Shiver (8 page)

The answer was so obvious that she didn’t know why she even bothered to lie. “No.”

“Maybe I better explain that those guys you shot back there are just a small part of the crew who’ll be looking for us as soon as they realize that I—we—escaped. They’re ruthless, vicious killers, and they’re going to keep coming after us, you understand?”

Just the idea that a gang of ruthless, vicious killers might be coming after her made Sam nauseous.

“Us?” Sam shook her head. “Oh, no. Uh-uh. There’s no ‘us’ in this. There’s you. They’re coming after you. Not me.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, baby doll, but they’re coming after you, too.” His voice was grim.

Sam felt cold sweat popping out around her hairline. “Not if you let me go.”

“It’s too late for that. Even if I didn’t need you to drive, you’d only wind up getting yourself killed.”

A single traffic light suspended on a drooping wire marked the Y-shaped intersection. It was red although they were the only vehicle within sight on either road. Even though they were still a couple of blocks away, Sam started applying the brakes, and they in turn started to groan in protest. She paid no attention as she considered her next best step. Story ran east. East
was the direction she meant to take. East led to people, possible escape opportunities, the heart of East St. Louis, and eventually, home and Tyler. North-south, following the path of the river, was the other choice. South led to a whole lot of nothing, while north eventually provided access to the Poplar Street Bridge, which carried three interstates across the Mississippi into St. Louis itself and beyond.

As the intersection grew closer, she applied more force and the brakes groaned louder. Sam took a deep breath and looked at him. “I’ve got a kid, okay? A four-year-old boy. Whatever you’re into, I can’t be a part of it. I’m a single mother, and I’m all he has.”

He looked at her for a moment without saying anything. His eyes narrowed. His lips tightened. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Sam was just starting to think that maybe her words had made a difference when he added, “I hate to break this to you, but that doesn’t change a thing. You think the people who are chasing us are going to cut you any slack because you’ve got a kid? Nice dream world you’re living in.”

“If you let me go—” Desperation laced her words.

“We’ll talk about it,” he interrupted. “Later. Once you get me to where I want to go.” He paused, glanced away, looked back at her. “So, where’s your kid?”

CHAPTER FIVE

T
he question jolted Sam. No way was she telling him
that.

“What’s it to you?” The look she shot him crackled with suspicion.

“They can’t find you, they might very well go after him. It’s the way these bastards work.”

Sam’s chest tightened with horror, rendering any answer impossible for the moment. Her stomach plunged straight to her toes. As they reached the intersection, she smashed the protesting brakes into the floor, grinding them down until the truck came to a full stop.

“They’d go after a little kid?” She found she could talk again, barely, as the truck, swinging wide, got under way once more. The idea that Tyler might be in danger flooded her system with icy waves of panic. It was an effort to try to think clearly, but she did her best. And what she came up with was, rush home, grab Tyler, and run.

Only she had to ditch Quasimodo first.

“They take him, they get leverage. They kill him, it instills fear.”

“Kill him?” Heart thudding, Sam had to consciously order herself to take a breath. “He’s
four.
What kind of monsters are they?”

“You said it: monsters.” He hadn’t objected to her left turn, but now he pointed right. “Pull into that alley.” He indicated a shadowy path that snaked between a broken-down service station and a closed Italian restaurant to disappear into the darkness beyond. “We’ll cut the BMW loose there.” He threw her a sharp look. “And if you’re thinking of cutting and running, just keep in mind that if you do, when they find the BMW—and they will—they’ll find this wrecker still attached to it. They’ll use it to track you down.”

Sam felt her stomach tighten. Finding her wouldn’t be hard: the license plate was registered to her. To say nothing of the fact that the name of the business—Sam’s Towing Service—along with her cell phone number was painted in big, glow-in-the-dark white letters along both sides of the truck.

What could she say? It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, just thinking about how big those letters were and how easy they were to read in the dark made her want to give her clueless previous self a swift kick in the butt.

“Yeah, that’s right, your name’s on it.” It was like he could read her mind. “And a phone number that I bet is yours is on there, too. Great big. Hard to miss.”

“Both those men back there are dead,” she said in a constricted voice as she followed his directions and pulled into the
alley. “They were the only ones who saw me. There may be an army of killers after
you,
but they’re not after me. Once I get the BMW unhooked, they won’t even know I exist.”

“That’s one of the reasons I finished them off. I was trying to make sure you’d be safe.”

Her expression must have been doubtful, because he continued, “It’s the truth. And look at the thanks I got: you tried to run off and leave me. No, you tried to run over me. Not nice.”

Sam shot him a look. “Sorry if I didn’t quite get that you were trying to help me out back there by killing two men.”

“You shot them first, baby doll.”

“I had no choice! You were right, they were going to kill me! And you.” She shot him a furious look. “I saved your ass. And look at the thanks I got: you’re kidnapping me!”

The slight quirk at the corner of his lips almost could have been the beginnings of a smile. It vanished as quickly as it appeared.

“What can I say? Shit happens.”

“Shit happens?”
Her voice quivered with indignation. “We’re talking about my life here. And my son’s life. Those two men are dead. They can’t identify me. You’ve got to let me go.”

“Can’t.” He shook his head. “Now that I’ve had time to consider it, I don’t think those two jerk-offs being dead is going to be enough to get you off the hook. I grant you that they’re looking for me, but what do you think the odds are that somebody didn’t see you hooking your truck up to the BMW to tow it away? Then there are always surveillance cameras. Google Earth, even. They’ll be moving heaven and earth to find me,
and the smart money says they’re going to stumble across you in the course of the hunt. I wouldn’t want to bet against it.”

Sam went cold with fear as she remembered the partying going on across the street from where she had picked up the Beemer. As noisy as Big Red was, it was more likely than not that somebody had noticed what she was doing. And Google Earth—there was no escaping Google Earth.

She almost wailed, “I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything.”

“Yeah, well. These guys aren’t the type to take a chance on that. They’re big believers in scorched earth. Pull in here. This should work.”

They were behind the service station now, approaching an empty lot that already held the chassis of an eighties-era Impala riding on cement blocks where its wheels had once been. He indicated the lot with a gesture. It was dark, shadowy, strewn with trash. A gravel parking area just off the alley at the front of the lot was overgrown with weeds. Scrub bushes grew tall against a broken-down privacy fence at the rear. A single-story building that Sam took to be a garage shielded the near side of the lot from view, while what appeared to be a metal storage shed squatted on the other side. The backs of various three- and four-story brick buildings crowded together across the alley. All the structures were dark and seemingly deserted, forming a wall of dense black rectangles that looked like uneven teeth getting ready to take a chomp out of the star-sprinkled charcoal of the sky.

“Turn off the lights,” he directed, and she did. The night
swallowed them. Sam immediately felt safer: at least no one chasing them down Story would be able to look over and see where they were.

Of course, the bad guys didn’t need to see them to find them, she reminded herself grimly. They had the Beemer’s GPS.

Wincing a little as Big Red rumbled noisily into the lot, she steered it around in a circle so it was facing forward again, haunted by the fear that they might need to make a quick exit. Knowing that at that exact moment a gang of killers might very well be tracking the Beemer’s every movement alarmed her to the point where the only thing she wanted to do was get away from it. Braking, praying the resultant sounds weren’t as loud as they seemed to her, she couldn’t slam the gearshift into park and get out of the door fast enough.

“Hang on.” Quasimodo grabbed her wrist again even as she wrestled with the damned uncooperative door latch.

“What?” Yanking against his hold in a futile attempt to free her wrist, she glared at him. If he were weakening, his grip showed no sign of it. His fingers were warm and strong. Except for a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead and maybe an increased degree of tightness around his mouth, he looked no different than when she had first set eyes on him. “Let go of me. Let’s get this done.”

“Just one thing first.” Without releasing her, he reached over the back of the seat into the rear compartment.

“What?” Jiggling with nervous impatience, Sam watched as he grabbed the jumper cables she always kept on a pair of hooks above the shelflike rear seat and hauled them into the front. His
damaged finger stayed stiffly erect while the rest of his hand curved around the cord. It was now the approximate girth of a hot dog in marked contrast to the rest of his long, tapering fingers, and just looking at it told her it had to hurt.
Not my problem.
“What do you want with those? According to you, we’re running out of time.”

“We are.”

“So?” She yanked at her wrist again, still without results.

“I’m not taking any chances.” He thrust the jumper cables at her. They were twenty feet long, maybe an inch in circumference, black, with the flexibility of a bungee cord and a pair of colorful clamps dangling from both ends. “Tie the cord around your waist.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

She understood then: he was afraid she was going to run away. Well, she was, first chance she got, but that didn’t stop her from feeling a rush of indignation.

“Now,” he ordered.

Her lips compressed. Arguing was a waste of time, she concluded. Taking the cable, wrapping one end around her waist, Sam cast him a fulminating look. “You can trust me to dump the BMW, you know.”

“Funny thing is, I actually believe that. But can I trust you after, is the question.”

When Sam didn’t reply—if he knew she was lying, what was the point?—he made a gesture with her gun at the cord she had looped around her waist.

“Tie it. In a knot.”

She did.

“Once more.” He indicated the knot. Sulkily, Sam made another loop. The knot wasn’t anything she couldn’t untie, but it would take a moment, and that would give him time to stop her. She knew it, and he knew it, which was why the look she gave him when she was done was venomous.

“Satisfied?”

“For now. Out my side.” Hanging onto the other end of the cable, he opened the passenger-side door—not without having to put some force into it, because it tended to stick, too—and slid to the ground. Since the truck had been modified to carry out its mission of carting off repossessed vehicles as unobtrusively as possible, the cab’s interior light had long since been disabled. Except for random night sounds, the empty lot stayed as dark and silent as a graveyard. Following him out, she was encouraged to see that he was bent almost double and leaning heavily against the side of the truck. She could hear the harsh rasp of his breathing. He was growing weaker, she thought hopefully. Maybe the prospect of him passing out wasn’t quite as much a case of wishful thinking as she had supposed.

“Cut the car loose,” he ordered as he saw her looking at him.

She didn’t need him to tell her. In this one matter they were in perfect accord. The idea that the bad guys might be homing in on the Beemer’s GPS and even at this moment might be closing in on them made her blood run cold.