Shady Cross (24 page)

Seconds later, stokes exploded through one of the doors and into the night, gun in hand. “Stay still,” he said to the coat-wrapped bundle slung over his left shoulder.

The shot came from his right, and he could practically feel the heat from the bullet as it sizzled just in front of his face. He half turned as he ran and squeezed off two blind shots to buy time, then pumped his legs as hard as he could. The wound in his thigh hurt like a son of a bitch, and more than once he nearly collapsed, but he kept running, issuing a loud and steady stream of instructions over his shoulder as he did, things like “Don’t cry,” “Keep your head down,” “You gotta stop squirming.” He also said soothing things like “You’ll be OK” and “We’ll get out of this.” He heard two more shots, but neither found its mark, and soon he was half running, half hobbling through the park, stumbling through the tall grass and weeds, fighting the growth that had taken over the grounds.

He heard shouts behind him and the sounds of pursuit. He never stopped speaking, never ceased his flow of comforting words. And he never stopped running. Still, they were gaining. But the sirens were getting closer, too, much closer. One way or another, this was going to be over soon.

Stokes was starting to feel light-headed as he loped past rusted rides and badly listing booths. To his left loomed a huge structure. The roller coaster, still standing after all these years. Trees and vines had grown up, through, and around its metal girders, like giant snakes twisting through the bones of a dinosaur skeleton.

Stokes’s encouraging words had sunk to a whisper. His little burden, so light before, felt heavy now. As did his legs. He was getting dizzy. It was the blood loss, he knew, accelerated by his mad, shambling run across the park. Stokes looked down as he stumbled along. The front of his shirt was soaked with blood. His pant leg was dark crimson.

The dizziness grew worse. The moonlight-draped landscape of the park became ringed in deep black as he lost the edges of his vision to darkness.

The pursuit behind him was getting much closer. The sirens sounded as though they might have been in the old gravel lot in front of the park.

Stokes limped on. His head became lighter, his thoughts more jumbled. He no longer knew where he was running and had but a tenuous memory of who was chasing him. A shot rang out from behind, then another. Stokes thought he might have felt an impact.

Please, God, no.

“Amanda,” he mumbled. “Are you hurt? Did they hit you?”

No answer.

Another shot.

“Amanda,” he cried, “
answer me
.”

Silence.

Jesus Christ.
Nothing to do but keep running. He was trying to buy time for them both, time for the cops to arrive and save them. Had Ellie been hit? Had she . . . ? No, not Ellie, that wasn’t right. It was . . . Amanda. Yeah, that was it, Amanda. Stokes prayed she hadn’t been struck by one of the bad guys’ bullets. His dimming vision blurred, and he was surprised to realize that tears had come to his eyes. He couldn’t think clearly.
Had
the girl been hit? She wasn’t moving a muscle. If only he’d run faster. If only he’d carried her in front of him in both his arms instead of over his shoulder, leaving her more exposed.

Just hold on, Ellie. I’ve got you. The cops will be here soon. Just hold on.

He no longer knew whether he was speaking aloud or whether the words were in his head.

The darkness on the edges of his eyes was spreading inward, shrinking the tunnel of his vision with every step. Then, not far ahead, in the center of his sight, he saw the mouth of an artificial tunnel and the yawning darkness beyond it, a darkness that could provide cover, buy them the last bit of time they needed. He stumbled toward the ruins of Miner’s Run, a broken-down thrill ride in which park patrons sat in old-fashioned mining cars and raced on tracks through nearly total darkness. Stokes sought that darkness now. The footsteps behind him were faster than his, and very close now. Another shot ripped the night.

“We’re almost there,” he whispered aloud.

I’m not gonna make it
, he said in his head.

As he neared the mouth of the tunnel, he tripped on the rusted track that ran down into the blackness. He dropped to one knee. A gunshot cracked and a bullet tore into his right shoulder, spinning him around. Finally, Stokes dropped his burden.

Chet Nickerson and Iron Mike were walking toward him. They were short of breath, but not nearly as badly as he was.

Voices drifted through the park. Footsteps crashed through thick green growth. Radios crackled. Flashlight beams bounced through tree limbs and waist-high weeds.

As Stokes knelt in the dirt, Chet and Iron Mike stared at the ground in front of him. Stokes followed their gaze to the pile of empty coats spilled on the ground—their coats, the ones he’d taken from the ballroom. He’d wrapped Amanda’s coat around theirs, thrown the bundle over his shoulder, and run like hell. For a moment, he was as surprised to see them as his pursuers were. Then he smiled. He remembered. He’d forgotten but now he remembered.

In their desperation to leave no witnesses alive, Chet and Iron Mike had gambled everything on being able to catch and kill Stokes and the girl, then disappear into the woods before the cops caught up with them. Now, staring at their coats lying open and empty on the ground, hearing the cops just behind them, they knew the girl would live. They might even have figured out that she was hiding under the overturned crate back in the ballroom, which Stokes himself, weak and confused from the blood loss, had remembered only a moment ago. Maybe they understood that Stokes had been hoping they’d hear him saying encouraging words as he ran. They certainly realized they’d been tricked and were now totally screwed, because the cops, who were bursting into the clearing at that very moment, would find the girl and the girl would tell them everything. Yeah, they realized that. Stokes could see it in their eyes. Especially Chet’s. Stokes tried to raise his gun but couldn’t. Chet had more success. He pointed his gun at Stokes and pulled the trigger. Stokes felt like someone hit him in the chest with a shovel, and he fell.

As he lay on his back, a coldness crawling through his body, he heard more shouts and more gunshots. A moment later—or was it an hour—he heard voices, urgent voices.

Time drifted lazily by as the cold inside him spread.

He thought he might have dozed off. He must have, because now he was lying on something, being carried through the night. He looked up at the stars. He thought he recognized a few constellations. Some were real, he knew, and some were the ones his father had made up a long time ago, but he could no longer remember the difference.

Faces looked down at him. Voices spoke—to him, to each other, to him again. They seemed to want a reply. He couldn’t give them one.

He was poked and stuck and prodded.

More voices.

“Everyone dead back there?” someone asked.

“Yeah, two of them.”

“Any of ours hurt?”

“No, Sergeant. They fired on our guys, our guys fired back and took them down.”

“You checked the girl out?”

“Yeah. Looks like she’ll be OK.”

At that, Stokes smiled dreamily. The cold inside him started to feel less cold. Soon, it became a warmth, welcome and soothing.

“How about this one?” a voice asked.

“He’s fading fast.”

He’d done it. He’d saved the little girl. He lost everything, but he’d saved her. Strangely, it didn’t seem like a bad deal to him. He was tired. He was halfway between the waking world and the world of dreams, and yet things looked clearer to him than they ever had. He realized that
this
was what she’d seen in him so long ago.
This
was what Jenny had seen. Jenny, the girl he should have married, the girl who gave him a daughter he should have raised. She’d seen something in him he never saw in himself. And this was it. This was what she had seen. The capacity to do . . .
this
.

Stokes knew that faces were still peering down at him, but he could no longer see them. His eyes were open, but he just couldn’t see. The stars above were gone.

He’d done what he’d had to do to save the girl, and things had turned out how they had to turn out. He found he had no regrets about that. There was only one thing he wished. He wished he knew what would happen to her. That’s all he really wanted. To know.

The activity continued around his body, he felt pressure in places, hands tending to him.

“We’re losing him.”

Miraculously, a life began to flash before his unseeing eyes, like he’d read about, like he’d seen on TV. Only this was different. Whether it was the product of a delirious mind or the answer to a prayer, the life that played like a home movie in his head was Amanda Jenkins’s. He saw her as a young girl, older than she was that day, but still young, and smiling, standing between a man and a woman Stokes didn’t recognize, people with kind eyes in gentle faces. Suddenly, she was a young woman, no longer chubby, pretty enough, but confident, full of life. Before Stokes knew it, she was older still, sitting in a living room somewhere with sunlight streaming in through a window behind her. A man sat beside her, holding her hand. Crawling across the floor at their feet was a pudgy baby in footed pajamas. The image shimmered, dissolving into a different one. Same room, same woman, only she was older now, quite a bit older, as was the man at her side. Three good-looking kids—teenagers—swept into the room and, one by one, kissed each of their parents before sweeping out. The scene shifted yet again, and the woman was much older now, gray haired, a lifetime of smile lines etched into her wrinkled face. The man was no longer at her side. The three teenagers had grown into adults and were sitting in the room around her, holding hands with their husbands or wives, the floor of the room alive with kids crawling and toddling back and forth. As Stokes watched this life flash through his mind, he realized the woman’s face had sometimes been that of Amanda Jenkins, and sometimes that of his own daughter, Ellie. He hadn’t seen Ellie since she was two years old, so there was no way he really could have recognized her, but somehow he did. And he smiled, watching Amanda or Ellie or maybe both of them, surrounded by loved ones, drifting gently, gracefully into old age.

A voice intruded on his thoughts, and the images faded from his mind. “Does he have a chance?”

“I don’t think so,” another voice said.

The warmth was all through him now, all around him. He felt both suffused with it and wrapped in it, hugged by it, like the warmth was cradling him in strong, loving arms.

“Is that it then?”

“Yeah, he’s not gonna make it.”

Stokes was replaying in his mind the images of the life—maybe the lives—he’d been permitted to see moments ago.
To hell with you
, he thought.
I did make it.

He smiled, closed his eyes, and simply let go, let it all go, and let the warmth embrace him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to many people for helping to bring this book to life. First, I thank Colleen . . . my wife, my friend, my first reader, my biggest fan, and my partner in everything. Thank you for walking beside me, and sometimes holding my hand, through the writing of this book and through all things. I also thank my sons, who inspire me every day in so many ways. Much appreciation goes to early readers and good friends Daniel Suarez and Adam Winston. I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Michael Bourret of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, for all that he does for me. I thank David Downing for his keen editorial eye and for asking the right questions. I am also grateful to Alison Dasho for giving
Shady Cross
a home at Thomas & Mercer, and to Jacque BenZekry, Tiffany Pokorny, Gracie Doyle, and the rest of the T&M team for taking such good care of my book and me. I would be remiss (and possibly in trouble) if I did not thank my family and friends for their constant and kind encouragement, with special thanks owed to my wonderful parents whom I miss every day. And words cannot adequately express how much I appreciate the support of my readers, who make it possible for me to do what I love to do. Finally, I should note that because I invented Shady Cross, Indiana, I likely got the facts right about the city, but if there are any errors in the book on any other topic, they are mine and mine alone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © James Hankins

Bestselling author James Hankins pursued
writing at an early age. While attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he received the Chris Columbus Screenwriting Award. After career detours into screenwriting, health administration, and the law, Hankins recommitted himself to writing fiction. Since then, he has written three popular thrillers, each of which spent time in the Kindle Top 100. Additionally,
Brothers and Bones
received a starred review from
Kirkus Reviews
and was named to their list of Best Books of 2013, while both
Jack of Spades
and
Drawn
were Amazon #1 bestsellers. He lives with his wife and twin sons just north of Boston.