Shiver (17 page)

A satisfied smirk curled his lips. “Samantha Jones? Where’s Marco?”

Sam’s heart convulsed. If she ran he’d shoot her. If she stayed—he’d have Tyler, too.

“Run, Tyler!” Sam shrieked, shoving her son back behind her, knowing that she had no chance of surviving this but going for it anyway, because if she could slow down what was getting ready to happen long enough to give Tyler a chance to escape that was the best she could hope for, and what she was going to do. Jerking up her gun, whirling to face the intruder, she opened fire—
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
in huge, earsplitting explosions that clearly caught the intruder by surprise, that tore up her cabinets and shattered her counters and filled the air with a sulfurous smell, that didn’t cause Mrs. Menifee’s poor bloody fingers to so much as twitch. To her astonishment the man didn’t fire back, didn’t shoot her dead where she stood, but jumped back out of sight into the kitchen, yelling, “What the fuck?” or maybe that was somebody else, because a different voice roared, “Get the bitch!”

That’s when it hit her: they didn’t want her dead, not yet, not until she told them where Marco was. So she turned to follow Tyler, turned to take a chance, to run—and saw that instead of bolting toward the front door, Tyler had fled into his bedroom.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught the flash of his bare legs, the light green of his Incredible Hulk short pajamas, disappearing into the dark.

“Tyler!”

Behind her, the man popped into view again, filling the space just inside the kitchen, his gun up and aimed at her.

“No!”

Dizzy with fear, Sam leaped headlong after her son just as a bullet smacked into the wall inches away from where her left leg had been. No bang—a silencer. They might not want her dead—yet—but this guy had no qualms about shooting her. And there was nothing they wanted from Tyler. The knowledge galvanized her.

These had to be professional hit men. Hadn’t Marco warned her?

“Mom! Mom! Are you shot?”

Tyler slammed the door behind her as she hit the floor hard on her hands and knees, hanging onto the gun for dear life. Until then, she hadn’t even realized that she’d been screaming like a woman faced with imminent death—which it was terrifying to realize was exactly what she was. The hardwood was unforgiving. The jolt of her landing cut off her scream and shot through her wrists and knees. But she was so frightened that she barely even registered the impact. With the door closed, only moonlight filtering through the thin curtains kept the room from being pitch black. On the shelf above Tyler’s bed, a favorite stuffed snake glowed faintly yellow through the dark.

“No.
Lock the door.
” Still clutching the gun, she scrambled
to her feet. Tyler did as she told him, his hands looking tiny and pale through the shadows as he snapped the tarnished brass dead bolt into place. But even though the door was big and heavy and old, she didn’t trust the lock to hold for longer than a minute or two. A grown man would be able to kick his way in easily, or they could shoot out the lock.

Even as the thought occurred, Sam’s heart leaped into her throat and she shrieked, “Tyler! Get away from the door!”

He did, darting toward the far wall.

She was already spinning away toward the rocking chair beside the bed, the one in which she’d left Mrs. Menifee, in which she had spent many an hour soothing Tyler when he was a baby, an old friend. Purchased at a yard sale and lovingly repainted, it had a wood slat back and a cane seat, and it was sturdy and just the right size and absolutely better than nothing. Picking it up—it was heavy—and practically lunging with it the eight or so feet needed to reach the door, she strong-armed the chair beneath the knob, wedging it tight, bracing the door as best she could. It wouldn’t hold up to a full-scale assault, but at least now, she hoped, the door wouldn’t spring open under a single hard kick.

A bullet drilled the door. Clearly aimed at the lock, which it just missed, it plowed into the floor near Sam’s feet. She screamed, an instinctive reaction that tore its way out of her throat and that she quickly swallowed for Tyler’s sake. Tyler gave a high-pitched cry that ripped at her heart and threw himself toward her. Catching him, throwing an arm around him, she took him with her as she bolted toward the room’s solitary
window. Escape, was what she was thinking. They had to get out of that room if they were to have any chance of surviving.

“Are they gonna get in?” Eyes huge with fear, Tyler clung to her even as Sam, struck by an epiphany, whirled back to face the door.

“No,” she promised grimly. Clapping Tyler’s head to her side and covering his exposed ear with her free hand, she pointed the gun at the wall in the approximate vicinity of where she calculated the shooter might have been standing in the hall beyond it, gritted her teeth, and pulled the trigger.

The enormous
bang
bounced off Sam’s eardrums. The bullet tore through the plaster, leaving a pale pockmark on the navy blue wall. The resultant shouts from the men outside told her that it had gotten through and that they had taken notice, which was what she wanted, even if she hadn’t hit one of them. Anything to hold them off.

“They killed Mrs. Menifee.” Tyler was trembling.

“They’re not going to kill us,” she promised, thrusting the gun back down into her waistband, and hoped with every fiber of her being that it wasn’t a lie.

Turning, whipping the curtains open, she found herself looking out at a scraggly honeysuckle bush, the blank side wall of a neighboring garage, and the narrow strip of grass between residences, all shrouded in the deep charcoal of night.

“Cover your ears,” she warned as she went to work on the window lock. Tyler did, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Help! We need help! Call 911!” toward the glass, hoping that it would penetrate far enough for a neighbor to hear, know
ing even as she did it that it was probably a waste of breath, because even if someone did hear the people around there had been programmed by many long years of casual neighborhood violence not to get involved and above all, not to involve the cops. Gunshots, screams, shouts for help—they weren’t so unusual that anybody would stick his neck out unless she got very, very lucky.

“Trey’s coming,” Tyler told her, his eyes big dark pools in his small face. She could feel shivers racking the warm little body pressed against her. “I called him. He’s on the way.”

That made no sense, but Sam didn’t have time to worry about it. “Okay.”

“Can you get it open?”

“Yeah.” As she wrestled the recalcitrant lock the final few millimeters needed to free the bottom half of the window, she tried to sound calm. Which was a joke: her kid wasn’t an idiot, he knew she was scared witless, knew that they could die, but still the mom in her tried to protect him from the full magnitude of her fear.

“I tried. I couldn’t open it.”

“I’m bigger.”

With half her senses focused behind her, on what was going on outside the bedroom door—she could hear nothing, which made her so nervous she wanted to puke—she grabbed the handles at the bottom of the sash with both hands and yanked.

The window didn’t budge.

“Hurry, Mom,” Tyler said breathlessly.

“Get her out of there,” she heard one of the men order as she
strained without success to pull the window up. From the direction of his voice, he was in the hall, near the kitchen. But closer than before?

If there was a reply, she didn’t hear it.

Sam thought about snapping off another shot in their direction, but she really didn’t want to ignite a firefight that the other side was sure to win and that would endanger Tyler. Anyway, gunfighting was not her thing; before tonight she had only ever fired a gun at a practice range or in the air as a warning. Besides, she only had—a quick check confirmed it—two bullets left.

Her stomach twisted into a pretzel.

That was not enough. Not near enough to save them.

“Pull harder,” Tyler urged, and Sam did, planting her feet, putting every bit of strength she had into dragging open that window. It didn’t work.

“I’m pulling as hard as I can.” Her voice was thin and breathless. Probably she shouldn’t have admitted it, not to Tyler, but the admission just came out.

“We don’t want to hurt the kid,” another man yelled, the words clearly intended for her ears. He sounded closer, nearer the door. “Come out now, and we’ll let him go. You make us come in and get you, and things could go real wrong in that regard.”

“Mom.” Tyler tightened his grip on her.

Sam’s heart pounded so hard that it felt like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Whatever it took, she was not letting them get their hands on
Tyler. Swallowing the panic that rose like bilge in the back of her throat, she shook her head reassuringly at him.

“You come anywhere near us and I’ll blow you to hell,” she yelled back. They couldn’t know she only had two bullets left.
I don’t care how bad they are, they have to be wary of a gun.
She figured that the knowledge that she had it was the only thing keeping them from storming the door.

“Will you really shoot them if they come?” Tyler whispered. He was holding tightly to her, hampering her movements more than a little as she tried rocking the window, shoving hard against the frame, jiggling the sash this way and that, but there was no way she was pushing him away.

“Yes,” she said, and this time she wasn’t lying. If they came anywhere near Tyler, she absolutely would. Although, and she hated to even let the grim truth into her consciousness, it still might not be enough to save him.

Another bullet plowed through the door. Silent and deadly, it buried itself in the wall maybe a foot away from the window with a sound like a hand slapping flesh. She and Tyler both froze, staring at the pale pockmark where the bullet had hit with widening eyes, before Sam roused herself and gave a desperate, do-or-die heave to the handles. Nothing; she came to the terrifying conclusion that the window was painted shut.

“Are we trapped, Mom?” Tyler sounded on the verge of tears.

“No way.” She gave Tyler a fierce, one-armed hug while she frantically assessed the window. She was so frightened that she
could hardly stand still. Sweat poured over her body in a wave. She could not—“Tyler?”

He had broken away from her. “I have to get something.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him slide partway under his bed and emerge with—of course—Ted. The sliver of her attention that had gone with him returned to rejoin the rest in focusing on the window.

Could she break it? Even if she broke the glass, the wood would still be intact. Maybe . . .

“Mom, here.” Tyler was back, holding trusty Ted by the paw, thrusting something—a glance down discovered a cell phone, to which she reacted with a quick, hopeful thrill—into her hand. “I called Trey. You can call somebody.”

Trey again. Even as she drew a blank once more on the name—superhero? imaginary friend? playmate she couldn’t place?—she gave Tyler a
you did good
look and started punching in 911.

Pheww. Pheww.
The peculiar hissing sounds were immediately followed by a pair of sharp smacks as two objects hit the baseboard opposite the door at maybe an inch above floor level. An awful chill of premonition slid down her spine. Casting a startled glance around, Sam heard another breathy
pheww
and watched a shiny sphere the size of a paintball blast beneath the door to slam with a smack into the baseboard maybe a yard away, where it burst. A shimmery aerosol was released into the air, expanding outward in a growing cloud. Two other similar clouds stretched toward each other, the products, she concluded with a thrill of horror, of the other two smacking sounds. Sam
didn’t have to smell the acrid odor, to feel the first burning tingles in her nostrils, to realize what was happening: they were shooting pepper balls under the door.

To drive her and Tyler out.

“Come to Papa, bitch,” one of them yelled gloatingly from just beyond the door.

Sam’s blood ran cold.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“M
om, what is it?” Tyler started rubbing at his eyes.

“Close your eyes! Don’t touch your face!”