CHAPTER EIGHT
“You know a place called Miss Kitty’s?” Quasimodo covered the mouthpiece of her phone—a cheap, folding silver Nokia, a poor substitute for the piece of technology she had long coveted, which was an iPhone—to glance at her.
“Yes.” It was all Sam could do to keep to keep from sounding as out of sorts as she felt. She couldn’t believe she had just tamely handed over her phone to him. Just because he’d told her that he needed to call someone who would come and pick him up didn’t mean she had to do what he asked. She had the gun; she could have held it on him while she used the phone herself to call 911. Of course, she wasn’t going to shoot him, probably, and he knew that, so holding the gun on him wasn’t going to act as much of a deterrent. Still, giving him her phone might well have been a step too far. If it came to that, what was she still doing driving this guy around? She’d had the perfect opportunity back there to escape, and she hadn’t taken it. He had blacked out; instead of pushing him out of the truck, or even leaping from the truck and running away herself if she was afraid he’d revive before she could get his door open, what had she done? Stayed put and used her training to save his sorry-ass life. Why? At least that had a simple explanation she could latch onto: she was pretty sure that he would have bled to death if she hadn’t.
Given that she wasn’t feeling bad at all about the two men she’d just shot, why letting this one die had felt different was something she was still trying to work out.
Maybe because of that kiss on her hand. Maybe because she was secretly kind of attracted to him. Maybe because stupidity where men were concerned was her fatal flaw. Who knew?
Examining her own motives had never been something she wasted much time on, but this particular Gordian knot was beginning to unravel in her mind. If she hadn’t shot those two men, they would have killed her. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name, and not just because Quasimodo had told her that that was their intent. She had felt it in some deep, instinctive place as soon as the trunk had opened and she’d seen that gun pointing her way.
Quasimodo hadn’t harmed her, had never tried to kill her, and in fact had seemed intent on making sure she didn’t die.
There was the real difference, not the physical attraction thing, not that any of it really mattered now that the thing was done. What mattered was that, for whatever reason, here she was, listening to him talk on her phone, chauffeuring him around when what she needed to be doing was racing home, grabbing Tyler, and taking off for parts unknown on a long, enforced vacation that she didn’t want and couldn’t afford.
It was like she and Quasimodo had bonded or something. The thought made her scowl.
“I’ll be there. And, hey, Sanders—don’t fuck this up.” He disconnected, clicked her phone shut, and looked at her. By this time he basically had one good eye: the other was swollen almost shut. His nose was looking more misshapen than ever, too, sort of like a potato stuck in the middle of his face. If in real life he was good-looking, and she suspected he was, right now you couldn’t tell it. In other words, it sure wasn’t his good looks that had kept her from abandoning him. Maybe she should just chalk it up to her own soft heart.
Yeah, right. She didn’t have a soft heart. She’d never been able to afford one.
“They’re going to meet us in the parking lot of Miss Kitty’s.” The words had a forced quality that made her think he was having to work to get them out. He was growing weaker, she could tell, and she would be glad to pass him off to Sanders, whoever he was, and get him off her hands as soon as possible. The good news was, Quasimodo wasn’t actually her problem. The not-so-good news was, she had plenty of problems of her own, although the scariest of them were absolutely his fault. “They’re heading there now. How far away are we?”
“Maybe ten minutes.” Miss Kitty’s was a strip club on the other side of town, where it was one in a string of similar establishments. The clubs were the best-paying employers around, hands down, and a lot of young, attractive women in the area worked at them, including a couple of her friends.
“Good.” He closed his eyes. Sam felt a niggling of alarm.
“Don’t you dare pass out on me again.”
A corner of his mouth quirked up in what she was beginning to realize passed for his smile. His eyes opened, and he looked at her.
“You almost sound like you’re worried about me.”
Sam snorted. “I’m worried about me. You passing out complicates my life.”
“Just get me to Miss Kitty’s.” His eyes closed again.
“So what’s going to happen when we get to Miss Kitty’s?” she asked uneasily. Keep him talking, and he’d be less likely to lose consciousness, she figured. As the truck rattled and bounced over the uneven pavement of the neglected road, the dark closed in around them. Except for the slashing headlights, moonlight was the only illumination. It washed down over the silver towers of an electric power station, over rusting train trestles, over a jumble of abandoned railway cars locked away behind a fence. No other vehicles were anywhere in sight; no people, either. Hitting the gas hard in an effort to speed them on to their destination, Sam started feeling more and more uneasy at the prospect of encountering whomever he was planning to meet.
“Bottom line is, we’ll be safe,” he said.
“Ye-ah.” Probably the drawn-out way she said it was the giveaway to how little she believed in that. Whatever, he opened his eyes again and turned his head to look at her. “Pardon me if I’m have a little trouble accepting that a bunch of criminals can keep anybody safe.”
He drew in a long, audible breath. She got the impression that he was fighting off an onslaught of—something. Pain? Dizziness? She didn’t know. “They’re U.S. Marshals, okay? You don’t have to worry.”
Sam gripped the wheel tighter, not sure if this was good news or not. All in all, she was going to go with the “not.” “Want to tell me why U.S. Marshals are coming to meet you in Miss Kitty’s parking lot?”
“Us. They’re coming to meet us. They’ll protect you, too.”
“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t a natural dissembler; there was no hiding the skepticism in her tone. The thing was, she couldn’t even be sure that anything he was telling her was the truth. And even if it was true, whatever this thing she had fallen into was, she didn’t want any part of it. All she wanted to do was go home. And get Tyler. And get out of town. Maybe even flee the country. Only she couldn’t afford to. Doing a quick mental review of her bank account, Sam despaired. Until she got paid, she couldn’t even afford an entire tank of gas.
“You have to trust me,” he said.
“Trust you? I don’t know anything about you. Except that for some reason, which you won’t tell me, you wound up beaten to a pulp, shot, and stuffed into a car trunk. With a posse of killers on your trail.”
“My name’s Marco, all right? Rick Marco.” The glassiness taking over his eyes scared her. He was talking slowly and carefully, as if forming each word involved a tremendous effort. “I’m kind of in the witness protection program. Some bad people found out where I was, and tonight they came after me. That’s what you and your tow truck interrupted. If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be dead now. I’m going to get the marshals to take you into protection, too. And your kid, if you want.”
“If I want?” She looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “You don’t have kids, do you?”
“No,” he said.
“First thing you need to understand is that whatever goes down, my son and I are a package deal. We’re together. And I won’t have him put in danger.” Her pulse raced as she drove under one final overpass and the bright lights of the expressway exchange popped up in front of her. Suddenly gas stations, car lots, and fast food restaurants crowded in everywhere she looked. Miss Kitty’s was close now. There wasn’t much traffic; it was too late at night. But there was some. Enough to be comforting—and to make her nervous.
For all she knew the vehicles were full of woul
d-be murderers—or U.S. Marshals. Or both.
“Hmm,” he murmured.
“What did you do to get put in the witness protection program, anyway?” Earlier, he’d refused to tell her anything. To keep her safe, he’d claimed. The fact that he was talking now alarmed her. What had happened to the whole if I tell you I’ll have to kill you thing he’d had going on?
The thought that he considered that she was now so caught up in what was happening that it didn’t make any difference what she knew was too terrifying to contemplate.
The truck had already sped past the little cluster of light and commerce surrounding the expressway entrance when it occurred to her that it was taking him a long time to reply. Glancing his way, she felt her stomach drop. His eyes were shut again. As bruised as it was, it was hard to be sure, but she thought his face had gone slack.
Her heart thumped.
“Hey.” God in heaven, she was so rattled she’d forgotten his name, which he had just told her maybe three minutes before. As the truck rolled past the giant Repent and Turn to Jesus sign that a church group had erected beside the cluster of nudie clubs she was coming up on, she racked her brain. “Marco?”
That was it. She was sure of it. But he didn’t respond. Didn’t move. Didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash.
He’d blacked out again.
“Marco! Rick!”
Nothing.
What to do? Stop the truck and attempt to revive him? Hurry on to their destination? Dump him? Okay, that last was out, she couldn’t just stop, open the door, and let him fall from the truck in the condition he was in, but Sam was still torn between the other two when Miss Kitty’s loomed up on her left. A giant neon sign flashed the words Miss Kitty’s above an image of a woman wearing kitty-cat ears and a long feline tail. When the lights outlining it glowed green, she was wearing a pink bikini. When they glowed pink, she was naked. The long, low white brick building below the sign was situated in the middle of a black asphalt parking lot. Its size would have done justice to a shopping mall. Although it was nearly 4:00 a.m., there were still maybe two dozen cars parked close to the building. No one was in sight, but Sam circled the parking lot warily, staying to the shadows, keeping to its perimeter.
Get the hell out of here.
Every instinct she possessed screamed it. Driving around the back of the parking lot, Sam tried to look in every direction at once. If anyone was there to meet her companion, she couldn’t tell it.
“Marco.” Reaching over, she tried shoving his shoulder. No response: he was out of it, eyes closed, dead weight.
Shit.
Her nerves were going haywire. She was breathing too fast, sweating, looking everywhere, seeing nothing pertinent.
She shoved him again. “Damn it, Marco—”
Her voice broke off as she spotted a pair of cars turning into the parking lot, one after the other, moving very fast. Big, dark cars: both Tauruses, she thought, or Saturns, which looked almost the same. Her pulse went into overdrive. Her heart thumped in her chest.
“Oh, God, it’s them, isn’t it?” She jostled her companion again, with the same result as before. “Marco! You’ve got to wake up.”
The cars made a beeline toward her. Sam didn’t recall Marco telling Sanders that he would be in a red wrecker, but somehow the cars seemed to know it anyway. Then she got it: the truck was the only other vehicle in the parking lot that was moving, and the only other one with its lights on. They had spotted her as easily as she had spotted them. Fighting back panic, driving slowly, and hugging the far edge of the parking lot as she conducted a furious internal debate about what best to do, Sam clutched the wheel so hard her fingers hurt as she watched the cars racing toward her. Should she stop, or say to hell with it and try to make a run for it?
She only had his word that they were U.S. Marshals, after all. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was lying. And even if he were right and telling the truth, did she want to get messed up with U.S. Marshals anyway? What would they do with her—and Tyler? What if they tried to whisk her away without her son? Being in their custody meant being under their control.
Panic tightened her throat, formed a knot in her chest, and quickened her breathing before she managed to tamp it down again. It wasn’t like she had a whole lot of options at this point. There was only one way out of the parking lot, and the oncoming cars were between her and it. The realization sent Sam’s stomach plummeting.
“Damn it, Marco, wake up!” This time, when she shoved his shoulder, it was violently.
“Mm.” He made a sound just as the cars got close enough so that she could see that there were two people in each of them, but by then she was too distracted to even glance at him. The cars were no longer traveling in a straight line with one following the other, but parallel with enough space between them to bookend the truck, to box it in. Looking at the four headlights closing in fast, Sam felt like a fist was tightening around her windpipe. Cold prickles raced over her skin. Marshals or not, they were absolutely zeroing in on the truck, and in just a minute or so this thing would be a done deal. She would be at their mercy, to do with as they would. The knowledge was terrifying.
She still hadn’t hit the brakes.
Stopping felt like surrender, like ceding control, like putting her fate in the hands of whoever was in those cars. Not stopping let her retain the option of smashing the accelerator to the floor and speeding away.
Or at least it gave her the illusion of retaining the option.
“Marco! They’re here.” She shoved him. The shove, or the urgency in her tone, must have finally penetrated, because he opened his eyes a slit.
“What?” He sounded groggy.
“Your friends are here,” she said, impressed by the steadiness of her own voice as she looked from him to the cars that were now only a few dozen yards away. She had slowed to a near crawl instinctively, probably because somewhere deep inside she knew that fleeing wasn’t going to work out. And the reason it wasn’t going to work out was that Big Red couldn’t outrun those cars. It wasn’t possible, although she faced the truth reluctantly. But stopping and just letting whatever happened next happen seemed about as smart as playing Russian roulette.
Marco hitched himself up a little in the seat, and she knew from the direction of his gaze that he was looking at the oncoming cars.
“Stop. Park.” His words had a bitten-off quality. Like he was having trouble mustering the strength to speak at all.
“I don’t know if . . .” this is such a good idea, she was going to say, but her words trailed off as nerves closed her throat. Then she came to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing else to do but stop. If cooperation was her only option, best to act like she was cooperating willingly. Moving like her leg weighed a thousand pounds, she put her foot on the brakes and pressed down.
Screech. Even the brakes seemed to scream that she was making a mistake.
“It’s going to be okay. Trust me.” He sounded more alert now as Big Red shivered and lurched in apparent protest. For a second, as the truck finally shook to a stop, her eyes held his. Did she trust him? The answer was, maybe she did. At least, she trusted him not to kill her. Even to keep her safe if he could. But that left huge, gaping holes that allowed for lots of bad things to happen. Those holes scared her. Her eyes were wrenched from him to the cars as they slammed to a halt mere feet from both the front and back bumpers. Just like that, any semblance of choice had been taken out of her hands: the truck was well and truly blocked in. Game over. Nothing to do. Even as Sam registered that and felt fresh panic surge through her veins, two clean-cut men in dark suits leaped from each of the cars and converged on the truck.
They were armed.
Her stomach cramped.
“You never . . .” Sam began, shooting Marco an accusing look, but she didn’t finish because two of the men appeared at Marco’s window just then, looming up behind him, drawing his attention as well as hers.
“Get out,” one of them ordere
d him. The tone, the attitude: cop to crook. It was eye-opening. She’d known it, of course, but still Sam felt a suffocating rush of dismay. So what’s the big surprise? she asked herself fiercely. He’d been in custody; they were treating him like he was a criminal. And that would be because he was a criminal. Somehow that nugget of truth hadn’t really crystallized in her brain before.
So are they going to treat me like I’m a criminal, too? Sam thought of the two men she’d shot and felt a spurt of panic. Do they know? Will that make a difference? Oh, God, am I making a huge mistake here?
A tap on her window brought her gaze swinging around. The other two men in suits stood just outside her window frowning in at her. Both looked like they could have been marshals, but then, she wasn’t about to rely on that. Books and covers, she knew the drill. One sure thing was that both carried pistols, which meant they both were to be treated warily. The man closest to her pecked on her window again with an imperious forefinger. Like he expected her to just reach right down and open the door for him.
“Talk about your fuck-ups,” Marco said to the men on his side, drawing her gaze again. His tone confirmed what she already knew: he had issues with them.
“Tell me about it.” One of the marshals, if that’s who these guys really were, reached through the broken window to pull up the lock on Marco’s door. He was stocky and blunt featured, with dark brown hair cut military style. “Won’t happen again, though.”
Marco replied, “Once was plenty,” and the two men exchanged less-than-friendly looks.
I’m getting a really bad feeling here.
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