Shady Cross

by James Hankins

  “Yeah, I know. But not by you. At least not tonight.” Actually, not ever by you, because you’re gonna die in the next few minutes.

  Stokes looked at his watch: 1:10. Twenty minutes until he was supposed to be at the Laundromat, though that didn’t matter now, he realized, seeing as the guy who was probably supposed to call him then was now bleeding on the floor in front of him. What did matter, though, was that Amanda was out there somewhere, and Stokes had no idea how these recent developments would impact his chances of saving her.

  “I don’t want to screw around here, Carl, trying to figure out the right questions to ask, listening to you jerk me around with evasive answers, having to stuff the sock back into your mouth and lean on your nose again. And I don’t think you want that either, so why don’t you just tell me what the hell is going on, OK?”

  Carl spit some blood out through his swollen lips. “What do you mean?”

  Stokes sighed. “I’ll get you started. Stop me when it starts to sound familiar. Leo Grote’s guys kidnapped a little girl named Amanda Jenkins. The stepmother owed Grote some money, so she sold out her own kid, got Iron Mike and Danny DeMarco to kidnap the girl to extort money from the father, Paul Jenkins—who you thought you were talking to all day, I guess. Any of this ringing a bell? And don’t make me step on your nose.”

  “Where’s Jenkins?” Carl asked.

  “He’s out of the game. I’m pinch-hitting for him. But believe me, I intend to pay. All I want is to get the kid back. Now tell me, what the hell do you have to do with all this?”

  Carl spit more blood, only this time he spit it up at Stokes. The bloody spittle sprayed the legs of Stokes’s jeans. Stokes almost kicked Carl in the side of the head. Instead, he took a breath to calm himself down.

  What the hell was going on here? If Carl Nickerson was involved in the kidnapping, the whole family probably was, too, Father Frank included. But why would Leo Grote and Frank Nickerson be working together, especially on something like the kidnapping of a six-year-old girl. Couldn’t be for a mere $350,000. Grote and Nickerson were rich. They didn’t need the risk this entailed. Stokes couldn’t get his head around this.

  “I’ll ask you one more time before I start hurting you, Carl. What’s your family’s part in all this? What the hell’s going on here?”

  “My question exactly.”

  That hadn’t come from Carl. Stokes turned. He’d been so focused on questioning the guy that he hadn’t heard Frank Nickerson open the door to the study. Yet there he was, Frank himself, looking down at his bound and bloody son on the floor . . . and pointing a gun at Stokes.

  Stokes reached behind him for the gun he’d kept tucked back there. It was gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  1:13 A.M.

  STOKES’S BACKUP GUN MUST HAVE slipped out of his waistband toward the end of the fight. It was probably lying on the floor behind the desk. He saw his other gun, the one he’d bounced off Carl’s forehead, lying under the window ten feet away. His first instinct was to bolt for it, but he knew he’d never make it.

  “Good choice,” Frank Nickerson said, as if reading Stokes’s mind.

  Frank looked like he had a year ago, the last time Stokes had seen him, only now he was wearing pajamas. He was fat and lumpy, like a Hefty bag stuffed with cottage cheese. He wasn’t really round, but he was too thick, too fat all over. His torso was fleshy and soft, his arms flabby, his legs chunky. He probably hadn’t had a moment of exercise in twenty years. That was one of the drawbacks, Stokes guessed, of having people around who did whatever you told them to do. You never had to do anything for yourself. Never had to move a muscle, if you didn’t want to, unless you had to go to the can—and you could probably find ways around that, too, if you really felt like it.

  Frank raised the gun an inch. “I’ve killed twenty-one people in my life,” he said, “and left a lot of others in far worse shape than I first found them in. I tell you this not to brag but as a warning: I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  “So why haven’t you yet?” Stokes asked.

  Frank nodded. “I thought about it, to tell you the truth. As soon as I saw my son lying there like that, I thought about killing you. And I probably will, don’t get me wrong. But not just yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  Frank looked at him appraisingly. “You’re a brave one. Or you’re monumentally stupid.”

  “Probably a little of both,” Stokes admitted.

  Frank was far better spoken than his sons were, though Stokes knew he wasn’t the best judge of something like that.

  “Come on, Dad,” Carl said from the floor, “make him untie me.”

  Frank looked down at his son. “Untie him,” he said to Stokes.

  Stokes looked at the gun in Frank’s hand, then at the one on the floor across the room.

  “You’d never make it,” Frank warned.

  Stokes considered his chances. A moment later, he bent down and untied Carl. Again, his broken fingers made it tough and excruciatingly painful to do, but he managed it. Carl labored to his feet, shaking the loose rope from his wrists, and slugged Stokes in the face hard enough loosen a few teeth. Flashes popped in the air before Stokes’s eyes, as if he were suddenly a celebrity on TV and the paparazzi were snapping shots of him walking up a red carpet. Just when his vision cleared, Carl hit him again and the room got a little wavy.

  “That’s enough,” Frank said, and though Stokes could see that Carl wanted to hit him again, and again, and not stop until Stokes was a quivering pile of bloody pulp, he obeyed his father. Frank might have been fat and getting old, but he still commanded respect and obedience from his crazy-violent son.

  “Help me out here, son,” Frank said.

  “It’s Carl.”

  Frank nodded.

  Stokes’s ears were ringing from Carl’s last two blows, and his vision was still a little fuzzy. If he’d ever had a chance to go for one of his guns, it was gone now. It would be a few minutes before he’d even be able to stand without getting dizzy, much less dive for a gun, twirl around, and fire accurately at not just one, but two people, one of whom was armed, the other of whom was nuts.

  Frank was studying him. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “His name is Stokes,” Carl said. He sounded really nasal, like he had a terrible head cold, or like someone had recently obliterated his nose in a fistfight. “Maybe you remember, Dad, he’s the one paid his loan in full today. A hundred thousand.”

  “A hundred and two,” Stokes said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Carl said.

  “I was asking him, not you, Carl,” Frank said. Carl lowered his head in a show of subservience. Man, if Carl-Fucking-Nickerson was afraid of his father, how worried should Stokes have been at the moment? It was a moot question actually, because Stokes couldn’t have been any more worried than he already was.

  “So,” Frank said, “I loaned you money some time ago and you paid it back today. With interest, I assume.”

  “A shitload of it,” Stokes replied.

  “Well, that’s business, isn’t it? So what is all this then? You decided to break into my home to steal the money back? Very, very unwise, Mr. Stokes.”

  Stokes shook his head but remained silent.

  “Nothing to say?” Frank asked.

  “What can he say, Dad?” Carl said. “I caught him in the act. He broke in. He was here in your office.”

  Frank Nickerson fixed cold eyes on his son, and Carl stopped talking. “Sit down, Carl,” he said. Carl did, in the wing chair opposite Stokes.

  “Mr. Stokes,” Frank said, “you obviously know who I am, so you must know that this is a very stupid thing you’ve done. I know how money troubles can make one desperate, but what would possess you to take this risk? Surely there are other, far less dangerous ways you could have gotten your hands on money, if you nee
d it that badly.”

  Still, Stokes was silent.

  “It’s time for you to open your mouth,” Frank said, “or I’ll open it for you.”

  “Not gonna have Carl do it for you?”

  Frank shook his head. “No, I’ll give this gun to Carl and I’ll work on you myself. And I should tell you, when I was a few years younger, I did some truly, truly awful things to some people. And now, knowing that you broke into my home, and seeing what you did to my son, I’m thinking about doing some of those things again if you don’t start talking.”

  Stokes believed him. Nickerson was different from Grote, who, earlier that night, had threatened to have Brower work Stokes over while he sat on his ass and watched. Nickerson liked to do his own dirty work.

  “Now,” Frank continued, “let’s hear it, or things get very unpleasant for you.”

  “They aren’t all that pleasant at the moment,” Stokes said.

  Frank said nothing.

  Stokes took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “I’m here because of Amanda Jenkins.”

  Still, Frank said nothing. He stared blankly at Stokes. Finally he said, “Who’s Amanda Jenkins?”

  “The girl you kidnapped.”

  Frank just stared.

  “The kidnapping you’re working on with Grote.”

  Frank frowned and said, “Maybe I need to clarify my instructions. I don’t just want you to speak, I also want you to make sense.”

  “Goddamn it, I’m talking about the little girl you and Grote kidnapped. The one you guys said you’d kill tonight if I don’t show up in time with the money you asked for.”

  “Grote?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah, Grote.”

  “Leo Grote?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Stokes said, “why the hell are you playing dumb with me? You’ve got the gun and your psycho son right next to you, and you’re obviously gonna kill me, so why pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Stokes,” Carl said from his chair.

  “What’s the matter with you guys?” Stokes asked. “Look, I don’t have a goddamn clue why you and Grote are working together on something like this, but it’s obvious you are, so let’s cut the bullshit and get on with whatever we’re gonna do to end this.”

  Frank regarded him curiously for a moment before sliding his eyes over to Carl, who was looking down. Frank looked back at Stokes.

  “Let’s pretend for a moment, Mr. Stokes, that I truly don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Please fill me in.”

  Though it didn’t seem to matter any longer, Stokes looked down at his watch: 1:22 a.m.

  “Someplace you have to be?” Frank asked.

  “Not anymore, I guess.”

  He wasn’t sure why he had to tell the whole story, seeing as Frank Nickerson had to be in on this, but Frank was the one holding the gun. Or was he in on it? Could Carl have been acting on his own? With Grote and his men? But that didn’t make—

  “I’m waiting,” Frank reminded him, and his look said that he wasn’t used to waiting and that he didn’t enjoy it on those rare occasions when he had to.

  Stokes shrugged. “I came across a car accident today. A single-car accident. The driver was dead. In the car was a bag with three hundred and fifty grand in it.”

  Stokes recounted much of what had transpired that day, talking about how he gave Carl and Chet some of the intended ransom money to pay off his debt to Frank before realizing just how serious the kidnappers were about receiving every cent they asked for, and that he therefore needed to get the ransom money back up to $350,000. He described going to Amanda’s stepmother’s house and learning of her involvement, about stashing her and the cop in a vacant house. He told Frank about the hourly phone calls Paul Jenkins had insisted on, and about how he’d posed as Jenkins, apparently fooling Carl and Chet all day, which earned Carl a mildly disgusted look from his father. He mentioned that he’d gone to Leo Grote’s house, hoping to borrow money that he intended to simply turn around and give back to him, via his underlings, to ransom Amanda.

  “And Grote turned down your request for a loan, I assume?” Frank said.

  “Just like you would have,” Stokes said.

  Frank nodded. “Which was why you decided to break into my house and steal the money back.”

  Stokes said nothing.

  “And you’re such a Good Samaritan, Mr. Stokes, that you have a quarter of a million dollars in your hands right now, and you were looking for another hundred grand from me, and rather than keep all that money, you were going to use it to get this little girl back? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Stokes shrugged.

  “Why?” Frank asked. “Why help the girl?”

  “I’m not sure. Not really.”

  Frank appraised him for a moment. “So you still have the money then? What is it, almost a quarter mil? Where is it now?”

  “In the trunk of the Camry on the street out front.”

  Keeping his gun trained on Stokes, Frank stepped over to his desk and picked up Carl’s cell phone. He flipped it open, studied it for a moment, and pressed a single button—Redial, apparently, because a moment later the phone in Stokes’s pocket began to vibrate and buzz.

  “You want me to answer it?” Stokes asked.

  Frank ignored him. He ended the call and turned to Carl.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Carl played dumb, which probably wasn’t a big stretch for him. “What?”

  “You know you don’t want to make me ask you again, son. I’m waiting.”

  Stokes watched Carl. He’d known the Nickersons since their school days. He was shocked to see, for the first time in his life, a Nickerson showing fear. Frank sat on a corner of his desk, facing his son, keeping one eye—and his gun—on Stokes.

  “Dad, let’s just kill this guy and—”

  “Are you going to make me ask you again?” Frank asked.

  Carl lowered his head. “No, sir.”

  “OK then.”

  Carl started in a somewhat shaky voice, which surprised Stokes as much as the fear that flickered across his battered face a moment earlier.

  “See, Dad, it’s like this . . . Chet and I got to thinking about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, about you. And Leo Grote.”

  “What about Leo Grote and me?”

  “Well, about how he has a bigger business than you.”

  “And?” Frank said.

  “And, uh, we thought maybe you should have more of a take, that’s all. That maybe you should be getting a little more and Grote should be getting a little less.” Carl paused. Frank remained silent, so Carl continued. “I mean, we probably take in, what? Seventy percent of what he does, maybe seventy-five? Why? Why should he have more than us? Why should he be bigger than us? Bigger than you, Dad?”

  Frank finally spoke. “What did you do, Carl?”

  Carl used his pajama sleeve to blot some blood gingerly from what remained of his nose. “We ran into a couple of Grote’s guys in a club, guys we knew. We all had a lot to drink and they started talking, bragging about a big score they were gonna make. Told us about this lady who owed Grote some money and instead of paying it back, she was helping them set up a kidnapping. Her stepdaughter.”

  Frank’s eyebrows rose.

  “Yeah, her own stepdaughter,” Carl said. “Crazy, right?”

  When Frank didn’t respond, Carl continued. “Anyway, the father and stepmom are divorced. He’s got over a third of a million in cash he’s saving for the kid. Guess where he got it from.” When Frank didn’t guess, he continued. “Stole it from Leo Grote. The stupid bastard did some accounting or something for Grote and skimmed over the years. How stupid can you be, right?” Frank said nothing and Carl plowed ahead. “So the stepmothe
r tells Grote’s guys that if they grab the kid, the father will give up all the money in a heartbeat. She offers to split it with them. They were gonna screw her over on that, of course, keep the whole thing, except for what she owed Grote. I mean, what was she gonna do? Call the cops?” Still, Frank remained silent. “Anyway, we could see that these guys, Grote’s guys, were doing this on their own, you know? Without Grote signing off on it. They were gonna give him the money the lady owed him and pocket the rest. So we ask why they weren’t bringing the deal to Grote. Turns out they don’t have a lot of loyalty for their boss. They were gonna give him his money, stash the rest of the ransom for a little while—which he wouldn’t even know about—then skip town in a few months. When Chet and me heard how they talked about Grote, an idea came to us, a way to do something we’d been kicking around for a while.”

  “And that was?” Frank asked.

  Carl cleared his throat. “Uh, getting Grote out of the picture.”

  “Out of the picture?” Frank repeated.

  “Yeah, out of the picture. We figure that with him gone, his business comes our way. Your way, Dad. Even if someone else takes over his operation, they aren’t gonna be able to hold it together like Grote did. They’d fall apart over there before long. More people would turn to you. And you’d be the biggest fish around, instead of the second-biggest fish.”

  Frank processed this for a while. So did Stokes. This was big stuff Carl was talking about now. For the moment, as he listened, Stokes almost forgot his own situation, the fact that he was probably going to be killed by gangsters any minute.

  Frank was composed, but his face betrayed hints of anger and confusion.

  “And how would kidnapping a little girl get Leo Grote out of the picture?” he asked.

  Stokes listened to the plan. Carl and Chet had convinced Iron Mike and Danny DeMarco that if they worked together on this, once Grote was out of the way, Frank Nickerson would take them in and make them wealthy, important men in his operation. They were going to set Grote up. It was a little complicated, and Stokes had some trouble following, but he thought he got most of it. He wasn’t sure what their original plan had been, but it was clear to Stokes that once Paul Jenkins told them he had evidence against Grote, the four thugs improvised and decided they could split the entire $350,000 that Jenkins had stolen from Grote and stuck in an account for the kid and make it look like the kidnapping had been about nothing but the evidence all along—that Grote had ordered the girl to be kidnapped so he could obtain the incriminating evidence as ransom. When the cops found the evidence, whatever it was, they’d have a solid link between Grote and the kidnapping, which he wasn’t actually a part of, and they’d also have hard evidence of other crimes Grote actually was responsible for.