Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,14,260489-shady_cross.html
She glared at him but said nothing.
“How much?”
There was something not very beautiful in those previously beautiful eyes. “How much for what?” she asked.
“How much did they pay you to sell out your own kid?”
He’d started having suspicions just before she clocked him a few minutes ago. He’d just finished speaking with Martinson, thinking about the guy loving his son who lived with his ex-wife, and there’s the cop with pictures of his kid all over his house. And Jenkins, Amanda’s father, he had pictures of his daughter everywhere. No matter where you stood in his house, you were never out of sight of a picture of Amanda. And then he remembered that Nancy didn’t have any pictures of Amanda displayed in her house. Not in the living room anyway. Just three crooked photos of flowers on the wall. And he didn’t remember seeing any in the kitchen, either. So he’d started to wonder, and while he was wondering, she decked him and tried to run with the money.
Stokes shook his head. “Jeez, you were good. I thought you were really going to cry a couple of times.”
She said nothing. He took a few of the cop’s plastic ties from his pocket and started to truss her up. She struggled a little, but gave in soon enough. While he worked, he said, “I’m trying to figure out why you told the cop I was hiding, back there at your house.”
He remembered that though he’d left his backpack in front of the armchair he’d been sitting in, when he came back out of the kitchen he’d noticed she had moved it behind the chair.
He said, “I guess you were hoping I’d be arrested and hauled off, and you’d be left with a quarter of a million bucks. Probably planned to blow town with it.” She remained silent. A moment later, she was bound hand and foot. He stared down at her, sitting on the rug, looking up at him with darkness in her eyes.
“I’m gonna check on the cop,” he said. “Don’t move a muscle.” He opened the door, went across the hall to where he’d left Martinson, and returned a few seconds later with his backpack, her clothes spilling out of it.
“I don’t have time for bullshit right now,” he said, “not if I wanna try to help Amanda . . . your goddamn daughter, by the way.”
He needed answers. He knew she’d switched the contents of their bags a little while ago when he first brought the cop into the house alone, but that was all he knew.
“You don’t give a shit about her, do you?” he asked as he dumped the backpack out.
She said nothing, merely stared at him. But it wasn’t a blank stare. Something ugly was swimming in the dark depths of her eyes.
Finally, she spoke. “That’s a lot of money you have there . . . you know, you never told me your name.”
“Right on both counts.”
Stokes said nothing more as he knelt and began removing the money from her bag and stuffing it back into his backpack.
After a moment, she said, “Maybe we can make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
She licked her lips, and Stokes—if he’d had more of a conscience, he would have been ashamed—found the sight enticing.
“Well,” she began, “how about we split the money and go our separate ways?”
He fastened the flap on the backpack and stood. “I’ve already got all the money. Why should I split it with you?”
“OK, don’t give me half. Give me a third of it.”
“You still haven’t told me what’s in it for me.”
She shrugged her shapely shoulders. “Anything you want.”
“Yeah? Anything at all?”
“Anything you can dream up. Any fantasy you’ve ever had but have been too nervous or polite or embarrassed to ask for. Anything at all.”
A small flick of her eyes toward the front of his jeans weakened his knees.
“We’ll get a motel room,” she said. “We can do whatever you want for however long you want to do it. When we’re done, I take my money, you take yours.”
“And you want a third? Shit, Nancy, I admit I wouldn’t mind taking you for a spin, but I gotta say, and no offense here, but nothing I can dream up is worth eighty thousand bucks.”
“You should talk to some of the men I’ve been with,” she said as she gave him a smile that felt almost like oral sex. “You want a taste of what I’d be bringing to the table?” she asked, looking up at him. “I’ll give it to you right now. Let you make an informed decision.”
“But . . .”
“No risk for you, not while my hands are tied together. No obligation to buy on your part. Just a chance to see what you’ll be getting for your money.”
“But . . .” he said again.
“Yes?” She smiled. Her eyes said, “I’ve got him.”
“What about Amanda?” he asked.
She jerked her head back as though he’d slapped her again. Disgust clouded her face. “She’ll be fine.”
“They might kill her.”
“They’re not gonna kill her. If they don’t get the money, they’ll let her go. They said—” She cut herself off.
Stokes shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m gonna have to pass.”
A wave of rage rippled across her features before disappearing again, leaving her face looking much like it did when Stokes first saw it tonight, only somehow it didn’t seem so attractive.
“Now, what did the kidnappers tell you?” he asked.
Her jaw muscles clenched. Thunderheads roiled in her eyes, which turned a darker, dangerous blue.
“You’re worried about Amanda?” she asked. “Hell, what’s she to you? Have you ever met her? Had you even heard of her before today?”
He shook his head. “Nope, but somebody’s gotta get her back, and it turns out that somebody is me. Now I’ve gotta get a move on here, Nancy, so start talking. I already know you’re somehow involved in all this. Start with this, though: Where the hell did Paul get three hundred and fifty thousand dollars? And don’t give me the bullshit you tried to give me back at your house.”
“Fuck you.”
“I thought we covered that. I’m not interested. Now answer my question.”
“Fuck you.”
After hitting her outside, he hadn’t wanted to do so again. But he was running out of time and had no choice. He slapped her hard.
“I don’t have time to screw around anymore. Answer my questions. You don’t, things get worse as we go on. The slap becomes a punch, the punch becomes a kick, my fist becomes a pistol butt, and soon you aren’t so pretty anymore, you understand?”
She looked into his eyes, tried to gauge the man in front of her. She gauged pretty well because she soon dropped her eyes and nodded.
“OK,” he said. “The money. Exactly where did Paul get it? He steal from his clients?”
“Paul handled a lot of people’s money. He’s been skimming for years.”
Stokes shook his head. Even though he’d been pretty sure that was the case, he hadn’t wanted to be right. He’d wanted Paul Jenkins to be everything he himself was not: honest, hardworking, a good family man. Stokes had hoped he was wrong, that the kidnappers were wrong, that Jenkins had earned the money honestly. Now that he learned the truth, he was disappointed. But it shouldn’t have surprised him. Look at the prize he’d married. None of this changed his thinking about Amanda, though. She deserved to be saved.
“Keep going,” he said.
“He put a lot away over the years, I guess. I didn’t realize how much while we were married.”
“When’d you figure that out?”
She hesitated. “I kept a key to his house after I moved out. Anyway, I had some suspicions, I guess, and I started to wonder if I couldn’t get a court to raise my alimony if I found out for sure how much he had. So I snuck into his house one day and went through papers in his office. I found some financial records, account state
ments, and questioned Paul about them. We argued. Finally, he told me what he’d done, but he said he’d done it for Amanda. He told me he had three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in an account for her that only he could access.”
“And that wasn’t good enough for you? That Amanda’s life would be a little easier for her one day. You had to have a cut, too.”
“Why should his daughter have so much while I have so little?”
His daughter?
“You mean your daughter, don’t you?” Stokes asked.
She shook her head. “She’s Paul’s daughter. With his first wife. Amanda’s real mother died when Amanda was a year and a half old.”
Well, that explained a shitload, right up to Nancy’s blonde hair and little Amanda’s dark hair, which Stokes just assumed she’d inherited from her father. He remembered a photo at Jenkins’s house of baby Amanda in the arms of a smiling brunette—Amanda’s biological mother.
“And you never quite warmed up to the girl, I guess,” Stokes said.
She shrugged. “Not really.”
“What’d you do after you found out about the money?”
“I made Paul give me more alimony.”
“You blackmailed him.”
She shrugged.
“And then what? It still wasn’t enough, so you found some guys to kidnap Amanda? Your own stepdaughter?”
She said nothing. He was tired of screwing around, so he slapped her again.
“Ow, shit.”
He still didn’t like hitting her, but by being such a horrible creature she was making it a little easier on him, for which he was grateful.
“Answer my questions and don’t jerk me around. Next time you get knuckles. You obviously told someone about the money. How else would the kidnappers know to ask for exactly three hundred and fifty thousand? So who’d you tell?”
She was silent. He raised a fist. She shrank back and raised her bound hands in front of her to ward off the blow that didn’t fall.
“That was your last warning,” he said. He wasn’t proud of himself, but he needed answers fast.
She took a deep breath. “I gamble sometimes. On horses. I lost a lot. Too much, so I borrowed more to win it back. Lost again. Borrowed a little more and lost that, too. Then I couldn’t get any more loans. And I couldn’t pay back what I owed, either.”
“Who’d you borrow from?”
“Some small-timer, I thought. But when a couple of guys came around asking for the money, they made sure I knew whose money I’d really been playing with.”
He waited. Had to be either Leo Grote or Frank Nickerson.
“Leo Grote,” she said.
“And to save your skin you told them about the money Paul had in an account for Amanda.”
She nodded. “It was Grote’s money anyway,” she said. “Paul did some work for him.”
“That’s who Paul stole from?”
She nodded.
“You said you didn’t know who any of Paul’s criminal clients were.”
She shrugged again.
No wonder the kidnappers were so insistent on getting the entire $350,000. Paul had stolen it from them, and they wanted it all back.
“So you told Grote about the money,” Stokes said.
“Well, I told his guys. They told me that if I helped them get it, they’d cancel my debt.”
“And you knew Paul would give it all to them to protect Amanda.”
“Every penny.”
“So why didn’t they just grab your ex and beat him until he gave them the money?”
“I told them that wouldn’t work, at least not as well as kidnapping Amanda would. Paul might have risked his own neck to hang onto his money, especially when he’d collected it for her, but I knew he’d never risk his daughter’s life.”
Hell, maybe Jenkins was an OK guy after all. At least he cared about his kid.
“So you and Grote’s guys worked out the kidnapping thing together. They’d get their money, you’d get Grote off your back. How much were you into him for?”
“Eighty-five thousand.”
“What about the rest of it?”
She said nothing.
“Don’t tell me. They were gonna split it with you.”
She shrugged. Stokes did the math in his head, which took a little while. He got hung up once and had to start over. Finally, he said, “That’s something like a hundred thirty grand for you, and the same for Grote. Jesus, you’re a sweet thing, you know that?”
“Fuck you.”
“They cut off two of her fingers, you know.”
“What?” Her voice caught the tiniest bit as she said it.
“Yeah, your friends cut off two of Amanda’s fingers. Nice people you’re in bed with, huh?”
Nancy’s eyes softened around the edges for a moment, then hardened like quick-drying cement. “She’ll be OK.”
“Sure she will, Nancy. Keep telling yourself that until this is all over. Now, who’d you cut the deal with?”
“What do you mean? Grote, I guess.”
“No, no, Grote had to OK the deal, I’m sure, but who’d you work the plan out with?”
“I never got their names.”
He knew some of Grote’s men, from when they’d all had the same boss. Grote would probably want guys he trusted on something as delicate and dangerous as a kidnapping, guys who had been with him for a while, so there was a decent chance Stokes knew them.
“What’d they look like?” he asked.
She thought for a moment. “There were two of them. One was a big, dark-skinned guy. Not black, I don’t think, but real dark complexion. Muscular. Black tattoo on his neck, I think. Some kind of swirly design.”
He nodded. Iron Mike, they called him, after Mike Tyson, the boxer.
“And the other guy?”
“Real ugly. Tall, stocky, gold tooth on one side of his mouth, I think.”
Danny DeMarco. Stokes knew him, too. Leg breakers, both of them. Enjoyed their work far more than he ever did.
Stokes thought about the scam. He was a little surprised by it, surprised Grote would go for it. Sure, it turned his eighty-five grand into, what? Over 215 grand? And actually, despite what they’d told Nancy, she never would have seen a dime of that money, so Grote was probably really looking at the whole $350,000, which was something like four times what Nancy owed him.
But Grote had plenty of money already and kidnapping was risky, like one of Nickerson’s psycho sons had said to Stokes earlier that night. Unless you kill the hostage, there’s always a witness. He wondered if Grote even knew about the deal at all. It sounded like maybe Iron Mike and DeMarco were doing this off the books. Maybe they planned to snatch the kid, collect the ransom, give Grote the money Nancy owed him, and pocket what was left. Assuming they cut Nancy out entirely, like he suspected they would, they’d each be something like a 130 grand richer and Grote would be none the wiser. Then again, guys like Iron Mike and Danny DeMarco don’t do much thinking on their own. They don’t have the brains for it, and they don’t, in the end, have the balls for it. They had to know that if Leo Grote found out they’d crossed him, they wouldn’t have any balls at all, at least not for long. No, the more Stokes thought about it, the more he realized that Grote must have OK’d the deal after all.
He asked, “Paul ever tell you about any evidence he’d collected against Grote, maybe as an insurance policy? Evidence of Grote’s criminal activities?”
Nancy shook her head.
“All right. Any idea where the exchange is supposed to take place tonight? Where Paul was supposed to drop the money? Where he was supposed to pick up Amanda?”
She shook her head.
“Give me the truth.”
“I swear to God, I don’t know.”
“Am I supposed to be at L
aund-R-Rama to get my phone call at one thirty tonight?”
“I don’t know. Really.”
“OK.”
He stood and started for the door.
“So?” she said.
“So what?”
“So what about me?”
“What about you?”
“You’re leaving me here? Like this?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I forgot.”
He went back to her, pulled out another of the plasticuffs, and used it to connect the ties binding her wrists with those binding her ankles.
“What the hell?” she said.
Stokes pulled the plastic ties tight, drawing her hands down near her feet. It didn’t look to Stokes like a comfortable position in which to spend a few hours.
Life’s rough.
“You can’t just leave me like this.”
“Sure, I can. Don’t worry, when the cops come for Officer Martinson, they’ll find you, too.”
He faced the door, which he’d left open. He’d also left open the door to the cop’s room across the hall a few minutes ago.
He called out, “So, did you get all that, Officer Martinson? Grunt once for yes and twice for no.”
He heard a single, muffled grunt. It wasn’t loud, but he heard it clearly in the empty, echoing house. No doubt the cop had heard Nancy clearly enough, too.
Stokes said, “Looks like you just confessed to conspiracy to kidnap your own stepdaughter.”
She spit at him. He didn’t care.
“You may not give a shit,” he said, “but I’m gonna get Amanda away from Grote’s men. I’m gonna bring her home.” He had no idea, though, to what home he’d bring her. Both her biological parents were dead, and her stepmother, who didn’t care about her anyway, was going to have a new home herself in an eight-by-ten-foot cell.
She glowered at him. “I’m thirsty.”
“You’ll live.”
“I need a drink.”
“Join the club.”
“Come on,” she said, “I’m thirsty.”
“The cops can give you a drink in a few hours.”
“I have to pee.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
“You asshole.”