Free Shady Cross by James Hankins Page A

door was closed. It listed information about the vehicle, including the vehicle identification number, or VIN. He used the screwdriver to scratch out the information on it. Next he would—
    He froze. Cocked his head, listening. He heard it again. Voices. A flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness, struck a nearby tree, and started a slow, probing crawl toward him.
    Shit, shit, shit.
    Cops? He couldn’t tell.
    He had to get the hell out of there. Grab the backpack from the ground on the other side of the car and run like hell.
    But he hadn’t finished removing the car’s identifiers. The kidnappers would find out Jenkins was dead, which was very bad for the kid.
    Stokes could still bolt, though, and get away with the money. He still had a chance at a new life.
    But the kid would have no chance at all.
    He hesitated. For too long.
    Daddy?
    He should just run like hell. No time even to grab the bag any longer. If he was going to get away clean, he had to take off now . Still, he hesitated. The goddamn kid. And, he had to admit, the money.
    The voices were close in the darkness now. He heard footsteps through crackling leaves. The flashlight was crawling closer. Too close.
    It was over. He wasn’t going to get away. And now maybe the little girl wasn’t, either.

NINE
    5:40 P.M.
    WHOEVER WAS COMING THROUGH THE dark woods was getting close now. Stokes’s last chance to get away cleanly had come and gone. As the flashlight beam bounced off the tree in front of him, the tree that had stopped Jenkins’s car and his life, Stokes crawled quickly through the open driver’s door, scrambled over Jenkins’s dead body, and positioned himself in the passenger seat, slumped over the dashboard. The damn bag of money was on the ground outside the passenger door. He’d worry about that later, if he got the chance. At the moment, he was worried about the fact that he was sitting there, the picture of health, in a wreck of a car beside a driver who had been turned to raw hamburger. That was going to look suspicious.
    He heard footsteps stop outside the car. He sensed the flashlight beam striking the tree again, then playing over the crumpled hood. Stokes took a chance. Without moving anything but his arm, he reached over, slid his hand under Jenkins’s jacket, groped along the sticky shirt, and finally reached the open chest wound. He took a shallow breath and dug his fingers into a hole in the flesh, his knuckle scraping on jagged bone. He pushed his fingers in, sinking them into the congealing bloody mess inside, then pulled his hand back, covered with gore. He let his head slide down just a little, resting his forehead on the dash, and brought his hand to his own face. He wiped the mess on his cheeks, his nose, his chin, suppressing a violent urge to vomit. Then he was still. There was no sudden commotion. They hadn’t noticed his movements.
    It wasn’t a bad plan. It hadn’t been a lot of fun, poking around inside a corpse, and sitting there with his face covered with a dead guy’s blood and gore wasn’t the way he wanted to pass the time, but all in all, it was a decent idea. The gore served double duty, making Stokes look like a victim of the crash while also disguising his face, which could be useful so long as the people outside weren’t cops, who would certainly arrest him as soon as they realized he wasn’t actually injured and had the dead guy’s license and vehicle registration in his pocket. But if they weren’t cops and he got the chance to grab the bag and run, the blood and whatever-the-hell-else he’d pulled from Jenkins’s chest and smeared all over his face might keep whoever was standing outside the car from identifying him later.
    This was nuts. He was nuts. This whole situation just wasn’t his goddamn problem.
    Daddy?
    Shut up, kid.
    Stokes had his face turned away from the window. The voices were very close. Through half-closed eyes he saw a flashlight beam creep around inside the car. He heard