Shady Cross (6 page)

EIGHT

5:33 P.M.

BRITTLE LEAVES CRACKLED AND CRUNCHED
under Stokes’s boots as he moved through the dim light. Out on the road, dusk was in full bloom. Here in the woods, darkness had taken hold.

It had been risky as hell coming here. If someone had found Paul’s car, the place would have been alive with cops and curious onlookers and maybe a reporter or two crawling all over the place like ants swarming over a fried chicken wing left on a picnic blanket while everyone was off playing volleyball. And Stokes wasn’t terribly eager to be connected with this accident, seeing as he had caused it.

But he was alone. Except for the dead guy, of course, who wasn’t far ahead.

Another few steps brought the dark, vaguely car-shaped hulk into sight. It was as he remembered it, misshapen, smashed up against a fat tree. He regarded it for a moment before approaching the driver’s door. The driver was as Stokes remembered him, too, still smashed and still dead. Only now he looked even more dead. His eyes were still open and staring, but the skin Stokes could see through the blood covering most of his face had dulled to a waxy gray.

He hadn’t wanted to return here. Only an idiot would return here. But he didn’t know what else to do. If he was going to try to figure out where he was supposed to be at one thirty that morning, and if he had any hope of finding the evidence the kidnappers wanted, he had to start here. And he had to move quickly. Time was moving faster than he remembered it ever moving before. He had to get to work.

He walked around to the passenger side of the car, dropped the backpack onto the soft carpet of leaves under his feet, and used his shirttail again to open the door without leaving fingerprints. The dome light glowed as Stokes slid into the passenger seat and he picked up a crumpled napkin from the floor and used it to turn off the light so no one passing by would see it and decide to investigate. Then he used the napkin to open the glove compartment, where he found a flashlight. He clicked it on and turned it toward the dead man.

Paul Something-or-Other was still slumped over the steering wheel, just like he’d been when Stokes had first seen him. Stokes reminded himself never to get into another car that didn’t have working air bags. He reached over and pulled on the body’s shoulder, trying to move it back against the seat. The guy didn’t seem to want to move—well, he’d probably have given anything to be able to move again—and Stokes was getting resistance from the body. He pulled a little harder and the corpse suddenly popped back from the steering wheel with a wet sucking sound. Stokes lowered his light and saw in its beam an open, ugly wound in the body’s chest. He looked at the steering wheel, which was made of hard plastic. The top half of it had broken off in the violent impact. The driver had clearly been thrown forward into the wheel, snapping it, and the broken part still attached to the steering column had slammed into him, shattering his breastbone, punching into his chest. Stokes glanced again at the raw, ragged, bloody gash. He took a breath, then reached up and slipped his hand into the guy’s jacket pocket, ignoring the stickiness his fingers encountered as they crept around in the folds of fabric. He was looking for a wallet. He needed to know the guy’s full name if he was going to continue to pose as him, in case it came up in conversation with the kidnappers.

He found the wallet in a breast pocket and opened it. Sixty-four bucks. It wasn’t a hundred thousand, but it was a start. He pocketed it. No other pieces of paper in the wallet, nothing that looked like “evidence” Paul could have used against anyone, and nothing with an address for the pay phone written on it. Damn. He shined the flashlight on the guy’s driver’s license. Paul Douglas Jenkins. Thirty-four years old. Two years younger than Stokes, who was going to continue to get older, at least for a while longer, while Paul Jenkins was not. Stokes noted the address on the license. It wasn’t in one of the more expensive areas. This tracked with the idea that Jenkins might have stolen the $350,000, which Stokes had suspected. So did the fact that ten-year-old Nissan Altimas, like the kind Stokes was sitting in, weren’t exactly the first choice of the rich and famous. Yeah, Paul must have stolen the money. For some reason, this bothered Stokes.

He slipped Jenkins’s wallet into his own pocket and shined the flashlight on his watch: 5:38. Just under eight hours before he had to be at a pay phone somewhere. He steeled himself and checked the rest of Jenkins’s pockets, one by one, looking for a written address. Nothing. He played the flashlight beam around the car’s interior, searching for something with an address written on it, and also for whatever evidence Paul had unwisely threatened the kidnappers with—files, a notebook, a computer disk, maybe a little tape recorder. But he saw nothing of the kind, which was a big disappointment. As for the pay phone’s address, maybe Jenkins never wrote it down. Maybe the kidnappers told it to him and he simply committed it to memory. But Stokes had to do something, so he kept searching. He checked the trunk and found nothing helpful. He slammed the trunk lid and climbed back into the passenger seat.

He sighed. He’d come up empty in his search, but he still had work to do here. Though it would become more unlikely the darker it got, someone could find this car in the next couple of hours. And they’d call the cops. And if the kidnappers truly had an informant in the police department, they’d know Paul Jenkins was dead and reasonably assume that they weren’t going to get their money. And then they might kill the kid. So Stokes absolutely could not let the cops know Jenkins was dead. He thought for a moment. He couldn’t move the car, couldn’t hide it any better than it was hidden, but he could try to make it harder for the cops to figure out whose car it was. Sure, they’d have a body, but if Jenkins hadn’t worked for the government or been in the military, and hadn’t been arrested—which the average person hasn’t—they shouldn’t have his fingerprints on file, which would make it more difficult to ID his body. And all Stokes needed was a few more hours.

He opened the glove compartment again and removed the vehicle registration and stuffed it in his pocket. He walked back to the trunk and got a screwdriver he’d seen there moments earlier and used it to remove the license plates. Then he opened the driver’s door and found a sticker he knew he’d find on the car’s frame, a sticker that would be hidden when the door was closed. It listed information about the vehicle, including the vehicle identification number, or VIN. He used the screwdriver to scratch out the information on it. Next he would—

He froze. Cocked his head, listening. He heard it again. Voices. A flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness, struck a nearby tree, and started a slow, probing crawl toward him.

Shit, shit, shit.

Cops? He couldn’t tell.

He had to get the hell out of there. Grab the backpack from the ground on the other side of the car and run like hell.

But he hadn’t finished removing the car’s identifiers. The kidnappers would find out Jenkins was dead, which was very bad for the kid.

Stokes could still bolt, though, and get away with the money. He still had a chance at a new life.

But the kid would have no chance at all.

He hesitated. For too long.

Daddy?

He should just run like hell. No time even to grab the bag any longer. If he was going to get away clean, he had to take off
now
. Still, he hesitated. The goddamn kid. And, he had to admit, the money.

The voices were close in the darkness now. He heard footsteps through crackling leaves. The flashlight was crawling closer. Too close.

It was over. He wasn’t going to get away. And now maybe the little girl wasn’t, either.

NINE

5:40 P.M.

WHOEVER WAS COMING THROUGH THE
dark woods was getting close now. Stokes’s last chance to get away cleanly had come and gone. As the flashlight beam bounced off the tree in front of him, the tree that had stopped Jenkins’s car and his life, Stokes crawled quickly through the open driver’s door, scrambled over Jenkins’s dead body, and positioned himself in the passenger seat, slumped over the dashboard. The damn bag of money was on the ground outside the passenger door. He’d worry about that later, if he got the chance. At the moment, he was worried about the fact that he was sitting there, the picture of health, in a wreck of a car beside a driver who had been turned to raw hamburger. That was going to look suspicious.

He heard footsteps stop outside the car. He sensed the flashlight beam striking the tree again, then playing over the crumpled hood. Stokes took a chance. Without moving anything but his arm, he reached over, slid his hand under Jenkins’s jacket, groped along the sticky shirt, and finally reached the open chest wound. He took a shallow breath and dug his fingers into a hole in the flesh, his knuckle scraping on jagged bone. He pushed his fingers in, sinking them into the congealing bloody mess inside, then pulled his hand back, covered with gore. He let his head slide down just a little, resting his forehead on the dash, and brought his hand to his own face. He wiped the mess on his cheeks, his nose, his chin, suppressing a violent urge to vomit. Then he was still. There was no sudden commotion. They hadn’t noticed his movements.

It wasn’t a bad plan. It hadn’t been a lot of fun, poking around inside a corpse, and sitting there with his face covered with a dead guy’s blood and gore wasn’t the way he wanted to pass the time, but all in all, it was a decent idea. The gore served double duty, making Stokes look like a victim of the crash while also disguising his face, which could be useful so long as the people outside weren’t cops, who would certainly arrest him as soon as they realized he wasn’t actually injured and had the dead guy’s license and vehicle registration in his pocket. But if they weren’t cops and he got the chance to grab the bag and run, the blood and whatever-the-hell-else he’d pulled from Jenkins’s chest and smeared all over his face might keep whoever was standing outside the car from identifying him later.

This was nuts.
He
was nuts. This whole situation just wasn’t his goddamn problem.

Daddy?

Shut up, kid.

Stokes had his face turned away from the window. The voices were very close. Through half-closed eyes he saw a flashlight beam creep around inside the car. He heard one of the voices again.

“There it is.” A male voice.

“Man, they look messed up,” a second voice said, also male.

Based on what little he’d heard, Stokes didn’t think they were cops. They sounded young. But still, he waited.

“What’s this bag on the ground?”

“Check it out while I call 911.”

He’d heard enough. He let out a loud, dramatic groan and turned his face to the window, directly into the flashlight beam, careful to keep his eyes mostly closed so he wouldn’t lose his night vision completely.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Holy shit.”

The flashlight dropped to the ground. Two young men, teenagers from the looks of them, backed away from the car. The fear on their faces was almost comical. They stopped, looked at each other, then looked back at Stokes. Then they squared their shoulders, trying to look unaffected by what they were seeing.

“Shit,” the taller of the two said, “that one guy’s still alive.”

The other kid pulled a cell phone out of his coat pocket. “We gotta call the cops.”

Stokes didn’t want that. Moving only his arm, he nudged the door open so they could hear him better. “Please,” he groaned, “come here.”

The kids hesitated before slowly stepping forward.

“I need your phone,” Stokes said.

“I gotta call the cops,” Shorty said. “You need an ambulance, man. You’re pretty jacked up.”

“Please,” Stokes said, raising his head briefly before letting it drop to the dashboard again. “Please give me your phone. I may not make it. May not . . . live long. Need to call my wife. Tell her . . . good-bye.”

Shorty looked at Tall, who shrugged. “His funeral, right?” Tall said.

Shorty still looked unsure.

“Please,” Stokes croaked. He added a hacking cough for good measure.

“Shit, give him your phone,” Tall said.

Shorty stepped up to the car, handed his phone through the open door. He watched as Stokes struggled to sit up, fumbling with the phone. Stokes punched a few random digits, then paused. He turned his head weakly to look at the kids.

“Did you find the guy on the bicycle?” he asked.

They frowned.

“What guy on a bicycle?”

“The one we hit with our car. Did you find him?”

“We didn’t see any guy on a bike.”

“We hit him a few hundred yards back, I think,” Stokes said. “Please . . . you have to go find him. See if he’s OK.” He coughed again.

“I should call the cops,” Shorty said again.

“I’ll call them. I’ll say good-bye to my wife, then call 911. You go look for the cyclist.” Stokes gave a gasp loaded with fake pain. “He might need help. My buddy here is dead and I don’t know if I even have a chance, but the guy we hit . . . maybe he can be saved. You gotta find him.”

Shorty eyed his phone in Stokes’s hand.

“My phone . . .”

“I’ll make the calls. You’ll get your phone back.”

“But . . .”

Stokes fixed him with a hard gaze. “I’m dying here . . . and some poor guy might be dying on the road up there . . . and you’re worried about your phone?”

The kid looked confused. Maybe he was worried about losing his cell phone. More likely, he was afraid Stokes would die before he called 911, and then everyone would wonder why the hell he’d given a dying man his phone without first calling the cops himself.

“Where am I gonna go with it?” Stokes asked. “I’ll be here when you get back. Hopefully, I’ll still be alive. Now please, go look for the guy we hit.” He let loose a horrible, wracking cough. “For God’s sake,
go
.”

The kids scurried away, scrambled through the trees, back toward the road, their flashlight bobbing before them. How the hell had they found the car? It was practically dark out, and Stokes thought he’d wiped away all traces of the tire tracks. Whatever—he needed to move. Stokes kicked open the door, stood, and wiped down the kid’s cell phone with the bottom of his shirt before letting it fall to the forest floor and stomping on it, grinding it beneath his boot.

“Sorry, kid.”

He got to work, figuring he’d bought himself only a few minutes before they’d be back. Or maybe they’d flag down a passing car, borrow a cell phone from the driver. Whatever, Stokes had to move fast. He hurried around to the driver’s side again, leaned into the car, and shined his light into the tight corner where the dashboard and the windshield and the side of the car all met. There he saw the small metal plate with the VIN stamped into it. He tried to get the screwdriver under it to pry it up, but couldn’t. So he used the sharp edge of the tool to scrape at the number. He dug at it as hard as he could for a minute before leaning back and inspecting his handiwork. He had completely obliterated five of the seventeen characters, and had badly damaged two others. Maybe this would slow down the identification of the car; maybe it wouldn’t. But he’d tried. He knew there could be another VIN stamped somewhere else on the Altima’s frame, but if there was, he didn’t know where and didn’t have time to hunt for it. He hurried around to the passenger door again so he’d be closer to the bag of money, and dropped into the seat there. He leaned over, turned the key to the “off” position, and plucked the keys from the ignition. He removed the only key that looked like it could have been a house key, then stuck the car key back into the ignition and turned it back to the “on” position. He used the napkin again to wipe his prints off the keys still on the ring.

Then he sat for a minute and thought, acutely aware of the seconds zipping by. Yeah, he’d done all he could. He was ready to go. He looked at his watch: 5:53. They’d be calling in seven minutes. He switched off the flashlight, stuffed the license plates into the bag next to the money, and picked up the backpack. He took a last look at Paul Jenkins.

Doubt started to creep into his mind. The cops were going to find the car. The kids would eventually bring them, probably sooner than later, and they’d ID the vehicle, probably fairly quickly. Or hell, maybe one of the cops even knew Jenkins personally somehow. Played golf with him or went to the same barber. Whatever. The point was, if he left the body in the car, they might figure out who he was in time to kill the deal, and maybe the girl, too.

Stokes sighed. There was nothing else to do. He had to take the body with him. Even if they identified the car, without the body they wouldn’t know for certain that Jenkins had died, and the kidnappers therefore might believe that their chance for a payday was still alive. Yeah, Stokes had to take the body. He should have just done that to start with, but who the hell thinks about dragging a corpse around?

Just when he’d made up his mind, he heard the kids’ voices again.

Goddamn it.

He dropped the backpack on the ground, where it had been when the kids were there a few minutes ago, and slipped back into the passenger seat. He let his head flop back against the headrest, closed his eyes, and tried to think of another goose chase to send them on so he could slip away with the body while they were gone.

Footsteps approached. He couldn’t hear what the kids were saying, but they were getting closer and the words were becoming more distinct. He opened his eyes a crack and saw the flashlight beam bouncing his way again.

“I’m telling you, we were talking to him,” one of the voices said. Sounded like Tall.

“Bullshit,” someone said. Stokes frowned. Didn’t recognize the voice.

“He’s alive, Kevin,” Shorty said. “Royally messed up, but alive. I gave him my phone so he could say good-bye to his wife.”

They were almost to the car. Stokes heard the new kid, Kevin, start to respond. “But I thought . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tall said, cutting him off, “the driver’s dead as hell, but the other guy’s still alive. At least he was when we left him here.”

“But . . .”

The flashlight hit the side of Stokes’s face. He turned slowly into the light and smiled weakly.

“Thank God you’re back,” he whispered, acting even closer to death’s door than he had before.

He looked at Shorty. Wasn’t sure what he was going to tell him about his phone. Stokes slid his gaze from Shorty to Tall, then moved it over to the new guy, Kevin. Kevin was staring back at him with a mixture of emotions on his face that Stokes couldn’t categorize. He was looking at Stokes, but he spoke to the other two.

“I swear to you guys, I looked in this car half an hour ago.”

Uh oh.

Kevin turned to the others. “Dudes, there was only one guy in there.”

Well, Stokes certainly hadn’t seen that one coming.