Shiver

by Karen Robards

  “I hear.”

  The last glimpse he got of her was of her frowning after him as he was rolled away. It was getting on toward 5:00 a.m., and besides being scared to death and traumatized, she had to be dead tired, but she was still hanging in there and he knew that her continued vigilance was for the sake of her boy. A pair of army medics, having loaded Danny onto a gurney, were hustling him away to emergency surgery in a hastily rigged operating room, where he would be put out briefly while they patched up his leg and other injuries. He didn’t have much choice but to let it happen, but the catalog of things that could go wrong while he was out of commission was so long that he was worried sick. Over the week and a half before tonight’s debacle that he as Marco had been in Sanders’s supposed custody, Danny had learned something of how the other man worked: he was the master of high-handed decisions reached in the spirit of getting the job he was assigned to do done. He was perfectly capable of deciding that Sam and her kid were not his problem, and in fact were a detriment to doing what he had been ordered to do. He was, in short, perfectly capable of shipping them off somewhere while he, Danny, lay unconscious, then shrugging his shoulders about it after the fact.

  Bottom line was, nobody official much cared about the fate of Samantha Jones and her son. Their involvement was accidental, and their rescue was, in Sanders’s case at least, grudging. They had nothing other than basic descriptions of their attackers—which they had already provided to the marshals, during the latter part of the car ride to the airfield, confirming that Veith at least had been on the premises—to contribute to the case. With no vested interest in keeping them safe, no one, in any agency, would be going out of his or her way to do so. As long as Sam and Tyler had no knowledge of where “Marco” was being taken next, it wouldn’t even officially matter to anyone in the game if Veith or some other whack team sent by the Zetas should find them. Which, unless mother and son were provided with first-rate assistance, the Zetas’ guys eventually would do. As far as the government was concerned, Sam and Tyler were unneeded and expendable, which placed them in extreme danger.

  Unless they were with him. The protection surrounding him had its flaws, not the least of which was that he had to be at least a little bit traceable to keep the Zetas on his trail rather than that of the real Rick Marco, but it was reasonably solid protection, the earlier debacle notwithstanding. But the thing was, as long as Sam and Tyler were with him, he could protect them. Which he had just made it his own personal mission to do. Of course, it would help if he were operating at something near full capacity, but he was hoping that would happen soon. The good news was, he tended to heal fast.

  “You understand me?” he said to Sanders as the gurney was pushed through a pair of double doors into the small clinic where the surgery was going to happen. The antiseptic smell hit him in the face first. Then a glance in the direction that he was headed found a number of gowned and gloved medical professionals looking at him expectantly as he was rolled into view. Damn, this is going to hurt. But other, more urgent matters pushed the thought out of his mind. Danny frowned up at Sanders, who had already made it clear that he wasn’t about to leave his charge’s side. “They’re not with me when I wake up, I don’t say a word to anybody about anything.”

  “You get your kicks trying to blackmail the government?” Sanders growled in reply. But Danny was reasonably sure his point had been made. If it hadn’t been, it was too late to do anything about it. They were already at his side, shoving a needle into his arm. As something cold shot into his veins, he grimaced . . .

  When he woke up, he was groggy and dry-mouthed and feeling way too good for it to be due to anything but a particularly felicitous combination of IV drugs. For a moment he floated, not thinking about anything in particular except that not being in pain was something to savor. Then reality started to intrude—his leg had hurt like a mother and there’d been an operation on it. He was still lying flat on his back, still on a gurney, but now he was strapped to the damned thing, across the chest and, he thought, the hips, which worried him, although probably less than it would have done if he hadn’t been high as a kite on whatever narcotic elixir they had him on. He was in a small, narrow room with a curved ceiling. A half-full IV bag hung on a pole beside him with clear plastic tubing that allowed a golden liquid to drip down into his arm. It was cold, and he was covered by a white blanket to the armpits. His hands and arms, he was glad to discover, were free, and further groping exploration found that the buckles securing the straps were within reach, which meant that he could free himself if he had to, although probably not with any degree of speed. What light there was came out of weird little circular openings on either side of the ceiling. There was a sound, a deep, throbbing sound that made the room vibrate—a generator of some sort? An engine? Then a figure stirred in the shadows at the far end of the room, separating itself from the wall. As Danny craned his neck to see better, whoever it was came walking toward him.

  Danny tensed. He was feeling way too mellow to go on full-body alert, which would have alarmed him except that he was feeling way too mellow to feel particularly alarmed. He would have swung into a sitting position, except the straps securing him to the gurney wouldn’t allow it.

  Oh, yeah, the straps. Why the hell was he strapped down?

  He felt for the buckle around his chest. But his hands were slow and his fingers were clumsy, and the hard truth was that freeing himself quickly just wasn’t going to happen.

  In worrisome evidence of how slow his thought processes currently were, yelling for help had just crossed his mind when the figure came close enough for him to identify it.

  “Crittenden.” He said his boss’s name out loud. He should have felt relief, but he didn’t.

  “You left a hell of a mess for us to clean up, Panterro. Five goddamn bodies.” A solid two hundred pounds at six foot one, with short, graying, dark hair, sharp features, and a perpetual deep tan, forty-eight-year-old FBI Special Agent in Charge Timothy Crittenden looked less than happy. He also looked the part of the National Guard officer whose uniform he was currently wearing. National Guard officer? Uniform? He even had an ID badge affixed to his chest. Danny blinked, turning that over in his currently slow-as-a-paddleboat mind. It didn’t compute. Then he realized: Crittenden was undercover. Of course he was. Just like Danny himself was undercover, as federal-agent-on-the-take-turned-federal-stoolie-who-was-marked-for-death Rick Marco, also known as the Dirtbag for short. Nobody, including U.S. Marshal Bruce Sanders and his band of clowns, currently charged with his protection, could be allowed to know that the “Marco” they were guarding was not the real one, or that he had any connection whatsoever to the FBI. On the heels of that aha moment of remembrance, a frightening thought—if Crittenden could infiltrate Sanders’s security arrangements then Veith and the Zetas probably could, too—caused Danny so little internal agitation that once again he had to chalk it up to the drugs.

  “I only killed two of them,” Danny protested. An urgent piece of information he needed to impart to Crittenden surfaced. “And, by the way, Army Veith is working for the Zetas now. He’s the one who came after me.”

  “Veith, huh?” Crittenden’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “They must really want you—ah, Marco—dead. Well, maybe we can end up taking him out as part of this operation, too.”

  “A happy thought.”

  Crittenden frowned at him. “So what the hell happened back there?”

  “You tell me.” The whole thing was slowly unspooling itself in Danny’s mind. The assault on the safe house. The dead marshals. His own near-death experience. Sam. And Tyler. Anger, mild but measurably there, which given the apparent strength of the drugs he was on told him something, bubbled up inside him. “Where the fuck were you guys?”

  “We couldn’t get to you in time.” Crittenden didn’t sound particularly apologetic. More like he had been late to an administrative meeting. An unimportant administrative meeting. “Hoffman and Lutts had eyes and ears
on the place, but the thing about remote monitoring is it’s remote. By the time we got to the scene, you were gone.”

  “I could’ve been killed.” Ordinarily he wouldn’t have bitched about it—the possibility of death was part of the job description in deep undercover ops like this one—but his internal censor was doing backstrokes in the sea of feeling-no-pain meds. “I would’ve been killed, if it hadn’t been for this girl.”

  Crittenden gave a curt nod. “Samantha Jones. Age twenty-three. Single mother to Tyler, age four. Owner-operator of Sam’s Towing, which consists of one wrecker and a contract with A+ Collateral Recovery. High school grad, a few college classes, now studying to be an EMT. Product of the foster care system. One arrest at the age of nineteen for shoplifting. Baby formula. No other record.”

  Danny gave Crittenden a long look as that information fit itself in with what he already knew about Sam. The shoplifting-baby-formula thing did a slow spin around his mind, but couldn’t find a place to settle. Reason? It bothered him. In what kind of financial straits did a young mother have to be to shoplift baby formula? “You did a background check on her.”

  “Hell, yeah, I did. What if she was a plant?”

  “She’s no plant.”

  “And you know that because—oh, that’s right, she’s a real hottie.”

  “Nothing to do with that. She saved my life. If she hadn’t shown up to tow away the car Veith had thrown me into the trunk of, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because I’d be dead now. I owe her. I mean to make sure nothing happens to her or her son, you got that?”

  Crittenden held up both hands in a gesture of innocence. “You say that like I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t.” His expression turned wry. “Beautiful young woman, though, I have to say. You always were the luckiest son of a bitch I ever met.”

  Danny fixed Crittenden with a look. He went for hard and purposeful but he wasn’t exactly sure how that worked out, because he was feeling about as intimidating as a marshmallow. But still, he meant what he said. “Nobody’s cutting her loose. She and her kid stay with me, get protection just like I do. Or you can take this assignment and stick it up your ass.”

  “No need to get testy.” Crittenden’s tone was reproving. “Actually, adding them to the mix works surprisingly well for us. Since they know about the girl, and they’ve already shown a willingness to go after her, it just lays down a heavier trail for the hunters to go sniffing for. Keeping them busy until Marco fingers every mule, supplier, and dirty agent he’s worked with is the name of the game.”

  “So make sure it happens.”

  “I will. You have my word.”

  “Unless something goes wrong, huh?” The recent debacle being a case in point.

  “Now that’s just cynical. The girl will be protected, okay?”

  A memory made Danny squint hard at his boss as it unfolded at a maddeningly slow pace in his too-sluggish-to-survive mind. “Veith asked me where the money was. Right before he blew my leg to shit. When it looked like he was getting ready to do the same thing to my arm, I told him Santos had it. He seemed willing to believe me.”

  Crittenden’s gaze sharpened. “What money?”

  “Don’t know. But Veith seemed to think there was some. From how bad he wanted to know where it was, I’m guessing it’s a substantial amount.”

  “He didn’t say—” Crittenden looked up sharply. A sound from outside the room penetrated Danny’s consciousness a split second later, like his senses were on tape delay or something. Someone was coming. Maybe several someones.

  “I need a weapon.” Danny’s tone was urgent. It was clear that his one-on-one with Crittenden was getting ready to be history.

  Crittenden glanced down at him. “I’ll see you get one. Not here. Later.”

  A metallic clunk, followed by the opening of a narrow door at the far end of the room, refocused Danny’s attention in a hurry. He hadn’t noticed the door before, probably because until that moment it had seemed to be part of the mysteriously curved wall. It rose up toward the outside like a lifting wing, letting in a burst of fresh warm air and a glimpse of what appeared to be dawn’s early light. The slice of sky he could see was pale gray touched with pink. Blinking lights on a tower threw red flashes against the metal roof of a long, low building with giant garage doors: a hangar. That’s when it hit him: he was inside an airplane. A small plane outfitted with maybe six seats, up toward the front, which he could only see if he lifted up his head. He and the stretcher were in the small cargo area in the back. A curtain separated the two areas, but it was only partially drawn. The plane was probably designed for patient transport, which would account for facilities to accommodate and secure a gurney.

  “I’ll be in touch.” That was how Crittenden left it as he started walking toward the door. Danny didn’t have a chance to reply.

  “All squared away in back,” Crittenden said to the scrubs-clad medic who stepped through the door just as he reached it. The medic didn’t even seem surprised to see him. He just nodded and walked toward Danny as Crittenden exited the plane.

  “Glad to see you’re awake.” When he was near the end of the gurney, the medic apparently saw Danny looking at him. “Sorry to leave you, but I had to take an emergency call. Hennessey get you all bolted down?”

  Danny assumed that Hennessey was Crittenden, and by all bolted down, the medic was referring to the stretcher.

  “Good to go.” Danny gave the medic a thumb’s-up. The guy checked his IV, which, Danny saw to his regret, was getting down to about a quarter full. Then Danny’s attention was grabbed by the arrival of Sam, who stepped through the door with Tyler in her arms. The kid wasn’t all that big, but he was big enough so that his feet dangled down almost to Sam’s knees. She was a slender girl, and he looked way too heavy for her, but she was managing. His head was on Sam’s shoulder, and it was obvious from his posture that he was sound asleep. Entering the small cabin, Sam seemed hesitant, but as she cast a swift look around the plane’s interior and saw him he thought she relaxed just a little. He knew how she felt: he was relieved to see her and the kid, too. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized just how worried he had been that she might not appear. Not that he didn’t trust Sanders, or Crittenden—okay, truth was that he didn’t trust them. Not either of them, not fully, not where Sam was concerned. Because they were both the same kind of by-the-book, the-mission’s-the-thing operatives. If either of them thought having Sam and Tyler on board interfered with the job they had been entrusted with, then they would be looking to lose Sam and Tyler as fast as possible, with very little concern about how it impacted Sam and her son.

  But here Sam was, her face pale and drawn with exhaustion, her hair having been reconfined into a haphazard ponytail that hung down her back in an unruly black mass, her white tank top and jeans stained with his blood, and still, as Crittenden had pointed out, looking hot. He gave her a brief wave, to which she responded with narrowed eyes and a grimace. Not exactly heartwarming, but at least she and the kid were there. Behind them came Sanders, with Groves, Abramowitz, and O’Brien. They looked tired, too, but Danny didn’t care. A guy in a uniform brought up the rear, closing the door behind them. The pilot, or pilots, must have already been in the cockpit, because as soon as the door shut the engines started to rev. Everybody—everybody except him—sat down and strapped in. The medic pulled down a jump seat from the wall near Danny’s head and strapped into that. Seconds later the plane was moving down the runway, gathering speed. Then it took off, rising gracefully in a steep ascension that would have sent him rolling if the stretcher hadn’t been fastened properly to the floor, which led Danny to conclude with grudging admiration that Crittenden was a man of unsuspected talents. Moments later, they were winging their way to God knew where.

  Nobody came to talk to him, and the movement coupled with the droning of the engines was soporific. Danny didn’t even realize that he had fallen asleep again until he woke up. The plane was just touching down, boun
cing along the runway, jarring him into wakefulness. By the time it taxied to a stop, he was definitely aware that his leg was still far from 100 percent. His other injuries were making themselves felt, too. Oh, not in any way that was too acutely painful, but insistently enough so that he didn’t have to look at the IV bag to realize that whatever wonder drug they’d been pumping into him had run out.

  Shit.

  A quick glance confirmed that Sam—and presumably Tyler, although he couldn’t see the kid—was still with him. That freed his mind enough to consciously not think about the pain.

  By the time they’d transferred out of the plane into a waiting Chevy Suburban, tan instead of black as if to foil the suspicions of any observers that the ride might belong to federal agents, Danny had given up on the whole not-thinking-about-the-pain thing as a lost cause. He felt like he’d been run over by a Mack truck. One that had backed up an extra time over his leg. It was still early morning, not quite 9:00 a.m. according to the clock in the SUV’s dashboard, but the sun was bright in a near cloudless blue sky and the day gave promise of being a hot one. Mountains in the distance rose with cool purple majesty that contrasted with the flat, arid land through which they were driving. From various landmarks, Danny was pretty sure they were in Nevada, heading north. The only thing Sanders and his little band of unmerry men had said about their ultimate destination was that they were driving, not flying, the rest of the way in because planes were easy to track, while cars were less so. Not that their destination really mattered; the operative principle was to hide, and where was immaterial.

  Before getting him up and into a wheelchair, which was waiting for him upon landing along with a pair of crutches for later, when he was ready to forsake the wheelchair, and then leaving him to Sanders and company’s tender mercies, the medic had handed Danny a plastic bag full of medicine bottles with instructions for what he was to take, and when. The instructions had gone in one ear and out the other—taking pain meds was something that, since he needed his wits about him, he felt that it was probably better that he not do—but now that they were zooming along the expressway, traveling at a steady seven miles over the speed limit to stay with the flow of traffic without getting pulled over and keeping to the middle lane and doing everything else possible to blend with the other vehicles on the road, his leg was hurting worse than it had when he’d first been shot. Giving up—with four armed marshals for protection exactly how sharp did he need to be?—he fished out a bottle, checked the label just to make sure, popped the childproof lock, shook a couple of Lortab into his hand, and swallowed them without water. Then, just to be on the safe side, he swallowed two more.