And as soon as they started, they didn’t stop. Everything began coming together. Noah wasn’t judging Tommy at all. Joshua was judging Noah. And it was Noah who hated the military for what they supposedly did to Harry, but it wasn’t really the military he was targeting. She went back to that first interview she’d had with him. It was the doctors and the hospitals. Hospitals Harry Stork worked at and where he, occasionally, brought his dad along to help.
She figured out the asterisks on those jobs. She hadn’t known if Harry Stork had put them there or her pa. Now she knew the truth: Neither of them had. That was Noah, reminding himself about which shifts Harry paid him for illegally under the table.
She hadn’t run a medical report or any kind of report on Noah Stork, but she was willing to bet he’d built the alias and used it every time he was admitted to a hospital. Back when he started, they didn’t even have computers and databases in place. Nobody would’ve ever known. Leah doubted even the Social Security numbers were ever really used. Nobody expected someone to use an alias while being admitted to a hospital. Why would they? Only, Noah was a lot smarter than anyone knew. He obviously felt one day that the cover might come in handy.
Leah realized Tommy still had his Beretta trained on her. “Tommy, it’s over. I know you’re the wrong guy.”
“You’re just fuckin’ with my head now!” he screamed.
“No,” she said quietly with a quick shake of her head. “No, I’m not. Please put the gun down before you do something really dumb.”
Back in the sixties, hardly anyone worried about any sort of identity theft, never mind creating identities for no apparent reason. Noah could even have a passport issued under the name Joshua Delford. It wouldn’t surprise Leah at all.
“It wasn’t me,” Tommy said, the weapon coming dangerously around, its barrel quivering.
“I know!” Leah said. “Please just throw your gun out onto the ground. I know it wasn’t you. Nothing’s goin’ to happen to you.”
Another thought flew into Leah’s mind. This one was the clincher. The blood sample . . .
“Tommy,” she said. “I can tell you don’t want this to go any further. Put the gun down now.” His green eyes caught the icicle light of the moon and held it for an instant. That was when Leah knew he’d made a decision. Not that it mattered. With her hands above her head and her weapon dangling from her index finger, she couldn’t defend herself no matter what happened.
But she knew then she didn’t have to. She knew he wasn’t going to do anything stupid. With a deep breath, Tommy looked at the gun one last time before making his next move. Leah held her breath, waiting to see what that move would be.
Behind Tommy, Dan was coming up fast.
“No, don’t!” Leah yelled to Dan, but it was too late. He tackled Tommy Stork right off the back porch of his shack. A gunshot rang out into the fresh Alabama air, followed by the smell of cordite. A dozen birds from the trees surrounding the area exploded into the sky, racing over the top of the shack, almost looking like bats in this godforsaken night.
Dan looked up from where he was lying on top of Tommy and disarming him. “You didn’t really just tell me not to do that, did you? The man had a gun on you. He’s a killer!”
Leah’s chest heaved as more and more puzzle pieces fit together. Her timeline was right, only she’d had the wrong name on it. Tommy Stork was as innocent as his brother, Harry, had been. Neither of them were the Stickman.
Catching her breath, Leah shook her head emphatically. “It’s not him. It’s not Tommy. And it wasn’t Harry.”
Now Dan seemed angry. “Then tell me, who in the name of hell is it?”
“Their pa,” she said, near on dying from exhaustion. “It’s their goddamn pa.” Her words disappeared into the night’s shadows, heard by nobody but herself.
CHAPTER 61
Making it onto his feet, Jonathon began walking the narrow path between the trees and the ditch toward Stork’s property line. All the while, he stayed as quiet as he could, trying hard not to dwell on the bad feeling wrapping around his insides on account of he still had seen no sign of Miss Leah and her team.
When he got to where the woods broke, he squatted down and put his head out slowly for a look at the garage standing there in the stark moonlight. It was the same baby blue of the house, only with that bright sheen you got after just painting something. He couldn’t see any lights. Lucky for him, he had the moon. If it had still been raining . . . Well, if it had still been raining, his silver Nissan Sentra would’ve probably been swallowed by one of them ditches on the edge of some bird street long before he managed to get there.
The garage had a pull-up door that was white. Jonathon had no way of knowing whether it was locked or not. Garage door locks were usually automatic and done from the inside. They weren’t something he could pick.
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t about to go pull up the door anyway. He could just imagine throwing that door up, its metal wheels rattling and roaring against their steel track as the thing slowed to a nice stop at the top. No, he’d be better off just going up and kicking it and yelling out, “Hey, it’s me! Come so you can kill me, too!”
He chanced looking a bit more. The house had a dim light on somewhere inside it. He could see it glowing faintly through the living room picture window. But that was it. The rest of the rooms he had window views of were dark as the porch. Same went for the garage. Luckily, the moon and the stars allowed him to view the garage’s side well enough to know there wasn’t a door or window on it. At least not on the side he could see.
With a few deep breaths, Jonathon decided his next move would be from where he stood now to that side of the garage. The blind side. Mentally, he counted to three, then dashed across the bit of yard separating him from his target. He moved low and fast and, far as he could tell, silently. The short, healthy grass took care of that, and he was thankful for it.
His nerves had caught up with him as he finally came to a stop halfway down the wall and pressed his back to it. He allowed himself time to catch his breath fully and calm down before thinking his next thought.
Now, he cautioned a look around the corner to the back of the building.
Behind the garage, a small garden bloomed chock-full of pansies, tulips, and daffodils, their colors faded with the waning light, making them look like old photographs. Just like everything else Jonathon had seen about this place, the flowers and the garden didn’t fit the picture for him. They didn’t belong in this place of death. It made him wonder if they reflected their owner. Likely Stork didn’t fit the world, either. His life must be a constant juxtaposition. He was the ultimate human non sequitur. Jonathon’s heart pounded, jackhammering his ribs, feeling like a fully stretched water balloon ready to burst. Sweat trickled down the side of his head.
Pulling the front of his gray T-shirt from his Dockers, Jonathon used it to wipe his face dry. With a glance toward the front of the building, making sure he wasn’t in danger of being caught, he took another look around the back, spotting the two white motion-activated security spotlights with the controller box between them up in the peak of the garage’s roof.
The lights did nothing to slow Jonathon’s racing heart as he slowly ducked his head back behind the wall.
He still hadn’t really seen the back side of the garage. He needed to know if there was a door or a window or . . . whatever . . . but now he had an even bigger problem. How would he get past those lights?
Jonathon had interesting hobbies. He knew this to be true. Home, school, and church security being a big one. He felt his back pocket, double-checking that his lock-pick set was still with him. He’d slid it into his pocket as soon as he got in the car back at Carry’s. Now, even if there actually did turn out to be a door, he was in a tight spot on account of those lights.
But he did know a thing or two about how the motion-activated part of the security lights worked. They ran on a system known as PIR, a term describing the passive infrared li
ght they used to detect movement. Everyone called them “motion detectors,” but the fact was, they didn’t detect motion at all. What they did was look for changes in temperature, running on the theory that an abrupt change in temperature (especially one going up to somewhere around a human body’s skin temperature) would be evidence of an intruder, and so the lights would come on. Then, after five to fifteen minutes, depending on how they were set, they’d go back off again.
The idea was to make a potential crook think someone had spotted him or heard him and turned on the light. Jonathon’s problem wasn’t that he was afraid of the lights, he was afraid of there being a window in the back of the garage that might allow someone else to see the light if it came on.
He actually knew a great deal about PIR. The way it worked was, internally, the lights watched the area in a three-dimensional cone-shaped pattern it divided up into little cubes. Each of the cubes was measured for temperature, and any dramatic shift in temperature from one cube to an adjacent cube would activate the lights. Due to the nature of their workings, in theory it should be possible to outsmart them by moving really slowly and allowing the lights time to “get used to” a very gradual change in temperature. But, for the kind of speed he needed, Jonathon didn’t have the time nor the patience.
Because of the cone-shaped pattern and the fact that these particular lights were placed about ten or eleven feet above the ground, Jonathon had a bit of breathing room. It explained why he hadn’t already tripped them. They probably wouldn’t see him at the garage’s corner until he either walked out a yard or came closer.
He wasn’t entirely sure how confident he was in those facts, though. So, when he decided to take another look, he sent up a small prayer to the god of whoever ruled over electric lighting to do him a solid.
With that done, he took one more glance, attempting to see everything on the garage’s back side. He moved slowly, even though he knew it wasn’t slowly enough. If he was in one of those light’s field of view, he was a dead man.
He kept moving a little farther out, his eyes darting from the back of the garage to the lights hanging at the peak, thinking every inch would be the one that killed him. But they didn’t turn on, and he got enough around to fully see the back wall.
Quite close to where he was stood a door, closed and, he suspected, locked. No dead bolt on it. The door handle looked like a Schlage and appeared to be a bolt lock. A bolt lock had a tiny version of a dead bolt—a spindle, really—that retracted from the door frame when it was open, but otherwise kept it tightly closed and in the hasp and strike plate.
On the other side of the wall was a window. From inside, a dim light shone through the glass, forming a stretched square on the ground between the garage and the garden. It was faint and flickery, almost like the garage was being lit with a lantern. There were no curtains on the window.
But what really got Jonathon’s attention was the white wooden apparatus hanging on the outside wall between the top of the door and the PIR lights: a ladder.
If Jonathon could get the ladder, he could conceivably get on the garage’s roof and adjust the lights so they pointed anywhere but behind the garage guarding that window and door.
Jonathon had seen enough of the garage on his jog across the front of the property to know that the final side was just like the one he now hid behind. Nothing but blue wooden siding ran along it. No window, no door. Alas, no ladder.
Thoughts began uncontrollably unrolling in his brain. How fast could he get that lock open? Fast enough that the light coming on wouldn’t matter? Not a chance. Could he pull down the ladder without making any noise? He doubted it. He might be able to do it fairly quietly. But that didn’t matter. He couldn’t possibly get to it without first stepping into the watchful eye of the security lights.
And the worst thought of all followed those. While he was out there, unable to decide what to do, Carry was—as far as he guessed—just beyond the wall, praying for her life. That was, if she was still alive.
That was a thought he really couldn’t afford to entertain, so he dropped it and dropped it fast.
And just then, his savior appeared, coming through the garden, pushing aside pansies as its little paws delicately tread through the soft dirt. Jonathon wondered if maybe someone had heard his prayers after all.
A brown and black bobtail, probably out looking for mice, appeared from a bouquet of tulips. First his feline face, then the white tufts at the end of his front paws, and finally his gray tail with a long white tip.
Immediately Jonathon heard the security lamps’ click, and the yard and garden behind the garage were bathed in white light. The white end of the cat’s tail snapped straight up at attention. He ducked back behind the shadow of the garage’s side wall and waited.
It wasn’t long. Maybe five or ten seconds—until Jonathon heard the door being unlocked and swinging open. He really hoped that cat hadn’t darted away. If it had, this might end up just as bad as if Jonathon had tripped the lights himself. He kept perfectly still, feeling sweat run down his face and one bead race down his arm. Everything in his brain told him to run as he stood there motionless, waiting for an indication of what to do.
Then, in the silence, he heard a small “mew.”
The cat had stayed. Jonathon let out a huge breath he’d been holding far too long as he listened to a dispute between the cat and, he assumed, Tommy Stork.
“Go away,” he heard a man’s voice whisper from around the corner. “Go!”
Then the door clicked closed again, and again Jonathon heard the lock.
Pulling up his shirt from where it still hung untucked, he dried the sweat off his face again. It was time to get to work. He had five to fifteen minutes, depending on how those lights were set, to get that ladder down from the roof without drawing any attention to himself either through noise or the view through the window.
The ladder was up on two white metal hooks screwed into the back wall. Standing at the outside of the door, Jonathon reached up and was able to grab the bottom but not the top. Carefully, he brought the end down, stopping just short of the angle of the ladder coming into view of the window. The ladder wasn’t light, and to keep the end up high enough, Jonathon could only slightly bend his elbows. It gave him no leverage. He couldn’t possibly just lift the whole thing up by this one end.
Sweat streamed into his eyes. It might as well be the middle of the goddamn day, he thought, placing one end of the ladder back on the hook. He pulled off his T-shirt and used it like a rag to dry the sweat off his face, neck, and under his arms. When he was finished, he tossed it to the ground.
From inside the garage came the chilling sound of Carry sobbing.
It doesn’t matter, he thought. I don’t have time for it to matter. Just do it. Just get it over with.
He brought the ladder’s edge down again, this time letting it fall past the window’s glass. Jonathon had no choice. If Stork noticed it, then fate had decided to cut him a raw deal.
Even with his hands now on both sides of the ladder, it took all the strength in his lower back to pivot the thing up and over the other hook. Then he almost let it fall back against the glass. Sweat poured from his hair and his arms while he scrunched up his face in pain, trying to keep the wooden edge of the ladder from slamming into the glass.
He was just about to fumble it when he used every bit of strength he had left to twist it outward, spinning it away from the window. It flew from his hands as it crunched onto the ground. In Jonathon’s ears, it was one of the loudest sounds he’d ever heard.
Standing there, frozen with fear, he listened, waiting for the door to yank open.
But all he heard was Carry’s crying. She was louder now, and he wondered if that helped conceal the ladder’s heavy landing. With a big breath, he decided not to overthink it and slid the ladder along the grass until it was well past the window. As he did, he noticed it was older than he’d thought. The boards making up the sides were cracked, and in one place,
a new board had been nailed across where it had almost split in two. Even some of the rungs looked ready to go.
At this point, he wasn’t about to let that concern him.
Pulling the ladder open to lengthen it, he set one end on the grass between the forest and the shadowed wall and gently let the other end set down on the bottom of the garage’s roof. With slow, careful, and deliberate steps, he made his way up, rung by rung, hoping the thing didn’t crack on him. Not because he’d get hurt, but because the sound would alert Stork to his presence.
He felt a surge of relief when his left foot came in contact with the garage’s shingles. With very slow steps, being careful not to shift his weight too suddenly and cause the ceiling joists to creak, he walked up the roof’s slopes and across to the peak. Once there, he got on his knees and, being ever so careful not to put his hand anywhere in front of the square plastic motion sensors, he positioned each light so that it stared harmlessly outward at the middle of the tangled mess of trees making up the forest on the other side of the garden.
Returning to the ladder, he gave it one look before deciding he was better off just to jump.
CHAPTER 62
Dan and Tommy landed in the grass, and Dan seized the wrist of the hand holding the gun while simultaneously bringing his own gun up to the side of Tommy’s head. Tommy’s gun had been the one that fired the shot, but it was an accidental shot that went off into nowhere.
“You thought you could get away with this?” Dan asked, not even sounding winded. “With being the Stickman and the Cahaba River Strangler? Well, you’re killin’ days end here. Tell me where the girl is, or so help me God, I’ll shoot you where you lie.”
“I . . . don’t . . . know . . . please . . . ?” Stork’s voice came out in gasps. The wind had been knocked from his lungs when Dan hit him, and he was trying to get it back.
Sticks and Stones Page 48