The trunk rose at a measured, majestic pace that reflected the luxury brand of the car rather than the urgency of the situation. In the space of about a heartbeat, as fresh air wafted in and a swath of starry night sky was revealed, Danny registered that they were outside rather than in a building, that the balmy summer’s night now smelled of garbage and the river, that Torres and Thug Two were approximately where he had pictured them, and, as the moonlight turned its snub-nosed black barrel to silver, that at least one gun was pointed right at his face.
Game on.
Gathering himself, he prepared to spring. The distinctive sound of a weapon being cocked behind him—behind him!—caused his eyes to widen. It was the only warning he got.
CHAPTER THREE
As the Beemer’s trunk lid rose, Sam’s heart jackhammered—until it didn’t. Her pulse accelerated to the point where it was all she could hear—until suddenly it slowed way down.
By the time she inhaled her first lungful of fresh air, beheld the first sliver of starry sky, heard the sudden, unmuffled onslaught of night sounds, every bit of fear she was experiencing had vanished, swept away in a flood of icy resolve.
She wasn’t dying tonight. No way, no how.
If she died, Tyler had no one.
That was all the motivation Sam needed. Whatever it took, she was going to survive for her boy. When the lid rose high enough to reveal two men silhouetted against the night sky, she had her own gun out and ready, down close to her chest, pointing out. One of the men was aiming a gun into the trunk: with moonlight glinting on its barrel, she saw it as plainly as if it were high noon outside. Lying awkwardly on her side, she angled her weapon more accurately, aiming up through the small space she had managed to create between her body and the muscular back of the man wedged into the trunk with her. The Smith & Wesson was heavy and warm from her body heat. Her palms were sweaty, which made its metal grip slippery, which made her tighten her hold on it. During the heartbeat it took her to reconfirm the deadly reality of the mess she was in—oh, yeah, it was bad—her stomach cramped. She ignored it, just like she was ignoring the painful throbbing in her head where one of these bozos had clobbered her, just like she was ignoring the fear that would have swamped her if she’d let it. If this was a fight for her life—and Tyler’s—then hell, yeah, she was going to fight. Gritting her teeth, she targeted just above the gleaming black barrel of the bastard’s gun. It was taking careful aim—at her, not her companion. Like he’d said, they were clearly going to kill her first. Tamping down hard on a rising wave of terror that turned her blood to ice and made her pulse race and her heart pound, she fired with grim determination, pulling the trigger multiple times, shooting at both dark shadows, blasting away for her life—and Tyler’s—in big explosions of sound.
“Holy shit!” the man in the trunk with her yelped, his arms flying up to shield his head, as her targets screamed, reeled away, then dropped from sight with heavy, crunching thuds. Clambering up onto her knees, looking wildly around for any possible new threat, Sam ignored her companion as he rolled onto his back to stare up at her. He said something else to her that didn’t register. Everything—the bang of the gunshots, the sulfuric smell of the recently fired gun, the screams and sounds of bodies dropping, and the terrible reality of the deadly violence that had suddenly forced its way into her life—had such a nightmarish quality to it that she was having a hard time processing that this is real.
Don’t think. Just get out of here.
Ears ringing from the noise of the gunshots, mind surprisingly detached in the midst of her body’s knee-jerk panic, she sprang out of that trunk like a gazelle—or a mother whose kid was in danger, which was what she was.
The men she’d shot were down, dark shapes sprawled on the silvery gravel near the back of the car, she saw as her feet hit the ground. One of them writhed and moaned. The other lay still. For a second, as the gun hung heavy in her hand, she stared at them. The one looked dead; the other clearly wasn’t, but neither seemed capable of posing any kind of a threat. Heart pounding, breathing way too fast, she forced herself to look away from them and take stock of her surroundings. She was outside, close enough to the river so that she could catch a glimpse of its rolling waters, standing in the middle of a shadow-filled open space. The moon and stars gleaming down from the black sky high above, the distant glow from the city of St. Louis across the river, and her truck’s white beams pointing like twin light sabers away from her made it plenty bright enough to see what was going down, even if darkness obscured a lot of the details. As she had suspected, they were in the scrap yard, a football-field-size cemetery for junk cars and trucks and discarded metal of all types, in which she personally had scrounged numerous times looking for parts for various vehicles, including the truck. Piles of would-be scrap were stacked up everywhere like mini-mountains, some reaching as much as twenty feet high. Two long, low warehouses formed a wall between the piles of scrap and the street. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence designed (unsuccessfully) to keep scroungers out surrounded the entire property. Making an instantaneous visual sweep of the area, Sam concluded that there was no one else around.
Except, of course, for the man who had clambered out of the trunk in her wake. Catching his laborious movement toward her out of the corner of her eye, she turned in his direction, of two minds about whether or not she ought to just go ahead and shoot him, too, and be done with it. Her lips compressed. It was obvious that he was badly injured. His right leg dragged. His shoulders hunched. His face looked like somebody had used it for a punching bag.
As she hesitated—cold-blooded murder wasn’t really her thing, although she guessed she could change if she had to—a dozen conflicting thoughts whirled through her mind. He hadn’t thrown her into the trunk; he had been imprisoned with her. He had tried to reassure her. He had held her hand, kissed it even. The feel of his lips against her skin had provoked a wayward tingle. On the other hand, he had been in the trunk in the first place. Her gut might tell her that he was a good guy, but good guys usually didn’t end up in trunks. Anyway, when it came to men, her gut wasn’t worth shit. She was still wavering between pulling the trigger and not when he reached her side.
“Give me that.” The pistol was snatched from her hand before she realized what he meant to do. So, choice made: she should have shot him. Only too damned late to do anything about it.
“Hey. That’s mine.” She grabbed at her gun to no avail.
The man who’d been in the trunk with her—her ally? Yeah, no, to hell with that, that kind of thinking was dangerous—gave her a reproving look before limping away toward the men she’d shot.
“Jesus, you could’ve told me you had a gun,” he flung over his shoulder at her.
“I could’ve.” Except he would have taken it from her, and she had needed it to protect herself: trusting him to that extent had never even been something she had considered. For an instant she watched him: for all the Hunchback of Notre Dame lurch he had going on, she could see that he was indeed tall and athletically built. Handsome? Hard to tell, but she was going with probably yes. Along with his bloody jeans, he was wearing a gray T-shirt that showed off the kind of muscles that would have made Kendra, for one, drool, and well-worn sneakers. End dangling from the belt he had pulled tight around his right thigh. Clearly injured in ways other than the gunshot he’d told her about. Weakened as he plainly was, he was still big and muscular enough to lead her to conclude that trying to physically fight him for her gun would be a gamble. Even with him injured and limping, trying to wrest the gun away from him was likely to end poorly for her. Whatever he’d done to get himself beaten up, shot, and thrown into a car trunk to die, it couldn’t have been anything good. Odds were that he was as much a bad guy as the thugs who had hit her over the head and thrown her into the trunk with him. She could very well wind up getting shot, or being taken captive again, or something equally horrific, by him, and anyway the fight itself would take up valuable time. Let him keep the
gun, she decided: all she really wanted was to get away in one piece. Survival was her goal, and to hell with everything else. Taking advantage of his concentration on the men on the ground, mindful that an unwary crunch from the gravel underfoot could swing his attention back in her direction at any second, she snuck toward the cab of her truck. The engine was idling, which meant that all she had to do was hop in and take off. Generally, the scrap yard was kept locked. When she’d come hunting for parts, unless someone else was paying, she had scaled the fence. But to get the truck out—with a quick look around, she located the gate. It was open. Yay.
Bang. A shot exploded behind her, making her jump, galvanizing her into breaking into a run. Whoa, who had fired that? Was it aimed at her? Sam didn’t know, but she wasn’t waiting around to find out. A snapped glance over her shoulder found her trunk companion standing over the man who’d been writhing and moaning a moment before. The guy now lay silent and motionless in the gravel, while her new pal held her gun in such a way that she had little doubt it was he who had just fired. Could anybody say, kill shot? An icy shiver raced down her spine. She might not be into cold-blooded murder, but this guy clearly had no such qualms. Was he killing all witnesses? God in heaven, was she next? Go, her every instinct screamed, and Sam went like the wind. When she reached the truck’s door, she was stymied briefly because the damned thing, as it had a tendency to do, was stuck. Finally succeeding in wrenching it open, she jumped into the high cab, yanked the door shut, and locked it. Bang! Another shot rang out. Impossible to see what was happening; the truck was facing in the opposite direction. She was betting on another kill shot. Was her buddy coming for her now? Sam’s mouth went dry and her heart slammed in her chest as she grabbed the stubborn old gearshift and wrenched it into drive, then put the pedal to the metal. The engine roared: no hiding what she was up to now. Its inner workings always balky and slow, Big Red didn’t move.
“Come on!” she screamed at it out loud, banging her palms against the steering wheel. As if in answer, the transmission finally engaged with a jolt. The truck shot forward.
“Go!” she encouraged it.
Unfortunately, the only way out that she knew of required a U-turn.
So jittery with fear by this time that she was practically bouncing up and down in the seat, Sam executed the tight half-doughnut with a grinding of gears and a shower of gravel. The headlights cut a crazy arc through the darkness, the towing assemblage clanked in noisy protest, and the Beemer fishtailed wildly behind as she goosed the accelerator. The truck, finally fully responsive, charged toward freedom. Her cell phone bounced out of the little plastic tray beneath the cassette player and landed in the passenger foot well. For a moment she looked after it with dismay—calling 911 was high on her list of priorities. But stopping and diving after it wasn’t happening: getting out of there was Job One. The open gate—escape!—waited directly in front of her, perhaps half a football field away. To her left, the long, low warehouses on the other side of the piles of scrap blocked her view of the street. Just ahead and to her right, the two men she had shot, both motionless now, curled like black commas in the gravel.
“Hey!” From out of nowhere the man who’d been in the trunk with her jumped directly into the truck’s path. He stood facing her, her gun held down by his side as, bent and grimacing, he waved at her, signaling her to stop.
Like that was going to happen.
“Move!” she yelled at him through the windshield. She doubted that he could hear her. Certainly he didn’t get out of the way. Clutching the steering wheel hard with both hands, she stomped the accelerator with everything she had. She wasn’t stopping, not for anything. He might have given her a tingle when he kissed her hand, but she didn’t care. He had a choice: move or be road kill. The truck surged, engine gunning, wheels spitting out sprays of gravel, as it bore down on him like a bull charging a matador.
“Get out of the way!” she screamed again, making exaggerated shooing motions with one arm. If what they were playing was chicken, she knew who was going to win. She just hoped he wasn’t too stupid to . . .
“Fuck!” At what was almost the last minute, he leaped to the side. The headlights picked up the startled, angry expression on his face.
“Good call,” she yelled at him. A triumphant smile just touched Sam’s mouth as the truck plowed over the place where he had been standing seconds before. The resultant flutter of relief that she wasn’t going to have to run over him to escape did not mean that she really wouldn’t have run him down. It just meant that she was glad she hadn’t had to. She was just starting to put him out of her mind when a thump against the passenger-side door ripped her gaze from the now-clear path to the open gate in front of her and redirected it toward the sound.
“Stop!” It was a roar. A battered face glared at her through the passenger-side window. With one eye swollen almost shut and bruises on the forehead and a cheekbone and a bloody, lumpen-looking nose, it was downright scary. It was also unhappily way too familiar. Scrabbling at the door handle—the door was locked, thank God!—then banging on the rolled-up passenger window with her gun, Quasimodo was hanging onto the too-damned-sturdy struts of the oversize side-view mirror for dear life.
Oh, no.
“Goddamnit, let me in!”
“In your dreams!” Keeping one wary eye on him, she jerked the steering wheel back and forth in a desperate effort to dislodge him. It didn’t work: at the end of every maneuver, he was still there. Sending sprays of gravel everywhere, zigzagging wildly, Big Red kept on barreling toward the street. Only one side of the big double gates was open, which meant the space the truck momentarily would be shooting through was narrow. Narrow enough to knock him off?
Please, God.
“Lean over and open the door!” He banged on the window with her gun again. He banged so hard she was afraid he might break it. Then she remembered that the window had been broken the previous year by an irate debtor whose car was in the process of being towed away, and replaced by heavy safety glass. Which, she had been assured at the time by the guy installing it, was practically unbreakable.
“No! Get off my truck!” She jerked the wheel sharply to the left, then to the right. Yelling curses, swinging precariously back and forth, he nevertheless managed to hang on. Hoping to attract attention—attract help—she hit the horn. The resultant air-horn-quality blast split the night. She winced. So did he.
“Are you brain-dead? Quit blowing the fucking horn!” he roared, swinging toward the door again and grabbing for the handle.
“Get off my truck!”
“Open the damned door!”
“No way in hell! Get off!”
The only way she was knocking him off for sure was if she took out the side mirror, too, was Sam’s lightning conclusion as she glanced from him to the gate the truck was quickly closing in on. Even then it wasn’t a done deal unless she wanted to risk trying to scrape up the entire side of the truck, which she hesitated to do. Number one, she needed her truck to make a living, and didn’t have the money to fix any damage that might result. Number two, if she miscalculated, she could end up having a wreck, getting the truck hung up on the gate, and thwarting her own escape. Mashing the horn again—“For fuck’s sake, stop doing that!” he screamed through the window at her—she jerked the wheel back and forth in quick succession, fighting to make him lose his grip. It didn’t work. He didn’t even flap around as much. From his sudden relative stability she surmised that he had found a way to wedge his feet more securely onto the running board, where they were obviously perched. His expression, she thought as she cast another poisonous glance at him, had turned purposeful. She frowned. Just as it had been, one arm was hooked around the mirror strut while the other hand—Sam’s heart leaped as she watched it jerk upward, watched him aim the gun inside the cab. Sweet merciful God, was he going to shoot her?
Her blood ran cold.
“No!” she screamed, cringing even as she whipped the wheel hard to the left and t
hen to the right. The tires spun. Gravel flew everywhere. Her cell phone skittered uselessly over the hard plastic mat lining the foot well, tantalizingly close but impossible to reach. Quasimodo teetered backward with the motion of the truck, then swung forward again, then reaimed the gun . . .
When it blasted, blowing out the passenger window and showering the seat and rear windshield and tiny backseat of the truck with BB-size chunks of safety glass, Sam shrieked and ducked and almost drove into one of the mountains of scrap. Only at the last possible minute did she see where the truck was headed and correct course with another sharp jerk of the wheel.
“Jesus!” he yelled, windmilling wildly as the maneuver threw him off balance again. Only his arm hooked around the strut kept him from being flung off. Warm night air gushed in. Without the barrier of glass between them he suddenly seemed way too close, much closer than before. She thought, hoped, prayed he might lose his grip on the strut—or at least the gun. “Stop, you crazy . . . !”
“No fucking way!” Sam screamed back. The words had no sooner left her mouth than Quasimodo launched himself right in through the window he’d blown out. Cursing a blue streak, he torpedoed through the opening.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Get out! Get out of my truck!”
“Like hell,” Quasimodo growled.
Driving one-handed, Sam leaned over and shoved his broad back as hard as she could. When that didn’t work—might as well have shoved at a fallen tree—she pounded at his head and shoulders with her fist in an effort to force him back out of the window.
“Ouch! Shit! Goddamnit, stop that!”
“Get out! Get out of here!”
The tire iron was out of her reach beneath the seat; her phone bounced near the passenger door; he had her knife and gun. Knowing that she had left herself basically defenseless made her nuts. They battled, her to push him out and him to slide the rest of the way inside, as Big Red zoomed through the gate. It careened with squealing tires out onto the street, which besides the scrap yard was home to an abandoned factory and a number of other now closed and mostly derelict commercial buildings. The street was dark as pitch and deserted except for a man, almost certainly drunk, staggering down the shoulder in the direction of the river, where Sam knew the homeless congregated to sleep on the bank on warm summer nights. Caught in the headlights, face a study in horrified astonishment, he leaped for the fence surrounding the factory across the street as the truck hurtled in his direction. At the last moment Sam corrected course with a frantic yank of the wheel. An old car parked on the shoulder barely missed being flattened. Then the truck was back on the street, bouncing on its tires, barreling toward an intersection that would take them someplace more populated. It veered drunkenly as Quasimodo tried to heave himself the rest of the way inside while Sam, driving one-handed, fought to keep him out.
Shiver Page 4
