Author: James Hankins
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/james-hankins/page,16,260489-shady_cross.html
Stokes hesitated. “A flashlight, a picture of the kid I’m gonna save, and a lot of money.”
“A lot?”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“You steal it?” Daniels asked.
“I found it.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“Save the kid, like I said.”
“Why does she need saving?”
“Look, I don’t really have time to go into it. If I’m gonna save her, I gotta get moving. The only reason I even bring it up is ’cause I need a car.”
“Wasn’t that you driving off in Bobby’s truck a couple of hours ago?”
Man, this guy didn’t miss a thing that went on around here.
“Yeah, well, I left that in the woods near here. But I obviously can’t go back to it now. After talking to Bobby and Joyce, the cops will be looking for it.”
Daniels nodded, seeing the sense in that. “And you need a car to save some little girl’s life tonight, some little girl you never even met.”
“Right.”
“So you want to borrow mine.”
“That about covers it.”
“What happened to your motorcycle?”
“Wrecked it.”
Daniels took a long puff on his cigar. “OK.”
“OK, what? I can take your car?”
Daniels nodded and Stokes almost let out an audible sigh.
“I’m a nice guy, Stokes,” Daniels said.
“I can see that.”
“No, I mean, I’m a really nice guy. Ask anyone around here, they’ll tell you. They’ll say, ‘That Charlie Daniels, he’d do just about anything to help just about anyone.’ Ask anybody in the park here, Stokes. They’ll tell you.”
“I hear you,” Stokes replied. “And I believe you.”
“Well, hold on, I’m making a point here.”
Stokes waited while Daniels took another long puff on his cigar.
“You remember last year,” he finally said, “when my Gloria had pneumonia.”
“Uh . . . ” Stokes wasn’t sure. He thought he might have remembered something about that. Or maybe not. But he’d take Daniels’s word for it.
“Yeah, I thought you might not remember. So you probably don’t remember that because you weren’t employed at the time—like most times, I guess—and you were hanging around your trailer a lot, and I was still working down at the glass factory, well, I asked you to look in on the missus once or twice a day. You know, just to see if she needed anything. Nothing too big, really. Maybe a glass of water if she was thirsty. Maybe ask her if she’d been taking her meds. Anyway, I asked you to do that. You remember?”
Stokes was starting to remember. He nodded.
“It’s coming back to you, I guess. So maybe you remember what you told me.”
Stokes said nothing.
“No?” Daniels said. “You don’t remember?”
Stokes did, but he shook his head.
“If I recall correctly—and I do, believe me—you said that if you wanted to play nurse to some old lady, you’d find yourself a rich old widow so that at least maybe she’d leave you something in her will. You said, at least then maybe there’d be something in it for you. Any of this ringing a bell?”
Stokes blew out a breath.
“Gloria died a few months later,” Daniels said. “Remember that part?”
Stokes nodded. Daniels was just jerking him around. “So you were just stringing me along? I can’t take your car?”
“No, no. You can still take it.”
“Huh?”
“You can’t borrow it, though. I can’t loan a car to someone the cops are looking for. You’re not worth going to jail for. You have to steal the car. Fortunately, everybody around here knows that I leave my keys, along with my spares, on hooks just inside my trailer. And I never lock my door.”
“So I can take the car.”
Daniels nodded.
“But what about all that with your wife,” Stokes said. “You know, last year?”
“Water under the bridge, Stokes. You can take the car. Just give me a thousand dollars.”
“What?” Stokes had said it too loudly. He lowered his voice and said it again.
“You heard me. You said yourself you got a lot of money in that bag. I want a thousand of it.”
Stokes sputtered inarticulately for a moment before saying, “But I thought you said you were such a great guy.”
Daniels took a swig of beer. “It’s true, Stokes. I am. I’m a real sweetheart. Like I said, ask anyone. The fact is, if anyone else in this park needed my help like this—even that dipshit Bobby, I suppose—I’d do whatever I could, and gladly. I swear to God. Wouldn’t charge a dime. I can’t tell you the number of people around here who come to me when they need something. In August I loaned half my monthly social security check to Ben Woodland so he could get his truck running again. He still owes me most of what he borrowed. And just last week I fixed a hole in the roof of Mrs. Bertrand’s trailer. I’m always willing to help.”
“So then why—”
“Because you’re different, Stokes. For you, it’ll cost a thousand dollars.”
Goddamn it. He should have just looked in on the old lady last year. Would it have killed him?
“But Jesus, Charlie, a thousand? Bobby only asked for a hundred.”
“Well, that was before the cops were looking for you, wasn’t it? Besides, you’re only banging Bobby’s wife. Mine, you treated like garbage. So it’s a thousand. And for that, I promise not to call the cops on you.”
Stokes gritted his teeth in frustration.
“And bring it back in one piece,” Daniels said. “Don’t smash it up and don’t make me have to go fetch it from the woods somewhere.”
Stokes didn’t know for sure that he’d be in any shape to come back himself, much less make sure he brought the car back, but he agreed to do as asked.
Daniels sucked the last of the life from his cigar, dropped it in the dirt at his feet, and ground it beneath the heel of his shoe.
“I’ll get you the key. Be right back.” He stood. “Why don’t you get my thousand dollars out of your big old bag of money there?”
As soon as Daniels stepped into his trailer, Stokes walked over and peeked in a window to make sure the son of a bitch wasn’t calling the cops. He watched Daniels grab a key off a hook next to a mustard-yellow refrigerator, then open the fridge and grab a beer. When Daniels stepped outside, Stokes was standing right in front of his door.
“Didn’t trust me, huh?” Daniels asked.
Stokes shrugged. Daniels held out his hand, and Stokes, shaking his head, gave him a $1,000 in hundreds. Daniels pocketed the money and handed the car key to Stokes, who stuffed it into his pocket.
“Thanks,” Stokes said. You bastard.
Daniels nodded and popped the top on his cold Bud.
Stokes walked away, past Daniels’s decade-old silver Toyota Camry. Daniels used that grating whisper again to stop him.
“Where you going? My car’s right there.”
“Yeah, I know,” Stokes said, “but there’s something I gotta do before I leave.”
He hurried off into the shadows between the trailers again, praying that Daniels didn’t hold enough of a grudge against him to call the cops—now that he had his money—despite his promise not to.
Stokes wound his way through a few small yards, past trailers, keeping to the shadows again and watching for cops, until he came to a heavy metal drainage grate set flush in the dirt in a dark corner of the grounds. He knelt and let the backpack slip from his shoulder. He reached down and hooked his fingers through the openings in the grate, got a firm grip, and leaned back. The grate came up like a trapdoor, though it wasn’t
hinged in place, just heavy so he couldn’t lift it right up. He tipped it all the way over and gently lowered it to the ground. Lying down next to it, he reached into the darkness below. He could have taken the flashlight from the backpack and shone it into the storm drain, but he knew right where the plastic bag would be. His hand closed on it, in the corner of the small space, right where he’d left it, hanging from a rung of the metal ladder that descended into the deep drain. He reached his other hand down, untied the bag, and hauled it up.
He looked around, made sure no one was watching, and opened the bag. Inside was a collection of diverse items. He shook the bag gently until he spotted what he wanted from it, then reached in and removed a leather case about the size of an address book. Next, he took out a pair of black leather gloves and slid his hands into them. Then he removed the rest of the things, one by one, from the bag. First came a gold watch. Not a Rolex, but nice. No need to wipe it down. He’d worn the gloves the only time he’d touched it. He dropped the watch into the drain. After a moment of silence, he heard it splash into shallow water in the darkness below. Next from the bag came a silver monogrammed money clip—without the money, which Stokes had spent that morning on gas for his bike. He dropped the clip into the dark, and followed it with an expensive-looking gold pen, a notebook computer, miscellaneous women’s jewelry, and a crystal figurine that was supposed to look like a bird maybe, which he’d wrapped in a dishcloth. He held on to the cloth. He dumped several more items down the storm drain before, finally, he took from the bag a solid-brass bookend in the shape of a column, the kind you’d see in ancient Rome. Dark-brown blood had dried and crusted on the top of it. He spit on the dishcloth and tried to rub away the dried blood. He wasn’t having a lot of success, so he dropped the bookend into the drain, listened for the splash, and hoped that the water down there would do what his saliva couldn’t do up here. After he dropped the towel and the plastic bag into the darkness, he gently lowered the grate back into place.
After being questioned about last night’s break-in, he’d planned to come back here for this stuff, remove the gloves he was now wearing and the little leather case he’d set aside, then take the bag with the rest of the items in it to Lake Rushton and toss it all in. But things had changed and now he needed the things he’d kept aside. And with Sergeant Millett’s godfather dying tonight, Stokes didn’t want the rest of the things hanging a mere two feet below the surface of the grate beside the road, just in case the cops searched the park and someone decided to shine a flashlight down there. With the stuff lying in a pool of water ten or so feet down, maybe nobody would ever find what he’d dumped there. And maybe he’d get really lucky and a big rain would come soon and wash it all away.
Stokes stuck the gloves and the leather case into a pocket of the backpack, slung the bag on his shoulder again, and hurried through the shadows back to Daniels’s Camry, where he was relieved to find Daniels, still alone, sitting in his lawn chair, sipping his beer, puffing on a new cigar. He looked too relaxed to have called the cops. He watched as Stokes dug the key out of his pocket and opened the car door.
A minute later, he was driving down the dirt road toward the exit of the trailer park, wondering if maybe there’d be a cop waiting there for him. It turned out that there was, but Stokes figured he was probably paying more attention to the way into the park than the way out. And he was undoubtedly looking for Bobby’s pickup coming in, not Daniels’s Camry going out.
As Stokes neared the police car, which was tucked into the shadow of a tree near the park’s entrance, he snatched up a grimy red baseball cap Daniels had left on the passenger seat and put it on, pulling the visor low. He drove right past the cop and out of the park. When he was well past the cruiser and hadn’t heard a whoop of a siren, he let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
He hadn’t meant to kill the guy last night. He hadn’t even meant to hit him. After he did, though, he really hadn’t thought much of it. Hadn’t spent the day wondering how the guy was, whether he’d survive the blow, except to think now and then that if Stokes were ever caught, it would be far, far better for him if the guy wasn’t too badly hurt. Now that he knew for a fact the guy had died, he was angry with himself. It had been stupid. If they ever did find a way to link him to the crime, his life might as well be over, too. He didn’t want to spend a couple of decades behind bars. In the dozens of home break-ins he’d committed over the years, he’d never had to hurt anybody before. And it bugged him. He was screwed now. He was feeling angry, frustrated, a little scared, and, he realized, a bit guilty. He had to admit it. Not so guilty that he planned to walk into the police station, march up to Sergeant Millett’s desk, and confess to the killing, but guilty nonetheless. He’d never wanted to kill anyone. Damn.
He still had no intention of going to jail for murder, though. Besides, he had more work to do tonight. He looked at his watch: 10:41 p.m. Less than three hours until he had to be at Laund-R-Rama to answer the kidnapper’s call. Which didn’t leave him a lot of time to come up with another $102,000—no, wait . . . after Charlie Daniels extorted another grand out of him, it was $103,000. Terrific.
He had no idea how to save the girl. No idea how this was all going to end. Equally troubling to him, he had no idea if there was any way it could end with the girl and him both going free—maybe one of them, but probably not both. That would take a miracle, and he’d never believed in miracles.
NINETEEN
10:55 P.M.
WIGGINS & MARTZ WAS A big antiques store in the highest-rent section of downtown. It was the kind of place you couldn’t just walk into and browse; you needed to make an appointment in advance, and when your time came, you rang a doorbell and they buzzed you in. Stokes had never been inside the place, though he’d looked in the windows plenty of times, wondering if it was worth the risk to try to break in one night. In the end, he’d always decided against it, because if he broke in he’d find two things: a lot of old stuff and an empty cash box. The “old stuff” was an assortment of antiques, of course, but Stokes didn’t have the faintest idea which ones were truly worth taking, nor did he have the first clue where to fence the kind of junk he’d find in there anyway. Besides, assuming he even got past the place’s security system, which he didn’t really think was all that likely, he couldn’t just carry a hundred-year-old piano or a roll-top desk out on his back. Just as importantly, however, Stokes had heard a reliable rumor that the store’s owners never left any money on site after closing.
Everyone in town knew who Hugh Wiggins and Arthur Martz were. They were respected gentlemen, good and honest businessmen, supporters of numerous local charities and other institutions requiring assistance, such as the public libraries and homeless shelters. Word had it they’d met almost forty years ago, when they were each in their early twenties. They became fast friends and business partners for life and, somewhere along the line, life partners.
Stokes didn’t care about any of that, though. What interested him about the men was something he’d heard during a poker game a while back. The old guys didn’t trust banks. Though their business was robust and they took in good money each day, for some reason they refused to deposit all of their day’s intake into their chosen institution. They typically held out a large percentage and took it home with them, to the house they’d shared for most of their adult lives. Stokes heard this from a guy he knew—Lenny Something-or-Other—who had driven a delivery truck for a while and had delivered some furniture to the antiques store. The owners were friendly and chatty as hell. Once Lenny realized that, he started asking questions and the old guys volunteered all kinds of information they shouldn’t have been sharing. Not long after, about three years ago now, Lenny donned a mask and broke into their house. When he couldn’t find the money, he simply threatened one of the gents with physical harm and the other fell over himself to get it for him out of a secret hidey-hole under an area rug in their den. Lenny got away clean with almo
st sixty thousand bucks. The thing was, according to one of the tellers at Wiggins and Martz’s bank—a teller who was happy to answer a few questions in exchange for one of Lenny’s twenties—after the robbery their bank deposits hadn’t increased. So Lenny had planned on breaking into the antique dealers’ house again and making another withdrawal. Before he got the chance, though, he was arrested for carjacking and was now serving a dime in prison. Which left Stokes with some useful—hopefully accurate—information.
Over the past few weeks, as the deadline for paying Nickerson ten grand of the hundred Stokes had owed him was approaching, Stokes had pulled a few jobs, broken into a few houses and a couple of small stores, trying to come up with enough for the payment. He’d have gone right to Wiggins and Martz’s house first, but a sign in their shop window said they had been on vacation in Italy for six weeks. Stokes figured they wouldn’t have left a ton of money in their house while they were gone, so he’d had to wait until they returned. The men had been back in town and back in business for three weeks now, and Stokes’s deadline for payment was two weeks away. He had planned to pull the job next week, which would have given him a week’s cushion before he had to turn around and give the money to Nickerson, but today’s events had forced him to speed up his plans.
Stokes had left Charlie Daniels’s car around the corner. He stood now in the shadow of a huge oak tree or elm tree or some other huge old tree, across the street from the house that Wiggins and Martz shared. The place was a big, rambling Victorian, old—as true Victorians must be—but extraordinarily well kept.
Stokes looked at the houses on either side of the Wiggins-Martz residence. They were colonials, and not nearly as well kept. But like Wiggins and Martz’s house, their windows were dark. Stokes looked at his watch: 10:58 p.m. He put the picture of Amanda Jenkins and her father, which he’d been looking at moments earlier, into a pocket of the backpack at his feet, then took the cell phone from inside his jacket and watched the house until the phone rang two minutes later. He answered it quickly.