He met her gaze. Her eyes blazed with intensity, she knew. For a moment, as their gazes met, she thought—maybe. Then he gave a single negative shake of his head.
“Like I said, it’s too late for that.”
“Bullshit.” Casting another scared glance toward the alley, she saw another building instead. It was one of a long row lining the block. Her pulse thundered in her ears. The look she shot him was hunted. “You could absolutely let me go if you wanted to, and we both know it.”
“We’ve been over this before: I can’t drive. Anyway, even if I could let you go, I wouldn’t. You’d just get yourself killed.”
Try as she might, she could see nothing more of what was happening around the Beemer, so she ignored her pounding heart to concentrate on putting as much distance between them and it as she could. The street was largely deserted so late at night, but signs that people were near abounded. Cars were parked all along the curb. A man emerged from one of them and hurried inside a building even as the wrecker trundled past. A couple of lights in upstairs windows made Sam think that they were apartments in which people might be still awake. Knowing that potential help was so close was tantalizing, but she knew, too, that there was no way to take advantage of it. Closing her mind to the impossible, she stepped harder on the accelerator. Seeing what the headlights in the alley were up to was now impossible; escaping while the escaping was good was something she could still do.
“Suppose you let me worry about me,” she said.
“Suppose you keep your eyes on the road.”
Sam swallowed the retort that immediately sprang to her tongue. Antagonizing him wouldn’t be helpful, so the best thing she could do was keep a lid on it for now. Be reasonable, let him think she was going to do exactly what he said, watch for her opportunity and take it. That was the plan.
“So where are we going?” The truck rattled and banged as it picked up speed. As Sam glanced in the rearview mirror again, anxiety formed a cold knot in her chest. Her pulse skittered and jumped. Two vehicles were on the road behind them. Had either of them pulled out of the alley while she was watching the road? There was no way to be sure.
“Somewhere else.” His voice was dry. “Uh, probably be a good idea to turn on the headlights.”
“Oh. Right.” Sam had forgotten they were off. Another way to attract unwanted attention: drive through the increasingly dark streets without lights. That she had forgotten was a good indication of how rattled she was, she thought as she pulled the knob that turned them on. Immediately the bright beams slashed through the night. Instead of feeling safer, Sam felt like she now had a glowing neon target on her bumper.
If they were spotted, the situation was not likely to end well. In any chase, the wrecker was not going to win. And if it came to a shootout—Sam shuddered.
I can’t get killed. I have to get back to Tyler. Stress quickened her breathing.
“Remember, they’re not looking for your wrecker. Yet.”
His words were so spot on that it was almost as if he had read her mind. Casting him a careful look, Sam let out the breath she hadn’t until that moment realized she was holding.
“I don’t want any part of this.”
“So you’ve said. Sorry, I’m fresh out of magic wands that I can wave to make this whole thing go away. Truth is, you’re in it and you’re stuck.”
“I don’t have to be,” she said. “You could get me out of this real quick by letting me go.”
“Give it up, baby doll.” His voice sounded grim. “It’s not happening. So why don’t you just concentrate on driving?”
Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. Various scenarios that might afford her a chance to escape chased themselves through her head.
“Soon we’re going to need to get some gas,” she said.
He leaned over to look at the gauge. It was down to about an eighth of a tank. Her words weren’t a complete ploy: the wrecker drank gas. An eighth of a tank wouldn’t get them far.
“We’re good for now.”
So much for that. Well, she hadn’t really expected it to work. She needed to find a way to call the cops and turn the whole thing over to them. The phone was practically burning a hole in her pocket, her secret ace in the hole. There was no way to use it with him sitting right beside her, though. She would have to wait.
The question was, should she call 911?
Or maybe just Kendra for a ride home?
Oh, God, then Kendra would be involved. Putting her friend in danger was the last thing she wanted to do. After endangering Tyler, that is.
“Look at it this way,” Quasimodo said. “The good news is, you’re still alive.”
Once again she had the unnerving feeling that he knew what she was thinking. Which, of course, was impossible. She cast him a hostile look. “Just so you know, that sucks.”
“What? Being alive?”
“The fact that that’s the good news.”
The sound he made almost could have been an aborted laugh. Certainly his grim expression relaxed for a moment. Casting another anxious glance in the rearview mirror, Sam was in no mood even to smile.
“You wouldn’t have any water in here, would you?” he asked after a minute.
Her response was short. “No.”
But the idea that he possibly wanted water because he was weakening gave her hope.
The next couple of blocks took them past rows of run-down buildings punctuated by towering signs advertising everything from Wild Turkey whiskey to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, which was one of a number of strip bars lining the expressway into St. Louis. Then the populated area thinned out until there was nothing much left except miles of broken concrete and tunnel-like underpasses. The road stretched away into a moonlit darkness filled with rusting railroad trestles and weed-filled empty lots and the occasional derelict building as it wound through what was essentially wasteland toward the distant pinpoint of light created by the giant streetlights that marked the expressway on-ramp. Other vehicles were few and far between, but each time she saw a pair of headlights Sam’s heart jumped. A motorcycle roared up behind and then zoomed around them, making her tense up as lightning visions of a lone assassin firing through the window as he passed filled her head. An ancient minivan, trundling along behind them for a mile or so, practically gave her palpitations. A late-model, dark-colored Lexus popping out of a side street to purr in their wake made her breath catch. The longer it stayed behind them the more nervous she grew. Was it . . . ?
She was just opening her mouth to draw it to Quasimodo’s attention when the Lexus veered off down a side street.
“You have a first-aid kit in this thing?” They were the first words he’d spoken in several minutes, and she was so focused on what the Lexus was doing that they made her jump. Immediately she pulled her eyes from the rearview mirror to look at him.
He’d slid down so that his head rested against the seat back. His face was turned toward her; swollen and battered from the beginning, it was now totally covered with a fine sheen of sweat. His hair fluttered in the warm, river-scented air that rushed in through the broken window. His lips were parted as if he were having to work to inhale enough oxygen. His one good eye was ringed with shadows, and there was a tautness around the edges of his mouth that spoke of pain.
In short, he looked in much worse shape than he had when they’d gotten back into the truck after unloading the Beemer. To her disgust, Sam discovered that her first reaction was to feel worried about him.
“In the glove compartment,” she replied before she thought. Then she gave herself a mental kick. Helping him was not something that was in her best interest to do. Getting away from him was what she needed to concentrate on. But once the words were out of her mouth, there was no taking them back. He nodded and sat up, which seemed to require a great deal more effort than his previous movements. Leaning forward, he opened the glove compartment—not without some difficulty, because like everything else in the truck the catch was old a
nd temperamental—and pulled out the red plastic box with the white cross on it that had been a staple of the glove compartment forever. It had been put there by the wrecker’s original owner, her uncle-by-affection Wilfred Purvis, who had been better to her than most of her own kin until he had died, and whom she still missed. She had only glanced inside it once when she’d needed a Band-Aid, so she had very little real knowledge of what was in there. Leaning back again as if the effort had drained him, Quasimodo opened it, rifled through the contents, and then looked up, frowning at the road ahead. They were running parallel to the river; Sam could occasionally see the water’s black gleam in the distance. Closer at hand, a concrete drainage ditch flanked by scruffy trees ran along the edge of the flat fields of the floodplain. What few structures they passed were old, empty, and largely commercial in nature. No signs of human habitation to be seen.
“Pull over behind that building,” he directed after a moment, pointing.
“That building” was a three-bay cinder-block garage. The doors were closed, the chain-link fence that had once surrounded it was broken down to the point where more of it was missing than standing, and its nearest neighbor was a burned-out structure that might once have been a house.
Sam was immediately suspicious. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
Sam gave him a long, mistrustful look, then reluctantly did as he said, easing the truck off the road and onto what was left of the pavement before bumping through the grass as she drove around the building.
When she was parked behind the garage, with the engine and lights turned off at his direction, he took a deep, shuddering breath. He was obviously in pain, obviously having trouble staying focused. His eyes were overbright in the moonlight as he looked at her. Once again Sam had to battle back the impulse to worry about him.
“Take off your shirt,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What?” She looked startled. Alarmed, even. Her widening eyes fastened on him like she was Little Red Riding Hood and he was the Big Bad Wolf.
Well, maybe for her, tonight, he was. But not in the way that was clearly worrying her.
She was definitely pretty enough to make him sit up and take notice under other circumstances. But right at the moment, injured as he was and with Veith and half the Zeta cartel and God knew who else hot on his trail, sex was the last thing on his mind.
The pain in his leg was bad. The sad thing was, Danny knew that it was about to get about a thousand times worse. But he was already past the fifteen-minute limit he’d allotted himself on the tourniquet. Much longer, and he risked doing serious damage to his leg, if not losing it altogether. And now that it was starting to look like he had a real shot at making it out of this alive, he was going to do his best to keep all his body parts attached and functional. On the theory that later they might come in handy.
The girl—Sam—was looking at him like he’d just grown horns.
Oh, right. He’d told her to take off her shirt. The couple of seconds it had taken him to remember why she was giving him that look worried him. His thought processes were starting to go fuzzy, he realized, which was never a good sign. He blinked and scowled, trying to keep sharp. It was hard when his leg burned like somebody had shoved a hot poker through it, and he was feeling more light-headed with every passing second.
“I need something to cover this wound,” he explained, because her expression made it clear that thoughts of having her bones imminently jumped were dancing through her head. Which, with him in his current condition, was laughable just on the face of it. He must be doing a better job than he’d thought of pretending that he wasn’t on the verge of total collapse if that was what was worrying her. “I’d use mine, but it’s too damned dirty.”
Relief shone from her eyes. Her face was easy to read, her expressions transparent, her thoughts visible in the curve of her lips, the quirk of her eyebrows, and, of course, her wide blue eyes. Jesus, she was pretty. And young. Too damned young to be caught up in something that could easily get her killed, but there was nothing he could do about that: through no fault of his, or hers, she was well and truly in this thing with him now. Anyway, the impression she gave of vulnerability lost something when he remembered that she’d just coolly shot Torres and Thug Two with the Smith & Wesson revolver she’d been packing. That he had not seen coming. Briefly it occurred to him to wonder what a girl, let alone one who looked like her, was doing carrying a gun, but speculating on extraneous things took brain power that he didn’t have to spare just then, and anyway he had other fish to fry. Like trying to survive.
“Do it.” When she continued to look at him without making a move, he frowned at her. Her lips tightened, and her whole expression turned way less than friendly, but to his surprise she didn’t argue. Instead she unbuttoned the loose blue cotton shirt she wore, pulled it free of the cord he’d made her tie around her waist, and handed it over, all without a word. Beneath that boxy uniform shirt, she was wearing a snug white tank that, he saw as she stripped the uniform shirt off, clung to her slim, supple shape like a second skin; he’d caught glimpses of it in the V of her neckline earlier. For such a slim girl, she had nice breasts, not too big, but firm and round as Florida oranges, which it was almost a relief to realize he still was functional enough to notice. Still, he had expected at least some discussion on the subject of taking off her shirt. So far in their acquaintance, she’d argued about everything. But not now.
Again, he didn’t have time to worry about the whys and wherefores. In all kinds of hair-raising ways, he was running out of time.
And options.
“What I’m going to do is loosen this tourniquet on my leg.” Even though she hadn’t asked, Danny spelled it out for her as he folded her shirt into a rectangular pad. The shirt was cotton, soft from what he guessed were repeated washings, hopefully absorbent, certainly cleaner than anything he was wearing. He kept talking because, like planning his next moves, talking helped him stay focused. “Then I’m going to pull my jeans down. I’ve got on boxers, so don’t freak out. When the wound is exposed, I want you to put this over the hole and apply direct pressure to it. That means press down hard with both hands. When I tell you. Be prepared for blood. A lot of it.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at his leg. He followed her gaze: the area around the belt was black with blood and looked—and felt—so swollen that his jeans could have been sausage casing. He got sick to his stomach every time he looked at it. So unless it was absolutely necessary, he just didn’t. Only now, it was necessary.
“You really think taking off that tourniquet is a good idea?” She glanced up at him. Her expression was uneasy.
“It is if I don’t want to lose my leg. Which I don’t.” He handed her the folded shirt, then picked up the roll of gauze that had been in the first-aid kit. Along with an Ace bandage, a tube of antibiotic ointment, some surgical tape, and a small pair of scissors, all also from the first-aid kit, that was all he had to work with. He placed each item carefully on the dashboard, within easy reach of his outstretched hand. Once the tourniquet came off, he was going to have to work fast. The darkness was an issue—moonlight only went so far—but he could see well enough to bandage the hole in his leg, and turning on an interior light would make them too visible. Finally, he pulled the pistol out of his waistband and tucked it down into the pocket on the door beside him, which put it out of her reach but kept it close enough where he could grab it if he needed it. When everything was ready, he unbuttoned his jeans and slid his zipper down, the better to get his pants out of the way fast when the tourniquet came off. Then he looked at her.
“Scoot on over here.”
“What happens if you bleed out?”
Trepidation showed in every line of her face, but she scooted obediently, sliding toward him until her knee just touched his good leg. Given the angle at which he was situated on the seat, that was as close to him as she was going to get without putting herself through some major contortio
ns. But she was near enough to do what he needed her to do: apply pressure to the wound while he bandaged it up.
“Then I guess you get lucky.” Reluctantly, he slid his fingers along the narrow leather strap constricting his leg to where the fastened belt buckle strained to hold it tight above his lacerated flesh. There was no exit wound, at least none that his probing fingers had been able to discover, which meant that the bullet was still in his leg, but digging for it wasn’t going to happen under these conditions. He didn’t see any way that what he was getting ready to do could be anything but bad, but he equally didn’t see any real alternative. The tourniquet had to come off. The wound had to be bandaged. He looked at her bent head. She was intently watching his fingers as they got reacquainted with the cool silver of his belt buckle. “Or not. Just so we’re clear, me dying does not get you off the hook. They’ll still come after you. And without me around to protect you, you’ve got about as much chance of surviving as a mosquito in a zapper.”
“Protect me?” Her eyes snapped up to meet his. Indignation sparkled in them. “Since when are you ‘protecting’ me? You said we were on the same side in the trunk, and then you kidnapped me at gunpoint. You ‘protecting me’ isn’t what’s happening here.”
She had him there. At least, he could definitely see things from her point of view. “It wasn’t my fault you got thrown in that trunk. And, believe it or not, I’m trying to keep you alive.”
Her lips curled scornfully. “Get real, why don’t you? The person you’re trying to keep alive here is you.”
“Okay, so I’m trying to keep both of us alive. Same thing.”
“No, it definitely is not.”
“I’m not going to argue about it. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”
The sound she made was rife with derision. But she didn’t argue anymore; instead, her gaze shifted to his leg.
“I think you ought to let me take you to a hospital.” She was eyeing his leg as if she wanted no part of what was getting ready to happen. Well, fair enough. He didn’t want any part of it, either, but they both had to deal.
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