Shady Cross

by James Hankins

  Frank asked, “How did Grote’s men plan to avoid being implicated?”

  “Well, they figured none of Jenkins’s evidence would incriminate them specifically in anything,” Carl said, “and Grote didn’t know anything about the kidnapping, so he couldn’t point fingers their way about it.”

  As Stokes listened, he realized that a thought had been nibbling on part of his brain like a pesky rodent. Something one of the Nickerson twins had said. Something from earlier that day.

  “You were gonna kill Jenkins,” he said abruptly, interrupting Carl’s narrative. “You were gonna frame Grote and his guys for it. And you’re gonna kill the girl, too.”

  Carl looked at him.

  “Jesus Christ,” Stokes said. “None of this mattered. Nothing I did today mattered. Not trying to collect all the ransom money you guys demanded, not trying to figure out where to meet you. I had no chance of saving that girl. You were gonna kill her no matter what. Because kidnapping’s a sucker’s crime, right? You never get away with it because you always leave a witness . . . unless you kill the hostage. Isn’t that what you told me today?”

  Carl didn’t respond.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” Stokes asked.

  Carl ignored him. Stokes knew he was right. Goddamn it.

  “Well?” Frank asked.

  Carl looked up at his father. “Yeah. The original plan was to wait till the father drops the money and the evidence, then kill him. But he . . . I mean Stokes here . . . changed things up on us, insisted on seeing the girl first, so we figured, no big deal, we’d let them see each other, then kill them. But Iron Mike doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s just a kidnapping and we’ve got a plan to pin it on Grote somehow. What he doesn’t know is that we have a side deal with DeMarco, who has already planted evidence at both Grote’s house and Iron Mike’s, fake evidence showing that Grote ordered the kidnapping and told Iron Mike to do it. But Chet was going to kill both Iron Mike and DeMarco tonight, after they got the money, making it look like they panicked, killed the kid and the father, then killed each other over something . . . probably the money. We were gonna leave fifty K behind to give the cops something to think they fought over. No one would ever know we were involved.”

  Frank stood up. “Chet was going to kill them? He’s not upstairs?”

  Carl shook his head.

  “Goddamn it, Carl,” Frank said, and Stokes could see in the father’s face a little of what kept his son—both his sons, no doubt—in line.

  “See, Dad,” Carl said quickly, “it’s a good plan. DeMarco thinks he’s fucking over Iron Mike, but the truth is, Chet and I are fucking them both over. Pinning everything on the both of them. And on Grote, too. When the cops look at this mess, they’ll see a kidnapping gone bad, one that Grote ordered, one that ended up with the victim and her father dead, and the two kidnappers, too. And Grote, who supposedly ordered it all, goes to prison on conspiracy charges, felony murder, whatever. He’ll be wrecked.”

  Stokes thought he’d probably taken it all in, though he’d been only half listening. He was mostly thinking about the chubby little girl in the picture, the one whose life would end tonight.

  He let his head fall into his hands. All for nothing. Everything he did today, everything he’d tried to do, everything he gave up. None of it mattered. And the poor kid. Amanda. She never had a chance. He never had a hope of saving her.

  “So what do you think, Dad?” Carl asked Frank. “What’s next?”

  Stokes looked up. This part interested him.

  “Next,” Frank said, his eyes sliding over to Stokes before drifting back to Carl, “it’s time for a little punishment.”

  Carl nodded. Stokes closed his eyes.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1:33 A.M.

  STOKES WAITED TO FEEL AGONY, a gun butt to the teeth, maybe a bullet shattering one of his knees. But when the pain didn’t come right away, he opened his eyes in time to see Frank Nickerson launch a solid punch into his son’s already savaged face.

  “Jesus, Dad, what was that for?” Carl said, the words sputtering out of his mouth along with flecks of blood.

  Frank threw a second punch, and Carl cried out in confused pain. A third blow snapped his head back.

  “God, Dad, please, stop it, just stop. I can’t take it.”

  But Frank didn’t stop. He hit Carl a fourth time, then a fifth, and the wet sound his fist made on contact with his son’s face made Stokes’s stomach twist. Stokes was surprised the big, fleshy guy could throw punches like that. Finally, Frank stepped back, breathing heavily. That was probably more exercise than he’d gotten in decades. And though short in duration, it had been quite a workout. Stokes was glad—and surprised as hell—that Carl had been the punching bag instead of him.

  And on this night of surprises, perhaps the biggest one of all came when Carl Nickerson started to cry, very softly.

  “Stop that, son,” Frank said, “or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

  How many times had Stokes heard that himself before his father walked out of his life for good? Carl sniffed a couple of times. He stopped crying. He looked up at his father with genuine pain in his eyes, and Stokes wasn’t sure the pain was entirely physical.

  “Why, Dad?”

  “That you even have to ask tells me how unbelievably stupid you are.” He shook his head. He sat back on the desk and let loose a sad, heavy sigh. “What makes you think I wanted a bigger cut of the action, Carl? What makes you think I’m not perfectly happy with the way things are?”

  Carl looked truly confused now. “But . . . Grote’s operation is bigger than yours.” He was having trouble speaking now through lips that were puffy and split in a couple of places. His face was covered in blood. Blood ran down his neck, trickled out one of his ears. It had even pooled in the white part of one of his eyes. The other eye was swollen nearly shut. At least one tooth was missing. It was hard to know for sure which damage Stokes had inflicted and which was the result of the beating Frank gave him. Either way, the guy was a mess.

  Frank wiped his bloody knuckles on the leg of his pj’s. “My God, Son, I don’t want Grote out of the picture. Without him around, the cops would have no one to concentrate on but me. As it is, I take in less than Grote, have my hand in fewer things, hurt fewer people, so the authorities spend more time on him than me. But if he’s gone, I’m the only ship on their radar.”

  Understanding seemed to dawn on Carl’s ruin of a face.

  “Besides,” Frank continued, “what do you think Leo Grote would do if the authorities fail to put him away? Let’s say the evidence you planted isn’t enough, or Grote gets out on bail. Hell, he can even still give orders from behind bars. So who do you think he’d suspect of trying to get him ‘out of the picture,’ as you say? Who do you think he’d retaliate against?”

  “You?”

  “That’s right, me.”

  Carl looked like he might cry again.

  “See, Carl, Leo Grote and I have had a certain arrangement for many years now,” Frank said, “and it’s worked fine for us all this time. He may be a professional rival, but the rivalry is an amicable one. And for the same reason I want him around, he wants me around. I take at least some of the heat off him. Neither one of us wants to have to manage the kind of operation it would take to oversee all the major crime in this area. Shady Cross may not be the biggest city in the state, but there’s enough action here and in the outlying areas where we do business that Grote and I have both become as rich as we need to be, especially because we both use the profits from our less-than-legal enterprises to fund other profitable and completely aboveboard activities.”

  Frank sighed.

  “Son,” he said, “did you ever ask yourself why I’ve never tried to have him killed? Why he’s never tried to take me out?”

  Carl thought for a moment. He shook his head.
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  Frank shook his head, too, sadly.

  “Carl, Carl, Carl,” he said, “if you weren’t my son, and if I didn’t love you, you’d be dead by now. And within minutes of Chet walking through the front door, he’d be dead, too. That is, if he weren’t my son and if I didn’t love him. But you are my sons, so instead of killing you both, I’m going to instruct you to fix this. Fix this so it never touches Leo Grote, and it definitely never touches me. Call it off.”

  “What about the kid?” Carl asked.

  “The kid?” Frank said, as if he hadn’t given the little girl a moment’s thought. He frowned, thinking. Stokes held his breath. Finally, Frank turned to Stokes. “Mr. Stokes, have you told anyone about Leo Grote kidnapping the little girl?”

  Stokes thought about it. “I told people about the kidnapping, but the cop I stashed in that vacant house is the only one who might have heard Grote’s name. I can’t remember for sure if I mentioned it. The stepmother knows, of course.”

  “But nobody knows our part in this, Dad.”

  Frank looked at his son with contempt.

  “You mean your part in this. And no, you’re right. Mr. Stokes here wasn’t aware of your involvement until a few minutes ago, so he couldn’t have told anyone. Still, things could get messy. I’m very angry, son.”

  Carl winced slightly, perhaps expecting another blow, or perhaps feeling the pain of parental disappointment. Or maybe the pain was merely from one of his numerous wounds, which could have included broken bones and ruptured organs.

  “Did you two at least have the good sense to wear a mask around the girl?”

  Carl hesitated before saying, “Yeah. Even though we were planning to kill her, we thought we should wear masks. It made it easier to . . . well . . . it just made it easier.”

  Frank pursed his flabby lips in concentration. Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “I don’t want the girl killed, Carl. She’ll be released. But you will tell Chet to kill Grote’s men. They’ll complain about us calling this off. They’ll want the money they were promised. They might do or say something stupid tomorrow. So Chet has to kill them tonight, like you planned. But someplace where the girl can’t see or hear. She can’t know what happens to them.”

  “Why not kill the kid, Dad?”

  “Because Chet’s going to bury the bodies of Grote’s men, someplace they hopefully won’t be found anytime soon. If men like that disappear, no one will shed too many tears. Even if they’re found, the police won’t worry all that much about two of Grote’s men being murdered. They’ll think the men were involved in something illegal, something that went wrong and got them killed, which will be true, but that’s beside the point. The point is, the police won’t lose much sleep over their deaths, nor will they expend undue energy in trying to find their killers and bring them to justice.”

  “And the kid?”

  “My God, son, are you listening?”

  Stokes looked at the tiny ribbon of blood leaking out of one of Carl’s ears and thought maybe his father should cut him some slack if he was having a little trouble hearing.

  “Although the police won’t care overly much about the murders of two men working for Leo Grote,” Frank continued, “they would no doubt care a great deal about the disappearance of a six-year-old girl. And the public would care, too. As would the media. And soon everyone would be looking everywhere for her, and somebody would have seen or heard something that you or your idiot brother or those two imbeciles who work for Grote did or said, and then this would come back to me. To Grote and me. And as I told you already, this will not come back to me. Understand now?”

  Carl nodded weakly. He was in rough shape.

  “Now,” Frank said as he handed Carl’s cell phone to him, “I assume Chet has his phone with him. You will call him and tell him what I told you. That he is to make Grote’s men disappear, and that he is not to harm the girl at all. In fact, he should leave her somewhere safe when his other work is done, someplace open all night, like a church or hospital or something.

  Carl was nodding and dialing as Frank spoke. Now he had the phone to his ear. He waited for Chet to answer. Frank waited, too. So did Stokes. They all kept on waiting. Carl blinked a drop of bloody sweat from his nonswollen, blood-filled eye. They waited some more. Finally, Carl looked at the phone with despair further distorting his already badly distorted features.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  Frank looked at Stokes. Stokes looked at his watch.

  “One forty-nine,” he said.

  “Oh, shit,” Carl said.

  “What?” Stokes and Frank asked at the same time.

  “He’s probably already on his way up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “Where we were gonna have Jenkins meet us. In the old ballroom up at Paradise Park.”

  Stokes knew Paradise Park well. The old amusement park had been closed for twenty-five years, but everyone who had ever been a teenager in or near Shady Cross knew every inch of the park’s grounds as well as they knew their own backyards, if they had backyards. After the park’s owners went bankrupt, they’d simply shut things down and moved on, leaving behind most of the structures on the land, which made the place a popular hangout with kids. The dozens of buildings left standing, the rides with their rails and tunnels and cars, were irresistible attractions for young people looking for a cool, remote place to drink, smoke pot, and just goof around. And predictably, guys had been bringing girls there since just after the amusement park closed up shop. The toll the years took on the place only added to its mystique. The cops made an occasional show of sweeping the grounds clean of restless kids, and now and then a politician looking to get elected would promise to find the funds to have Paradise Park well and truly closed, with the buildings and rides torn down and the debris removed and the land put to good use, but the promise was invariably forgotten as soon as the election was over.

  The choice of the defunct amusement park as a place to meet Jenkins was a good one, Stokes thought. Like everyone else who grew up in this area, the Nickersons had spent many hours exploring the park. While the cops might know a dozen ways in and out of the park, the Nickersons would know three times that many. And they knew places to hide, if it came to that. And places from which to ambush.

  “So try calling your brother again,” Frank said. “Stop him.”

  “I don’t think I can, Dad.”

  “It wasn’t a request, Carl.”

  “I mean, I probably can’t reach him. He’s not answering. The cell reception is bad up there. That’s why one of us had to stay back here and make the last calls to the kid’s father.”

  Frank closed his eyes. It looked to Stokes like he was counting silently to himself. He’d probably read one of those stress management books advising people who are angry to count to ten to keep from losing control. If his reputation was deserved, Stokes doubted he’d used the technique many times over the years. He certainly hadn’t used it a few minutes ago when he pummeled his son without mercy.

  Carl was probably right, though. The old Paradise Park grounds were a few miles out of town, up toward the top of either a really big hill or a really small mountain, depending on how you looked at it. Stokes thought of it as a big hill; mountains were in short supply in Indiana. The old amusement park was set on land carved out of the deep woods that draped the entire hill. Stokes had driven the roads through those woods. Cell reception was never good up there.

  “Wait a minute,” Stokes said to Carl. “You were supposed to call me a few minutes ago on the pay phone at Laund-R-Rama. Shouldn’t Chet and Grote’s guys have waited to hear from you, to hear that things were still on track with Jenkins? Weren’t you gonna use the last phone calls to move Jenkins around, see if he was being followed by the cops or something?”

  Carl shifted in his seat. “Well, we wanted him to think that. The truth is, ev
erything we heard about this guy, we figured he didn’t have the balls to do anything but what we told him to do. And his ex-wife confirmed it, told us he wouldn’t dare do anything that could put the kid in any more danger than she was already in. And after we cut off a couple of the girl’s fingers, we thought there was no way—”

  “You did what?” Frank said.

  “He called the cops, Dad. Ken Haggerty told me.” Stokes figured Haggerty must be their inside man with the police. “We had to stop him from doing it again,” Carl said, “so we cut off a couple of fingers.”

  Frank nodded slowly. Stokes couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved of his sons’ tactics in this regard.

  “If you were so sure Jenkins would follow orders,” Stokes said, “why’d you keep going on in our phone calls about following instructions to the letter and what would happen if I didn’t?”

  “Like I said before, just in case Jenkins grew some balls. But the ex-wife really didn’t think he would and we didn’t, either. So we figured there was no need for our guys to wait around for the one-thirty call. I mean, things had been going fine all day. Jenkins was answering the calls . . . well, we thought it was him, anyway . . . and you,” he said, looking at Stokes, “you said you had the money. So everything looked fine. We only had a few more calls to make.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The one o’clock, which is when I heard your phone ring in the bathroom there, the one thirty I was gonna make to you at the Laundromat, and one more after that. We figured everything was going smoothly, so after Chet talked to you at midnight, he decided to get a head start up to the park.”