Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,6,260489-shady_cross.html
Stokes knew what he was supposed to do, what the right thing was to do. And he did it. He stopped staying out with his buddies until the early morning hours. He stopped drinking too much. There were no more fights. He started taking his work more seriously, knowing he could no longer afford to grab his lunch pail and walk away from a job the moment he grew tired of it. He had to work steadily, put in overtime when he could, save money, save for a house, plan for the future. The thing was, Stokes had already started doing those things. Being with Jenny made it worth doing those things. He did them because he wanted to, wanted Jenny to be proud of him, wanted her to continue to see in him whatever it was he didn’t see himself.
Then Ellie was born, and everything Stokes had been doing because he wanted to, he now did because he had to. And he resented it. It wasn’t like he didn’t like the kid, because he did. He loved her, actually. More than he thought he would. More than he thought he could. She was cute and plump and dimply and giggly, and when he held her while she slept and her little baby breath blew softly against his neck, and Jenny sat beside him on the couch, smiling at him, smiling at the father that had been inside the angry young man he’d been all along, well, in those moments he thought he had everything he could ever have wanted right there on that couch. But other times, when he was punching the clock, working yet another overtime shift at the warehouse, taking shit from his boss, telling his buddies he couldn’t shoot pool that night because he needed to get home and give Jenny a break from Ellie, during those times he looked at beautiful Jenny and cute little Ellie and all he saw were manacles, twin iron manacles snapped around each of his ankles, grinding through the flesh down to the bone, chaining him to that house, that town, that life.
And then one day it all ended. He’d simply had enough. He’d tried, she had to give him that. He’d tried. So while Jenny snored softly, her dark hair fanned out across her pillow, while Ellie breathed her little baby breaths into the early morning air and dreamed of whatever two-year-old kids dream of, Stokes stuffed clothes into a duffel bag and slipped out of that house, that town, that life.
He drifted around, settled briefly in seven different states, moving on for one reason or another—because he’d grown tired of the place, because he’d heard of an opportunity somewhere else, or maybe because he’d needed to stay a step ahead of someone. And he’d hardly thought about Jenny or Ellie. It was like he’d thrown a switch in his mind. Turned off the light and shut the door. All that time, all those years, he never called her, never wrote. And he never heard of her trying to reach him. He knew what that said about him, about the kind of person he was. He’d come to terms with that a long time ago. He was that person for nineteen years before Jenny showed up. He was that same person while they were together, though he tried to be somebody else. Why wouldn’t he be that same person after he left them?
Eventually, eight years after he walked out, he found his way back to Shady Cross. He didn’t go to their old apartment. He didn’t call their old phone number. After a couple of weeks, he finally asked around a little about her. He wasn’t looking to get back together with her, didn’t want to try raising a kid again. Besides, a woman like her, she wouldn’t have been by herself for too long if she didn’t want to be. So Stokes wasn’t sure why he even asked about her. But in the end, it didn’t matter because she and Ellie were long gone. Moved away within a year of Stokes’s leaving and no one he spoke with had heard from her since.
Five years later, he had to admit that he thought about them now and then. In his mind, Jenny was still twenty-one, still full of youthful beauty, still quick to laugh her infectious, full-throated laugh. And Ellie was still two years old, toddling around on plump little legs, giggling at the silly faces and funny sounds he’d make, ready at the slightest invitation to throw her little arms around his neck and squeeze.
No, Stokes couldn’t blame little Ellie for his being in this situation, for his giving up his chance at the good life to help out a six-year-old girl he’d never met, even though it didn’t take Sigmund Freud to tell him that she had something to do with it. He knew it had been her voice he’d heard in his head, along with the voice of the little girl on the phone. But how could he possibly blame her? So he was forced to blame his ex-girlfriend—Jenny, who’d given him a daughter he never wanted but reluctantly loved anyway, loved as much as he knew how, which he knew wasn’t even close to enough in the end. Because of that little two-year-old girl he hadn’t seen in thirteen years, he was standing where he was at that moment, back on the deserted stretch of road where all this started nearly four hours ago.
Stokes was standing at the spot where the dead guy’s car had entered the woods. His legs were heavy from his run, and he was sweating despite the crisp evening air. There were no cars in sight. It wasn’t even six o’clock in the evening, but the sun was far below the treetops, getting ready to set for the night, and the road was growing darker by the second. Still, Stokes could see the dented guardrail on the other side of the road. His twisted Yamaha lay in a shallow depression twenty yards in the trees beyond, covered with leaves. He turned back to the woods in front of him, looked deep into them. The trees were thicker in there. What little light remained in the sky had a hard time falling all the way to the ground. From where he stood, he couldn’t see the dark car that he knew was wrapped around a thick trunk thirty feet into the trees. The car with a little girl’s dead father inside.
Stokes took one last look up and down the road, then walked into the wooded darkness.
EIGHT
5:33 P.M.
BRITTLE LEAVES CRACKLED AND CRUNCHED under Stokes’s boots as he moved through the dim light. Out on the road, dusk was in full bloom. Here in the woods, darkness had taken hold.
It had been risky as hell coming here. If someone had found Paul’s car, the place would have been alive with cops and curious onlookers and maybe a reporter or two crawling all over the place like ants swarming over a fried chicken wing left on a picnic blanket while everyone was off playing volleyball. And Stokes wasn’t terribly eager to be connected with this accident, seeing as he had caused it.
But he was alone. Except for the dead guy, of course, who wasn’t far ahead.
Another few steps brought the dark, vaguely car-shaped hulk into sight. It was as he remembered it, misshapen, smashed up against a fat tree. He regarded it for a moment before approaching the driver’s door. The driver was as Stokes remembered him, too, still smashed and still dead. Only now he looked even more dead. His eyes were still open and staring, but the skin Stokes could see through the blood covering most of his face had dulled to a waxy gray.
He hadn’t wanted to return here. Only an idiot would return here. But he didn’t know what else to do. If he was going to try to figure out where he was supposed to be at one thirty that morning, and if he had any hope of finding the evidence the kidnappers wanted, he had to start here. And he had to move quickly. Time was moving faster than he remembered it ever moving before. He had to get to work.
He walked around to the passenger side of the car, dropped the backpack onto the soft carpet of leaves under his feet, and used his shirttail again to open the door without leaving fingerprints. The dome light glowed as Stokes slid into the passenger seat and he picked up a crumpled napkin from the floor and used it to turn off the light so no one passing by would see it and decide to investigate. Then he used the napkin to open the glove compartment, where he found a flashlight. He clicked it on and turned it toward the dead man.
Paul Something-or-Other was still slumped over the steering wheel, just like he’d been when Stokes had first seen him. Stokes reminded himself never to get into another car that didn’t have working air bags. He reached over and pulled on the body’s shoulder, trying to move it back against the seat. The guy didn’t seem to want to move—well, he’d probably have given anything to be able to move again—and Stokes was getting resistance from the body. He pulled a little harder and
the corpse suddenly popped back from the steering wheel with a wet sucking sound. Stokes lowered his light and saw in its beam an open, ugly wound in the body’s chest. He looked at the steering wheel, which was made of hard plastic. The top half of it had broken off in the violent impact. The driver had clearly been thrown forward into the wheel, snapping it, and the broken part still attached to the steering column had slammed into him, shattering his breastbone, punching into his chest. Stokes glanced again at the raw, ragged, bloody gash. He took a breath, then reached up and slipped his hand into the guy’s jacket pocket, ignoring the stickiness his fingers encountered as they crept around in the folds of fabric. He was looking for a wallet. He needed to know the guy’s full name if he was going to continue to pose as him, in case it came up in conversation with the kidnappers.
He found the wallet in a breast pocket and opened it. Sixty-four bucks. It wasn’t a hundred thousand, but it was a start. He pocketed it. No other pieces of paper in the wallet, nothing that looked like “evidence” Paul could have used against anyone, and nothing with an address for the pay phone written on it. Damn. He shined the flashlight on the guy’s driver’s license. Paul Douglas Jenkins. Thirty-four years old. Two years younger than Stokes, who was going to continue to get older, at least for a while longer, while Paul Jenkins was not. Stokes noted the address on the license. It wasn’t in one of the more expensive areas. This tracked with the idea that Jenkins might have stolen the $350,000, which Stokes had suspected. So did the fact that ten-year-old Nissan Altimas, like the kind Stokes was sitting in, weren’t exactly the first choice of the rich and famous. Yeah, Paul must have stolen the money. For some reason, this bothered Stokes.
He slipped Jenkins’s wallet into his own pocket and shined the flashlight on his watch: 5:38. Just under eight hours before he had to be at a pay phone somewhere. He steeled himself and checked the rest of Jenkins’s pockets, one by one, looking for a written address. Nothing. He played the flashlight beam around the car’s interior, searching for something with an address written on it, and also for whatever evidence Paul had unwisely threatened the kidnappers with—files, a notebook, a computer disk, maybe a little tape recorder. But he saw nothing of the kind, which was a big disappointment. As for the pay phone’s address, maybe Jenkins never wrote it down. Maybe the kidnappers told it to him and he simply committed it to memory. But Stokes had to do something, so he kept searching. He checked the trunk and found nothing helpful. He slammed the trunk lid and climbed back into the passenger seat.
He sighed. He’d come up empty in his search, but he still had work to do here. Though it would become more unlikely the darker it got, someone could find this car in the next couple of hours. And they’d call the cops. And if the kidnappers truly had an informant in the police department, they’d know Paul Jenkins was dead and reasonably assume that they weren’t going to get their money. And then they might kill the kid. So Stokes absolutely could not let the cops know Jenkins was dead. He thought for a moment. He couldn’t move the car, couldn’t hide it any better than it was hidden, but he could try to make it harder for the cops to figure out whose car it was. Sure, they’d have a body, but if Jenkins hadn’t worked for the government or been in the military, and hadn’t been arrested—which the average person hasn’t—they shouldn’t have his fingerprints on file, which would make it more difficult to ID his body. And all Stokes needed was a few more hours.
He opened the glove compartment again and removed the vehicle registration and stuffed it in his pocket. He walked back to the trunk and got a screwdriver he’d seen there moments earlier and used it to remove the license plates. Then he opened the driver’s door and found a sticker he knew he’d find on the car’s frame, a sticker that would be hidden when the door was closed. It listed information about the vehicle, including the vehicle identification number, or VIN. He used the screwdriver to scratch out the information on it. Next he would—
He froze. Cocked his head, listening. He heard it again. Voices. A flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness, struck a nearby tree, and started a slow, probing crawl toward him.
Shit, shit, shit.
Cops? He couldn’t tell.
He had to get the hell out of there. Grab the backpack from the ground on the other side of the car and run like hell.
But he hadn’t finished removing the car’s identifiers. The kidnappers would find out Jenkins was dead, which was very bad for the kid.
Stokes could still bolt, though, and get away with the money. He still had a chance at a new life.
But the kid would have no chance at all.
He hesitated. For too long.
Daddy?
He should just run like hell. No time even to grab the bag any longer. If he was going to get away clean, he had to take off now. Still, he hesitated. The goddamn kid. And, he had to admit, the money.
The voices were close in the darkness now. He heard footsteps through crackling leaves. The flashlight was crawling closer. Too close.
It was over. He wasn’t going to get away. And now maybe the little girl wasn’t, either.
NINE
5:40 P.M.
WHOEVER WAS COMING THROUGH THE dark woods was getting close now. Stokes’s last chance to get away cleanly had come and gone. As the flashlight beam bounced off the tree in front of him, the tree that had stopped Jenkins’s car and his life, Stokes crawled quickly through the open driver’s door, scrambled over Jenkins’s dead body, and positioned himself in the passenger seat, slumped over the dashboard. The damn bag of money was on the ground outside the passenger door. He’d worry about that later, if he got the chance. At the moment, he was worried about the fact that he was sitting there, the picture of health, in a wreck of a car beside a driver who had been turned to raw hamburger. That was going to look suspicious.
He heard footsteps stop outside the car. He sensed the flashlight beam striking the tree again, then playing over the crumpled hood. Stokes took a chance. Without moving anything but his arm, he reached over, slid his hand under Jenkins’s jacket, groped along the sticky shirt, and finally reached the open chest wound. He took a shallow breath and dug his fingers into a hole in the flesh, his knuckle scraping on jagged bone. He pushed his fingers in, sinking them into the congealing bloody mess inside, then pulled his hand back, covered with gore. He let his head slide down just a little, resting his forehead on the dash, and brought his hand to his own face. He wiped the mess on his cheeks, his nose, his chin, suppressing a violent urge to vomit. Then he was still. There was no sudden commotion. They hadn’t noticed his movements.
It wasn’t a bad plan. It hadn’t been a lot of fun, poking around inside a corpse, and sitting there with his face covered with a dead guy’s blood and gore wasn’t the way he wanted to pass the time, but all in all, it was a decent idea. The gore served double duty, making Stokes look like a victim of the crash while also disguising his face, which could be useful so long as the people outside weren’t cops, who would certainly arrest him as soon as they realized he wasn’t actually injured and had the dead guy’s license and vehicle registration in his pocket. But if they weren’t cops and he got the chance to grab the bag and run, the blood and whatever-the-hell-else he’d pulled from Jenkins’s chest and smeared all over his face might keep whoever was standing outside the car from identifying him later.
This was nuts. He was nuts. This whole situation just wasn’t his goddamn problem.
Daddy?
Shut up, kid.
Stokes had his face turned away from the window. The voices were very close. Through half-closed eyes he saw a flashlight beam creep around inside the car. He heard one of the voices again.
“There it is.” A male voice.
“Man, they look messed up,” a second voice said, also male.
Based on what little he’d heard, Stokes didn’t think they were cops. They sounded young. But still, he waited.
“What’
s this bag on the ground?”
“Check it out while I call 911.”
He’d heard enough. He let out a loud, dramatic groan and turned his face to the window, directly into the flashlight beam, careful to keep his eyes mostly closed so he wouldn’t lose his night vision completely.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Holy shit.”
The flashlight dropped to the ground. Two young men, teenagers from the looks of them, backed away from the car. The fear on their faces was almost comical. They stopped, looked at each other, then looked back at Stokes. Then they squared their shoulders, trying to look unaffected by what they were seeing.
“Shit,” the taller of the two said, “that one guy’s still alive.”
The other kid pulled a cell phone out of his coat pocket. “We gotta call the cops.”
Stokes didn’t want that. Moving only his arm, he nudged the door open so they could hear him better. “Please,” he groaned, “come here.”
The kids hesitated before slowly stepping forward.
“I need your phone,” Stokes said.
“I gotta call the cops,” Shorty said. “You need an ambulance, man. You’re pretty jacked up.”
“Please,” Stokes said, raising his head briefly before letting it drop to the dashboard again. “Please give me your phone. I may not make it. May not . . . live long. Need to call my wife. Tell her . . . good-bye.”
Shorty looked at Tall, who shrugged. “His funeral, right?” Tall said.
Shorty still looked unsure.
“Please,” Stokes croaked. He added a hacking cough for good measure.
“Shit, give him your phone,” Tall said.
Shorty stepped up to the car, handed his phone through the open door. He watched as Stokes struggled to sit up, fumbling with the phone. Stokes punched a few random digits, then paused. He turned his head weakly to look at the kids.