Shiver (5 page)

“How sure are you that they’re going to kill us?” The girl’s voice was breathier than before. Probably because she now had enough of a handle on the situation to be really, truly frightened. His initial instinct was to reassure her, to tell her that everything was going to be all right. Under the circumstances, though, his initial instinct was shit. Truth was what she needed to hear.

“One hundred percent. I’d be dead already if they hadn’t gotten interrupted.” The question was, who, exactly, had interrupted them: Crittenden and the cavalry, or more of the contingent of hapless U.S. Marshals out of whose custody he’d been snatched, or someone else hunting Marco? Or even a new player whose moves he wasn’t yet trying to follow around the board?
Answer: impossible to know. As Danny assessed the truth of that, he sliced through the first tie, and was on to the second. It
wasn’t
his imagination: the car was definitely slowing down.

The sudden crunch of gravel under the tires acted on him like a warning siren: wherever they were going now, it was somewhere off the public roads. Which meant they might very well be nearing Veith’s killing ground of choice. Because of course Veith was on his way, planning to rendezvous with Torres and finish the job.

Under those conditions, the sudden turn onto gravel could not be good.

He would be a fool to assume anything other than that they were approaching their destination.

“Hear that gravel? I think we’re just about to get where we’ve been going.”

“We’re probably in the scrap yard,” she said.

“Scrap yard?”

“For old cars and things. They recycle scrap metal. It’s not too far from where I found you. It’s all gravel.”

That made sense. A scrap yard in the middle of the night sounded like Veith’s kind of place. He knew it was probably a waste of time, but still he tried to identify any source of possible help.

“An attendant on duty? Anything around, like a bar or an open-all-night convenience store or something?” Someplace she could head for when she bolted.

“No.” The tempo of her breathing had slowed down, like
she was deliberately calming herself. He succeeded in cutting through the second tie: hallelujah, his feet were free.

As soon as he moved his cramped legs, pain shot through his body like a thousand flaming arrows. He felt the hot slide of more blood leaving the hole in his thigh. Who was he kidding? He was going to fight off Veith and his thugs with a pocket knife? In the shape he was in? Hell, he was surprised he wasn’t already unconscious from blood loss. Chalk it up to adrenaline, he thought. Forcing himself to concentrate, he moved on to item two on his survive-the-night list and started tugging his belt from its loops.

“What are you doing?” she asked, clearly having felt the change in his movements. There was definitely fear in her voice now: it was sharper, more tightly wound. Well, he thought as he pulled his belt free, if she wasn’t scared she would have to be brain-dead.

“I’ve got a bullet hole in my leg. I’m going to use my belt to put a tourniquet on it.”

“They shot you.” It wasn’t a question. “That’s where all the blood came from.”

“Yeah.”

“What, is this like a hit on you or something? Who
are
they?”

“Again, you’re better off not knowing.”

A long, harsh grinding sound from outside, from somewhere toward the front of the car, made Sam inhale sharply.

“That noise you’re hearing? That’s the brakes on the tow
truck,” she told him, even as the car lurched and rocked in a way that was different from before. “We’re stopping.”

Queasy and light-headed, sucking in the too-hot, oxygen-deprived air like they weren’t making it anymore, knife tucked carefully away into his T-shirt pocket so there was no danger of him losing it in the dark, Danny was already wrapping his belt around his thigh and pulling it tight. God, that hurt. It made a rough but effective tourniquet, and if he left it in place longer than about the next fifteen minutes he would probably be in danger of losing his leg.

Which, unfortunately, seemed like the least of his problems at the moment.

“As soon as that trunk lid opens, I want you to be ready to go. Jump and run. Just run away into the dark as fast and as far as you can. For your life, you hear?” he told her.

“I hear.” The tempo of her breathing had slowed down, as if she were deliberately calming herself. “Oh, God. I’m scared.”

“In a situation like this, fear’s a good thing. Keeps you sharp.” He reached around, caught her hand. It felt slender and fine-boned and, surprisingly considering the temperature in the trunk, cold as ice. Or maybe not so surprising: he could feel a slight tremor in her fingers that underlined just how truly afraid she was. Her hand clung to his, clutching it, telling him that she needed comforting in the worst way. Pulling her hand around in front of him, he surrendered to the impulse of the moment and lifted it to his mouth, kissed the knuckles. He felt her slight movement and took it for surprise, but again she didn’t try to pull away.

“We got this,” he told her. He was still holding her hand, and she was holding his hand back even more tightly. Maybe it was a lie, but right now he felt she needed to hear it. To stand even the smallest chance of escaping, she was going to need confidence and courage. “We’re going to make it. Just do what I tell you, and you should be fine.”

“I will.” Her voice had steadied. “What about you?”

“You let me worry about me.”

The car stopped its forward motion. Then the rocking stopped. They weren’t moving at all any longer. His body tightened as his heartbeat speeded up. Behind him, Sam caught her breath and quickly withdrew her hand from his. She must have realized what the fact that they had stopped meant, too. He felt her tense, and then her weight no longer pressed into his back as she edged away from him, scooting as best she could back toward the rear of the trunk. While he could still feel the warmth of her touching him in places, she seemed to have put as much distance between them as possible, as if she thought maybe they might overlook her or something when the trunk opened. Which he didn’t have a problem with: at least it gave him some room to maneuver. As long as she remembered to jump.

“Here’s the deal.” He fished the knife—the pathetically small and way-less-than-lethal knife—out of his pocket. Ironically, now that he had cut off the blood flow to most of his leg it hurt worse than ever. Enough to where not thinking about it required real effort; fortunately, he had distractions. “I’m going to go after whoever opens the trunk as soon as it happens. They think I’m still tied up, so they won’t be expecting that. You take
advantage of their distraction, and jump out of the trunk. You’ll probably only have a few seconds, so run like hell the minute you hit the ground.”

“Shh.” She breathed the warning.

That was when he heard it at last: the slight crunch of footsteps on gravel.

They were coming.

Danny tensed. He took a deep breath, centered himself, and felt his pulse rate slow way down: battle mode. At least now, unbound, he had a chance, however slim it might be. He braced the foot of his uninjured leg against a protuberance at the side of the trunk, the better to help him spring out, and got a good grip on the knife. His hand-to-hand combat skills were top-notch, but the sad truth was that, virtually weaponless, it was hard to defend against one gun, let alone two. Uninjured, he might have stood a fighting chance, but as it was . . .

The footsteps stopped. Danny’s every sense went on red alert. From the sounds, he knew that there were still only two of them, even knew where they were. Both stood behind the car, one in the center, one to the left.

Torres and Thug Two, he presumed. If Veith was there, or anyone else, they’d arrived earlier. He would have heard another vehicle crunching over the gravel.

“Heads up,” he whispered.

Just as Danny realized that he couldn’t hear her breathing any longer, a metallic click sent the hair on the back of his neck into bristle mode. It also gave him a split second’s warning:
someone had hit the trunk release button on the BMW’s key ring.

This is it.

His gut clenched. His muscles bunched. Adrenaline shot through his veins like a speedball rush.

The trunk rose at a measured, majestic pace that reflected the luxury brand of the car rather than the urgency of the situation. In the space of about a heartbeat, as fresh air wafted in and a swath of starry night sky was revealed, Danny registered that they were outside rather than in a building, that the balmy summer’s night now smelled of garbage and the river, that Torres and Thug Two were approximately where he had pictured them, and, as the moonlight turned its snub-nosed black barrel to silver, that at least one gun was pointed right at his face.

Game on.

Gathering himself, he prepared to spring. The distinctive sound of a weapon being cocked behind him—behind him!—caused his eyes to widen. It was the only warning he got.

CHAPTER THREE

A
s the Beemer’s trunk lid rose, Sam’s heart jackhammered—until it didn’t. Her pulse accelerated to the point where it was all she could hear—until suddenly it slowed way down.

By the time she inhaled her first lungful of fresh air, beheld the first sliver of starry sky, heard the sudden, unmuffled onslaught of night sounds, every bit of fear she was experiencing had vanished, swept away in a flood of icy resolve.

She wasn’t dying tonight. No way, no how.

If she died, Tyler had no one.

That was all the motivation Sam needed. Whatever it took, she was going to survive for her boy. When the lid rose high enough to reveal two men silhouetted against the night sky, she had her own gun out and ready, down close to her chest, pointing out. One of the men was aiming a gun into the trunk: with moonlight glinting on its barrel, she saw it as plainly as if it were high noon outside. Lying awkwardly on her side, she angled her weapon more accurately, aiming up through the small space
she had managed to create between her body and the muscular back of the man wedged into the trunk with her. The Smith & Wesson was heavy and warm from her body heat. Her palms were sweaty, which made its metal grip slippery, which made her tighten her hold on it. During the heartbeat it took her to reconfirm the deadly reality of the mess she was in—oh, yeah, it was bad—her stomach cramped. She ignored it, just like she was ignoring the painful throbbing in her head where one of these bozos had clobbered her, just like she was ignoring the fear that would have swamped her if she’d let it. If this was a fight for her life—and Tyler’s—then hell, yeah, she was going to fight. Gritting her teeth, she targeted just above the gleaming black barrel of the bastard’s gun. It was taking careful aim—at her, not her companion. Like he’d said, they were clearly going to kill her first. Tamping down hard on a rising wave of terror that turned her blood to ice and made her pulse race and her heart pound, she fired with grim determination, pulling the trigger multiple times, shooting at both dark shadows, blasting away for her life—and Tyler’s—in big explosions of sound.

“Holy shit!” the man in the trunk with her yelped, his arms flying up to shield his head, as her targets screamed, reeled away, then dropped from sight with heavy, crunching thuds. Clambering up onto her knees, looking wildly around for any possible new threat, Sam ignored her companion as he rolled onto his back to stare up at her. He said something else to her that didn’t register. Everything—the bang of the gunshots, the sulfuric smell of the recently fired gun, the screams and sounds of bodies dropping, and the terrible reality of the deadly vio
lence that had suddenly forced its way into her life—had such a nightmarish quality to it that she was having a hard time processing that
this is real.

Don’t think. Just get out of here.

Ears ringing from the noise of the gunshots, mind surprisingly detached in the midst of her body’s knee-jerk panic, she sprang out of that trunk like a gazelle—or a mother whose kid was in danger, which was what she was.

The men she’d shot were down, dark shapes sprawled on the silvery gravel near the back of the car, she saw as her feet hit the ground. One of them writhed and moaned. The other lay still. For a second, as the gun hung heavy in her hand, she stared at them. The one looked dead; the other clearly wasn’t, but neither seemed capable of posing any kind of a threat. Heart pounding, breathing way too fast, she forced herself to look away from them and take stock of her surroundings. She was outside, close enough to the river so that she could catch a glimpse of its rolling waters, standing in the middle of a shadow-filled open space. The moon and stars gleaming down from the black sky high above, the distant glow from the city of St. Louis across the river, and her truck’s white beams pointing like twin light sabers away from her made it plenty bright enough to see what was going down, even if darkness obscured a lot of the details. As she had suspected, they were in the scrap yard, a football-field-size cemetery for junk cars and trucks and discarded metal of all types, in which she personally had scrounged numerous times looking for parts for various vehicles, including the
truck. Piles of would-be scrap were stacked up everywhere like mini-mountains, some reaching as much as twenty feet high. Two long, low warehouses formed a wall between the piles of scrap and the street. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence designed (unsuccessfully) to keep scroungers out surrounded the entire property. Making an instantaneous visual sweep of the area, Sam concluded that there was no one else around.