Free Shady Cross by James Hankins

body’s chest. He looked at the steering wheel, which was made of hard plastic. The top half of it had broken off in the violent impact. The driver had clearly been thrown forward into the wheel, snapping it, and the broken part still attached to the steering column had slammed into him, shattering his breastbone, punching into his chest. Stokes glanced again at the raw, ragged, bloody gash. He took a breath, then reached up and slipped his hand into the guy’s jacket pocket, ignoring the stickiness his fingers encountered as they crept around in the folds of fabric. He was looking for a wallet. He needed to know the guy’s full name if he was going to continue to pose as him, in case it came up in conversation with the kidnappers.
    He found the wallet in a breast pocket and opened it. Sixty-four bucks. It wasn’t a hundred thousand, but it was a start. He pocketed it. No other pieces of paper in the wallet, nothing that looked like “evidence” Paul could have used against anyone, and nothing with an address for the pay phone written on it. Damn. He shined the flashlight on the guy’s driver’s license. Paul Douglas Jenkins. Thirty-four years old. Two years younger than Stokes, who was going to continue to get older, at least for a while longer, while Paul Jenkins was not. Stokes noted the address on the license. It wasn’t in one of the more expensive areas. This tracked with the idea that Jenkins might have stolen the $350,000, which Stokes had suspected. So did the fact that ten-year-old Nissan Altimas, like the kind Stokes was sitting in, weren’t exactly the first choice of the rich and famous. Yeah, Paul must have stolen the money. For some reason, this bothered Stokes.
    He slipped Jenkins’s wallet into his own pocket and shined the flashlight on his watch: 5:38. Just under eight hours before he had to be at a pay phone somewhere. He steeled himself and checked the rest of Jenkins’s pockets, one by one, looking for a written address. Nothing. He played the flashlight beam around the car’s interior, searching for something with an address written on it, and also for whatever evidence Paul had unwisely threatened the kidnappers with—files, a notebook, a computer disk, maybe a little tape recorder. But he saw nothing of the kind, which was a big disappointment. As for the pay phone’s address, maybe Jenkins never wrote it down. Maybe the kidnappers told it to him and he simply committed it to memory. But Stokes had to do something, so he kept searching. He checked the trunk and found nothing helpful. He slammed the trunk lid and climbed back into the passenger seat.
    He sighed. He’d come up empty in his search, but he still had work to do here. Though it would become more unlikely the darker it got, someone could find this car in the next couple of hours. And they’d call the cops. And if the kidnappers truly had an informant in the police department, they’d know Paul Jenkins was dead and reasonably assume that they weren’t going to get their money. And then they might kill the kid. So Stokes absolutely could not let the cops know Jenkins was dead. He thought for a moment. He couldn’t move the car, couldn’t hide it any better than it was hidden, but he could try to make it harder for the cops to figure out whose car it was. Sure, they’d have a body, but if Jenkins hadn’t worked for the government or been in the military, and hadn’t been arrested—which the average person hasn’t—they shouldn’t have his fingerprints on file, which would make it more difficult to ID his body. And all Stokes needed was a few more hours.
    He opened the glove compartment again and removed the vehicle registration and stuffed it in his pocket. He walked back to the trunk and got a screwdriver he’d seen there moments earlier and used it to remove the license plates. Then he opened the driver’s door and found a sticker he knew he’d find on the car’s frame, a sticker that would be hidden when the