Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,15,260489-shady_cross.html
He bent down, removed her sneakers, and yanked off her socks, which he tied together and used to gag her. He stood and looked down at her. Her eyes were wild. Her face red with rage. Incredible how she’d completely lost her looks in less than an hour.
He walked away, shutting the door behind him.
Outside, he got back into Bobby’s truck. He pulled around the house and back onto the road. A couple of minutes later, the cell phone twittered in his pocket. Stokes didn’t have to look at his watch. It would say it was exactly ten o’clock. He opened the phone.
“I’m here,” he said.
“You got the money, right?” the kidnapper asked. Stokes wondered whether it was Iron Mike on the other end of the line or Danny DeMarco.
“I got it,” Stokes said, then felt a flash of fear that the kidnappers would suddenly change the plan on him, tell him to meet them right now . . . with the money and Paul’s evidence against them. He assumed they had their reasons for waiting until later, though . . . probably fewer potential witnesses or cops around, or something like that . . . and he prayed that those reasons were compelling enough for them to stick to their game plan, because he sure as hell wasn’t ready to meet with them.
“Just a few hours until you see your daughter again,” the kidnapper said, and Stokes breathed a mental sigh of relief.
“I know,” he said. “Put Amanda on.”
“She’s sleeping. Want me to wake her?” Stokes thought it might have sounded more like DeMarco but he couldn’t really tell.
“Wake her,” Stokes said. “I need to know she’s OK.”
“You don’t trust us?”
“Well, I know kidnappers are usually a trustworthy bunch, but I’d still like to talk to Amanda.”
Stokes could almost hear the kidnapper shrug. A moment later, a little sleep-filled voice said, “Daddy?”
“I’m here, Amanda. And I’ll be there soon to take you home. Now go back to sleep, OK?”
“OK . . . Daddy.”
The kidnapper took the phone. “Talk to you in an hour, Paul.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
Stokes swallowed. “There’s been a slight change of plans.”
A pause. “Really? Because I don’t remember changing them.”
“I’m changing them.” Stokes held his breath.
After a moment of silence, the kidnapper said, “You think so, huh? What change are you suggesting, Paul?”
“I’m not going to drop the money and the evidence and hope you tell me where to find Amanda.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I want to see her before I give you anything. I need to know she’s still alive, that she’s OK.”
“Fuck you, Paul. Listen to me—”
Stokes interrupted but tried to keep from sounding overly confrontational. “No, you listen to me,” he said, then quickly added, “please.” He continued. “I don’t care about the money. I just want Amanda back safe. So I’ll give you the money, and all the evidence I have, but I won’t do that unless she’s there for me when we meet, ready to come home with me. OK? I see her, I give you the money and the evidence, and you give her to me.”
Stokes waited through a cold silence. He began to sweat. A moment later, mumbled conversation drifted across the connection. Finally, the kidnapper said, “Fine, Paul. We’ll do it your way. I’ll call in an hour.”
Stokes would try to give them the entire $350,000 they wanted. Also, he’d give them the blank thumb drive and tell them that it had Jenkins’s evidence on it. By then, they’d know he wasn’t Paul Jenkins, so he’d tell them that Jenkins was dead. He hoped they’d accept the money and take the thumb drive and let him go with the girl. And if they unfortunately had a laptop at the meeting place and could verify that the thumb drive didn’t contain the evidence they were expecting, he’d apologize and explain that he’d searched Jenkins’s house and hadn’t been able to find any evidence, and that Jenkins, being dead, was beyond being able to give it to them or, more importantly, to the authorities. And if they seemed inclined to kill Amanda and him anyway after all that, he’d try to convince them it just wasn’t necessary. Stokes just wanted the girl, and the girl just wanted to go home. And her real parents were dead and her stepmother didn’t give two shits about her, so there was no one to care about bringing anyone to justice.
It was a lousy plan, but it was all he had.
He looked down at the cop’s gun lying on the floor of the truck, secured in its holster again on Martinson’s belt. As he drove, his eyes kept returning to the weapon.
EIGHTEEN
10:11 P.M.
STOKES FELT LIKE HE’D MADE a little progress. He thought he knew where to be to receive the one thirty call. And he’d been able to convince himself that the kidnappers wouldn’t really care about the evidence, whatever it was, once they learned that Jenkins was dead. His big problem was that he still had only $248,000 and Grote’s guys had made it crystal clear that showing up with a penny less than the $350,000 Paul stole from Grote was not going to be acceptable. And $102,000 was a lot more than a penny. So he needed to come up with that amount in just under three and a half and hours. He wasn’t factoring in the forty-odd dollars he had left of Tom What’s-His-Name-from-Pittsburgh’s money, the cash he took from Paul’s wallet, or the seventy-two cents he found on his nightstand.
If he wanted to come up with a lot of money fast, he had only a few options of varying levels of viability. The first option was to borrow it. The odds of one of his acquaintances having that kind of money within easy reach were very, very low. And if, by some miracle, his acquaintances did have that kind of money on hand, the chances of them loaning it to Stokes were even lower. No, if he were going to borrow $100,000, he knew . . . as he always knew . . . that it would have to be from either Leo Grote or Frank Nickerson.
He considered Nickerson first. The problem was that Stokes had just taken almost a year to erase a $75,000 debt, a debt that an unconscionable interest rate had inflated to $100,000 by the time Stokes paid it back earlier that very afternoon. Plus, his sons had no doubt voiced their opinion that Stokes had been trying to leave town without settling that debt before they hauled him off a bus. So he didn’t like his chances of getting the money from Frank Nickerson. Besides, the guy wasn’t likely to be in a giving mood if Stokes knocked on his door after ten o’clock at night.
Stokes turned his thoughts to Leo Grote. The irony would be that the money Stokes would borrow from Grote would be paid back to the bastard only hours later as part of the ransom for Amanda Jenkins. The problem was, Stokes had a history with Grote, and not a pleasant one, so he didn’t like his chances of getting big bucks from old Leo, either. In fact, the last thing Grote said to him was something like, “Stokes, I hope you realize how lucky you are that you’re only going to end up with a few broken bones tonight, because I really ought to punch your ticket, you know? So good fucking riddance, and if I ever see your face again I’ll probably just have you killed, so stay the fuck out of my sight.” So Grote wasn’t much of an option, either.
All of which forced Stokes to consider a third option. Which was why he was sitting in Bobby’s truck, parked a short way up a side road into the woods, hidden from the main road, a quarter of a mile from his trailer park. He’d leave the truck where it was and enter the park on foot. After the unpleasant little surprise of finding Sergeant Millett waiting for him at his trailer a couple of hours ago, he couldn’t risk driving right into the place. But he nonetheless needed to go in.
He used a flashlight to make his way through the trees to the trailer park again. He hopped the chain-link fence and moved through the park, sticking to the shadows where he could, staying off the roads as much as possible in case one of his neighbors was up late and had nothing better to do than sit at his window, watching the dirt road in front of his trailer. Stokes was slinking from shadow to shadow, two rows
of trailers over from his—which was likely far enough in the event Millett had decided to camp out in front of Stokes’s place all night—and was about to duck behind Mrs. Grandison’s trailer, when he heard someone call his name in a half whisper, half yell. It was Charlie Daniels—still no relation to the singer—calling to him through the dark. Stokes must not have been as stealthy as he’d intended to be.
Stokes ignored Daniels and disappeared behind Mrs. Grandison’s trailer. Daniels called again.
Jesus Christ.
Stokes hurried around the trailer and across the road, where he found Daniels parked in a lawn chair in front of his place, a can of beer in one hand, a lit cigar in the other. Stokes was now on the road parallel to the one he lived on, where Millett may have been sitting in his cruiser at that moment, waiting for Stokes to come home—perhaps waiting to arrest him.
He tried to keep the frustration out of his voice as he quietly said, “Hey, Charlie.”
“Hey, Stokes.”
“How about keeping our voices down, OK? Don’t want to wake the neighbors, right? Or end up with a citation from that Nazi Barrington.”
Bill Barrington was tasked with enforcing the rules of the trailer park—rules pertaining to how long your grass could be, whether you could have pink plastic flamingos on your property, what type of holiday decorations you could have, when they could be put up, and when they had to be taken down. He seemed to take secret delight in flexing the muscles his position of authority had put on his skinny, sixty-five-year-old frame, and handing out the occasional citation.
Daniels nodded. “Yeah, we should keep our voices down. Don’t want to bother the neighbors, like you say. Or the cops who were knocking on everybody’s doors an hour or so ago, asking about you. Or the ones who went through your trailer.”
Stokes hesitated. “Yeah, don’t wanna bother them, either.”
They were silent for a moment. Stokes cursed inside his head—really loudly inside his head. He couldn’t go back to Bobby’s truck now. They’d be looking for it. He was glad he’d taken to keeping the backpack with him wherever he went.
Daniels took a swig of beer. “Looks like you’re in trouble.”
Stokes nodded. “Cops still around?”
“Been gone a little while now.”
“They were in my trailer?”
“Yup.”
Stokes nodded again, thinking. Sounded like Millett came back again and brought friends with him. And a search warrant. Maybe an arrest warrant, too. Or maybe they just said, “To hell with procedure, we’re going to nail this guy.” Either way was bad news for Stokes, and probably meant there had been a big change in the case. What the hell could it have been? Why the hell was Millett so focused on Stokes, for God’s sake?
“So,” Stokes said, “anybody watching my trailer now?”
“Probably. Not that I can see, but if I could see them, then so could you, and they know that if you saw them, you’d go running off. So maybe they’re watching your place and maybe they aren’t. I have no idea. I just can’t see anyone. And I keep a pretty good watch on things generally around here.”
He took a puff on his cigar. Stokes watched the end glow brightly for a moment. “I watch a lot of things in this park, you know? For example, I see that you seem to be pretty good friends with Bobby’s wife a few trailers down. Kind of a pretty thing, though she looks like she has about ten years more wear on her than her birth certificate probably shows. What’s her name again?”
“Joyce.”
“Yeah, Joyce. You two seem to be pretty good friends.”
Stokes shrugged. Daniels sipped his beer.
“See, Charlie,” Stokes said, “Joyce and I, we just—”
“Hell, Bobby’s a dipshit. I don’t care what you and his wife do.” Daniels took another puff of his cigar. “Cops say you knocked some guy’s head in. Did you?”
“No, Charlie, I didn’t. I swear to God.”
“They’re just picking on you for no reason then?”
“Not really. The guy got his head knocked in when he surprised someone robbing his house, and the cops have reason to believe I’ve robbed a house or two in my day, plus I was seen last night in a bar a few blocks away from the guy’s house, so they put these things together and decided to try to pin this one on me. It’s bullshit.”
Daniels nodded. “I see. But you weren’t the one who robbed that house last night. You weren’t the one who brained that guy, right?”
“Swear to God, Charlie. On my mother’s grave. I was in that bar last night, sure, but shit, so were a lot of guys who could have pulled that job. The problem is, this cop on the case, he questioned me a couple of weeks ago about another burglary, a different one, and—”
Daniels interrupted. “You do that one?”
Stokes shrugged. “It’s possible that I might have.”
“But not this one.”
“Nope. Not my style, assaulting people. Never did it, never will.”
“Not your style.”
“That’s right.”
Daniels seemed to be sizing Stokes up, judging his character and veracity. That was still never a good thing for him, in Stokes’s experience.
“He died, you know,” Daniels said. “The guy who got his head busted. He died a little while ago.”
Oh, man, Stokes thought. Now Millett was going to go crazy to try to pin this on him, to try to bring his godfather’s killer to justice. Well, screw Millett and screw his godfather. Stokes had no plans to take the fall for this one. He was not going down for murder. Plenty of other guys in this town knew how to break into a house. Any one of them could be a legitimate suspect in that job last night.
This changed things for Stokes, though. Maybe it was time to cut and run. He’d done his best for the girl, he truly had, but sticking around now was suicide. How long could he evade the cops? If he saw this through now, tried to save Amanda, even if he was successful, did he have any hope of slipping safely out of town when it was all over?
Daniels was watching him.
“I didn’t do it, Charlie. I didn’t kill that guy. My hand to God.”
Daniels nodded, raised the beer can to his lips, tipped his head back, and drained the last of his Budweiser. He looked hard at Stokes.
“The thing is,” Daniels said, “I heard a couple of the cops talking outside my trailer—I guess they didn’t think anyone could hear them—but I heard them saying that the guy with the busted head woke up from a coma or something long enough for them to show him a bunch of pictures. Before he died, he picked you out.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stokes said. “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
Daniels took a puff on his cigar.
Goddamn it. This was very bad. “Look at my face, Charlie,” Stokes said. “Looks just like everybody else’s, doesn’t it?”
Daniels looked at him a moment before making a gesture with his shoulders and head that was somewhere between a shrug and a nod.
Stokes normally wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass whether Daniels believed him, but he couldn’t afford to have his neighbor calling the cops, telling them he was just talking to the man they were all looking for, so he really needed Daniels to believe him.
“Look,” Stokes continued, “the guy wasn’t even in his right mind probably, seeing as somebody had recently cracked his skull, but they still believe him when he picks me out of a photo lineup? Hell, the cops already thought I did it. They probably showed the guy my picture along with a dozen black guys, maybe threw in a couple of women and a one-eyed albino midget.”
Daniels looked skeptical again. Goddamn it. Stokes knew his face really was a pretty common type. He would have bet his life savings, if he had a life savings, that a solid dozen of the guys in town capable of breaking into that house last night were dark-haired white guys in their thirties wi
th little or no facial hair. Guys who looked a lot like him. Goddamn it.
“Shit,” Stokes said, “I’m just saying that my face is a common one and it’d be easy for some half-conscious guy to pick it by accident. But I swear to God, Charlie, I didn’t do this. I swear to God.”
Daniels took a big puff on his cigar, held it for a moment, then let loose a cloud of smoke. Finally, he nodded to himself, as if coming to a decision.
“All right,” he said.
“You believe me?” Stokes said. “That I didn’t kill that guy?”
Daniels did that shrug-nod thing again, which Stokes took to mean that he mostly believed what Stokes had said. Stokes mentally sighed with relief. Maybe he’d be able to skip town after all.
Amanda’s scared, brave face popped into his head.
No, no, no. Sticking around town would be insane. I tried my best, but things are different now . . .
But the little girl . . .
Stokes could call the cops anonymously, let them worry about it. Why was it his problem now?
But he couldn’t call the cops. The kidnappers would know if he did. They’d made that clear. And they’d probably kill Amanda.
She had no one to save her. No one but him.
Goddamn it.
Daniels watched with casual curiosity as Stokes played mental ping-pong.
“Listen, Charlie,” Stokes finally said, “not only didn’t I kill anyone last night, but tonight I’m trying to do something good.”
Daniels showed his doubt by chuckling. “Yeah, like what?”
“Like trying to save somebody’s life, maybe.”
The older man knitted his bushy eyebrows together in a skeptical look. “Whose life?”
“A little girl’s. She’s just a kid. Six years old, I think.”
“Who’s she to you?”
“Nobody, really.”
“Nobody?”
“Never even met her. But I’m gonna save her.”
“How?”
“With this,” Stokes said, tapping his backpack with his foot.
“What’s in there?” Daniels asked.