Shady Cross

by James Hankins

  Chatty pulled the Escalade away from the curb. Stokes was thinking hard. How was he going to get out of this with most of the cash and all of his bones intact?

  “This about the money I owe your father?”

  “What the hell do you think?” Chatty said.

  “I think it is.”

  “Fucking genius.”

  “I have it.”

  Silence.

  “I have it,” Stokes repeated.

  He saw Chatty’s eyes flick up to regard him in the rearview mirror. Non-Chatty turned around. “Bullshit,” he said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Then why were you skipping town?”

  “I wasn’t. I was going to Akron for a couple of days. Got some friends there who owe me money.”

  “Ohio?”

  “Yeah, that’s where Akron is.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it’s still there.”

  If either Nickerson got his joke or thought it was funny, he didn’t let on. “You were skipping town, Stokes,” Non-Chatty said. “Skipping out on your debt.”

  “I wasn’t. Seriously. I have your money.”

  Non-Chatty squinted at him for a moment. Chewed his gum, his jaw muscles working. “Why didn’t you pay then?”

  “Due date’s in two weeks. I still have time.”

  Non-Chatty chewed on that for a while, along with his Doublemint. “So you weren’t skipping town?”

  Stokes shook his head.

  “So how much have you got then?”

  After a brief hesitation, Stokes said, “All of it.” He’d considered giving them only the ten-grand payment that was coming due soon and leaving town later with the rest, but then he’d have to look for Nickersons over his shoulder for the rest of his life, so instead he decided to pay them off entirely and start life somewhere with a clean slate—well, as clean as his slate could get.

  “All of it?” Non-Chatty said. “The whole hundred thousand?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Jesus Christ, I said I have it. Do you want it or not?”

  “You better not be lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Why should we believe you? Maybe we should just take you behind the old shoe plant and work you over a bit, like we were planning to do in the first place. Find out if you’re lying.”

  “Well, shit, Carl, or Chet,” Stokes said, “or whichever one you are, you can take me behind the old shoe plant and kick the shit out of me, or you can take me to where I’m keeping the money and I’ll give you what I owe your dad. All of it. Every penny.”

  Non-Chatty thought about that for a moment. He looked at his brother. Chatty looked back at him. Then Chatty looked back at the road, which was a good thing because they were going fifty miles an hour now. Non-Chatty looked back at Stokes.

  “Where’s the money?”

  Stokes told them where to take him. After a moment, Non-Chatty said, “Yeah, all right. But if you’re lying, it’s not gonna be a fun afternoon.” Then he added, “For you, I mean. My brother and I will enjoy ourselves just fine.”

  Stokes had understood exactly what he meant.

  They traveled in silence the rest of the way—well, not silence, really, not with two thugs chewing gum with their mouths open. The bus station wasn’t far from the center of town, where Stokes had led them, so they arrived at their destination in just a few minutes. Chatty pulled the Escalade to a stop in a no-parking spot beside a fire hydrant in front of a Chinese restaurant. “Too Good Food” glowed in red neon in the front window. Stokes ate there now and then and was never sure if this was the name of the establishment or a testimony about the quality of its food.

  “The money’s in there?” Chatty asked, frowning.

  “Yeah, it’s in there. I’ll go get it.”

  “Hold it,” Non-Chatty said. “What’re we, stupid? I’m going with you.”

  Stokes figured that would happen. He shrugged and got out of the car, taking the backpack with him. Fortunately, they let him.

  “It better be here,” Nickerson said as they walked toward the restaurant, the powerful aromas of the food that Stokes had to admit was indeed “too good” washing over them before they were within twenty yards of the place.

  Inside, a little old Asian lady with a huge smile came forward to greet them, but Stokes walked right past her. Nickerson followed closely. Stokes walked between the tables and pushed through a swinging door, into the kitchen. A chorus of Chinese voices rose from the various cooks and servers, but he ignored them, scanning the room, then walked toward what looked to be an office in the back. He had no idea. He’d never been back there before. All the commotion drew an elderly Asian man from the office. He shouted in Chinese. Stokes held his hands out in what he hoped was a calming gesture. Nickerson watched him closely.

  “It’s OK, Pops,” Stokes said. “Settle down. I’m back for the money you’ve been holding for me.”

  The wrinkled old man kept up a stream of agitated Chinese as Stokes brushed past him and stepped into the office.

  “What the fuck’s he chattering about?” Nickerson asked behind him.

  “No idea. I don’t speak Chinese.” And, as Stokes already knew, the old man didn’t speak English, which was one of the reasons he’d chosen this place. He crossed the office to an old desk against the back wall and opened a drawer. Acutely aware of Nickerson’s eyes on his back, Stokes snuck a hand beneath his leather jacket and started removing bundles of cash from the waistband of his jeans, bundles he’d surreptitiously slipped out of the backpack and into his pants while he was in the Escalade’s backseat. He hoped he’d counted it right, but he’d done it largely by feel, stealing glances down when he could, so he wasn’t certain. He removed the last of the bundles from his jeans, shut the drawer, and turned around. He handed Nickerson the money. The old Chinese guy’s eyes widened, seeing thousands of dollars apparently coming from his desk. His words ceased for a brief moment before tumbling out again, a hell of a lot more rapidly than before.

  “It’s OK, Mr. Chang,” Stokes assured the old man, who didn’t seem the least bit placated.

  Nickerson eyed the money in his hands suspiciously. He stepped over to the desk and opened several drawers. Satisfied that there was no more cash to be had there, he headed out of the office, back toward the dining room, riffling through the money in his hands. Stokes followed. On Stokes’s heels was an ancient and very upset Chinese man who may or may not have been named Chang.

  The old man jabbered at Stokes and Nickerson all the way through the dining room and kept jabbering away at them from his doorway. Once they reached the Escalade, Stokes tuned him out. He wondered briefly if this episode would bring the old guy trouble from the Nickersons, but he didn’t think so. Plus, he didn’t care all that much.

  The passenger window of the luxury SUV zipped down and Chatty leaned down and looked at them from behind the wheel.

  “He really had the money?” he asked.

  “Looks that way,” Non-Chatty said. He looked at Stokes. “Why’s that old guy still yelling at us?”

  “Beats me,” Stokes said. “He knew I’d be back for my money, so I don’t know what his problem is.”

  Non-Chatty probably had a lot of questions—like why the guy was holding Stokes’s money in the first place, and how he knew that Stokes would be back for it, when neither of them spoke the other’s language—but in the end, all that seemed to matter to him was the money.

  “Looks like a hundred and two thousand here.”

  Shit. Stokes thought he’d grabbed ten bundles of hundred-dollar bills. Must have grabbed a bundle of twenties, too. “Oh, that’s a mistake. Give me back the two grand.”

  Non-Chatty nodded like that sounded reasonable to him. But he kept the
money. “Guess you’re paid up now.”

  He opened the passenger door and slid inside, placing the money on his lap. He fastened his seat belt.

  “See you, Stokes,” he said. “Nice doing business with you.”

  “Wanna give me a ride home?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Stokes watched the tinted window rise as the Escalade pulled away. He shifted the backpack on his shoulder and headed down the street to look for a pay phone so he could call a cab. He knew there was one in Too Good Food, but he didn’t think he’d be welcome back in there for a while.

  He spotted a cab idling in front of the drugstore on the corner, the “On Duty” light glowing on its roof. He walked toward it, feeling comforted by the weight of the bag on his back. Maybe twelve pounds of money. Sure, it was a $102,000 lighter now, but he’d managed to keep a lot of the money on his back while getting Frank Nickerson off of it. Equally important, he was still alive and in one piece. Things were OK. As he walked, he glanced at his watch. It was 4:49 p.m.

  SIX

  4:50 P.M.

  TWO HUNDRED FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS. He’d counted it.

  Jesus.

  That meant the backpack originally held $350,000 before he paid off the Nickersons, which had been a shame. Still, $248,000 was a whole lot of money. What the hell? He’d call it $250,000. It was a nice round number, and it was close enough.

  A quarter of a million dollars. Jesus.

  He was sitting in the back of the cab, heading away from Too Good Food, on his way to his trailer on the outskirts of town. The route followed the one he’d just taken with the Nickersons, only in reverse. He’d go back past the bus station and out to where his twenty-five-year-old silver Airstream trailer squatted among even older trailers in the park. He thought about his trailer and smiled. He’d never done that before—thought about his trailer and smiled—but this time he could smile because he knew he’d soon be leaving the piece of shit tin can behind for good. Since he’d settled his debt with Frank Nickerson, he could return to the trailer for the last time, pack what little of his crap he wanted to take with him, if anything, and leave Shady Cross forever.

  Two hundred fifty thousand bucks. In the first moments of the ride, the cabbie made a couple of halfhearted attempts at polite conversation. Stokes gave him nothing in return, and the guy got the message soon enough. He drove in silence and kept his eyes on the road. Still, Stokes put the backpack on the floor between his feet, far below the cabbie’s sight line in the rearview mirror, and pulled out bundles of money, one after another. And there were a lot of them. Stokes knew that each bundle wrapped in a currency strap totaled a hundred bills of whatever denomination it contained. A lot of the bundles in the bag were hundreds, making each of those bundles worth ten thousand bucks. There were also bundles of fifties and twenties. Add them all together, he had $248,000. He began stuffing the money back into the bag, afraid the smell of it would waft through the little holes drilled into the Plexiglas divider separating him from the cabbie and make the man suspicious. Cabbies had been known to keep guns under their seats to protect themselves. Guns like that could also be used to rob a rich, stupid passenger.

  Stokes fastened the flap on the backpack, the money safely stowed inside, and sat back. He smiled. He was thirty-six years old, and for just about every one of those thirty-six years he’d gotten the short end of the stick. But his life had abruptly spun on its heels and was finally heading someplace bright and sunny. Unconsciously, he squeezed the bag with his knees, perhaps to reassure himself that it was really there, it was really real. When he did, he felt a soft crinkle. The money wouldn’t have crinkled. It was packed too tightly to crinkle. So what had crinkled?

  He pulled the backpack onto his lap, checked the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and looked more closely at the bag. He knew the main compartment held nothing but the money, but there were also two outer pockets. He’d already been in one of them and found nothing but the dead guy’s cell phone, which he’d thrown away. He frowned. He zipped open the other pocket and reached inside. Pulled out an envelope, crumpled into a ball.

  He should have just put it right back in the bag. Better yet, torn it in half and chucked it out the window. Instead, he lifted the flap of the envelope and pulled out a sheet of wrinkled white paper. A typed letter. He took a breath and read.

  We have your daughter. We haven’t hurt her but we will if you don’t do exactly what we say. Tomorrow you’re going to withdraw the $350,000 you stashed in your daughter’s account, and tomorrow night you’re going to give it to us. Every penny. It doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t belong to her, and you’re going to give it back. We’ll tell you later exactly how and exactly when. Keep this cell phone with you at all times. We’ll call you now and then to make sure you’re behaving yourself and not doing anything stupid. We’ll even let you talk to your daughter from time to time. If you fail to answer one of our calls, the girl loses a finger. We know you have the $350K so don’t try to say you don’t. It will only get your daughter hurt. If you say one time that you can’t get the money, she loses an eye. You say it again, she loses the other one. You don’t want to know what happens if you say it a third time. At some point we’ll tell you exactly where to drop the money tomorrow night. When we have it, we’ll tell you where to pick up the girl. If you don’t show, your daughter is dead. If you go to the cops or the FBI or anyone like that—and we’ll know if you do—she’s dead. If anything happens to make us think this deal isn’t going to go down smoothly, just like we say, with no outside interference, she’s dead. Don’t screw us around. Get the money. Answer when we call. Show up where we tell you. Do all that and this ends okay. Screw us around and the girl dies. We’ll call you soon.

  Without realizing he was doing it, Stokes glanced down at his watch: 4:52. Fifty-two minutes since he had ignored the kidnappers’ call. He blew out a breath. This wasn’t his problem. It sucked, but it wasn’t his problem. He could forget about this. He had almost 250 grand in his lap, which would make it a lot easier to forget all about this. He looked out the window just in time so see the bus station drift past. In a few minutes, he’d be back at his trailer. In a few hours, he’d be on a plane or train or bus out of town forever.

  Besides, they probably wouldn’t even call again. He’d missed the four o’clock call. It might all be over already. The girl might be dead. Nothing he could do about that now.

  Or she might not be. Maybe they just cut off her finger, like they threatened.

  Then again, maybe they were going to do worse still.

  Goddamn it, this just wasn’t his problem. This was the dead guy’s problem, and he certainly wasn’t worrying about it anymore, so why should Stokes?

  He squeezed the letter into a ball and dropped it on the floor of the cab before realizing it was evidence in a crime, evidence that could probably now be traced back to him somehow. He picked it up and stuffed it back into the outer pocket of the bag. As he did, his fingers touched something else in the pocket. He thought he knew what it was, so he withdrew his hand and zipped the pocket closed. He didn’t want anything to do with what was in that pocket.

  He paused. Sighing, he opened the pocket again, reached in, and took out a photograph. In it, Paul Jenkins—looking very much like he did when Stokes last saw him, only in the picture he was smiling . . . and alive—sat on a park bench beside a little girl with dark, curly hair, maybe six years old. She was a little chubby, with a nose that was a bit too big. She wasn’t ugly or anything, but no one other than close family members or friendly liars would call her cute. Still, there was something about her eyes. A twinkle in them, maybe. Something. She was holding a stuffed frog that had the ragged, well-worn look of a favorite toy. She wore blue jeans with some kind of curvy, flowing stitching on them, a white T-shirt with a big daisy on it, bright yellow socks, and shiny silver sneakers. Stokes didn’t want to look at the photo any
longer, so he turned it over in his hands. On the back, in the lower right corner, was a date written in looping, childish handwriting, presumably the date the picture was taken. Eight months ago. Across the top, written in block letters—clearly different handwriting—someone had handwritten a message: “Found this in her backpack, in case you need a reminder to be a good boy.”

  The girl’s voice, small and hopeful, said in Stokes’s head, Daddy? Are you coming to get me? It said it again, then again. By the time he heard the words yet again, the voice was different, younger, a voice he hadn’t heard in years.

  He looked at his watch: 4:57. Almost an hour since their call . . .

  Shit. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

  Daddy?

  A new life.

  Are you coming to get me?

  Goddamn it.

  Stokes jammed yet another of Tom Whatever’s twenty-dollar bills through the Plexiglas divider as the taxi jerked to a stop in front of the bus station. He didn’t wait for his thirteen dollars in change. Backpack in hand, he burst from the cab and raced into the station. He looked at his watch: 4:59.

  He ignored the stares directed at him as he ran across the bus station toward the trash can where he’d tossed the cell phone an hour ago. He’d already missed one call. Who knew whether they had made good on their threat. Who knew what they would do if he missed another?

  Would they even call again at all?

  Or would they just . . . ?

  He skidded to a stop at the trash can, bent over it, and found a candy wrapper and an empty Pepsi can. That was it. No other garbage. No cell phone. Someone had emptied the trash since he’d thrown out the phone. Oh, shit.

  As he stood, catching his breath, wondering if he was disappointed or relieved—after all, he’d tried now, right?—he became aware of a faint ringing. Definitely a cell phone. He looked around. Most of the people were still looking at him. None was reaching into a pocket or purse for a phone. Where was the ringing coming from?