Wiggins looked at Martz uncertainly. Martz returned a similar look before turning to Stokes. “Remember, we could shoot you dead and almost certainly get away with it, especially given your history and reputation.”
“I know,” Stokes said.
“And the police would never know a thing about the money. We could hide it long before they got here.”
“I see that.”
“And we’ve told you how desperate we are to have that money.”
Stokes nodded.
“And still, you won’t leave without it?”
Stokes shook his head. “Guess you’re gonna have to shoot me.” He held his arms out in front of him, his palms up, and made an exaggerated shrug that said, It’s out of my hands now. Your move.
Martz and Wiggins exchanged another long look. Finally, they seemed to come to some silent agreement. Wiggins lowered his head and Stokes knew he’d successfully called their bluff. So when Martz shot him, he was surprised—so surprised that someone could have knocked him over with a feather if the bullet hadn’t already done the job.
TWENTY-TWO
11:57 P.M.
AFTER MARTZ PULLED THE TRIGGER, things happened fast. Stokes’s arms were still slightly away from his body and the bullet ripped along the inside of his left biceps, between his arm and his chest, ten inches away from his heart. Shock and the searing sting of the bullet creasing his skin made him spin and fall to the floor. As he dropped, he heard glass shattering and wood splintering and someone shouting. He thought he’d cried out in pain and surprise, but unless he was able to do so in stereo, the cries he heard hadn’t come from him. He looked up and saw Wiggins and Martz—Martz with his gun still up in firing position—staring with horror. But they weren’t staring at him, the man they’d just shot. They were staring over his head.
“The Regency bookcase,” Wiggins cried. “Arthur, you shot it.”
And he had. After burning a trench across the inside of Stokes’s arm, Martz’s bullet had shattered the glass in the door of the $12,000 bookcase behind him, then blown a hole in the back of the thing. From the looks on the faces of the antique dealers, you’d have thought they shot one of their mothers.
Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Stokes ignored the blazing pain in his left arm and with his right hand grabbed the backpack, heavy with money, off the floor. In one fluid motion, he sprang to his feet and used the momentum of his rising to increase the power of his throw as he spun and hurled the bag at Martz. The throw didn’t catch the guy in the face and knock him to the floor or anything, but the backpack sailed at his midsection. Instinct made him drop his gun and protect himself from the impact. The bag bounced harmlessly off him, eliciting a little “Oof,” but the gun fell from his hands, which is what Stokes had hoped for. So Stokes, who had followed the backpack across the room, headed straight for the still-armed Wiggins, prayed the old guy was too shocked by both Martz shooting the antique and Stokes’s flinging the backpack at his partner to squeeze off a shot, because if he did, and if the bullet hit Stokes anywhere important from only a few feet away, it would all be over.
But Wiggins didn’t shoot. Stokes reached him in three steps, shoved his gun hand to the side, and punched him in his wrinkled, senior citizen face. Wiggins dropped his gun and staggered back against a wall, knocking a mirror to the floor, shattering it. Stokes turned, kicked Wiggins’s gun away, and lunged for Martz’s just as the older man shook off his stupor and reached down for the weapon. Stokes got there first and Martz straightened up. Stokes stepped over to the other gun. He picked it up and tucked it into his jeans at the small of his back. Martz saw the gun in Stokes’s hand, and the look in Stokes’s eye, then moved to his fallen friend and knelt beside him.
“You punched him,” Martz said to Stokes, though he was looking at Wiggins.
“You shot me,” Stokes said.
“You don’t seem badly hurt, Hugh,” Martz said to Wiggins. “Our mistake, you realize, was in standing too close together. Stupid.”
“Your mistake was shooting me, you assholes,” Stokes said. “I can’t believe you shot me. You tried to kill me.”
He was shaking with anger. Or maybe fear. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline raging through his system. Felt like anger, though, as he seriously considered just popping the two old men. But that moment passed quickly. He wasn’t a killer. Well, he’d actually killed two people in the last twenty-four hours, one with his motorcycle and the other with a bookend, but he hadn’t meant to kill either. But, Jesus, he was pissed.
“I just cannot fucking believe you tried to kill me.”
Martz looked sheepish. “I suppose an apology wouldn’t do much to calm the waters, would it?” he asked.
“Shit no.”
“Are you going to kill us?”
Stokes blew out a breath. He sighed. “Not unless I have to. Goddamn it, though, I really should. Shit.”
Martz was holding his partner’s hand.
“He OK?” Stokes asked. The question had just slipped out. He didn’t actually give a shit.
“I’m fine,” Wiggins said. He started to rise and Martz helped him to his feet. Wiggins swooned a little and grabbed Martz’s arm for support. Stokes watched and felt his own arm throb. He tried to keep from shooting someone. He was tense and angry, so when the cell phone in his pocket shrilled he nearly fired a shot at the old guys by accident. He forgot he’d left the ringer on. Normally if he was breaking into a house, he wouldn’t even be carrying a phone, but if he happened to have one on him, he’d set it not to ring but to vibrate only. But in this case, he just didn’t bother, thinking that by the time the top of the hour rolled around again, he’d already have the house’s occupants under his control.
“Don’t move,” he said, nodding down at the gun in his hand for emphasis, “and don’t make a sound.”
The phone rang again and Stokes answered his midnight call. Wiggins and Martz watched him as he spoke.
“I’m here.”
“Good,” the kidnapper said. “Still got the money, right?”
“Sure.”
“And your evidence, I assume.”
“Of course.”
“Good. Things go smoothly, this will all be over soon. Things are going to go smoothly, right, Paul?”
“They will on my end,” Stokes said.
“And no heroics, right?”
“Me?” Stokes said.
“Yeah, you. You decide maybe you can save Amanda and bring some kidnappers to justice, maybe even keep your money to boot. Nothing like that, right?”
“I’m not the heroic type.”
“I didn’t think so, but I wanted to hear you say it. And you’re not gonna cheap out on us either, right?”
“Cheap out?”
“Yeah, like maybe show up with only a hundred grand and figure we’ll be satisfied with that. We won’t be. We know you have our three hundred and fifty thousand, so don’t try to cut a last-minute deal. Got it?”
“I got it.”
“Good. We’re getting close now, so I really need to make sure you understand. If things don’t go exactly like we discussed, things aren’t gonna turn out good. Answer the phone at Laund-R-Rama at one thirty, be there alone with exactly three hundred and fifty thousand and the evidence you say you have. If it doesn’t go just like that, we’ll kill your daughter. We won’t make her suffer, don’t worry about that. We’re not animals. But we’ll put a bullet in her head.”
“Don’t worry,” Stokes said. “Things will go exactly like you said. I just want Amanda back.”
Wiggins and Martz, who were still watching him, dropped their eyes a little. The kidnapper was silent for a moment, perhaps gauging Stokes’s sincerity, perhaps just scratching himself somewhere. Finally, he said, “The kid’s still asleep. Want me to wake her?”
“No. Let me hear her breathing ag
ain, like last time.”
A moment later, Stokes heard the soft, peaceful sleep sounds of a little girl breathing. A moment later, the gentle breathing was gone and the kidnapper was back.
“Good enough?”
“Yeah,” Stokes said.
“Got another car yet?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I borrowed one. I’m all set there.”
“OK then. I’ll call you in an hour, to keep our end of the bargain. After that, I’ll call you at the Laundromat a half hour later and tell you what to do next. And an hour after that, at two thirty, we get the money and the evidence, you get the kid, and this is all over.”
The line went dead. Stokes put the phone into his pocket.
“That was the kidnappers?” Wiggins asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are you really not going to kill us?” Martz asked.
Stokes sighed. “I want to, but I shouldn’t. You’re right. If you’d killed me, the cops would have pinned medals on your bony chests. If I kill you, it’s different.”
Besides, he just wasn’t a stone-cold murderer, despite the fact that one of the men in front of him had just tried to kill him.
“So what happens now?” Martz asked.
Stokes shrugged. “I take my money and leave. Try to find another hundred and three grand before I have to be somewhere at one thirty. Then I try to save the kid.”
“And what about us?”
“You? I don’t give a shit what you do. Just don’t call the cops on me, at least not tonight. If you have to do that, for insurance reasons or something, do the right thing and wait until tomorrow. Give me a chance to save the girl. Other than that, I don’t care what you do. So good-bye, good night, and fuck you for trying to kill me.”
Stokes snatched the backpack off the floor, along with his cowboy shirt with the eyeholes cut in the back, and started for the back door.
“You’re bleeding,” Wiggins said.
“On our Persian rug,” Martz added.
Stokes kept walking. “Screw your rug and screw you guys.”
“Wait,” Wiggins said. “We have a first aid kit. I still remember enough of my training to be able to do a field dressing.”
“Let him go, Hugh,” Martz said.
“The least we can do is repair the damage we did, Arthur.”
Stokes heard Martz sigh behind him. His arm hurt. Blood ran down it. If he didn’t let them patch him up, he’d have to find a way to do it himself before long. He stopped and turned. He noticed the shattered mirror on the floor, the one that broke when he’d knocked Wiggins into it. Crazily, he wondered which of them would be cursed with the seven years of bad luck. The person who knocked it off the wall, or the person who shoved that guy into it. Who was Stokes kidding? If he lived long enough, the curse was certainly going to be his.
“Where’s the first aid kit?” he asked the older men.
“Under the sink in the kitchen.”
He jerked his head. “Come on.”
Stokes sat at the kitchen table with Martz’s gun in his right hand and Wiggins’s tucked into the back of his jeans while Wiggins dressed the wound on his left arm. Martz watched from a seat across the table, where Stokes had put him. While Wiggins cleaned and disinfected the wound, Stokes grimaced and called him vile names. When the man finished his work, he handed Stokes some extra gauze and tape. Stokes thanked him, then said “Fuck you” to them both one last time before walking out the door. At least he had a couple more guns, in case he needed them, which he hoped he wouldn’t. He also had his very own bullet wound. What he didn’t have was the rest of money he needed to get Amanda back alive.
TWENTY-THREE
12:14 A.M., EARLY SATURDAY MORNING
THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT AMANDA Jenkins’s eyes. She really wasn’t a very cute kid, but her eyes sparkled in a way that most people’s didn’t.
Stokes was sitting in Charlie Daniels’s Camry looking at the wrinkled picture he’d taken from the pocket of the backpack. He still wasn’t sure she was worth everything he’d given up for her, or all the shit he’d been through today, but there was no doubt she looked like a decent kid.
Stokes’s own daughter, Ellie, she was a cute one. He hadn’t seen the girl in thirteen years, so he didn’t know if she still was, and sure, she was only two years old when he’d left, but at the time, she had a face that could have sold anything—toys, diapers, baby food, anything. She was a little knockout. Even when she was being a pain in the ass—which all kids could be, he knew, especially two-year-olds—she was still cute as hell. She’d be screaming about some ridiculous little thing, like him giving her the blue cup with the fish on it, even though Mommy always gave her the yellow cup with the clown on it, and still he’d think, “Man, that’s a cute kid.” Of course, that only went so far. In the end, it didn’t go far enough to keep Stokes from waking before dawn one morning and sneaking out of her life.
He took one last look at the picture of Amanda Jenkins with her father before zipping it back up in the pocket of his bag. He looked out the car window at the big house across the street. And it was a big house. All brick, with tall windows and tall white columns in front. It sat on at least three acres of land surrounded by a high wrought iron fence. At the top of the long driveway squatted a big fountain, which wasn’t spouting any water at the moment. Scattered here and there on the lawn were statues and topiary, or whatever the hell you called bushes that gardeners trimmed to look like animals or whatever. An imposing gate spanned the bottom of the driveway. Beside the gate was a call box. If Stokes wanted to talk to Leo Grote about borrowing money, he was going to have to push the button on that call box, which would buzz somewhere in the house, maybe waking up Leo Grote. And Leo Grote was not a man to wake at twelve fifteen in the morning. Especially not if you were someone who had pissed him off the last time you were in front of him, pissed him off enough for him to have his guys kick the crap out of you.
But hell, Stokes was never as scared of Grote as he probably should have been. He had his reasons.
He popped the trunk of the car, then walked back there and stowed the two guns he’d taken from the antique dealers, the cop’s gun and belt, and the bag of money. He closed the trunk and strode across the street. When he reached Grote’s gate, he pushed the button on the call box and waited. A few seconds later, he pushed the button again. He was about to push it a third time when some guy’s voice came through the box. “Get out of here.”
“I want to see Mr. Grote,” Stokes said.
“It’s the middle of the night. Mr. Grote’s asleep. Get the fuck out of here.”
“I used to work for him.”
“I know who you are. Get the fuck out of here.”
Stokes looked up and noticed a security camera mounted on top of the fence beside the gate.
“Tell Mr. Grote I’m here,” Stokes said.
“Fuck you.”
The connection ended. Stokes pushed the button again.
“Am I gonna have to come out there and kick your ass?” the guy asked.
“You can come out and try. After you do, I’ll step over you, trying to avoid the big puddle of blood, and walk inside and find Mr. Grote myself.”
“You weren’t so tough when we tossed you out of Mr. Grote’s office two years ago. You ever find all your teeth?”
“That you, McCutchen?”
“It’s Brower.”
“Well, unless you’ve got McCutchen with you again, I like my chances.”
“Fuck you, Stokes.”
“Just let me in, will you?”
“Mr. Grote’s asleep, I said. He’ll kill me if I let you in.”
“I can see the lights on in his bedroom. Don’t forget, I worked for the man, too. I’ve been inside the house.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna disturb Mr. Grote for you, Stokes,” Brower said. “Besides, d
idn’t he tell you to stay the fuck out of his sight?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do yourself a favor and get out of here.”
“Goddamn it, just tell Grote I’m here, will you? I need to see him. It’s important.”
“He won’t give a shit.”
“So it finally happened then? You’ve had your head up Grote’s ass for so long you finally made it all the way up into his head? You can read his mind now? Just go tell him I need to see him and see what he says, OK?” The call box was quiet for a moment. “He’ll see me, Brower. Just tell him I’m here.”
After another few seconds, during which Brower was probably thinking, or doing something closely approximating it, he said, “I’ll tell him. But if he chews my head off because of you, I’ll find you, and I’ll make that little beating I gave you two years ago seem like a Swedish massage, you got me?”
“I think I just pissed myself in fear,” Stokes replied.
“Fuck you, Stokes.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
The box went dead. Stokes raised his eyes to the distant house. He focused on the second-floor windows at the front right corner of the house. He’d figured Grote would still be awake. He was a night owl. Used to roll into his office around noon. Despite being an ugly son of a bitch, he got a lot of action. He had a hot wife thirty years younger than him, and hot mistresses who came and went as he pleased, whether or not the hot wife was home. Stokes wondered at first why she put up with it, then realized that any night some other woman was having sex with her fat husband was a night that she didn’t have to do it. Knowing that Grote rarely passed a night without grunting and sweating on top of some poor young thing, Stokes was worried that the man might be in the middle of such activities at that very moment, which wouldn’t be good for Stokes. But he had to take the chance. Besides, it wasn’t like Grote would cuddle with whatever unfortunate gal he’d just rutted with, so unless Stokes had happened to call right in the middle of a sex act, or just before it, he figured he’d be OK.
In the window, an indistinct silhouette drifted behind the sheer curtain, passed to the next window, and disappeared from sight. Stokes waited. He let his eyes roam over the house. Was Amanda Jenkins somewhere in there right now?
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