Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,5,260489-shady_cross.html
The men’s room door opened, and a gray plastic trash can on wheels rolled out, pushed by a sweaty guy in navy coveralls. The ringing grew louder as the janitor wheeled the trash can away from the men’s room and closer to where Stokes was standing. Stokes covered the distance to the can in four long strides, wondering as he did why the hell the janitor wasn’t more curious about the phone ringing in the trash can he was wheeling around. Stokes stopped the can and began pawing frantically through the garbage. The janitor looked surprised for a moment before shrugging and taking a seat in a row of nearby chairs, where he could watch from a safe distance.
The ringing continued as Stokes rooted through the trash, literally holding his breath as he pushed aside a half-eaten apple, old newspapers, cardboard toilet paper rolls, empty Styrofoam coffee cups, disgustingly moist paper towels, and a lot of unidentifiable nasty things until his hand finally closed around the smooth plastic of the cell phone. It had just finished another ring when Stokes flipped it open and raised it to his face. He tried not to think about where it had just been and why it was so sticky as he said, “Hello? Hello?”
The phone was silent a moment and Stokes thought he was too late. Finally, a man said, “You trying to kill your daughter? Where the hell have you been? We called you at four, like we said we would, then we tried you every fifteen minutes. We were about to give up and tie up the loose ends here, if you follow me.” The voice sounded a little different than before. There was clearly more than one kidnapper; maybe they shared phone duty.
“Sorry,” Stokes said, “sorry.” Realizing that if he were truly the girl’s father, he’d sound sorrier than he just had, he added, “Really, I’m so, so sorry.”
“I thought you knew we were serious. I thought you said you watched the first video.”
Video?
“You saw it, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“You didn’t like it, did you?”
It didn’t sound like he would have, if he’d seen it, so he said, “No, I didn’t.”
“So how the hell can you make us send you a second one? My God, what’s wrong with you? You watch that one yet?”
Second one? Oh, no.
“You don’t think we’re serious, Paul? Did you watch the second video?”
“I know you’re serious.”
“Did you watch the second video we sent?”
“No.”
“Hang up and watch it. I’ll call back in five minutes.”
The line went dead. Stokes hesitated, then examined the phone for a moment. They said they sent two videos. Stokes’s own cell phone was a relatively Stone Age model, without any bells and with, at most, one whistle, but he knew enough to know that the videos likely came in attached to either a text or an e-mail. Thankfully, there was a little button with the word “text” on it, so he pressed that and saw two texts in the in-box. Both had little icons of paper clips next to them. One had a time stamp of 10:09 a.m., and the other apparently came in at 4:12 p.m. . . . just under an hour ago, mere minutes after he missed the four o’clock call. He drew a breath and clicked on the first video.
The chubby kid, wearing a pink shirt with a purple heart stitched on it, sat on a bed, clutching the same tattered stuffed frog she was holding in the photo in the backpack Stokes was carrying, the photo the kidnappers presumably had sent to the girl’s father with the ransom note. She was looking above the camera, which had to be the kidnapper’s cell phone, probably looking at the guy holding it. It was a tight shot, just the kid sitting on the bed. Then she looked up and to her left as a shadow slid across the wall behind her. A hand reached in from out of frame and grabbed her left hand roughly.
“Ouch.”
“Sssssh,” the man off-camera said as he closed all but her little finger into his fist.
“We told you we’d know if you contacted the authorities, Paul. We told you we were serious. This is your fault.”
The man reached down with his other hand, which held big scissors, maybe tin snips, and cut off her pinky. Jesus. The girl screamed. The camera phone recorded it all, maybe ten more seconds of hysterical shrieking before the screen went black.
Stokes thought he might throw up. He looked around to see if anyone had overheard the video, but that didn’t seem to be the case. God, he was sweating so badly all of a sudden. He drew a deep breath and clicked on the second video. The girl was sitting on the bed like before, only now her hand was wrapped in a plaid dishcloth. Her eyes were puffy and red. It looked like she’d just woken up. Actually, it looked like she’d just woken up after crying herself to sleep earlier. She clutched her frog tightly. Stokes thought he saw blood on it. Her terrified eyes darted from the man with the camera phone to the person throwing another shadow on the wall, the one coming closer to her. She screamed and shrank away from the hands now reaching for her. She kicked but couldn’t stop him from grabbing her left hand, unwrapping the towel. Stokes could see where her pinky should have been. She kept screaming as the man closed all but her ring finger into his fist, reached into a back pocket or somewhere—Stokes could see only his arms—and brought out the tin snips. The cries, already piercing, rose to a new level as the blades came together with a sickening snap-crunch. Maybe the bastards recorded ten more seconds of her screaming, like before, but Stokes snapped the phone shut. He was breathing as though he’d just run ten miles. He was dizzy. The phone rang in his hand. He opened it on the third ring.
“You watch the video?”
Stokes sucked in a gasping breath.
“You there?”
“I’m here,” he finally managed to say.
“See the video?”
“I saw it.”
“Now maybe you know how serious we are. I can’t believe it took two fingers to convince you. But maybe we’re on the same page now, though. Are we, Paul? Are we on the same page now?”
“Yeah. We are.”
“Good. Believe me, we didn’t enjoy that but you didn’t give us a choice. Don’t put us in that position again.”
Stokes’s breath was starting to slow. “I won’t.”
“We’re trying to be patient with you, Paul. We’re trying to work with you, right?”
Stokes said nothing.
“Aren’t we?”
He seemed insistent, so Stokes said, “I guess.”
“You guess? When you told us you had evidence about where you got all that money, evidence that could be bad for us, did we get all pissed off and hurt the girl? Did we just say ‘fuck you’ and break a few bones? No, we did not. We could have, but we didn’t. And if we had, we’d still have the girl and you’d still want her back and we’d be right back where we started, only maybe the girl wouldn’t be in such great shape any longer. But we didn’t hurt her then. We realized you were just trying to protect your daughter. So we were nice enough to revise the deal. We agreed to let you give us the evidence along with the money. Wasn’t that nice of us, Paul?”
Stokes rubbed his eyes.
“Paul?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was nice.”
“That’s right, it was. So what happened?”
“When?”
“Why didn’t you answer an hour ago? Or forty-five minutes ago? Or half an hour ago?”
Stokes didn’t know what to say.
“Well?” the kidnapper said. “How the hell could you miss our four o’clock call? All we planned to do was call you now and then. You’re the one who insisted we call every hour on the hour so you could talk to your daughter. And we agreed. And we also made it pretty damn clear from the start what would happen if we called and you didn’t pick up. So what the hell happened?”
Stokes still didn’t know what to say. He still didn’t want to speak too much and give the kidnapper a chance to realize that the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t the voice he’d first spoken with, the voice of
the dead father. He had to say something, though.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, speaking low. “I left the phone somewhere. Had to go back for it.”
“She’s going to run out of fingers sometime, Paul. When she does, we move on to something else. Is that going to happen? She going to run out of fingers?”
“No.”
“Is this going to happen again? Because maybe we’ll forget the fingers and take something else. Maybe we’ll get creative. Or, shit, maybe we’ll just kill her. How’s that sound?”
“Please,” Stokes said, struggling to keep his voice low, “don’t hurt her anymore. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I swear.”
“Better not,” the voice said. “Wanna talk to her?”
Stokes froze. He didn’t want to talk to the kid. That was just a bad idea. She’d probably know right away he wasn’t her father, and that could screw things up royally, put the girl in even worse danger than she was in. Plus, he just didn’t want to hear her voice. He hadn’t enjoyed hearing it in his head. He certainly didn’t feel like hearing it live again. The problem was, if he were truly her father, he wouldn’t just want to talk to her, he’d insist on it. And the last thing Stokes could afford to do if he wanted to help the girl was let the kidnapper know he wasn’t her father.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” the guy asked. “You wanna talk to her or not? She’s a little sad, of course, a little scared, and still in a bit of pain from the fingers, I think, but she can talk.”
“Put her on,” Stokes said.
A moment later, that damn little voice came on the line. “Daddy? Are you there? We kept trying to call you, but you didn’t answer.” Her voice was hoarse. From the screaming and crying, he knew. “They said they hurt me because you didn’t answer the phone. I don’t want them to hurt me again, Daddy. Can I come home soon? Please?” Stokes thought he heard a shuddering breath. Maybe it was a sob.
Stokes took a breath of his own. It was his fault. The second finger was his fault. Not the first one. That one was on her father, who obviously had ignored the kidnappers’ warnings and contacted the authorities. Stokes didn’t know if it was the cops or the FBI or whomever, but Paul clearly had called someone and the kidnappers, true to their word, had found out. And seeing as there didn’t appear to be a mobilization of cops or agents looking for the kid, whatever man they had inside whatever department, agency, or bureau her father had called must have been able to nip things in the bud somehow as soon as Paul called it in.
“Daddy,” the girl was saying, “can I come home soon?”
“Sure, Baby.”
A pause on the line. “Baby?”
He realized his mistake. He shouldn’t have used a pet name. He didn’t even know her real name yet, and he sure as hell didn’t know what cute little nickname her father had for her. Maybe he called her Princess, or Sweat Pea, or Sugar Bear. But judging by the girl’s reaction, he never called her Baby. If the kidnapper noticed the girl’s confusion—
“Satisfied?” It was the kidnapper’s voice again. Stokes blew out a breath as quietly as he could. The kidnapper didn’t wait for a response. “I’ll call in an hour. You better answer. And you better have the money. You know where to be to get your final instructions. Now I’m going to tell you when to be there.”
Huh? Wait a second. Stokes didn’t know where to be. “Hey, hold on—”
“Be at that pay phone at one thirty this morning. If we see anyone hanging around there before then, we’ll kill the girl. We’ll tell you where to drop the money and the evidence. After we have it, we’ll tell you where you can find the kid. Then we’re done. Everybody’s happy.”
“But—”
The line went dead. Stokes closed the phone. A few people were still looking at him, but most had gone on their way. The janitor was sitting a few feet away, watching him. Stokes stuck the cell phone in his pocket and shoved the trash can with his foot, sending it rolling toward the janitor.
Pay phone? Stokes’s mind was spinning. He had figured the kidnappers were just going to call the cell phone and tell him where to meet them. It never occurred to him that there was an instruction he’d already missed, something he was already supposed to know. But why send him to some pay phone to receive his final instructions when he had a cell phone? Stokes considered it. Maybe it made sense. They were probably going to send him from one pay phone to another, keeping an eye on him as they moved him around to make sure he wasn’t working with anyone, communicating with someone during the process. Finally, when they were sure he was going it alone, as instructed, they’d tell him where to make the drop.
One of Stokes’s problems, if he truly wanted to help the girl—something he was still struggling with a bit, if he had to be honest—was that he didn’t know where he was supposed to be at one thirty to receive the drop instructions, yet he was obviously supposed to know that. They’d already communicated that to the dead father. Stokes couldn’t play dumb and just ask them again. No father would forget that information. Somehow, Stokes would have to find out where that pay phone was located.
He had other problems, too. He was short $102,000 and the kidnappers sounded pretty serious about wanting every last dime of the $350,000 they asked for. Stokes had seen with his own eyes just how serious they were.
He also didn’t have the evidence they were looking for, whatever it was. He knew it wasn’t in the bag with the money. That meant the father had planned to get it later. But from where? And what the hell was it?
Maybe it was time to confess that he wasn’t the girl’s father and he didn’t have a clue about any evidence, but that he’d still be willing to give them the money in exchange for the girl.
But no, they’d been pretty damn insistent that nothing go wrong with their plans. And they’d demonstrated a cold brutality when something did. So Stokes simply wasn’t ready to reveal that he didn’t have enough money or the evidence they wanted. Maybe he could find both. Maybe he couldn’t, in the end, but his best play for now was to continue to pretend to be the girl’s father.
So he had to come up with another $102,000 before one thirty in the morning rolled around, and he had to figure out what evidence Paul was supposed to give the bad guys, and then find it. And it suddenly occurred to him where he had to go to start looking for both. He also knew that going there would be one of the stupidest things he’d done in his entire life, a life in which no one had ever accused him of being a genius.
SEVEN
5:29 P.M.
THIS WAS ALL JENNY’S FAULT. Stokes had had time to give it some thought over the past twenty-two minutes, and he kept coming to the same conclusion. This was Jenny’s fault. He couldn’t blame his current situation on a little girl he hadn’t seen in thirteen years, a girl he’d last seen when she was just two years old. And Jenny was next in the blame line, so it was her fault.
Back at the bus station, Stokes had gone against his nature, against everything he’d ever learned, against who he’d become after thirty-six years on this planet, and decided to help the chubby kidnapped girl. He’d give up the money—and, Jesus, it was a lot of money—to try to get the kid out of danger. There was nothing in it for him. He had no angle. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose—the money, the freedom it would buy, the dreams he could have realized with it, everything. But he was going to try to help the kid anyway.
He no longer had his bike, and he didn’t want to take a taxi anywhere near where he was going, because that would leave a trail that could be followed by the cops later, so he’d stuck both arms through the straps on the backpack, fastened it securely on his back, and started to run. He didn’t exercise regularly, but he was in decent enough shape. Ran once or twice a week when the weather was nice, like it had been lately. If he took shortcuts through a couple of parking lots and some woods, he probably would have less than two miles to run. It would be harder in the jeans, le
ather jacket, and lightweight boots he was wearing than it would be in sweats and sneakers, and the backpack full of money weighing him down didn’t help any, but he’d manage. Shouldn’t take long, which was good, because he was fast realizing that time was important in this.
It took him twenty-two minutes to cover the distance, twenty-two minutes during which he had nothing to do but run and think—regulate his breathing, watch his footing, and think. And the more he thought, the more certain he became that Jenny was throwing a wrench into the gears of his life yet again. Indirectly this time, maybe, but this was her fault nonetheless.
Stokes met her seventeen years ago, when he was nineteen. He’d dropped out of school three years before, kicked around aimlessly for a few years after that, getting into fights, getting into trouble, getting himself put on probation for trying unsuccessfully to rob somebody’s grandmother at an ATM. The old woman screamed and Stokes ran, but not fast enough. Anyway, along came Jenny. Eighteen years old, pretty, hell of a sense of humor, the kind of person that other people wanted to be friends with. Well, women wanted to be friends with her; guys wanted something else. But everyone wanted to be around her. She didn’t have to work at it; it just came naturally to her. Stokes truly had no idea what she saw in him. He knew he wasn’t bad looking, but a girl like Jenny could have done better, especially if she started factoring in other traits, like potential and dependability and quality of character. Whatever it was she saw in him, it was something Stokes certainly didn’t see. In fact, he was pretty sure it wasn’t even there.
They dated for a year and he started getting into less trouble, started looking for real work, even started thinking about asking her to marry him. They moved in together, and things were pretty damn good for a while. Then one morning Jenny knocked his world off its axis with a little piece of news. Eight months later, Ellie was born. And when Ellie was born, everything changed. Forever.