“Coffee to start?” she asked, empty coffee cup and steaming Pyrex pot already in her hands.
“Coffee only, I think,” Stokes replied. He thought he saw a slight frown in her mud-colored eyes, annoyance at his taking up a booth and her time with the promise of only a microscopic tip for her troubles. Realizing that this made it more likely she’d remember his being there, he quickly added, “That meat loaf smells OK. Maybe I’ll have that, too.”
The waitress’s face brightened a bit as she poured his coffee. “Early bird special it is then,” she said as she scooped up the menu and waddled away. Stokes glanced at the backpack beside him. Dark green on the outside, money green inside. He placed a hand on it, felt its solidness, its realness. He had to think things through. Someone might find the dead guy’s car soon. Probably not, seeing as it would only get darker out now, the autumn sun sinking earlier every day than the day before, and the car was pretty far into the woods, and Stokes had wiped away the traces of it going off through the gravel on the shoulders of the road. Still, he’d wanted to get out of those woods and away from the entire area as quickly as he could. So instead of emptying the backpack onto the leaves and counting the money right there like he wanted to do, he’d hoofed it back to the road and into the diner, now just another guy waiting on the meat loaf special. Fortunately, he already had enough money in his pocket for his meal. The last thing he wanted to do was open the bag in here, give the waitress with the fat ankles or someone on the way to the restroom a peek inside.
He sipped his black coffee and wondered how much money was in the backpack. A lot, that much he knew. Certainly enough to pay off his $100,000 debt to that son of a bitch Frank Nickerson . . . if he wanted to. But was there enough to do more? Enough to change his life?
He heard the waitress approaching before he saw her, and a plate slid in front of him. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes smothered in thick brown gravy and a multicolored pile of chopped vegetables to the side.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked.
Stokes shook his head and was alone again, alone with his meat loaf and his thoughts. And his money. When this day started, he’d been just about out of options. He’d woken up in a cell and spent the morning being grilled about a burglary by a cop with Egg McMuffin stuck in his teeth until they’d had to let him go. But before they did, they made it clear they’d get him eventually. Sergeant Lance Millett, a guy Stokes had gone to high school with, had questioned Stokes in the past—just a couple of weeks ago, actually—in relation to a different break-in. They’d had nothing on him but the fact that he’d been seen in the area and had a questionable personal history, so they had to kick him loose. Then they hauled him in again last night on suspicion of another break-in. Millett and the other cops were a little more peeved this time. They told him the homeowner had surprised the burglar, who had clocked the guy with a blunt object before fleeing the scene. Apparently, the homeowner’s skull was cracked and he wasn’t doing too well that morning. Well, Stokes had no intention of letting them pin the B&E on him, or the assault and battery, which would escalate to something far more serious than assault and battery if the guy ended up dying. No, he wasn’t going down for that. Shady Cross wasn’t the biggest city in Indiana, but there were plenty of other guys around who could have pulled that job, plenty of other guys who could take the fall for it as easily as Stokes could. Fortunately, he had money now, which meant he had options.
The question was, should he pay off Nickerson before leaving town? If he did, his backpack would be a hundred thousand bucks lighter, but Stokes wouldn’t have to worry about the loan shark sending his lunatic sons after him to retrieve his money and make an example of him. That would hurt, maybe permanently. On the other hand, with the kind of money he had now, he could probably keep all the dough for himself and disappear somewhere farther than Nickerson would bother to look. After all, a hundred grand might have felt like a million bucks to Stokes but it probably wasn’t really that much to Nickerson. Hell, if Stokes disappeared well enough, Nickerson wouldn’t even lose face. If anyone even knew about the debt, they’d just assume Nickerson had made him disappear, never to be seen by anyone, anywhere, ever again.
With his mind pretty much made up, Stokes dug into the meat loaf and was surprised to find that it tasted pretty damn good. He was about halfway through it when a phone rang.
At first, he thought it might have been a pay phone around the corner, near the restrooms. It rang a second time. Stokes frowned. The phone wasn’t around the corner. It was in the backpack next to him. It rang again. Must have belonged to the dead driver. The guy sure kept the ringer loud enough. The phone rang a fourth time, and Stokes started to feel uncomfortable. Hang up already. It rang yet again and Stokes wondered when voice mail would pick up. After a few more rings, he knew no voice mail was going to stop the ringing, which he realized was now the only sound in the room. Conversation had stopped. Silverware no longer clinked against plates. Stokes knew if he glanced over his shoulder he’d see everyone in the diner staring back at him, staring at the guy in the corner letting his phone ring twenty times without answering it, not even to say “I’m in a restaurant, I’ll have to call you back.” Being stared at was definitely not what he wanted just then. He heard footsteps coming his way. The waitress probably. With his back still to the room, he held up one hand in apology, mumbled, “Sorry, folks,” and reached quickly for the backpack. The footsteps faltered, but the damn ringing kept up as he patted the bag’s outer pockets, felt a bulge in one, and fumbled with the zipper until he got it open. As he pulled a black cell phone from the pocket, it rang loudly in his hand. He looked at it, feeling a whole lot of eyes on his back, and flipped it open, killing it in midring. He was about to snap it closed again when he heard a small voice on the other end of the line. The voice made him pause. He looked at the open phone in his hand. He couldn’t hear the words, but he heard the voice. Slowly, he raised the phone toward his ear, the words becoming clearer the closer it got.
“Daddy,” the little voice said, “are you there? Can you hear me? They told me you’re coming to get me soon. That if you give them money, they’ll let you take me home.”
Stokes blinked.
The little girl’s voice spoke again. “Daddy?”
THREE
3:00 P.M.
“DADDY? HELLO? ARE YOU COMING to get me?”
Stokes sat with the cell phone pressed to his ear, listening to a little girl addressing her dead father, a father whose death was mostly Stokes’s fault. Well, maybe more than mostly.
“Are you there, Daddy?”
Stokes blew out a breath. Maybe it was a grunt. Whatever it was, the little girl heard him.
“Daddy! There you are! Are you coming to get me soon? I really want to go home now. I don’t want them to hurt me again. Please come get me.”
Stokes stared down at the meat loaf in front of him, which no longer looked the least bit appetizing. He didn’t say a word. There was a brief fumbling on the other end of the line, and a new voice spoke. A man’s voice.
“Your three o’clock call, as promised. As you can hear, she’s OK.”
Stokes glanced involuntarily at his watch. Three o’clock.
The man continued. “I sure as hell hope you’ll have the money, though, like you said you would, or she may not be OK for long.” A pause. “You there, Paul?”
Stokes said nothing.
“Paul, you there? Answer me.”
Stokes sat silent.
“Answer me or I’ll hurt your daughter. And you know I will.”
“I’m here,” Stokes said quietly, not wanting to hear the kid get hurt, and also not wanting to say too much, or say it too loudly, since he wasn’t Paul.
“Good. You’ll have the money, right?”
Two syllables. That’s all he’d spoken. He’d sneaked them by the guy, who hadn’t been able to tell that Stokes wasn’t th
e girl’s father.
“Paul? Get a grip, OK? You only gotta hold it together for a few more hours. Now, I asked you a question. You gonna have the money?”
“Yeah.” A single syllable that time.
“Good. Be a shame if you didn’t. Talk to you in an hour.”
The phone went dead. Stokes closed it and slipped it into the inner pocket of his scarred leather jacket. He shut his eyes.
“Well, will you look at that?”
He snapped his eyes open. The waitress stood next to his booth.
“What?”
He dropped his eyes quickly to the backpack, afraid that some of the money was somehow peeking out.
“You’ve left some of Donnie’s meat loaf,” she said. “You’re the first person I can remember didn’t eat it all and lick the plate clean. Don’t let Donnie see that.”
Donnie must have been the short-order cook. Screw Donnie. Screw his meat loaf.
“More coffee?” she asked with a smile.
“My check,” Stokes said.
“Pie?”
“My check.”
The waitress’s smile disappeared. She fingered through the receipts in the pocket of her little red-and-white plaid apron and pulled out a check. She placed it facedown on the edge of the table and huffed away.
Without looking at the check, Stokes pulled from his pocket one of the twenties he’d taken from Whatever-his-name-was at the bar a couple of hours ago and dropped it on top of the check. He stood, slid the backpack onto one shoulder, and headed for the door. Then he remembered that his motorcycle was a twisted wreck lying deep in the woods two miles away.
Back near the restrooms, Stokes dropped a couple of coins into the pay phone and dialed the number of the cab company he’d called not long ago for Whatever-the-hell-his-name-was—Tom, maybe. Stokes could have used the dead guy’s cell phone to make the call but he didn’t feel like opening it again.
It was a short walk from the diner back to the bar, where he’d told the cab company he’d be waiting. It would have been easier to wait at the diner, but he wanted to get the hell away from there. People looked at him funny on his way out, possibly because word had gotten around that he hadn’t finished Donnie’s meat loaf, but more likely because of the phone incident. Anyway, he figured he’d think better walking than waiting around Tootie’s.
He strode through the diner’s gravel parking lot, then along the shoulder of the road toward Chuck’s bar, thinking as he went. Things had changed. His list of options had grown from two to three. The first option, the safest one, was to pay off Nickerson and keep whatever money was left over. The second, and riskiest, was to skip town with all the cash and hope Nickerson or the two thugs he had for sons wouldn’t find him. Then there was the option number three, the new one: he could use the money for what the dead father had intended to use it for—to ransom the little girl—which would leave Stokes with nothing but his goddamn $100,000 debt to Frank Nickerson. He hated option three.
He arrived at the bar and took a seat on an old wooden barrel in front of the building. Neon from the window behind him glowed cold blue. He held the backpack in his lap, his arms wrapped around it. With the slightest squeeze he could feel its firmness. It was full of cash . . . cash he’d love to keep.
He’d had a big hand in killing the girl’s dad, though. He had to admit that.
A taxi pulled into the lot. Stokes dropped his eyes to the backpack in his arms. The money in it could buy freedom for him, or for a little girl, but not for both.
He thought about the girl’s voice, asking to go home, pleading with her father to take her home, a father she had no idea was never going home again.
The cabbie tapped his horn. Stokes looked up. He looked back down at the bag in his arms. He thought he could smell the money inside.
He heard the girl’s voice in his head. Daddy?
Aw, shit.
Fifteen minutes later, Stokes gave the cabbie another of What’s-his-name’s twenties and pocketed the change, minus tip. As the cab pulled away, he hiked the backpack higher up his shoulder and headed into the Shady Cross Bus Depot. Inside, he checked the departures board, saw that the next bus out of town was leaving in just over an hour. Without much thought about where it was going, he bought a ticket from the guy at the booth, a guy he thought he might have gone to high school with twenty years ago. In fact, he thought he might have beaten the guy up once during gym class. Maybe twice. Whatever. He stuck the ticket in the back pocket of his jeans and found a seat in a deserted corner of the station, where he sat with the backpack in his lap and started thinking about what he was going to do with his money. Thirteen minutes later, the dead guy’s cell phone rang in Stokes’s jacket pocket, surprising him. He’d forgotten all about it. He pulled it out and looked at it. He looked at his watch. Four o’clock on the dot. He stood, walked over to a trash can, and dropped the ringing phone in. He returned to his seat and his thoughts and tried to ignore the phone, its ringing muffled by a day’s worth of trash.
FOUR
4:07 P.M.
THE ENGINE OF THE BUS idled soothingly. They’d be pulling away in a few minutes, leaving behind Shady Cross, Stokes’s problems, and problems that belonged to other people, people he’d never even met, like the kid on the phone. Stokes sat in the last row, next to the john. The backpack was on the seat beside him, next to the window. His elbow was resting on the bag, his head was tipped back, his eyes were closed.
He felt comfortable with his decision. Nickerson wasn’t going to worry about $100,000. Stokes would be out of sight, out of mind. He wasn’t worth Nickerson sending anyone to look for him, least of all Nickerson’s batshit-crazy sons. No, Stokes would take his money, take it far, maybe to California, and just disappear. Start a new life. Start a business, something that could make a buck or two but wouldn’t be too hard. Maybe a hardware store, something like that. He didn’t know much about hardware, but how tough could it be? You hang a sign over your door, companies send you hammers and screwdrivers, you hang them up or put them on shelves. Better yet, you hire someone else to do that. Yeah, that sounded OK.
He glanced at his watch: 4:09.
Nine minutes since the dead guy’s phone had rung. Nine minutes since Stokes had ignored the kidnappers’ call. He wondered what that meant, his ignoring the call. He wondered whether—
Forget it. Not his problem. Besides, when they realize they aren’t going to get their money, they’ll probably let the kid go. Leave her somewhere, make an anonymous call to the cops, telling them where to find her.
He forced his mind to move on to other things. Damn, should he have paid off Nickerson? There was a shitload of cash in the bag under his elbow. If he paid Nickerson a hundred thousand bucks, he’d probably still have plenty of money left; plus, he’d have peace of mind. He never should have borrowed from the bastard in the first place. That’s what he got for trying to walk the straight and narrow. He wasn’t used to doing it, so naturally he’d screwed it up, tripped along the way. He should have known he didn’t have it in him. He’d tried it once years before, and he’d suffocated in that life until he couldn’t take it anymore and just walked away. Since then, no real work, at least nothing steady, or even legal. There were a couple of relatively brief stints in prison, too, which didn’t feel all that brief when he was in the middle of them. Then, a year ago he got the bright idea of starting his own contracting business. He knew even less about being a contractor than he did about owning a hardware store, but he figured he could cut wood and pound nails and figure out the rest. So he borrowed $75,000 and bought a retiring contractor’s business from him. Got himself a bunch of fancy new tools, too, to go with the guy’s old ones. He didn’t like the guy’s dented old truck, so he bought a shiny new one and had a sign painted on its door, professional enough to fool a few people into thinking he was the genuine article. And he’d tried to be. Things went OK for a fe
w months. He had a few jobs, did decent work on some, got complaints on a few others, but nothing serious. Then he caused an electrical fire in someone’s house and the fact that he wasn’t licensed or insured became a big deal. The home owner sued him and Stokes lost in court, which wasn’t much of a shock to anybody involved. He had no money to pay the damages awarded to the plaintiff, which was even less of a shock to everyone, so he was forced to sell his tools and his truck and give the money to the son of a bitch home owner.
A year later now, an exorbitant interest rate had turned the $75,000 debt into a $100,000 debt. Stokes shook his head. Stupid. He shouldn’t have gone to Nickerson. But with no assets, a spotty-to-nonexistent employment history, and a prison record, he had no chance of getting a loan from a bank. Once he’d come to grips with that fact, he had two choices: get the money from Nickerson, or try to get it from Leo Grote.
Despite the name Shady Cross, which sounded like it should have been the setting of Leave It to Beaver or something, and which brought to mind images of neighbors sipping lemonade under big leafy trees while their kids played hopscotch on the sidewalk nearby, the place was far from idyllic. The city may have grown up around a shady crossroads in the middle of a small town, but in the hundred-fifty-odd years of its existence, Shady Cross had gotten quite a bit bigger and a lot uglier. Sure, it had its upper-middle-class and even upper-class neighborhoods where reasonably wealthy folks lived when they weren’t working in the bigger—and better—cities, like Fort Wayne or South Bend or Gary, but Shady Cross also had plenty of areas at the other end of the spectrum, neighborhoods ranging from lower-class to downright dangerous, where tenements and projects housed poor people living side by side with criminals and criminals-in-training. And if you were one of those criminals, you operated with the implied or express permission of, and often paid a percentage to, one of two men: Leo Grote or Frank Nickerson.
Shady Cross Page 2