Shiver (19 page)

“I already told Trey about Mrs. Menifee. I told him I think they killed her.” Tyler sounded both sad and surprisingly matter-of-fact.

“Trey?” Sam blinked hard at her son, trying to bring him into focus. Discovering that she was almost too spent to move, Sam moved anyway, saying, “Let me go” to Marco and the man still holding her legs, easing into a sitting position carefully, mindful of Marco’s wound. She was blinking away, resisting the urge to rub at her eyes only because she knew that rubbing them would just make them feel worse. There wasn’t any room, so she ended up perched on Marco’s good thigh, leaning back against the solid warmth of his chest with his arm heavy around her waist, squinting in an effort to see properly. His expression was difficult to read. Her head leaned against his shoulder, making the angle odd, and anyway she couldn’t really focus still. From the way his leg shifted beneath her she thought that it wasn’t the most comfortable situation for him. But there really wasn’t anywhere else for her to go. Uncomfortable or not, he didn’t shove her off him and she wasn’t about to move onto
anyone else’s lap of her own accord. Better the devil you knew, and all that.

“I’m Trey,” Marco told her, as Tyler scooted close and Sam wrapped a protective arm around him. He felt thin and frail—bird bones. In that, he was like her. Clutching Ted, her son snuggled against her side. “It’s a nickname.”

Sam ignored the questions that were dying to be asked in favor of the more crucial matter. “We”—oh, God, she didn’t want any part of this, but she had to get help for Mrs. Menifee; terror for the other woman kept her heart pounding and knotted her stomach—“have to go back. Somebody has to help her. She was hurt. Bleeding. And those men were still in my house. They still had her.”

She hoped her tone conveyed everything else that she didn’t want to say where Tyler could hear: that Mrs. Menifee had been tortured. That if they hadn’t murdered her by the time she and Tyler had escaped, she felt that they almost certainly would have done so once they saw that their primary prey was gone. But there was always a chance that Mrs. Menifee was still alive, still suffering, still being tortured for information, and while there was that chance they had to go back and do what they could to save her.

“No can do.” Sounding clearly indifferent to Mrs. Menifee’s fate, the driver made no effort to so much as slow the speeding car down. Bright lights flashing into the car’s interior, along with a glimpse of tall metal light poles and clustered service stations and fast food places, told Sam that they had reached the expressway interchange, and then they were zooming up the
on-ramp onto I-64. Sam thought the driver was looking at her through the rearview mirror, but she couldn’t be sure. “You’re damned lucky we came after you.”

Sam stiffened, and Marco’s arm tightened around her waist. Tyler lifted his head, and for his sake she forced herself to moderate her tone. “You can’t just leave her!”

“Sure we can,” the driver said. “And we’re going to.”

“You’re U.S. Marshals! You have to help her.” Then Sam had a thought. “You
are
U.S. Marshals, right?”

The men around her all nodded. Marco gave her a look as though to say,
oh ye of little faith.

“Yeah, we are. And we have a job to do.” The driver’s tone said the discussion was over. “That job is getting him”—he jerked his head in Marco’s direction—“and now you and your son, out of harm’s way. Which is what we’re doing.”

“But Mrs. Menifee—”

“The local cops are on the scene,” Marco told her quietly. “They were pulling up as we were leaving. They’ll handle it. There’s nothing else we can do.”

“I saw a police car, Mom,” Tyler said. “The police will help Mrs. Menifee. Won’t they?”

The uncertainty of his voice as he said that last made Sam’s throat tighten. He’d been through so much tonight—way too much for anybody, much less a four-year-old, to have to endure. She gave him a reassuring hug. Thank God they hadn’t found Tyler! Just thinking about it made her sick.

“Yes,” she told him. “They will. Of course they will.”

“You can thank us for that. We called 911,” the guy whose
lap Tyler was still partly sitting on told her. He sounded a little defensive. “The local yokels will play mop-up. They’ll find your friend, get her to a hospital.”

“Best we can do,” the driver said.

Outside the window, Sam saw metal struts flashing past. Beyond them curved the starry night sky. Below slid the denser black that was the river. They were on the bridge, one of a number of vehicles streaming into St. Louis. The giant, imposing curve of the Arch that was the symbol of the city glowed silver just ahead. Sam reluctantly understood that there was no going back. What happened to Mrs. Menifee now was beyond her control.

She felt terrible for her kindly neighbor, shaken and sad and guilty, and deeply, deeply sorry that such a horror had befallen her because of Mrs. Menifee’s connection to her. But however reluctantly, she understood, too, that there was nothing more that she could do.

I’m lucky to still have Tyler. We’re lucky to be alive.

“Before you got in the car, Tyler told us some of what happened. He said that the bas—”—Marco broke off, cast a glance in Tyler’s direction, and corrected himself—“
bad
guys in your house hit you both with some kind of chemical spray.”

Sam nodded. The effects of the pepper spray were wearing off—thank God she’d gotten only a small dose, and Tyler, she was almost certain, had gotten even less—but still her eyes teared and her vision was blurry and her eyes and skin stung. She had to keep blinking rapidly just to keep everyone in focus.

“We locked ourselves in Tyler’s bedroom. They shot pepper balls under the door.” Sam swallowed, or rather, tried to swallow, remembering. Her mouth was still Sahara dry, and what little saliva she had tasted bitter. She made a face, shuddering.

“Here.” Marco passed her a half-f bottle of water that he got from the guy holding Tyler, plus a box of Kleenex. “Wipe out your eyes. Wipe your face and any exposed skin.”

“Mom shot them,” Tyler said as Sam accepted the items, then immediately took a swig from the water bottle. The wetness was heaven to her parched mouth, but the taste as the water went down made her think of Brussels sprouts mixed with battery acid. She grimaced and shuddered again. “She had her gun. She said she was going to shoot them some more if they tried to get into my room.”

“You shot them?” Marco asked the question, although all the men looked at her with widening eyes. Sam nodded as she grabbed a handful of tissues from the box, wet them, and started applying them to her eyes. Oh, the relief!

“I shot
at
them. I don’t think I hit any of them. I wish I had, though, believe me. Speaking of, I’d like my gun back.”

A few
yeah, right
looks, a couple of negative headshakes, and one definitive
no
from the driver were her answer. Sam thought about arguing, decided it was a waste of time, and remembered that she was out of bullets anyway. Then a thought occurred, and she quit wiping her eyes long enough to frown up at Marco. “How did you find us? How did you find my house? I never told you where I lived. In fact, I was really careful not to.”

“I said my address.” Tyler sounded proud of himself. She’d spent days teaching him his address and phone number just the month before.

“When the—bad men—first broke into your house, Tyler called your cell phone looking for you. I have your phone, remember? He told me everything that was happening as it happened,” Marco answered the look she gave him. “And he gave us your address.”

“I told you I talked to Trey, Mom. I told you he was coming,” Tyler said.

“I remember.” She managed a smile for Tyler, along with another quick hug. “You did good, baby. I’m proud of you. You saved us.”

“Are the bad men gone forever?” Tyler asked. His voice was suddenly very small.

“I hope so,” the driver said grimly. But something about his tone told Sam that he wasn’t convinced. Then she realized: the looks she’d thought he’d been giving her through the rearview mirror? They hadn’t been directed at her at all. They’d been aimed behind her, as if he were watching for a following car. In fact, the marshals on either side of Marco had been casting quick glances behind them all along. The guy in the front passenger seat had been keeping a lookout through his side-view mirror.

“Yes, they are,” she told Tyler in a firm tone that dared any of the men to contradict her. But even as she said it, her eyes met Marco’s, and what she saw in them made a chill run down her spine.

They said as clearly as words could have done that the men who were hunting Marco weren’t going to stop until he and, Sam very much feared, now her and Tyler, too, were dead.

She hated to pose the question in front of Tyler, because she hated to plant so much as another sliver of worry in his mind. But she had to know.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“T
hey stay with me,” Danny told Sanders fiercely, referring to Sam and Tyler. He looked at Sam, who was seated in one of a line of folding chairs placed against the cinder-block wall of a small, dimly lit office off the National Guard hangar at Scott Airfield. Drooping and pale, she looked indescribably weary, along with a number of way less relevant things, like far too young to be anybody’s mom and absurdly pretty, given what she had been through and the circumstances. She had an arm around her kid, who was curled up against her side, clutching his teddy bear and sound asleep. “
Sam.
You make sure you two stay with me. Don’t let them railroad you and Tyler into going anyplace without me. Do you hear?”

“I hear.”

The last glimpse he got of her was of her frowning after him as he was rolled away. It was getting on toward 5:00 a.m., and besides being scared to death and traumatized, she had to be dead tired, but she was still hanging in there and he knew that her continued vigilance was for the sake of her boy. A pair of
army medics, having loaded Danny onto a gurney, were hustling him away to emergency surgery in a hastily rigged operating room, where he would be put out briefly while they patched up his leg and other injuries. He didn’t have much choice but to let it happen, but the catalog of things that could go wrong while he was out of commission was so long that he was worried sick. Over the week and a half before tonight’s debacle that he as Marco had been in Sanders’s supposed custody, Danny had learned something of how the other man worked: he was the master of high-handed decisions reached in the spirit of getting the job he was assigned to do done. He was perfectly capable of deciding that Sam and her kid were not his problem, and in fact were a detriment to doing what he had been ordered to do. He was, in short, perfectly capable of shipping them off somewhere while he, Danny, lay unconscious, then shrugging his shoulders about it after the fact.

Bottom line was, nobody official much cared about the fate of Samantha Jones and her son. Their involvement was accidental, and their rescue was, in Sanders’s case at least, grudging. They had nothing other than basic descriptions of their attackers—which they had already provided to the marshals, during the latter part of the car ride to the airfield, confirming that Veith at least had been on the premises—to contribute to the case. With no vested interest in keeping them safe, no one, in any agency, would be going out of his or her way to do so. As long as Sam and Tyler had no knowledge of where “Marco” was being taken next, it wouldn’t even officially matter to anyone in the game if Veith or some other whack team sent by the Zetas
should find them. Which, unless mother and son were provided with first-rate assistance, the Zetas’ guys eventually would do. As far as the government was concerned, Sam and Tyler were unneeded and expendable, which placed them in extreme danger.

Unless they were with him. The protection surrounding him had its flaws, not the least of which was that he had to be at least a little bit traceable to keep the Zetas on his trail rather than that of the real Rick Marco, but it was reasonably solid protection, the earlier debacle notwithstanding. But the thing was, as long as Sam and Tyler were with him,
he
could protect them. Which he had just made it his own personal mission to do. Of course, it would help if he were operating at something near full capacity, but he was hoping that would happen soon. The good news was, he tended to heal fast.