Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,9,260489-shady_cross.html
“Listen, Joyce,” Stokes whispered, “I don’t know anybody else here that well and I really need a car. It’s an emergency, OK? What do you say?”
“It’s Bobby’s truck, not mine. You know that. I can’t let you take it.”
She’d been letting him take a lot more than that at least twice a month going on half a year now, but Stokes didn’t point that out. He was about to ask again when footsteps sounded in the trailer. Bobby came around the corner. He stood about five five and wouldn’t crack 140 on a scale with his pockets stuffed with rocks.
“Stokes?” he said. “It’s late.” His freakishly deep voice was as amusing as always, coming out of the tiny little mouth in his tiny little head.
“Yeah, sorry about that. But listen, Bobby, you got a truck, right? A pickup? I’d like to borrow it.”
Bobby looked like he was trying to decide whether to just shut the door in Stokes’s face or whether to laugh first. Before he could decide, Stokes spoke again.
“I’ll give you forty bucks if you let me use it.”
That got Bobby thinking. “I need that truck for work in the morning. Suppose you aren’t back with it by then.”
“I will be.”
“Suppose you aren’t.”
“I will be. I’ll be back by two this morning, three at the latest.”
“Suppose you aren’t.”
Stokes wasn’t sure what else to say. Bobby’s record sort of got stuck on a groove there. Then, suddenly, he knew exactly what to say.
“Well, I suppose if for some reason I didn’t get back in time, you’d have to call a cab, right? That might cost you another twenty bucks, I guess. Making it sixty total.”
“Might cost me another forty.”
“Forty for a cab? Don’t you do body work at Tucker’s place on Sycamore? What’s that, a mile from here?”
Bobby shrugged. “Could be traffic.”
Stokes sighed. “Eighty bucks then?”
“Plus there’s the gas you’d be using tonight. My gas.”
“Another twenty.”
“Should cover it.”
“So, a hundred?”
Bobby thought about it and nodded. Stokes could see he’d enjoyed sticking it to his neighbor. Which was fine, because Stokes had been having an OK time himself sticking it to his neighbor, who happened to be Bobby’s wife.
“Get the key,” he said. “I’ll get the hundred from my trailer and come right back.”
Bobby disappeared inside. Joyce winked at Stokes, which yesterday might have given him a little charge, and closed the door. He walked away, slipped behind a dark trailer nearby, and took out his wallet. Between what he had left of Tom-from-Pittsburgh’s money and what he took from Paul Jenkins’s wallet, there was a hundred forty-two bucks inside. He removed five twenties, waited long enough to make it seem like he’d gone all the way to his trailer and back, then walked over and knocked on Joyce and Bobby’s door again. Bobby opened it. He held up a hand with a car key on a ring dangling from his finger. Stokes pushed the money into his free hand and reached for the key. Bobby pulled it up, out of Stokes’s reach, which wasn’t easy for a five-foot-five guy to do to a six-foot-two guy, but Bobby was up in his trailer and Stokes was a couple of steps below him. Bobby chuckled and handed the key to Stokes. The whole thing annoyed Stokes, and he thought he might come back and give the jerk’s wife one more ride, even though he’d already decided he wasn’t going to spend any more afternoons with Joyce.
Stokes turned without a word and headed over to Bobby’s rusty, dented Ford F-150 pickup. Tossed the backpack in, got behind the wheel, turned the key, and was satisfied with the sound of a healthy engine. As he pulled away, he glanced over at Bobby, who was still standing in the doorway of his trailer. Joyce had joined him. He stood there with his little arm around the waist of his cheating wife. Stokes flipped him off.
THIRTEEN
7:45 P.M.
IT WAS QUARTER TO EIGHT when Stokes pulled Bobby’s truck over to the curb in front of Jenkins’s modest house in his modest neighborhood. It was a two-story colonial, not terribly big. Probably had three bedrooms, two and a half baths. Definite fixer-upper that no one had gotten around to fixing up.
Stokes stared at the house and, for the first time, a question popped into his mind that probably should have popped into it hours before. Where was the kid’s mother in all this? Was she sitting inside that house, waiting for her husband to bring their daughter home? Were they divorced? Did she even know about any of this? Or did she maybe die of some accident or disease a long time ago? Stokes looked at the dark windows of the house, too dark this early at night for anyone to be inside. He eased Bobby’s pickup along the street and left it in front of the house two doors down, then walked back to Jenkins’s house with the backpack slung over a shoulder.
He looked around, saw no one watching, and moved swiftly up the front walk. He knocked on the door, just to be sure. A moment later, he rang the bell to be doubly sure. He wasn’t worried about an alarm system. This wasn’t the neighborhood for it. And there weren’t any alarm company stickers in the windows and no alarm company sign sticking out of the scraggly little plants by the front door. Still, he peeked in a window by the door, into the front hall, and was pleased not to see an alarm panel there. He slipped Jenkins’s key—which he hoped was indeed his house key—into the lock and turned it. The door opened. Stokes stepped quickly into the house, shutting the door behind him. He moved into the living room and pulled the drapes closed, then walked back through the hall and did the same in the TV room. Then he flicked a switch on the wall, turning on a ceiling light. This wasn’t the middle of the night. No one knew Jenkins wasn’t coming home. Lights on in the house wouldn’t look suspicious.
The house itself wasn’t in the best shape, with old and faded wallpaper, worn carpets, and outdated lighting fixtures, but it was neat and clean. No junk lying around, no magazines scattered on the coffee table, no ashtrays full of cigarette butts on the end table. The TV remote sat on top of the television. Throw pillows were positioned neatly in each corner of the sofa. Either Jenkins had a maid, which he didn’t appear to be able to afford, or he and his daughter kept the place well. Stokes saw a bookshelf in one corner, an array of kid’s toys tidily lined up on its shelves—pink things, cuddly things, colorful things—and he remembered why he was there. Seeing the toys made the weight he was carrying a little heavier, and he wasn’t thinking about the backpack he’d been lugging around all day. He looked at a stuffed panda on the bookshelf and was reminded of the girl’s ragged stuffed frog.
He saw the girl’s face again, dimpled, smiling this time, not scared at all—saw it on top of the bookshelf where a row of pictures of her stretched from one side to the other. She was grinning in each one. One looked like it was taken in a park. Another at a birthday party. In yet another she stood ankle deep in the surf in a pink floral one-piece bathing suit, squinting in the bright sun, mugging for the camera. And there she was as a baby with a smiling brunette, probably her mother. And in another one she was a little older, sitting on the knee of an attractive blonde. Maybe that was her mother and the brunette was an aunt, though the brunette’s hair color was closer to the little girl’s. And there were more pictures on the wall. A baby picture, the little girl on a pony, the girl standing beside a snowman twice her height. The goddamn snowman had an honest-to-God carrot for a nose. In most of the shots, she was with the blonde again, who must have been her mother after all. And naturally there were a few of Jenkins with his daughter, the two of them smiling wide. He wondered who took those pictures. In them, the ones with her father, the girl seemed to be smiling the brightest. Or maybe that was Stokes’s imagination. Either way, he felt a pang of guilt.
He heard her little voice again. Are you coming to take me home?
No, kid, he’s not. But I’m working on it.
He got busy. He was look
ing for three things. First, he hoped to find whatever evidence Jenkins had on the kidnappers. And since he didn’t have the slightest idea what that might be, he hoped it would be in a big file with the word “Evidence” stamped on it in red capital letters. Failing that, he had to hope he’d find something that looked to Stokes’s admittedly untrained eye to be evidence of . . . well, of some kind of wrongdoing. He was a shady character himself, so he might be able to recognize something like that. Second, he was looking for something, anything that might tell him the location of the pay phone where he was supposed to be at 1:30 a.m. to receive final details from the kidnappers. Third, he was looking for a $102,000, though he didn’t have high hopes of finding it in the couch cushions or under a mattress.
Stokes started in the living room, pulling open drawers, checking the sofa, searching the bookshelf, looking anywhere Jenkins might have intentionally placed or accidentally dropped a piece of paper with the pay phone’s address on it, or where he could have hidden evidence of some kind. No luck. He searched the TV room with the same result. And everywhere he looked, more pictures of the girl.
In the hall closet, he searched coat pockets. He didn’t see any women’s coats, which told him that the girl’s mother didn’t live there. He moved quickly. He could practically hear a clock ticking. Leaving the closet, he passed an ancient grandmother clock and realized that he had been hearing a clock ticking.
In the kitchen, he checked every drawer and cabinet, looked at every scrap of paper stuck by magnets to the avocado-green refrigerator, or by thumbtack to a little bulletin board above the toaster, and didn’t find what he was looking for. He tried to ignore the cute little drawing of a cowgirl riding a dinosaur the girl had made with crayons. Stokes even lifted the lid on the trash can in the corner and dug around through Jenkins’s garbage until he was satisfied that he hadn’t written the address down and later thrown it away. Nothing. He struck out in the downstairs bathroom, too.
He took the stairs two at a time, realizing he had to move faster. Bathroom at the top of the stairs. Low priority at this point. To his right, Jenkins’s bedroom. He searched it quickly but thoroughly and found nothing—no evidence, no pay phone address, no money . . . unless he counted the seventy-two cents in change he found on Jenkins’s nightstand next to yet another framed photo of Jenkins with his daughter. Stokes pocketed the coins and moved on. He decided the master bathroom was also a low priority and skipped it for now.
His hopes rose when he entered a second bedroom, which Jenkins used as an office. He rifled through the desk and a filing cabinet and, unfortunately, didn’t come across the pay phone’s address or anything remotely resembling evidence of anything. He likewise failed to find $102,000. He flicked on the computer, saw that it needed a password, and turned it off again. He didn’t know anything about computers.
Damn it.
He sighed. One last door off the hall. One last room left to search. Had to be the little girl’s bedroom. If he struck out in there—and it didn’t seem likely that Jenkins would leave the location of the pay phone in his daughter’s room—then Stokes would have no choice. He’d have to come right out and ask the kidnapper in the next phone call where he was supposed to be at one thirty. He could pretend to have written it down and lost the paper, forgotten the address. It would look suspicious, but he was running out of options. He needed to—
His thoughts were interrupted by the cell phone ringing in his pocket. He automatically glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock on the dot.
Wherever you are now, Paul, Stokes thought, you’re killing me with all these phone calls.
He opened the phone. “Yeah,” he said.
“You holding up OK?” the kidnapper asked.
“You care?” Stokes spoke more freely, figuring that if his voice hadn’t yet alerted them that he wasn’t Paul Jenkins, it wasn’t going to. They’d talked enough times that it was probably his voice now, and not Jenkins’s, that they associated with the girl’s father.
“Watch yourself, Paul. We still have your little girl. We could hurt her again.”
“Sorry,” Stokes said quickly. Again, he knew what was expected of him. “Let me talk to the kid.”
Silence. Stokes immediately realized his mistake.
“The ‘kid?’ ” the voice on the line said.
Stokes tried to recover. “Yeah, my daughter,” he said quickly. “Let me talk to her.”
A pause. “Your daughter.”
This wasn’t going well. “Yeah, let me talk to her. That’s the deal, right?”
Another pause. “Paul, is this really you?”
Oh, shit.
“Of course it is. Now I want to talk to my daughter.” He needed to do better here, to fix this. He tried for bluster. “So help me God, if you’ve hurt her—”
“We already hurt her, Paul. You know that. Or should, anyway. The question is, how much more do we hurt her.”
Stokes realized he was sweating. His heart was beating like a ferret’s.
“Please, let me talk to her.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yeah, my daughter.”
“What’s her name?”
“What?”
“Tell me your daughter’s name, Paul. Simple question, you gotta admit.”
Oh, God. He had no idea. Was it Ellie? No, that was Stokes’s real daughter, and she’d be in high school now. What the hell was Jenkins’s daughter’s name?
“Hell,” the kidnapper continued, “even if you’re actually a cop or FBI agent you’d know her name. So who the hell are you?”
“I’m her father,” Stokes said as he strode the final few feet down the hall toward what he now prayed was the kid’s room and pushed open the door.
“Paul—if that’s really your name—I’m waiting. And I’m picking up a knife.”
Stokes looked frantically around the room. Definitely the little girl’s room. Pink shit all over the place. Dolls on the bed. Stuffed animals in a corner. Posters on the wall of ponies and puppies.
“Time’s up, Paul. I’m hanging up now.”
“Amanda,” Stokes blurted.
He saw the name stenciled in primary colors on a toy chest in one corner. Amanda. The first “A” was green, the “M” was red, the second “A” was yellow, the “N” was blue, and so forth. Amanda. Please, God, let it be Amanda. Please don’t let that toy chest be something Jenkins picked up from a thrift shop and hadn’t bothered to stencil his own kid’s name on.
After a long moment, the kidnapper said, “Good guess.”
“Come on, I know my own daughter’s name. I just got flustered. I’m under a lot of pressure here. This is all pretty stressful, you know.”
Stokes became dimly aware of the sound of a car door closing nearby. Then another.
The kidnapper was quiet.
“Let me talk to Amanda,” Stokes demanded.
“In a minute.” Silence again.
The pleasant chime of a doorbell sounded in the foyer, floated up the stairs and down the hall to Stokes. He moved to the window overlooking the front lawn and saw a police cruiser in the driveway. He’d heard two car doors closing, meaning there were two cops standing on the porch right now. Two cops who’d seen a bunch of lights on in the house and who therefore would surmise that someone was inside.
Stokes’s mind started spinning like it was on a carnival’s Tilt-A-Whirl. They must have found Jenkins’s car. Had the teenagers he’d threatened in the woods ignored his warning and spilled their guts? No, probably not. If the police knew Jenkins was dead for certain, and that somebody had threatened three teenagers and then apparently stolen Jenkins’s body, and then they came and saw lights on in his house, they’d be a lot more forceful in their approach. Who knew? Maybe the teens’ mother had indeed called the cops. But Stokes be
lieved that the kids had kept their mouths shut so far. He also believed that the cops hadn’t yet found Jenkins’s body. But they definitely had identified Jenkins’s car somehow. Knew it was his, but they didn’t know where Jenkins was.
The doorbell rang again. The cops would wonder why whoever was in the house and using all the lights wasn’t answering the door. Then they’d think about the blood in Jenkins’s car. Then they’d kick down the door.
Or they’d just turn the knob and walk in, because Stokes hadn’t locked it behind him.
“Paul?” the kidnapper said in his ear. “Got a question for you.”
The doorbell rang a third time. It was immediately followed by a loud knocking, which in turn was followed by a cop yelling, “Police, open up.”
“Paul, if that’s really you, are you still there?”
“Is anyone there?” one of the cops called.
“I’m here,” Stokes said into the phone as he turned and fled Amanda’s room. He ran down the hall and into Jenkins’s bedroom just as the front door opened downstairs.
Stokes could picture the cops downstairs. Eyes scanning the rooms, hands on their guns, or maybe they had their guns drawn already. Thick, muscular young men, top students at the academy, young but up-and-coming in the department, crack shots with their weapons. Stokes slipped into the master bathroom and closed the door behind him to help hide any sound he was going to make. He moved to the window he’d seen when he peeked in here a few minutes ago. He tried to raise it but found it difficult to do with the phone in one hand.
“Here’s my question, Paul,” the kidnapper said.
“Listen, can I call you right back?”
“No.”
Stokes tucked the phone into the crook of his neck, against his shoulder, and tugged with both hands at the window, which stubbornly refused to rise. He heard heavy footsteps clomping around downstairs. He knew they’d clomp up the stairs at any moment.