokes say something stupid. Or maybe he hoped his steely glare would make Stokes crumble and confess. Well, he was going to be disappointed. He’d have to find someone else to pin this on.

“Look, Sergeant, you know me. Knew me growing up, maybe heard a few things about me around town since then. We both know I’m no angel, but I’ve never hurt anybody who didn’t try to hurt me first. Check my sheet, ask around about me, you’ll find that’s true.”

“First time for everything.”

“You’re trying to sweat the wrong guy. Meanwhile, the right guy’s out there laughing his ass off at you. Now, you guys kicked me loose, so leave me alone.”

“The guy you put in the hospital?” Millett said. “I’ve known him all my life. He and my father were best friends. He’s my godfather. So you picked the wrong house last night, Stokes.”

Well, that explained a few things.

“I didn’t pick any house last night, Sergeant.”

Millett tried the tough-guy-glare thing for a few more seconds. He actually wasn’t bad at it. But when Stokes didn’t wither under it, the cop sneered and looked Stokes up and down again. His eyes landed on Stokes’s boots, which were still wet from his trudge through the stream. And his feet were still freezing.

“Where you coming from?” Millett asked.

“Sorry, but that’s not your business.”

Millett’s jaw muscles twitched. Stokes stared back at him. At that moment, the cell phone, Paul Jenkins’s goddamn cell phone, rang in Stokes’s pocket. Had it really been an hour already? The phone rang again and Stokes must have reacted in some way, shown his anxiety, because Millett raised his eyebrows, smiled a little, and said, “You gonna answer that?”

“Up to me whether I do or not.”

“Guess it is.”

The phone rang a third time. Millett just stood there. Stokes looked at his watch. Straight up seven o’clock. Another ring. Stokes stepped to his left to move around Millett. Millett slid to his right to block his path. Stokes didn’t bother trying to go back the other way. The phone rang a fifth time. Millett waited. Stokes took the phone from his pocket and flipped it open.

“Hello,” he said, turning his back to the cop.

“Your hourly call, Jenkins,” the kidnapper said.

“Thanks.”

“Got the money yet?”

“I will soon.”

“I know you will, because you got a pretty good idea what happens if you don’t. Wanna talk to the kid?”

“Of course.”

Stokes turned away again and started walking. He could hear Millett following him around the corner of his trailer. He could feel the cop’s eyes on his back. Knew he was listening to every word Stokes said. When Stokes reached the other corner of his trailer, Millett sped up and stopped in front of him.

“Daddy?” the little girl said on the phone, her voice tinged with faint hope.

“No, it’s still me,” Stokes said, “but remember, you have to pretend I’m your daddy.”

A brief pause. “OK . . . Daddy.” Her voice was different from a moment ago, sadder. She’d hoped she’d be speaking with her father again. But she was smart enough to play along. He only hoped the kidnappers hadn’t noticed her change in tone.

“Good girl,” Stokes said, and Millett’s eyebrows knitted. “Keep it up. This will all be over soon. I promise. Are you . . . OK?”

A sniffle. “I guess, Daddy. My hand hurts a lot, though.”

“I’m sorry—”

Stokes heard a fumbling on the other end of the line, then the kidnapper said, “OK, Paul, are we—”

“What will all be over soon?” Millett asked.

“Who’s that?” the kidnapper snapped.

“Nobody,” Stokes said quickly. “Just some guy standing nearby. I’m in public right now.”

“Who’s that on the phone, Stokes?” Millett asked, too loudly.

“What’d he say?” the kidnapper asked. “Who the fuck is with you, Paul?”

“Jesus, nobody, all right, nobody.” He was addressing both of them. “I’m just in public is all,” he said into the phone.

The kidnapper was silent for a moment. “Just get the money. We’ll be heading into the home stretch soon. Then you’ll have your little girl back, almost as good as new. Talk to you in an hour.”

Stokes closed the phone and slipped it into his pocket. Millett leaned back against the side of the trailer. “What’s gonna be over soon?” he asked as he absently reached down and began drumming softly, steadily on the metal lid of the trash can beside him—the trash can where Stokes had stashed the money.

“Not your business, Sergeant.”

“Who’s the ‘good girl’ you were talking to?”

“What?”

“You said ‘good girl.’ ” Millett noticed a crumpled piece of paper on the ground at his feet. He picked it up, uncrumpled it, and gave it a quick scan with his eyes. Stokes wasn’t worried about what was on the paper. Probably a bill. More likely an overdue notice. Either way, he wasn’t worried about what was on the paper. What he was worried about was what Millett was going to do with the paper, which he was crumpling again.

“This is my personal life, Sergeant.”

He held out his hand for the ball of paper. Millett looked at the hand, then reached down and lifted the lid off the trash can. Stokes focused all of his energy on not letting his eyes stray to the bag of money that he knew was fully visible now.

“In fact,” he continued, willing Millett’s eyes to stay locked on his own, “this is my property you’re standing on, not yours, so I’ll have to ask you to get off it. My feet are cold and wet. I need to put on some dry socks. Have a good night.”

He moved past the cop, hoping Millett’s eyes would follow him. An agonizingly long moment later, he heard the clang of the lid dropping back onto the can, followed by Millett’s footsteps behind him. As Stokes stepped up into his trailer, he expected to hear the cop say something like “I’ll be watching you,” but he said nothing. Probably thought it would sound like a cheesy line from a bad movie, which it would have. Stokes closed the door. When he parted the little curtain on the little window in his kitchen, he saw Millett walk over to his cruiser and lean against it, his eyes on the trailer.

Man, Stokes did not need this.