Shady Cross (5 page)

Stokes thought he might throw up. He looked around to see if anyone had overheard the video, but that didn’t seem to be the case. God, he was sweating so badly all of a sudden. He drew a deep breath and clicked on the second video. The girl was sitting on the bed like before, only now her hand was wrapped in a plaid dishcloth. Her eyes were puffy and red. It looked like she’d just woken up. Actually, it looked like she’d just woken up after crying herself to sleep earlier. She clutched her frog tightly. Stokes thought he saw blood on it. Her terrified eyes darted from the man with the camera phone to the person throwing another shadow on the wall, the one coming closer to her. She screamed and shrank away from the hands now reaching for her. She kicked but couldn’t stop him from grabbing her left hand, unwrapping the towel. Stokes could see where her pinky should have been. She kept screaming as the man closed all but her ring finger into his fist, reached into a back pocket or somewhere—Stokes could see only his arms—and brought out the tin snips. The cries, already piercing, rose to a new level as the blades came together with a sickening snap-crunch. Maybe the bastards recorded ten more seconds of her screaming, like before, but Stokes snapped the phone shut. He was breathing as though he’d just run ten miles. He was dizzy. The phone rang in his hand. He opened it on the third ring.

“You watch the video?”

Stokes sucked in a gasping breath.

“You there?”

“I’m here,” he finally managed to say.

“See the video?”

“I saw it.”

“Now maybe you know how serious we are. I can’t believe it took two fingers to convince you. But maybe we’re on the same page now, though. Are we, Paul? Are we on the same page now?”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Good. Believe me, we didn’t enjoy that but you didn’t give us a choice. Don’t put us in that position again.”

Stokes’s breath was starting to slow. “I won’t.”

“We’re trying to be patient with you, Paul. We’re trying to work with you, right?”

Stokes said nothing.

“Aren’t we?”

He seemed insistent, so Stokes said, “I guess.”

“You guess? When you told us you had evidence about where you got all that money, evidence that could be bad for us, did we get all pissed off and hurt the girl? Did we just say ‘fuck you’ and break a few bones? No, we did not. We could have, but we didn’t. And if we had, we’d still have the girl and you’d still want her back and we’d be right back where we started, only maybe the girl wouldn’t be in such great shape any longer. But we didn’t hurt her then. We realized you were just trying to protect your daughter. So we were nice enough to revise the deal. We agreed to let you give us the evidence along with the money. Wasn’t that nice of us, Paul?”

Stokes rubbed his eyes.

“Paul?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was nice.”

“That’s right, it was. So what happened?”

“When?”

“Why didn’t you answer an hour ago? Or forty-five minutes ago? Or half an hour ago?”

Stokes didn’t know what to say.

“Well?” the kidnapper said. “How the hell could you miss our four o’clock call? All we planned to do was call you now and then.
You’re
the one who insisted we call every hour on the hour so you could talk to your daughter. And we agreed. And we also made it pretty damn clear from the start what would happen if we called and you didn’t pick up. So what the hell happened?”

Stokes still didn’t know what to say. He still didn’t want to speak too much and give the kidnapper a chance to realize that the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t the voice he’d first spoken with, the voice of the dead father. He had to say something, though.

“I’m really sorry,” he said, speaking low. “I left the phone somewhere. Had to go back for it.”

“She’s going to run out of fingers sometime, Paul. When she does, we move on to something else. Is that going to happen? She going to run out of fingers?”

“No.”

“Is this going to happen again? Because maybe we’ll forget the fingers and take something else. Maybe we’ll get creative. Or, shit, maybe we’ll just kill her. How’s that sound?”

“Please,” Stokes said, struggling to keep his voice low, “don’t hurt her anymore. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I swear.”

“Better not,” the voice said. “Wanna talk to her?”

Stokes froze. He didn’t want to talk to the kid. That was just a bad idea. She’d probably know right away he wasn’t her father, and that could screw things up royally, put the girl in even worse danger than she was in. Plus, he just didn’t want to hear her voice. He hadn’t enjoyed hearing it in his head. He certainly didn’t feel like hearing it live again. The problem was, if he were truly her father, he wouldn’t just
want
to talk to her, he’d insist on it. And the last thing Stokes could afford to do if he wanted to help the girl was let the kidnapper know he wasn’t her father.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” the guy asked. “You wanna talk to her or not? She’s a little sad, of course, a little scared, and still in a bit of pain from the fingers, I think, but she can talk.”

“Put her on,” Stokes said.

A moment later, that damn little voice came on the line. “Daddy? Are you there? We kept trying to call you, but you didn’t answer.” Her voice was hoarse. From the screaming and crying, he knew. “They said they hurt me because you didn’t answer the phone. I don’t want them to hurt me again, Daddy. Can I come home soon? Please?” Stokes thought he heard a shuddering breath. Maybe it was a sob.

Stokes took a breath of his own. It was his fault. The second finger was his fault. Not the first one. That one was on her father, who obviously had ignored the kidnappers’ warnings and contacted the authorities. Stokes didn’t know if it was the cops or the FBI or whomever, but Paul clearly had called someone and the kidnappers, true to their word, had found out. And seeing as there didn’t appear to be a mobilization of cops or agents looking for the kid, whatever man they had inside whatever department, agency, or bureau her father had called must have been able to nip things in the bud somehow as soon as Paul called it in.

“Daddy,” the girl was saying, “can I come home soon?”

“Sure, Baby.”

A pause on the line. “Baby?”

He realized his mistake. He shouldn’t have used a pet name. He didn’t even know her real name yet, and he sure as hell didn’t know what cute little nickname her father had for her. Maybe he called her Princess, or Sweat Pea, or Sugar Bear. But judging by the girl’s reaction, he never called her Baby. If the kidnapper noticed the girl’s confusion—

“Satisfied?” It was the kidnapper’s voice again. Stokes blew out a breath as quietly as he could. The kidnapper didn’t wait for a response. “I’ll call in an hour. You better answer. And you better have the money. You know where to be to get your final instructions. Now I’m going to tell you when to be there.”

Huh? Wait a second.
Stokes didn’t know where to be. “Hey, hold on—”

“Be at that pay phone at one thirty this morning. If we see anyone hanging around there before then, we’ll kill the girl. We’ll tell you where to drop the money and the evidence. After we have it, we’ll tell you where you can find the kid. Then we’re done. Everybody’s happy.”

“But—”

The line went dead. Stokes closed the phone. A few people were still looking at him, but most had gone on their way. The janitor was sitting a few feet away, watching him. Stokes stuck the cell phone in his pocket and shoved the trash can with his foot, sending it rolling toward the janitor.

Pay phone?
Stokes’s mind was spinning. He had figured the kidnappers were just going to call the cell phone and tell him where to meet them. It never occurred to him that there was an instruction he’d already missed, something he was already supposed to know. But why send him to some pay phone to receive his final instructions when he had a cell phone? Stokes considered it. Maybe it made sense. They were probably going to send him from one pay phone to another, keeping an eye on him as they moved him around to make sure he wasn’t working with anyone, communicating with someone during the process. Finally, when they were sure he was going it alone, as instructed, they’d tell him where to make the drop.

One of Stokes’s problems, if he truly wanted to help the girl—something he was still struggling with a bit, if he had to be honest—was that he didn’t know where he was supposed to be at one thirty to receive the drop instructions, yet he was obviously supposed to know that. They’d already communicated that to the dead father. Stokes couldn’t play dumb and just ask them again. No father would forget that information. Somehow, Stokes would have to find out where that pay phone was located.

He had other problems, too. He was short $102,000 and the kidnappers sounded pretty serious about wanting every last dime of the $350,000 they asked for. Stokes had seen with his own eyes just how serious they were.

He also didn’t have the evidence they were looking for, whatever it was. He knew it wasn’t in the bag with the money. That meant the father had planned to get it later. But from where? And what the hell was it?

Maybe it was time to confess that he wasn’t the girl’s father and he didn’t have a clue about any evidence, but that he’d still be willing to give them the money in exchange for the girl.

But no, they’d been pretty damn insistent that nothing go wrong with their plans. And they’d demonstrated a cold brutality when something did. So Stokes simply wasn’t ready to reveal that he didn’t have enough money or the evidence they wanted. Maybe he could find both. Maybe he couldn’t, in the end, but his best play for now was to continue to pretend to be the girl’s father.

So he had to come up with another $102,000 before one thirty in the morning rolled around, and he had to figure out what evidence Paul was supposed to give the bad guys, and then find it. And it suddenly occurred to him where he had to go to start looking for both. He also knew that going there would be one of the stupidest things he’d done in his entire life, a life in which no one had ever accused him of being a genius.

SEVEN

5:29 P.M.

THIS WAS ALL JENNY’S FAULT.
Stokes had had time to give it some thought over the past twenty-two minutes, and he kept coming to the same conclusion. This was Jenny’s fault. He couldn’t blame his current situation on a little girl he hadn’t seen in thirteen years, a girl he’d last seen when she was just two years old. And Jenny was next in the blame line, so it was her fault.

Back at the bus station, Stokes had gone against his nature, against everything he’d ever learned, against who he’d become after thirty-six years on this planet, and decided to help the chubby kidnapped girl. He’d give up the money—and, Jesus, it was a lot of money—to try to get the kid out of danger. There was nothing in it for him. He had no angle. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose—the money, the freedom it would buy, the dreams he could have realized with it, everything. But he was going to try to help the kid anyway.

He no longer had his bike, and he didn’t want to take a taxi anywhere near where he was going, because that would leave a trail that could be followed by the cops later, so he’d stuck both arms through the straps on the backpack, fastened it securely on his back, and started to run. He didn’t exercise regularly, but he was in decent enough shape. Ran once or twice a week when the weather was nice, like it had been lately. If he took shortcuts through a couple of parking lots and some woods, he probably would have less than two miles to run. It would be harder in the jeans, leather jacket, and lightweight boots he was wearing than it would be in sweats and sneakers, and the backpack full of money weighing him down didn’t help any, but he’d manage. Shouldn’t take long, which was good, because he was fast realizing that time was important in this.

It took him twenty-two minutes to cover the distance, twenty-two minutes during which he had nothing to do but run and think—regulate his breathing, watch his footing, and think. And the more he thought, the more certain he became that Jenny was throwing a wrench into the gears of his life yet again. Indirectly this time, maybe, but this was her fault nonetheless.

Stokes met her seventeen years ago, when he was nineteen. He’d dropped out of school three years before, kicked around aimlessly for a few years after that, getting into fights, getting into trouble, getting himself put on probation for trying unsuccessfully to rob somebody’s grandmother at an ATM. The old woman screamed and Stokes ran, but not fast enough. Anyway, along came Jenny. Eighteen years old, pretty, hell of a sense of humor, the kind of person that other people wanted to be friends with. Well, women wanted to be friends with her; guys wanted something else. But everyone wanted to be around her. She didn’t have to work at it; it just came naturally to her. Stokes truly had no idea what she saw in him. He knew he wasn’t bad looking, but a girl like Jenny could have done better, especially if she started factoring in other traits, like potential and dependability and quality of character. Whatever it was she saw in him, it was something Stokes certainly didn’t see. In fact, he was pretty sure it wasn’t even there.

They dated for a year and he started getting into less trouble, started looking for real work, even started thinking about asking her to marry him. They moved in together, and things were pretty damn good for a while. Then one morning Jenny knocked his world off its axis with a little piece of news. Eight months later, Ellie was born. And when Ellie was born, everything changed. Forever.

Stokes knew what he was supposed to do, what the right thing was to do. And he did it. He stopped staying out with his buddies until the early morning hours. He stopped drinking too much. There were no more fights. He started taking his work more seriously, knowing he could no longer afford to grab his lunch pail and walk away from a job the moment he grew tired of it. He had to work steadily, put in overtime when he could, save money, save for a house, plan for the future. The thing was, Stokes had already started doing those things. Being with Jenny made it worth doing those things. He did them because he wanted to, wanted Jenny to be proud of him, wanted her to continue to see in him whatever it was he didn’t see himself.

Then Ellie was born, and everything Stokes had been doing because he wanted to, he now did because he
had
to. And he resented it. It wasn’t like he didn’t like the kid, because he did. He loved her, actually. More than he thought he would. More than he thought he
could
. She was cute and plump and dimply and giggly, and when he held her while she slept and her little baby breath blew softly against his neck, and Jenny sat beside him on the couch, smiling at him, smiling at the father that had been inside the angry young man he’d been all along, well, in those moments he thought he had everything he could ever have wanted right there on that couch. But other times, when he was punching the clock, working yet another overtime shift at the warehouse, taking shit from his boss, telling his buddies he couldn’t shoot pool that night because he needed to get home and give Jenny a break from Ellie, during those times he looked at beautiful Jenny and cute little Ellie and all he saw were manacles, twin iron manacles snapped around each of his ankles, grinding through the flesh down to the bone, chaining him to that house, that town, that life.

And then one day it all ended. He’d simply had enough. He’d tried, she had to give him that. He’d tried. So while Jenny snored softly, her dark hair fanned out across her pillow, while Ellie breathed her little baby breaths into the early morning air and dreamed of whatever two-year-old kids dream of, Stokes stuffed clothes into a duffel bag and slipped out of that house, that town, that life.

He drifted around, settled briefly in seven different states, moving on for one reason or another—because he’d grown tired of the place, because he’d heard of an opportunity somewhere else, or maybe because he’d needed to stay a step ahead of someone. And he’d hardly thought about Jenny or Ellie. It was like he’d thrown a switch in his mind. Turned off the light and shut the door. All that time, all those years, he never called her, never wrote. And he never heard of her trying to reach him. He knew what that said about him, about the kind of person he was. He’d come to terms with that a long time ago. He was that person for nineteen years before Jenny showed up. He was that same person while they were together, though he tried to be somebody else. Why wouldn’t he be that same person after he left them?

Eventually, eight years after he walked out, he found his way back to Shady Cross. He didn’t go to their old apartment. He didn’t call their old phone number. After a couple of weeks, he finally asked around a little about her. He wasn’t looking to get back together with her, didn’t want to try raising a kid again. Besides, a woman like her, she wouldn’t have been by herself for too long if she didn’t want to be. So Stokes wasn’t sure why he even asked about her. But in the end, it didn’t matter because she and Ellie were long gone. Moved away within a year of Stokes’s leaving and no one he spoke with had heard from her since.

Five years later, he had to admit that he thought about them now and then. In his mind, Jenny was still twenty-one, still full of youthful beauty, still quick to laugh her infectious, full-throated laugh. And Ellie was still two years old, toddling around on plump little legs, giggling at the silly faces and funny sounds he’d make, ready at the slightest invitation to throw her little arms around his neck and squeeze.

No, Stokes couldn’t blame little Ellie for his being in this situation, for his giving up his chance at the good life to help out a six-year-old girl he’d never met, even though it didn’t take Sigmund Freud to tell him that she had something to do with it. He knew it had been her voice he’d heard in his head, along with the voice of the little girl on the phone. But how could he possibly blame her? So he was forced to blame his ex-girlfriend—Jenny, who’d given him a daughter he never wanted but reluctantly loved anyway, loved as much as he knew how, which he knew wasn’t even close to enough in the end. Because of that little two-year-old girl he hadn’t seen in thirteen years, he was standing where he was at that moment, back on the deserted stretch of road where all this started nearly four hours ago.

Stokes was standing at the spot where the dead guy’s car had entered the woods. His legs were heavy from his run, and he was sweating despite the crisp evening air. There were no cars in sight. It wasn’t even six o’clock in the evening, but the sun was far below the treetops, getting ready to set for the night, and the road was growing darker by the second. Still, Stokes could see the dented guardrail on the other side of the road. His twisted Yamaha lay in a shallow depression twenty yards in the trees beyond, covered with leaves. He turned back to the woods in front of him, looked deep into them. The trees were thicker in there. What little light remained in the sky had a hard time falling all the way to the ground. From where he stood, he couldn’t see the dark car that he knew was wrapped around a thick trunk thirty feet into the trees. The car with a little girl’s dead father inside.

Stokes took one last look up and down the road, then walked into the wooded darkness.