Shiver (42 page)

Marco.
Sam’s heart lodged in her throat. Was he inside the fuselage still? Stumbling toward the wreckage, surprised to find her body working and seemingly unhurt, and then in the next breath realizing, too, that the tie that had bound her hands was gone, she called his name. “Marco!”

“Sam!” His voice came from behind her. Turning, she saw that he was walking toward her from the woods, the edge of which formed a stockade of tall pines that ended only a few yards behind her. Now that she thought about it, she could smell a heavy scent of pine in the air, along with a gasoline-y smell that she guessed must be airplane fuel. Marco was moving pretty well, fast actually, using—she had to squint to make it out—a sturdy piece of branch as a cane. She registered then that somehow he’d managed to get his hands free, too.

The sight of him made her feel warm all over, even though, as she was just starting to realize, where they were the night was cold. A few fat flakes of snow were falling, floating down around them like swan’s down.

“Are you hurt?” His eyes were busy checking her out even before he reached her.

“No, I don’t think so.” Feeling like they were where she belonged, she walked right into his arms. “What about you?”

“I’m good.” He wrapped her up in a warm embrace, and she said, “I’m so glad to see you,” because it was true, and hugged him back and lifted her head. He kissed her, a quick hard kiss that did a lot to erase the fog that still gripped her.

“Come on,” he said, and let her go. “I want to see if I can find a gun and then we need to get the hell out of here.”

That’s when the fear returned: she and Marco weren’t the only ones on this bleakly beautiful mountainside. Somewhere—somewhere nearby—Veith and his thugs were probably regrouping, too.

Her heart started to pound. Casting scared glances around, she hurried toward the wreckage at Marco’s side.

Even before they got there, he stopped to scoop something up out of the snow with a sound of satisfaction. It was a pistol, and as he straightened and snapped the slide into place and checked the magazine he said to her, “That’s better. We’re in some business now.”

Sam was all for turning tail and leaving then, but he spotted another gun in the snow even nearer the wreckage and went to retrieve that one, too, which he checked and then passed to her with the admonition, “Just don’t shoot me,” which she found vaguely insulting and so she frowned at him.

He wasn’t looking at her. Gun at the ready, surprisingly agile with only his makeshift cane for support, he was already moving toward the torn fuselage. A moment later he had his head and shoulders in the largest gap, looking around inside.

Keeping a careful eye out all around—the night was beautiful and still, no sign of any of the others—she joined him.

“You don’t want to come in here,” he pulled back to tell her. From that she deduced that he was going inside, which he did. Taking him at his word, she stayed outside by the gash, keeping nervous watch.

The thought that Veith might very well be out there somewhere scared her to her back teeth.

When Marco reappeared, she saw that he had a whole arsenal of pistols and some ammunition, too, which he was busy stowing around his waistband and in his pockets. That made her feel a little better. Against all odds, she found that she was still trusting him to get her out of this alive. And forget the whole
if he could
thing.

“Anybody still in there?” she asked as he stepped through the gap. He had his crutch back, she saw as he handed something to her—a blanket, one of the small, thin airplane variety.

“Pilot and the guy in the copilot’s seat. They’re both dead.” He said it matter-of-factly, no grief there. Well, she wasn’t feeling any, either. “Veith and the other guy are missing. At a guess, I’d say they fell out like we did.”

That was all she needed to hear. She shivered. “Let’s get out of here.”

He nodded, and she started walking away, down the slope because that seemed the logical thing to do, keeping a firm grip on the pistol and wrapping the blanket around her shoulders as she moved because the night, while not freezing, was way too cold for just bare arms. Realizing as she got it settled that
there was only one, and that he was wearing an identical T-shirt that left his arms bare, too, she indicated the blanket and asked, “What about you?”

“Worried about me, baby doll?” He smiled at her, the first smile she’d had out of him since she’d left his bed what seemed like a lifetime ago, and she realized that one thing hadn’t changed: it still did funny things to her insides. “Don’t be. I don’t feel the cold.”

“Think somebody will be sending a rescue team? Does anybody even know that the plane went down?”

“The plane should have a transponder,” he said. “Which means somebody should be coming after us sooner or later. In the meantime, we probably want to see if we can’t walk down to a lower elevation, where we’ll have a better chance of running into people. Climbers, hikers, campers, somebody should be on this mountain. Especially once it’s daylight.”

Sam was just thinking that something seemed different about him, an air or an attitude that she hadn’t quite picked up on before, when she heard the moan. It was a low, drawn-out sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It seemed to be coming from behind a large outcropping of snow-dusted rock just down the slope on their left. A glance at Marco told her that he heard it, too.

By consensus they moved toward the sound.

“Stay behind me,” he whispered as they reached the outcropping, which was taller than he was and twice as long. Sam had no problem with that, hanging back as, gun at the ready, Marco stepped around the rock.

Sam couldn’t see what he saw, but she could see his reaction to it. She watched his broad back as at first he froze, pointing his pistol purposefully at whatever was on the ground. Then a weak voice said, “Help me,” and Sam recognized it as belonging to Veith even as she followed Marco the rest of the way around the rock.

Veith lay on his back in the snow, visible from about midchest up, trapped in a good-size chunk of wreckage that was jagged and torn and heavy enough to keep him pinned to the ground. Sharp-looking tendrils of metal wrapped around his upper torso like barbed wire. Around him, the snow was dark. Sam realized that it was from his blood.

“Watch my back,” Marco said in a low voice to Sam, then moved to crouch near Veith’s head. To Veith he said, almost conversationally, “Looks like you’re in a bad way.”

“Get me out of this,” Veith replied. His voice was weak. He looked first at Marco, then at Sam. Standing close behind Marco, listening for any stray footfalls, she watched for signs of danger. Unwillingly, she registered how white Veith’s face was and how shrunken and dark his eyes looked. Despite everything, she felt a twinge of pity for him. Not for him, precisely, but for a living creature who was obviously hurting.

Sam didn’t hear Marco’s reply, but something, either his expression or a gesture that Sam missed, must have told Veith he wasn’t feeling a Good Samaritan vibe.

“I can help you out.” Veith sounded desperate. “You need somebody like me on your side.”

“I’ll think about it. And while I’m thinking about it, suppose you tell me what happened tonight at the town house.”

Veith grimaced. “What’s to tell? We showed up, damned place blew up.”

“You didn’t blow it up?”

“Why would I do that? Calderon wants his fucking money back. Kill you before I know where the money is, and my ass is in a sling.” Veith moved uncomfortably. “You think you could move some of this crap off me now?”

Marco gave a negative shake of his head. “Keep talking. If you were there, why didn’t you get blown up with the house?”

“Something seemed screwy about that whole deal, so I sent a guy in to case the place while the rest of us cruised around in the van. He was supposed to text us, let us know if you were in there, before we tried hitting it. He sent a text saying he was in, and the next thing we know the whole place goes sky-high.” He took a labored breath. “You didn’t do that, then you got more troubles than me.”

“Maybe.” Marco seemed to be thinking. “What do you mean, something seemed screwy?”

“We got tipped off that’s where you were. One of our usual informants. But it was too easy. It just didn’t feel right.” He wet his lips. “You stay in the business long enough, you develop a nose for things like that.”

“The guy you sent in? He say anything about offing the marshal standing guard?”

Veith shook his head. “No time. He didn’t have no time to off nobody. What happened was, he walked in, the place blew. At a guess, I’d say it was rigged to explode a couple of minutes after someone opened a door. It’d take a real pro to do that, but it wasn’t me.”

“Yeah.” The affirmative was terse. Marco stood up and looked down at Veith almost meditatively.

“Hey.” Veith sounded alarmed. “You’re not leaving, right? You get this stuff off me, and I’ll tell you something else.”

“You tell me something else, and I’ll see about getting this stuff off you.”

“All right. All right.” Veith made a gesture toward a piece of wreckage. “You see that piece there? That’s part of the tail. I’m an old military man, served my fair share in war, and I know the signs. I’ve been lying here just looking at that. See those scorch marks? See that jagged edge? We didn’t just hit something up there. We got shot down.”

“Don’t get within his reach,” Marco turned to say softly to Sam, then went over to the piece of wreckage Veith had indicated and examined it.

Sam was left looking at Veith. His eyes gleamed up at her through the dark.

“I’m sorry I threatened you,” Veith said humbly. “Nothing personal, you understand. I was just doing my job.”

Sam thought of Mrs. Menifee, thought of Marco as she had first seen him, thought of the unknown number of others whom Veith had undoubtedly killed, and didn’t even bother to reply. A
moment later, Marco had rejoined them and also stood looking down at Veith.

“See? Was I right?” Veith asked.

“Looks like it.” At Marco’s terse confirmation, Sam looked at him with a frown. They were
shot down
? By whom? But Veith had started talking again, so she saved her questions for later.

“See, you got more enemies than me. Maybe I can help you out with that. Maybe that even puts us on the same side in this. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that, right? Right?”

Marco was looking down at Veith thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. “Nah. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy,” he said, then glanced at Sam. “Head on down the slope, would you? I’ll catch up in a minute.”

For a moment Sam just looked at him. Then she turned and did as he said.

A few minutes later she heard it: a single sharp
bang.
She knew what it was: kill shot. Bad as it might be of her, she couldn’t even feel a smidgen of sorrow. As long as Veith was alive and on this planet, she never would have felt safe for herself or for Tyler for the rest of her life.

Or for Marco, either.

She stopped, waiting for him, and when he rejoined her she asked: “What about the other guy?” in reference to the last remaining unaccounted-for thug. It was a tacit acknowledgment that she knew what he’d done.

“Without Veith, he won’t bother us. If he’s alive, he’ll slink away with his tail between his legs.”

After that, they walked down the snowy slope in silence for a while. Neither of them mentioned Veith. Finally the silence got old, so she glanced at him and said, “Marco?”

Instead of the reply she had been expecting, he looked at her, sighed, and said, “About that . . .”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“A
bout that?” Sam repeated, frowning at him questioningly.

Marco caught her arm, stopped walking, and turned to face her. They were a good distance from the plane now, with a wall of woods to one side and the mountain stretching up to its towering peak behind them. It was cold, but not bitter, and at this elevation the darkness was alleviated by the moon and twinkling stars. The snow underfoot was just deep enough to cover the ground. A light flurry of flakes floated in the air.

Marco’s expression was rueful as he looked down at her. He was tall and broad shouldered enough to block her view of the woods behind him, dark and tough and handsome, a man to depend on even if, she realized with a little catch in her heart, tonight was probably all they were ever going to have.