Shiver

by Karen Robards

  “Pilot and the guy in the copilot’s seat. They’re both dead.” He said it matter-of-factly, no grief there. Well, she wasn’t feeling any, either. “Veith and the other guy are missing. At a guess, I’d say they fell out like we did.”

  That was all she needed to hear. She shivered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He nodded, and she started walking away, down the slope because that seemed the logical thing to do, keeping a firm grip on the pistol and wrapping the blanket around her shoulders as she moved because the night, while not freezing, was way too cold for just bare arms. Realizing as she got it settled that there was only one, and that he was wearing an identical T-shirt that left his arms bare, too, she indicated the blanket and asked, “What about you?”

  “Worried about me, baby doll?” He smiled at her, the first smile she’d had out of him since she’d left his bed what seemed like a lifetime ago, and she realized that one thing hadn’t changed: it still did funny things to her insides. “Don’t be. I don’t feel the cold.”

  “Think somebody will be sending a rescue team? Does anybody even know that the plane went down?”

  “The plane should have a transponder,” he said. “Which means somebody should be coming after us sooner or later. In the meantime, we probably want to see if we can’t walk down to a lower elevation, where we’ll have a better chance of running into people. Climbers, hikers, campers, somebody should be on this mountain. Especially once it’s daylight.”

  Sam was just thinking that something seemed different about him, an air or an attitude that she hadn’t quite picked up on before, when she heard the moan. It was a low, drawn-out sound that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It seemed to be coming from behind a large outcropping of snow-dusted rock just down the slope on their left. A glance at Marco told her that he heard it, too.

  By consensus they moved toward the sound.

  “Stay behind me,” he whispered as they reached the outcropping, which was taller than he was and twice as long. Sam had no problem with that, hanging back as, gun at the ready, Marco stepped around the rock.

  Sam couldn’t see what he saw, but she could see his reaction to it. She watched his broad back as at first he froze, pointing his pistol purposefully at whatever was on the ground. Then a weak voice said, “Help me,” and Sam recognized it as belonging to Veith even as she followed Marco the rest of the way around the rock.

  Veith lay on his back in the snow, visible from about midchest up, trapped in a good-size chunk of wreckage that was jagged and torn and heavy enough to keep him pinned to the ground. Sharp-looking tendrils of metal wrapped around his upper torso like barbed wire. Around him, the snow was dark. Sam realized that it was from his blood.

  “Watch my back,” Marco said in a low voice to Sam, then moved to crouch near Veith’s head. To Veith he said, almost conversationally, “Looks like you’re in a bad way.”

  “Get me out of this,” Veith replied. His voice was weak. He looked first at Marco, then at Sam. Standing close behind Marco, listening for any stray footfalls, she watched for signs of danger. Unwillingly, she registered how white Veith’s face was and how shrunken and dark his eyes looked. Despite everything, she felt a twinge of pity for him. Not for him, precisely, but for a living creature who was obviously hurting.

  Sam didn’t hear Marco’s reply, but something, either his expression or a gesture that Sam missed, must have told Veith he wasn’t feeling a Good Samaritan vibe.

  “I can help you out.” Veith sounded desperate. “You need somebody like me on your side.”

  “I’ll think about it. And while I’m thinking about it, suppose you tell me what happened tonight at the town house.”

  Veith grimaced. “What’s to tell? We showed up, damned place blew up.”

  “You didn’t blow it up?”

  “Why would I do that? Calderon wants his fucking money back. Kill you before I know where the money is, and my ass is in a sling.” Veith moved uncomfortably. “You think you could move some of this crap off me now?”

  Marco gave a negative shake of his head. “Keep talking. If you were there, why didn’t you get blown up with the house?”

  “Something seemed screwy about that whole deal, so I sent a guy in to case the place while the rest of us cruised around in the van. He was supposed to text us, let us know if you were in there, before we tried hitting it. He sent a text saying he was in, and the next thing we know the whole place goes sky-high.” He took a labored breath. “You didn’t do that, then you got more troubles than me.”

  “Maybe.” Marco seemed to be thinking. “What do you mean, something seemed screwy?”

  “We got tipped off that’s where you were. One of our usual informants. But it was too easy. It just didn’t feel right.” He wet his lips. “You stay in the business long enough, you develop a nose for things like that.”

  “The guy you sent in? He say anything about offing the marshal standing guard?”

  Veith shook his head. “No time. He didn’t have no time to off nobody. What happened was, he walked in, the place blew. At a guess, I’d say it was rigged to explode a couple of minutes after someone opened a door. It’d take a real pro to do that, but it wasn’t me.”

  “Yeah.” The affirmative was terse. Marco stood up and looked down at Veith almost meditatively.

  “Hey.” Veith sounded alarmed. “You’re not leaving, right? You get this stuff off me, and I’ll tell you something else.”

  “You tell me something else, and I’ll see about getting this stuff off you.”

  “All right. All right.” Veith made a gesture toward a piece of wreckage. “You see that piece there? That’s part of the tail. I’m an old military man, served my fair share in war, and I know the signs. I’ve been lying here just looking at that. See those scorch marks? See that jagged edge? We didn’t just hit something up there. We got shot down.”

  “Don’t get within his reach,” Marco turned to say softly to Sam, then went over to the piece of wreckage Veith had indicated and examined it.

  Sam was left looking at Veith. His eyes gleamed up at her through the dark.

  “I’m sorry I threatened you,” Veith said humbly. “Nothing personal, you understand. I was just doing my job.”

  Sam thought of Mrs. Menifee, thought of Marco as she had first seen him, thought of the unknown number of others whom Veith had undoubtedly killed, and didn’t even bother to reply. A moment later, Marco had rejoined them and also stood looking down at Veith.

  “See? Was I right?” Veith asked.

  “Looks like it.” At Marco’s terse confirmation, Sam looked at him with a frown. They were shot down? By whom? But Veith had started talking again, so she saved her questions for later.

  “See, you got more enemies than me. Maybe I can help you out with that. Maybe that even puts us on the same side in this. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that, right? Right?”

  Marco was looking down at Veith thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. “Nah. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy,” he said, then glanced at Sam. “Head on down the slope, would you? I’ll catch up in a minute.”

  For a moment Sam just looked at him. Then she turned and did as he said.

  A few minutes later she heard it: a single sharp bang. She knew what it was: kill shot. Bad as it might be of her, she couldn’t even feel a smidgen of sorrow. As long as Veith was alive and on this planet, she never would have felt safe for herself or for Tyler for the rest of her life.

  Or for Marco, either.

  She stopped, waiting for him, and when he rejoined her she asked: “What about the other guy?” in reference to the last remaining unaccounted-for thug. It was a tacit acknowledgment that she knew what he’d done.

  “Without Veith, he won’t bother us. If he’s alive, he’ll slink away with his tail between his legs.”

  After that, they walked down the snowy slope in silence for a while. Neither of them mentioned Veith. Finally the silence got old, so she glanced a
t him and said, “Marco?”

  Instead of the reply she had been expecting, he looked at her, sighed, and said, “About that . . .”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “About that?” Sam repeated, frowning at him questioningly.

  Marco caught her arm, stopped walking, and turned to face her. They were a good distance from the plane now, with a wall of woods to one side and the mountain stretching up to its towering peak behind them. It was cold, but not bitter, and at this elevation the darkness was alleviated by the moon and twinkling stars. The snow underfoot was just deep enough to cover the ground. A light flurry of flakes floated in the air.

  Marco’s expression was rueful as he looked down at her. He was tall and broad shouldered enough to block her view of the woods behind him, dark and tough and handsome, a man to depend on even if, she realized with a little catch in her heart, tonight was probably all they were ever going to have.

  “Do you love me?” he asked.

  Sam’s eyes widened. She searched his face as her pulse started to pound. “Yes,” she said, because she did.

  He blinked. “You do?”

  Not the response she had been hoping for. Her brows snapped together. “Are you telling me that that was a rhetorical question?” Her tone was acerbic. His hand tightened on her arm when she would have pulled away.

  “No,” he said hastily. Then a smile just touched his mouth. “Maybe. But guess what, baby doll? I love you, too.”

  Her heart lurched. She felt vulnerable suddenly. Exposed. She didn’t like it. She couldn’t deal. Unless—he was telling the truth.

  “Really?” She searched his eyes suspiciously. Maybe there was a hint of insecurity in that look somewhere. If so, maybe it was because she was feeling slightly insecure.

  “Yes, really.” He slid a hand along her cheek, unsmiling now. Then he bent his head and kissed her. It was a sexy kiss, hard and hungry, and she closed her eyes and kissed him back for all she was worth. Her arms were still around his neck when he lifted his head to nuzzle her cheek, then straightened to look down at her. Opening her eyes, she smiled at him.

  “I love you, Sam. This whole fiasco has been a nightmare from hell, except for the fact that I found you.”

  After the I love you part, she barely registered a word he said. She was standing there smiling up at him, stupidly, with flowers blooming in her heart and stars blazing from her eyes, when he sighed and added, “Keep that in mind, would you? Because there’s something I need to tell you.”

  That did not sound promising, but she was too dazzled even to frown. “What?”

  “Let’s walk and talk, shall we?”

  Not even worried about whatever horrible deed he was about to confess to—she knew the worst about him, right, and loved him madly anyway—she withdrew her arms from around his neck and fell in beside him as they resumed their trek down the slope.

  “So tell me,” she said.

  He sighed again and said, “I am not Rick Marco. My name is Daniel Panterro. Danny.”

  “What?” Sam heard that with a sense of shock. Her eyes flew to his face. She would have stopped walking, except he caught her arm and urged her on.

  “I’m an FBI agent. This has been an undercover operation. I’ve been pretending I’m Marco—there really is a Marco, and he really did do all the bad things you’ve been accusing me of—while he spills the beans on all the Zeta cartel’s secrets, including its distribution channels and the corrupt law-enforcement agents who work for them.”

  He told her the whole story.

  “Oh, my God,” she said when he had finished. As he had talked, it had started to occur to her that if he were not Rick Marco, then he would not be going to prison or to witness protection or wherever. She would not never see him again. Unless . . . “It’s all been a big lie?”

  He took one look at her face and shook his head. “Not all of it. Not you and me. Not Tyler, either. Everything between us was real.”

  Sam frowned suddenly, remembering. “You made me cry. I never cry. But I thought I was never going to see you again.”

  “I know.” At least he had the grace to look slightly sorry. “I never meant for that to happen. I was dying to take you to bed, but I was going to hold off until this was over and I could tell you the truth about who I was. But you came on to me last night, and I lost my head. You were way too sexy to resist.”

  She was indignant. “I came on to you?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He grinned at her. “You made me hotter than I can just about ever remember being, too.”

  “The way I remember it, you were coming on to me. This whole time.”

  “Well,” he said. “There’s that.”

  Sam frowned at him, he grinned at her, and all of a sudden she realized she could have him if she wanted him. A real relationship. With nothing to take him away.

  The very idea made her wary; she had learned a long time ago not to believe in happy endings.

  “So what now?” she asked, a little gruffly. By this time they’d walked a long way, and the first pink fingers of dawn were stealing over the eastern horizon.

  “First things first: we get off this mountain.”

  She made a face at him. “After that. You know what I mean.”

  “Well, let’s see. Probably you want to go grab Tyler, and then—” He broke off abruptly as a low pulsing sound filled the air. They both looked around. Sam was excited to see a helicopter soaring over the woods toward them. It was big and black and official looking, and she grabbed Marco’s—no, Danny’s; that was going to take some getting used to—arm excitedly.

  “We’re rescued,” she said happily.

  “Yeah, so you’d think.” He sounded grim suddenly. “I want you to walk away from me straight into the woods. Go right now.”

  “What?” She looked at him in bewilderment.

  “Sam,” he said. “Just do what I say. Please.”

  After one look at his face, she did. She turned and left him and walked into the woods as the helicopter soared above the clearing she’d just left.

  As he watched the helicopter land, Danny was resigned. He’d hoped against hope that he was wrong, but he’d known he wasn’t. Ever since Veith had said he hadn’t blown up the town house, Danny had known who his real enemy had to be.

  He’d made his plans. Back there when he’d taken Veith out of their lives for good, he’d set them into motion.

  When the helicopter was on the ground and Crittenden stepped out, Danny waved and walked toward him like he was expecting to be rescued.

  Crittenden was regulation FBI today: dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. His salt-and-pepper hair was blowing a little in the breeze cast up by the rotors.

  “Where’s the girl?” Crittenden greeted him. He sounded tense.

  Danny jerked his head at the woods behind him. “She had to take a tinkle.”

  “We need to get her back.”

  “She’ll just be a minute.”

  Looking past Crittenden at the man who’d descended from the chopper on its other side, Danny got a surprise. Crittenden had Rick Marco with him. Danny had seen his picture, read his file, knew who he was instantly. In fact, the man felt like an old friend.

  The kind you love to hate.

  Both men drew on him at the same time. Bottom line, as far as Crittenden was concerned it was clearly game over; he wasn’t even going to bother to pretend anymore.

  Danny didn’t even reach for a gun.

  “Nine million dollars worth it, Crittenden?” he asked his boss.

  “Four and a half million,” Crittenden corrected with barely a pause. “Marco and I are splitting it. How’d you find out?”

  “A little bird told me.” Danny looked at the man he’d worked for for the last four years with a mixture of sadness and anger. “You sent Army Veith after me for real. You blew up the town house I was staying in. You shot down the damned plane I was in last night.”

  “It wasn’t anything personal.” Crittenden sounded al
most apologetic. “You just happened to be the best stand-in for Marco. When I busted him for being a crooked agent, and he told me about the money, it just seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. Nine million dollars in cash! You just don’t get that coming your way every day. I knew that the only way we were going to be able to keep it was if the Zetas thought Marco had hidden it someplace where they couldn’t find it and then he was killed. So I hid him, and the money, and got you on board. I had to use you because you were one of mine, and since this wasn’t going to be a real operation nobody else in the chain of command could know anything about it. I needed somebody who reported to me, and no one else. The reason I chose you instead of one of the other members of the team isn’t because I don’t like you, you know. It’s just that you look something like him”—he nodded at Marco, who was standing silently with his gun trained on Danny, Crittenden’s perfect henchman—“which made it easier. So I got you into witness protection, put the word out on the street that Marco was going to sing his little insides out about the inner workings of the cartel, and waited for them to kill him. Uh, you. Only they kept screwing up.”

  “Sorry about your luck,” Danny said.

  “You always were a lucky son of a bitch.” Crittenden regarded him almost with affection. “So how did you figure out it was me?”

  “When the town house blew up I knew something was wrong. Veith didn’t want to kill me until after I told him where the money was. Blowing up the town house wasn’t something he’d do.”

  “I thought blowing up the town house might be a little strong,” Crittenden admitted. “But I started getting antsy about Veith. Once he started talking to you about the money, he worried me. So I thought, why not tip him off about your whereabouts, then wait until he came to kill you and kill you both in one fell swoop? Plus, I started thinking that it would be better if your body weren’t so recognizable, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” Danny’s voice was dry. “But it was shooting down the plane that did it. I remember your military record: you did that in Afghanistan all day and all night. You should have known I’d catch on after that.”