Shady Cross (12 page)

SEVENTEEN

9:51 P.M.

STOKES WAS LYING ON A
hard floor. Someone was digging through his pockets. He heard a faint jingle, then footsteps fading away. A moment later he heard a car door slam. His head hurt like a bastard. He opened his eyes and, thank God, saw his backpack lying a few feet away. The flap was open. He could see inside. He blinked. There should have been money in there. Almost a quarter of a million dollars. Instead, he saw a few articles of clothing and a big, clunky metal first aid kit the size of a fishing tackle box. It was probably the first aid kit that had momentarily stunned him.

Goddamn Nancy. He struggled to his knees, expecting the truck’s engine to turn over any second outside. It didn’t. He put his hand on the wall for support and got to his feet. He was dizzy for a moment, but it passed quickly enough. He wished it had taken his headache with it. He felt behind him for the gun and found it still snugged into the waistband of his jeans. Thank God it hadn’t gone off and shot him in the ass when he fell. He left it tucked where it was. He didn’t want to shoot Nancy.

He hurried through the house and out the back door, where he saw her, with her duffel bag over her shoulder, stepping out of the truck. She had just begun to run when he called her name. She turned and he started toward her. She must have realized he’d catch her with ease because she jumped back into the truck and yanked the door closed. He saw her push down the locks.

“Open the door, Nancy,” he said through the closed window.

“Fuck you.”

Sweet little Nancy had a nasty side.

“Looks like you took the wrong keys out of my pocket,” he said. “Took the cop’s keys, left me the truck key.”

“I know that now, asshole.”

“So I could just unlock the door myself, you idiot. You might as well save me the trouble.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she did as instructed.

“I’m gonna pull this door open now,” he said. “I don’t think anyone in these other houses is close enough to hear you scream if you try, but I don’t want to find out. So if you scream, I’ll knock you out, you understand?”

She nodded. He opened the door. She opened her mouth. Stokes didn’t know if she was going to scream or not, but he slapped her in the face anyway, just in case. He didn’t take any pleasure in hitting a woman. He’d seen too much of that when he was a kid. He didn’t want to do it a second time, and he told her so. “So don’t make me,” he added.

She rubbed her cheek and nodded. He took the bag from her lap, the one she’d transferred his money into, and dragged her out of the truck by her arm. He led her back inside the house, to a second bedroom, and shoved her into a corner. He pulled all the window shades down and pointed to a rolled-up area rug that the house’s prior owners had left behind.

“Sit down.”

She did. He rubbed his eyes.

“How much, Nancy?”

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 statements, 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.