Shiver (23 page)

“Oh, yay.” The marked lack of enthusiasm with which she said it made him smile. It was, Sam realized, the first time she had seen him really smile, and it was a revelation.
Cute guy.
The words popped into her head of their own volition, and she immediately realized that was how she would have described him to Kendra. It didn’t please her. At the look she gave him the smile broadened into a grin that was slightly lopsided, possibly due to his cut lip. It revealed strong white teeth and crinkles around the corners of his eyes, which, she was just now observing, were a deep, coffee brown. It was a teasing grin, and it made him look younger than she had thought. It was also sexy as hell.

That thought made her scowl again.
Sexy
was the last word she wanted rattling around inside her head when it came to Marco. Almost as annoyed at herself now as she was at him, she started to turn away. She was so tired she was drooping with it,
and the only cure for that was sleep. Sleep, too, would probably cure her headache. And what was that saying about everything looking better in the morning? She could only hope. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she saw that she was as pale as chalk, with shadows beneath her eyes. Even her mouth looked pale. She had washed and towel dried her hair—if there was a blow-dryer around she hadn’t found it—and tucked it behind her ears before going in to put Tyler to bed. Nearly dry now, it hung to the middle of her back in an unruly tangle of midnight black curls.

She was something else that would hopefully look better in the morning. Or at least when she located a blow-dryer and had time to tame her hair.

“Good night,” she added over her shoulder.

Marco stopped her exit by coming out with a hasty, “Uh, by the way, since you were listening so well, did you happen to hear anything about how long until I’m good to go again? Because if anybody said anything about that, I totally missed it.”

Turning back around, Sam shot him a scathing look. “You totally missed a lot, didn’t you? Probably because you’ve been high as a kite all day.”

“I am not high. I’m on pain meds. And that would be because I’m in pain. At least, when I’m not on the meds.” That grin flashed at her again. When she narrowed her eyes at him, he added hastily, “So did you hear anything about how long it’s supposed to take for me to be able to walk without crutches again, or not?”

“Nope.” He was reaching for his crutches, and against her
better judgment she helped him out by handing over the one that was farthest from him. “Although he did say that you were supposed to change your bandages and put ointment on the wound every day for a week.”

“Ah.” Marco looked pleased. “A week, then.”

“But, see, I think you’re also supposed to stay off the leg for a week. As in, use the wheelchair they gave you. The crutches were for after that.”

He shrugged. “I don’t like being pushed around in wheelchairs. And they’re hell climbing stairs.”

Watching him fit the crutches under his arms, impressed by the muscles that she could see flexing in his chest and arms and then feeling annoyed at herself, first for looking and then for being impressed, she frowned at him. “Since we’re talking about how long things are supposed to take, do you have any idea how long it’ll be before Tyler and I can go home again?”

Again with the shrug. Accompanied by a quick, assessing glance at her. That she read as meaning,
You don’t want to know. And I don’t want to be the one to tell you.
Then as her frown darkened he got busy hopping around trying to get his crutches situated. On purpose, she had no doubt.

That lack of a direct reply made her angry. She folded her arms over her chest and fixed him with a simmering look.

“Because we can’t just disappear, you know. Not for long. People will be worried about us.” Sam thought about Kendra, and her other friends, and her great-aunt Marla, former girlfriend of her aforementioned “uncle” Wilfred, whom she didn’t see a whole lot of but whom she did see from time to time and who
would miss her eventually, and Tyler’s father, whom she saw even less often than she saw Marla but who at some point would surely realize that his son was nowhere to be found, and the people at A+ Collateral Recovery, and . . . “People probably are already worried about us.” She thought about Kendra again. “If they know about Mrs. Menifee, they’ll be going out of their minds.”

Marco had both crutches firmly under his armpits now, and was standing on his good leg. “You gave your phone to Sanders, didn’t you?”

Sam nodded.

“Then he’ll have passed it on to the cleanup crew, and the people you call most often, or who call you most often, will have gotten a text from you saying something like you were called away on a family emergency. It was probably sent even before we got on the plane this morning.”

“Nobody who knows us is going to believe that!” Sam thought about her great-aunt, who was ninety-two and lived in a nursing home in Wentzville. Kendra might actually believe the emergency concerned Marla, who had been kind of sickly lately. If Kendra didn’t hear from Sam and Tyler in a few days, though, she would almost certainly call Marla, or rather the nursing home where Marla was living, to be told that no, it didn’t, then start calling around to their various friends, to check out other possibilities. If Kendra then found no trace of them, what would she do? Call the police? Maybe, but calling the police wasn’t something that people in East St. Louis did. File a missing persons report? Maybe again, but . . . Sam frowned as one really good reason why nobody would believe she’d just been called
away on a family emergency hit her. “Nobody’s for sure going to believe it when they find out that poor Mrs. Menifee was
murdered in my house.
”

“Maybe they’ll think that’s the real reason you left. That you were involved in something bad that went wrong. Maybe you found the body and were scared and ran away. Or maybe you committed the crime and fled.”

“Nobody’s going to think I killed Mrs. Menifee.” Sam’s eyes widened as she made some unwelcome mental connections. “Oh, my God, that’s not what the police think, is it?”

“She was killed in your house, and when the police got there you were nowhere to be found.”

Sam must have looked horrified, because his grin flashed at her again. That’s when she knew she was being teased.

“This isn’t funny,” she said crossly.

“The look on your face is, just a little bit. Uh, didn’t you say you fired some shots in your house? I bet the police will be able to trace those bullets back to your gun.”

Sam had an electrifying thought. “What about those two men I shot? Will they be able to connect the bullets they recover from my house to them?” Visions of being charged with murder—maybe three murders if they included Mrs. Menifee—made her stomach knot.

He shook his head. “I doubt the cops will ever know anything about those guys. They’re probably making the acquaintance of the Mississippi River catfish about now.”

“Oh, my God.” Sam didn’t know what her face looked like, but it must have been expressive, because he laughed.

“Anyway, since Sanders took your gun, it’s long gone. No ballistics to compare.”

“That’s a good thing.” If she sounded slightly doubtful, it was because that was how she felt.

“Yeah.” His eyes still danced. Then, in response to something he saw in her face—probably stark fear—his expression turned serious. “The cleanup crew—the agents on the ground—they’re pros. They’ll see to it that there’s some sort of cover story about what happened to Mrs. Menifee that most likely won’t involve you as the murderer, and that includes where you and Tyler went, and they’ll wrap it up in a big bow that will make it easy for the local cops to buy. They’ll pacify whoever needs pacifying, and they’ll make sure nobody goes all Nancy Grace looking for you. Believe me, you won’t even make the papers.”

Sam was aghast. “They can do that?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She looked at him with disbelief. “Who
are
you guys?”

The grin came and went. “Your tax dollars at work, baby doll.”

Remembering that he was no longer entitled to be paid by those tax dollars, Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did, her voice was softer, troubled.

“Mrs. Menifee—I saw her. Tied to one of my kitchen chairs. It looked like—” Sam took a deep breath. “It looked like they tortured her. There was blood everywhere. I’m pretty sure they”—she hesitated because it was hard to even get the words
out—“cut off the tip of one of her fingers.” She fixed him with an accusing gaze. “Because they were looking for you.”

He wasn’t smiling any longer. His eyes held hers. “I’m sorry they did that to her. I’m sorry you had to see it. I’m sorry any of you got involved.”

Sam’s throat felt tight. “She had nothing to do with any of this. She was just baby-sitting Tyler.”

“I know. These guys—they have no respect for human life. They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way.”

“They would have done something horrible to Tyler if they’d found him.” It wasn’t a question; she knew it for an absolute fact. Even thinking about what could have happened made Sam feel cold all over. “They would have killed him. And me. They
will,
if they find us.”

His expression acknowledged the truth of that. “Which is why you and Tyler are staying with me.”

Sam made a scoffing sound. “Like being at ground zero is going to keep us safe?
You’re
the one they’re really looking for.”

“Ground zero or not, you’re safer with me than you would be anywhere else.”

“So you say. I’m not so sure.”

“You got some alternative you want to share with me, I’m all ears.”

He had her there. There was no alternative that she could come up with. Kendra, Marla, a host of people might be willing to take her and Tyler in and even help them hide, but after seeing what had been done to Mrs. Menifee, Sam wouldn’t inflict
such a danger on her worst enemy, much less people she cared about. She thought about just taking Tyler and running and hiding on her own, but immediately dismissed it. First, not being a professional fugitive, she didn’t have a great deal of confidence in her ability to disappear without a trace, and second, she had no money to run away on. Being broke, as she had discovered a long time ago, tended to severely limit your options.

The sense of being trapped was suffocating.

He was watching her. “You got nothing, am I right?”

Reluctantly Sam shook her head. Still, there was no way she and Tyler could just drop off the radar so easily. He had preschool, and play dates, and she—she had classes. And work. And bills. As the inescapable realities of life started crawling out of the hole where terror had buried them, her eyes widened.

“I have a class on Monday. I guess I can miss it, but . . . I can’t miss more than three or I don’t pass the course. Plus my electricity bill is due on Monday. I mean, really due. I got a shut-off notice. If I don’t pay by then, they’ll turn the electricity off. And I have to pay Tyler’s preschool Monday, too, or he’ll lose his place. And . . .” As Sam thought about all the things she had coming up, she felt her chest tighten. If she didn’t go to class, she would flunk. If she didn’t go to work, they didn’t have any money. And if she wasn’t home, she couldn’t work. “I have a check waiting for me at A+ right now. I need to pick it up. Oh, my God, I’ll lose my contract with them. If I’m not there to repossess the cars they need to have repossessed, they’ll just give the work to someone else.” Probably Bobby Thompson at Thompson’s Towing, or Al Fisher at Downtown Towing, or—there
were so many. At the idea that she could lose her livelihood, Sam felt growing panic. She had worked too hard to find a way to scratch out a living for herself and Tyler just to let it go like this. “I left the wrecker on the street across from the duplex. You can only park there on weekends. If I’m not there to move it by early Monday morning, they’ll tow it. Then I’ll have to pay who knows how much to get it out. I can’t afford it. I have to go home.”

He was looking at her steadily. “You know you can’t, right?”

“I have to. We’ll lose everything.” Sam’s stomach was in the process of turning inside out.

He frowned. “Make a list of what has to be paid. I’m sure some kind of arrangements can be made.”

“Some kind of arrangements can be made? What about my class? And who’s going to go out every night and haul cars in for me? Who’s going to keep my business going?” Sam’s fists clenched, and she turned away abruptly. “And then there’s Mrs. Menifee. She was never anything but kind to Tyler and me, and she’s
dead.
She’s dead, and Tyler and I almost died, and now our lives are going to be ruined. And it’s all because of
you.
”

“Sam.” He was following her into the hall when the edge of his crutch caught on the threshold, where tile met thick beige carpet. “Look out!”

Sam turned in time to see him stagger. Just as quick as that he lost his balance and started to fall. Instinctively she surged toward him, tried to grab him, to steady him, only to have him crash into her and send her reeling into the wall.

God, the guy was big.

“Umph.”
The sound was forced out of her as he smacked into her. With the wall hard against her back, she felt like a bug being squashed.