Shiver (12 page)

“What about your kid’s father?”

This time the look she shot him was wary.

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. Just seems hard that you should have to provide for a kid on your own.”

“Life’s a bitch, or haven’t you heard?”

He studied her averted face as she crammed the last of the remaining supplies back into the box, then restored it to the glove compartment. She could have let him bleed to death, but she hadn’t. Well, he meant to repay her by keeping her alive.

“You want to help me get my pants back on again, we’ll be good to go.” Having his jeans down around his ankles was almost as bad as having his legs tied in terms of what it did to his mobility. Plus, it was embarrassing. But he had a bad feeling that he might not be capable of the effort required to do it all by himself. What he needed was some time to recover his strength. Unfortunately, time was something he didn’t have to spare.

Her lips compressed, but she reached for his jeans and started pulling them back up over his calves. The feel of her cool hands brushing against his bare skin triggered another one of those instant, instinctive moments of awareness of her as a woman, which was, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how he looked at it, a little muted by the circumstances. When he could reach the waistband without shifting around too much, he grabbed hold.

“I got this,” he said, even though his head swam alarmingly as he moved. Jesus, he felt weak.

“Don’t be an idiot.” Ignoring his directive, she helped him get his jeans up, which was a good thing. In the end, he wasn’t sure he could have managed on his own.

“Ah.” Despite his efforts at stiff-upper-lipping it, the sound emerged as he sank back onto the seat less gently than he’d intended and the wound got jostled. She shot him a look, but didn’t say anything. Instead, while he fastened and zipped up his jeans, she began to extricate herself from the foot well, moving carefully so as not to jar his injured leg. Her snug white tank was liberally covered with dark streaks now, he saw, and it didn’t require much of a mental stretch to figure out that they’d been made by his blood.

“Thank you,” he said, meaning it.

“It’s only a temporary fix. You still need to get to a hospital,” she warned, slithering around him until she was once again sitting behind the wheel. Clearly drained, she slumped against the door, letting her head rest back against her intact window as she looked at him warily. Moonlight played over her face. She was exquisitely pretty: her skin was creamy smooth, her cheekbones were high, her jawline determined but delicate. Her lips were full and soft looking. Her nose was small and straight. Her eyes—by moonlight they were a deep, clear blue—were thickly lashed and faintly slanted. Now that she was minus the shape-concealing uniform shirt, he was able to see that her shoulders were slender but well formed, her arms firm and sleek, and her breasts—well, suffice it to say that even under current conditions he was definitely a fan. The cable cord was still tied around her waist, which was slender and shapely; apparently she had been too consumed with patching him up to take the time to untie it. He undoubtedly would have been feeling guilty about now for forcing her to tie herself to him if what he had
told her hadn’t been 100 percent accurate: she was in too deep to get out. Without him, she was a dead woman walking, unlikely to live out the next few hours, collateral damage as Veith et al came after him full bore.

“So why’d you do it?” he asked, as he finished inventorying long, slim legs in blue jeans over sturdy black hiking boots and his gaze returned to her face.

“What?”

“Stay. Bandage me up.”

“I couldn’t just let you bleed to death.” Her tone was testy. It didn’t take a genius to infer that she was having second thoughts about the wisdom of what she’d just done. Using her teeth to tear open a small foil packet that she’d produced from somewhere, she pulled from it a pair of wet wipes, unfolded them, and proceeded to wipe her face and arms then scrub at her hands. “I’ll drive you to wherever you’re going—as long as it’s fairly close—but then I’m out of this. I have to get home to my son.”

Something in her tone told him that she thought the tide of power had turned in her favor. Danny frowned. Arguing with her at this point seemed counterproductive, however, since she had professed willingness to drive at his direction; his best bet was to wait until she was no longer willing and revisit the discussion then, when hopefully his head was a little clearer. He was just coming to that conclusion when an alarming possibility occurred to him. Thrusting a discreet hand down into the door pocket at his side confirmed what he already suspected: she’d taken the gun.

He withdrew his hand slowly. She watched him. From the expression on her face, she knew what was up.

“We’re both better off if I have the gun.” His tone was even, reasonable.

She snorted. “I don’t think so.”

“How about if I give you my word I’m not going to shoot you?”

“How about if I give you
my
word I’m not going to shoot
you
?” She paused. “Unless you deserve it.”

“Professional killers are hot on our tail. I need to be able to shoot them.”

“If they find us,
I’ll
shoot them.”

“No offense, baby doll, but—”

“Just so we’re clear, I’m not your ‘baby doll,’” she broke in. She was busy untying the cord around her waist as she spoke. Concluding that since she hadn’t bolted while he was unconscious she probably wasn’t going to anytime soon, he merely watched as she undid the knot and, with a hard look at him, gathered up the jumper cable and dropped it into the back, where it landed with a clatter on the floor. “And you’re not getting my gun back, so you might as well give up trying. Where do you want me to drive you? If I were you I’d make up my mind fast, before I decide my best bet is straight to the nearest police station.”

“The police can’t protect you. Even if they threw you in jail you wouldn’t be safe. These people can get to you anywhere.”

“So you say. I just have your word for that.”

They exchanged measuring looks.

“Let’s get out of here. Head for the expressway.” With that, he tacitly conceded that he wasn’t going to be wrestling her for possession of the gun anytime soon. Staying on the move was vital if he wanted to keep them one step ahead of Veith. His original intention had been to head across the river into St. Louis. The breached safe house, as well as the other nearby house where Crittenden’s group was based, was located over there, in the Riverview neighborhood. But then he remembered that Marco would know nothing of the second house, or hovering FBI agents. All Marco would know was that the U.S. Marshals guarding him hadn’t been able to keep him safe, that Veith and the cartel had found him, that he’d escaped by the skin of his teeth, and that he was running for his life.

So what would Marco, badly wounded and panicking, aware that it was just a matter of time until Veith or somebody else equally lethal caught up with him, do?

If he were smart, he’d turn himself back over to the marshals. First of all, he needed medical attention. The patch-up job on his leg wasn’t a long-term fix by any means, and if the way he felt was any indication, he needed to get it, as well as his other injuries, seen to pronto. Plus there was the girl, whom his version of Marco was determined to keep safe, which in his present condition he wasn’t going to be able to do on his own. All things considered, and tonight’s fuck-up notwithstanding, the marshals were probably Marco’s best bet for staying alive. And the thing about a fuck-up was, it looked bad on the records of everyone involved. The marshal’s office would be pissed, embarrassed, reeling from the black eye. They would pull out all
the stops to make sure Marco was safe under their protection. Nobody would be getting through their defenses a second time.

Danny caught himself: he was thinking like an FBI agent again. He had to be careful about that. Nobody, outside his contact and supervisor, Crittenden, and Crittenden’s small, elite group, knew that he wasn’t Marco, or what his mission really was.

If at all possible, until this operation was over, he needed to keep the deception in place. He wasn’t going to die as Marco if he could help it, but as long as he considered that he had at least a decent chance at staying alive he was going to play this out like Marco would.

“So why don’t you give me that phone in your pocket?” He held his hand out for it. Watching her slight start and widening eyes flash a look in his direction as he revealed his knowledge of what she undoubtedly considered her guilty secret would have been amusing if he hadn’t felt so bad, so light-headed and nauseous and like he was growing weaker by the second. As it was, he just wanted to get them both somewhere safe as quick as he could. Before, as he feared was going to happen soon, he was no longer able to function. “There’s a call I need to make.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Y
ou know a place called Miss Kitty’s?” Quasimodo covered the mouthpiece of her phone—a cheap, folding silver Nokia, a poor substitute for the piece of technology she had long coveted, which was an iPhone—to glance at her.

“Yes.” It was all Sam could do to keep to keep from sounding as out of sorts as she felt. She couldn’t believe she had just tamely handed over her phone to him. Just because he’d told her that he needed to call someone who would come and pick him up didn’t mean she had to do what he asked. She had the gun; she could have held it on him while she used the phone herself to call 911. Of course, she wasn’t going to shoot him, probably, and he knew that, so holding the gun on him wasn’t going to act as much of a deterrent. Still, giving him her phone might well have been a step too far. If it came to that, what was she still doing driving this guy around? She’d had the perfect opportunity back there to escape, and she hadn’t taken it. He had blacked out; instead of pushing him out of the truck, or even leaping
from the truck and running away herself if she was afraid he’d revive before she could get his door open, what had she done? Stayed put and used her training to save his sorry-ass life. Why? At least that had a simple explanation she could latch onto: she was pretty sure that he would have bled to death if she hadn’t.

Given that she wasn’t feeling bad at all about the two men she’d just shot, why letting this one die had felt different was something she was still trying to work out.

Maybe because of that kiss on her hand. Maybe because she was secretly kind of attracted to him. Maybe because stupidity where men were concerned was her fatal flaw. Who knew?

Examining her own motives had never been something she wasted much time on, but this particular Gordian knot was beginning to unravel in her mind. If she hadn’t shot those two men, they would have killed her. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name, and not just because Quasimodo had told her that that was their intent. She had felt it in some deep, instinctive place as soon as the trunk had opened and she’d seen that gun pointing her way.

Quasimodo hadn’t harmed her, had never tried to kill her, and in fact had seemed intent on making sure she didn’t die.

There was the real difference, not the physical attraction thing, not that any of it really mattered now that the thing was done. What mattered was that, for whatever reason, here she was, listening to him talk on her phone, chauffeuring him around when what she needed to be doing was racing home, grabbing Tyler, and taking off for parts unknown on a long, enforced vacation that she didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

It was like she and Quasimodo had bonded or something. The thought made her scowl.

“I’ll be there. And, hey, Sanders—don’t fuck this up.” He disconnected, clicked her phone shut, and looked at her. By this time he basically had one good eye: the other was swollen almost shut. His nose was looking more misshapen than ever, too, sort of like a potato stuck in the middle of his face. If in real life he was good-looking, and she suspected he was, right now you couldn’t tell it. In other words, it sure wasn’t his good looks that had kept her from abandoning him. Maybe she should just chalk it up to her own soft heart.

Yeah, right. She didn’t have a soft heart. She’d never been able to afford one.

“They’re going to meet us in the parking lot of Miss Kitty’s.” The words had a forced quality that made her think he was having to work to get them out. He was growing weaker, she could tell, and she would be glad to pass him off to Sanders, whoever he was, and get him off her hands as soon as possible. The good news was, Quasimodo wasn’t actually her problem. The not-so-good news was, she had plenty of problems of her own, although the scariest of them were absolutely his fault. “They’re heading there now. How far away are we?”