Shady Cross

by James Hankins

  “OK,” he said. “Go down that hall, past the billiard room, to the garage on the other side of the house. There are keys hanging just inside the door, each clearly marked. There’s a garage door opener in the Porsche.”

  “Got it. Give me a thirty-second head start.”

  Stokes started for the doorway.

  “Mr. Stokes,” Frank said, and Stokes stopped. “When this is all over, if you succeed and survive . . .”

  “Yeah?” Stokes said impatiently.

  “Before you leave town for that faraway city where I’ll never see you again, leave my car somewhere I can find it. Lock the key inside. I have a spare.”

  Stokes merely waved a hand over his shoulder as he took off at a run. He flew down the hallway and opened the door at the end. It was fairly dark in the garage, but Stokes couldn’t risk turning on a light and having it seen from the street. He could see the Porsche, looking sleek and fast, gleaming silver even in the faint light bleeding in through the windows in the garage doors. He squinted at the keys hanging on little hooks by the door and found one with a label on the wall above it reading, “Porsche.” He grabbed the key just as he heard Frank start screaming bloody murder on the other side of the house, yelling that his house had been broken into, that his son was badly hurt.

  Stokes hurried over to the window and saw one of the cops—just one of the goddamn cops—sprinting up the long drive. It was Randy-Todd. Down on the street, Tony rushed back to the cruiser and leaned inside. Stokes knew he was calling in to report this new development.

  Shit. Stokes’s goddamn money was in the Camry. He had no choice now. He had to leave it behind.

  Forever.

  Shit.

  He hurried over to the Porsche, opened the door, and sank into a leather seat so smooth and comfortable and perfect for driving, and so unlike anything he’d ever experienced in a seat of any kind, that he almost wanted just to sit for a while and enjoy it. But he jammed the key into the ignition and brought the engine roaring to life as he stabbed at the button on the garage door opener clipped to the passenger-side sun visor. He didn’t want to use his mangled hand, so he reached across his body with his right hand and pulled the car door shut. The garage door rose and Stokes was backing out even before it had risen all the way. He shot under it with mere inches of clearance and continued a few yards, cutting the wheel left as he did, before screeching to a stop, spinning the wheel right, and rocketing forward down the drive. He thought he was doing pretty well driving mostly one-handed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Randy-Todd at the open front door with Nickerson. They both turned his way as he screeched off.

  The Porsche’s engine growled deep in its throat, and the car thrummed with power as Stokes sped down the drive, toward the road. Officer Tony was standing by the police cruiser, radio mic in hand, watching in openmouthed surprise. He scrambled into the car as Stokes shot out of the drive and banged a hard right, the high-performance tires gripping the road with confidence. He was lucky he needed to go in that direction anyway, as it forced Tony to have to turn his car around, costing him valuable time while Stokes raced off in a machine built for speed.

  As Stokes poured on as much gas as he could without risking a violent wreck, he heard Tony’s siren begin to wail behind him. Soon, a few more joined the chorus. Backup had arrived and entered the chase.

  This was nuts, Stokes thought. This was reckless and stupid and had very little chance of succeeding, and everything he’d done that day had been leading toward this stupid, stupid end. It was over for him. He was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. All for a kid he’d never even met.

  He was a goddamn idiot.

  But still he drove. Not toward the highway out of town, toward a life somewhere far away, but toward the road leading up into the hills, where he hoped he’d find a little girl in a defunct amusement park.

  He shook his head and asked himself why he’d done this, and he told himself to just shut up and drive.

  The cops were back there but didn’t seem to be gaining on him as he tore through the streets. They might even have been losing ground. He figured more cops would pull in front of him up ahead somewhere. Not a roadblock. They hadn’t had enough time to set something like that up. But there was probably a cruiser or two patrolling the area he was driving through, especially because the route he had to take brought him through one of the rougher parts of town, and the cops inside those cruisers would be aware of what was happening and would have been instructed to cut him off. But they hadn’t appeared yet, and the cops following him weren’t in sight, so when Stokes saw a group of seedy-looking guys in muscle shirts and tattoos hanging around outside a dive bar—maybe gang members, maybe just gangbanger wannabes—gathered around a dark and dented SUV of some kind, a Ford Explorer maybe, Stokes jerked the wheel and screeched the Porsche into an alley just past the bar. He leaped from the car and ran the half block back toward the group. They watched him come, eight or nine of them, some impassively, some with open curiosity. As he neared them, he pulled one of his guns while at the same time speaking rapidly.

  “I don’t wanna hurt anyone, but I don’t have time for bullshit.” He imagined how he looked to them: covered in blood and bruises. “The cops are after me. I want your truck, but I’d rather not have to steal it from you. You can have my Porsche, though you’ll probably wanna wait a while before taking it out of that alley. So who owns this truck?”

  They were all a little too surprised to answer, though a few heads turned toward a wiry guy, maybe twenty-five years old, who must have been the truck’s owner. Stokes could sense a few of the young men thinking about pulling weapons of their own. He looked at the wiry guy, raised his gun a little in as nonthreatening a threat as he could make, and held up the key to the Porsche.

  “Like I said, I don’t have time for bullshit. We have a deal?”

  One of the tough guys said, “What’d you do, man?”

  Stokes ignored him and focused on the owner of the truck. He could see the guy running through his options. Turn the deal down, maybe get shot, and lose the truck anyway. Accept the deal, lose his truck, but in return receive a Porsche, which he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep but which he could no doubt sell to the right person or maybe a chop shop for a hefty profit. Of course, he had no idea the car belonged to Frank Nickerson. When he found that out, he’d be insane to do anything but leave the car the hell alone, or maybe even return it with a sincere apology. But he wouldn’t find that out until he looked in the glove box and found the registration, which would be after Stokes was long gone with the truck.

  A chorus of sirens wailed in the not-too-distant distance.

  Stokes pointed the gun at the wiry guy and tossed his key at the guy’s feet. Negotiations were closed. Done deal. The other guy nodded, dug a key ring out of his pocket, removed one key, and threw it to Stokes. Stokes couldn’t catch it with his busted fingers so he let it hit the ground. With the gun still held firmly in his good hand, he carefully picked up the key with just the thumb and index finger of his injured hand.

  “Thanks,” Stokes said. “You don’t owe me any favors, but try to keep this to yourselves for a while, OK guys? Maybe you should go back inside for one last beer.”

  He waved the gun a final time before hustling into the truck. The younger guys milled about for a moment, then did as he suggested.

  Stokes started the truck and drove off as quickly as he dared, while keeping his speed low enough not to attract attention. He figured he could push it a bit, though, seeing as the cops would be occupied by looking for a silver Porsche tearing through town and wouldn’t worry too much about a black Explorer exceeding the speed limit by a few miles per hour.

  A minute later, Stokes heard a single siren getting closer and closer and a police car screamed around a corner a few blocks ahead of him. He tensed until it shot past and continued in the other direction. Soon, ano
ther cruiser blew past, siren shrieking, lights flashing, looking for the same silver Porsche.

  Stokes was confident now that he’d make it out of the city proper. He gave the truck a little more gas and looked at the dashboard clock.

  It was 2:25.

  He had twenty minutes to reach Chet before the asshole was supposed to kill Amanda. If he drove a bit insanely, which he could probably afford to do now that he was nearly out of town and driving a vehicle the cops had no reason to be looking for, it would still almost certainly take more than twenty minutes just to reach Paradise Park, probably closer to twenty-five. Then figure another few minutes to ditch the car and find Chet and the others.

  And he had only twenty minutes.

  He gunned the truck through the city’s outskirts and onto the two-lane road leading up to the old amusement park. He sneaked another look at the clock in the dash. His heart sank.

  Shit, he thought. I’m not gonna make it.

  THIRTY

  2:39 A.M.

  IT WAS 2:39 A.M. WHEN Stokes brought the black Explorer to a crunching stop in the gravel on the shoulder of the road. He’d driven with suicidal recklessness, racing along the winding two-lane road at careless, stupid speeds, barely touching the brake pedal, several times narrowly avoiding the same fate Amanda’s father suffered—sailing his vehicle off the road, into the woods, headlong into a tree. It was incredible that he’d survived. Thankfully, he’d passed no cops.

  Stokes backed the truck into a small gap in the trees, far enough that it wouldn’t be seen easily from the road. He reached up and turned off the dome light. Just around the next bend, he knew, was the entrance to a huge gravel lot now carpeted with weeds. Decades ago it would fill with cars every day, cars that carried happy families to Paradise Park for a day of wholesome fun, tasty though less-than-wholesome food, and lasting memories. But those days were long gone. After operating for sixty-eight years, the amusement park shut down twenty-five years ago. Stokes’s parents had taken him once, when he was five. The image that stuck with him most from that day was his father—his hand never without a beer in it, his lips never without a cigarette between them—waiting impatiently for Stokes and his mother to get off each ride. Stokes recalled his father smacking him on the side of the head when he’d asked for cotton candy.

  As Stokes exited the truck, shutting the door quietly behind him, he tried to remember something else from that day, something pleasant. He remembered a lot of colors, the miasma of food smells, spinning on some ride with his mother, seeing other children with big, colorful balloons but being afraid to ask for one of his own. These memories fluttered in his mind for a moment before disappearing like scraps of paper in a strong wind. He was left again with the image of his father, a big cup full of beer in his hand, a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, a look on his face as lacking in warmth as it was in patience.

  Stokes ran across the road and entered the woods. He knew his way well, moving as quickly and quietly as he could, reassured by the weight of the antique dealers’ two guns in his jacket pockets and the feeling of Officer Martinson’s bigger gun pressing against the small of his back. He was confident he’d know his way around the grounds once he reached them, so he shouldn’t have trouble finding the old ballroom at the park’s center. He could have chosen to drive into the weed-and-gravel lot and walk through what used to serve as the park’s main entrance, but he figured Chet Nickerson might have posted one of Grote’s boys there to watch it. Though they were expecting someone, that someone wasn’t Stokes. He knew he’d have to reveal himself eventually, but he’d rather be fairly close to them when he did . . . close enough to do whatever it was he was going to have to do.

  Stokes trotted though the woods. Over the decades, the trees surrounding the park had encroached on the grounds, so it was only when Stokes started passing dilapidated shacks and booths and rusted pieces of machinery that he realized he’d crossed the perimeter of the old park itself. He pressed on and the trees gave way to thick overgrowth. He resisted the urge to look at his watch, but every moment he was afraid he’d hear gunshots.

  I’m not gonna make it.

  The moon was bright and the sky clear, so Stokes was able to get his bearings. He was beside the run-down fun house, its once-garish colors muted by time and weather. He walked through thigh-high weeds, as quietly as he could, farther into the park, keeping a watchful eye for movement and listening hard for any sound that didn’t belong in this place at this time of night.

  Stokes knew time was running out fast and he’d have to sacrifice a bit of stealth for a little more speed. As he quickened his already-quick pace, making a direct line for the old ballroom, he couldn’t help but recall some of his many wasted hours there in the park. He’d smoked his first joint behind the Dunk the Clown stand. He remembered a few other hours spent in this place that weren’t so wasted. He’d touched his first naked breast, sitting in a rusted bumper car, feeling the soft, warm flesh beneath his clumsy, groping fingers, ignoring the cramped space and the hard metal seat that had long before lost any padding it once had. And less than two months later, he’d lost his virginity to Lisa Genovese, the both of them lying half-naked on a scratchy blanket he’d spread out on the floor of the empty penny arcade.

  As the hulking rectangular shape of the ballroom finally came into view, Stokes realized he’d be spotted soon. He was counting on the fact that it was night rather than bright day, and that he bore a passing similarity to Paul Jenkins—at least in that they were of similar height and neither was overweight—to get him close enough to do something to save Amanda Jenkins. Just what that something was, of course, he had no idea. It was time to figure that out. It was past time, actually. He checked his watch: 2:47. He was late. Chet was going to start killing people any second. If Carl had been telling the truth, and if things worked out as they planned, Chet would start with Grote’s men, then move on to Amanda.

  The absolute best time for Stokes to make his move would be after Chet had killed Iron Mike and Danny DeMarco, thereby removing two of Stokes’s potential obstacles, but before he shot Amanda Jenkins. But there was no way Stokes could time it like that. He’d have to face all three of them. His only hope was that he’d get close enough before they realized he wasn’t Amanda’s father, because even though he wasn’t afraid to use the guns he was carrying, he had no idea if he could shoot straight, seeing as he’d never pulled a trigger in his life.

  Acutely aware that his time was completely gone, that shots might shatter the night quiet at any moment, Stokes paused for a brief moment in the shadow of a booth that used to house some kind of game of chance, and checked all three of his weapons, making certain their safeties were disengaged. They were.

  He left the shadows and stepped into the light of the clearing that spanned the twenty yards between him and the ballroom. No time left for subtlety. He broke into a run through the tall grass and weeds, hoping his guns wouldn’t fly out of his pockets or waistband as he ran. As he neared the building, he saw that it was as he remembered it. Maybe sixty feet wide and three times as long. Most of the glass in its windows had been broken by kids with rocks ages ago.

  He was racing for a doorway at one end of the building—the door itself was long gone—wondering if he would be recognized the instant he stepped through it, recognized as not being Paul Jenkins, and would be shot without hesitation. But he kept going, running right into the building, skidding to a stop just inside the door. He threw up his hands and said to nobody in particular, “I’m here, I’m here. Please don’t hurt her.” He was out of breath.

  Stokes kept his hands up but tried to keep his head down, his face in shadow, as he swept the room with his eyes. In the middle of the cavernous space he could make out three tall figures and a shorter one. That meant that all of them—Chet and both of Grote’s men, as well as Amanda—were inside the building. He was surprised at first that Chet hadn’t positioned the others
in a place where they could watch for Jenkins’s approach from outside, and watch for cops at the same time. But maybe he’d had watches posted earlier, and when two thirty had come and gone and Jenkins still hadn’t shown, and when the extra fifteen minutes he’d planned to wait had ticked by, too, he’d called the others inside to kill them.

  “I’m here,” Stokes repeated, hoping that his build was indeed similar enough to Jenkins’s, that his voice could still pass for the father’s, that his face was deep enough in shadow.

  “You’re late,” someone said. Sounded like Chet. He apparently still believed that Stokes was Jenkins. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

  “I had trouble finding this building.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  Stokes took a breath. “You think I’d hand it over without seeing Amanda first?”

  “Where’s the fucking money?” Chet asked. “And the evidence?”

  “I hid it in the park on the way here. After I know Amanda’s all right, I’ll take you to it.”

  “You asshole,” Chet said. No doubt he was considering how this impacted his plan just to kill everyone right here in the next few minutes. “Fucking asshole.” He sounded really pissed, maybe pissed enough to just start shooting right now, hoping he’d find the money and the evidence hidden in the park himself. Stokes wouldn’t put it past him. The guy was a lunatic. Stokes was having serious doubts about his ability to use the lockbox code word Frank Nickerson had given him to stop Chet from killing anyone. Besides, as Stokes had already realized, this was never truly about the money, and it wasn’t about the evidence, either. If their little kidnapping-gone-terribly-wrong scenario played out as he planned, they didn’t really need any more evidence. Finally, Chet said, “OK, fine. Whatever. The kid’s OK, as you can see. Other than a couple of fingers.”