Shiver (39 page)

“Should we just jump?” Tyler’s whisper, directed at Marco, was full of fear.

“Hang tight a minute.” Marco looked at Sam. “I’m going to lower you down.” His instructions were low and rapid. “Then I’ll hand Tyler down to you. Then the two of you run like hell. Don’t wait for me.”

“You’re coming with us, right?”

He nodded. “Count on it.”

“Are we going to the other town house? Or—”

Shaking his head, he broke in before she could finish. “I’d like to hook up with Sanders if we could. We may need the firepower. But we’re going to get away from here and see what’s what before we decide.” Passing Tyler the crutch to hold, Marco stretched out on his stomach on the shingles and looked over the edge, then a moment later beckoned to Sam to come closer. “When you get through the gate, run around the outside of the fence toward the street behind us. In case somebody’s watching from out front.” The prospect made Sam’s blood run cold. She nodded wordlessly, and he held out his hands to her. Scooting into position, she put her hands into his. “Okay, go.”

Sam slid over the edge. Briefly she dangled in space, suspended from Marco’s strong hands. When he let go, she dropped the few remaining feet to the ground, landing softly on the balls of her feet. Nobody attacked her. Nothing bad happened. Glancing fearfully all around, she saw nothing beyond the rectangle of fuzzy light thrown by the sliding glass window, and the tree and the basketball goal and the chairs and the grill, along with the ghoulish shadows they cast. Everything looked
absolutely as it should, everything was absolutely still. And something about
that
made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

The killer could be anywhere.

“Mom.”

Looking up, she caught Tyler as Marco lowered him down to her. He weighed practically nothing at all, and she gave him a quick hug as she set him on the ground. Then she grabbed his hand and together they ran for the gate, staying low, hugging the shadows near the fence as they went. A slight thump made her look back: the crutch lay on the ground. Marco had dropped it. Out of the corner of her eye, as she fumbled with the latch, she watched Marco swing over the side. Landing lightly on his good leg, he hopped once or twice before he got his balance. Then he grabbed his crutch and came after them.

Finally the latch opened. She and Tyler made it through the gate and around the corner and were running through the even more absolute darkness of the strip of empty land on the other side of the fence when she glanced back to make sure Marco was following.

He was. Her gaze had just found him, coming around the corner of the fence, moving fast for a man using a crutch, when the town house exploded behind them with a sound like a sonic boom.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
he force of the blast slammed Sam face first into the ground. Debris flew past her, pelting the grass around her like some hellish rain. Behind her, the night was suddenly as bright as day as flames engulfed the town house with a roar. The acrid scent of the fire reached her nostrils on a whoosh of blistering air. Stunned, she lay there for a moment, ears ringing, cheek pressed into the thick grass, and then she thought
Tyler,
and lifted her head.

He was a few feet in front of her, lying flat in the grass, facedown just like she was. Even as Sam’s heart skipped a beat he rolled into a sitting position and looked back at her, and then past her, at the blazing town house. Blinking dazedly, he watched the conflagration shooting through the roof. The fire painted his small face, and indeed everything around them, a flickering red. Sam looked back, too, and saw Marco sprawled on the ground behind them. He was unmoving; if he were hurt, she couldn’t tell. Beyond him, she watched flames reaching like bright orange fingers toward the sky. The roar of the fire had a
fierce crackling quality to it now, and she could feel its intense heat.

If the explosion had occurred only a few minutes earlier, they would have been dead now. The certainty made her insides clench.

“Tyler, are you hurt?” Her voice was high-pitched, wobbly.

“No—” He broke off, his head turning sharply to the left.
“Mom, look out.”
Fear infused his voice.

In the process of pushing herself into a sitting position, Sam jerked a glance in the direction in which he was looking just in time to see someone racing at her from the shadows. Her heart leaped into her throat. Every instinct she possessed screamed
danger.

“Run, Tyler!” she shrieked, and with her heart in her throat watched him scramble to his feet and bolt even as she shot to her feet and started to run herself. The bear mace in her pocket: remembering it, she grabbed for it, fumbled to pull it out. But the man—it was a man, stocky and strong—caught her too soon, grabbing a handful of her shirt even as she tried to get her finger on the nozzle, tried to whirl and spray him. He knocked it from her hand before she could get it into position, then yanked her back against him. Going into instant, instinctive self-defense mode, Sam slammed an elbow back into his rib cage—
“Ummph!”
he said—and directed a potentially knee-cap-shattering kick backward. Before it could land her assailant dodged, then wrapped an arm around her throat in a chokehold that abruptly cut off the scream that had been tearing out of her lungs. Clawing at the arm around her neck, still kicking
and fighting despite the pressure on her windpipe that felt like it would crush it and that had her choking and coughing and gasping for air, she watched with burgeoning terror as a white paneled van with some kind of writing on the side barreled over the grass toward her.

It screeched to a stop just feet away at the same time as she felt the cold barrel of a gun jam hard against her temple.

Her captor yelled, “Stay back!” Then, to her, he growled, “Make another move, and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

She was no fool: the gun at her head meant instant compliance. She immediately stopped fighting and stood perfectly still in his hold. She could barely breathe, and she couldn’t talk; the arm around her neck was too tight.

“I said,
stay back
!”

The warning was directed at Marco. Sam’s terrified gaze slewed around to find him on his feet aiming his pistol at the man holding her. He was maybe fifteen feet away now, two-handing his gun, only slightly favoring his bad leg as the crutch lay forgotten at his feet. He’d clearly been rushing her assailant, and had just as clearly stopped when the gun had made contact with her head. Now, despite the weapon in his hand, he was as helpless to help her as she was to help herself. As she realized that, her blood turned to ice. Her heart thundered. Her pulse raced.

“Let her go!” Marco never faltered. His eyes stayed fixed on the man holding her. But Sam knew, and she very much feared her captor knew, that he would never fire as long as that gun was at her head.

Sam’s attention was jerked away by the sound of the van doors opening.
White’s Irrigation
—that’s what the lettering on the side said, in big dark letters. Camouflage for the van’s real purpose, Sam thought with a sickening certainty as a man jumped out of the passenger seat and another came around the front of the van. A loud rattle—the sliding door in the van’s side being opened—made her glance that way again. The passenger seat guy had done the honors; the van’s black interior yawned like a hungry mouth.

“Drop your weapon, Marco. You’re outgunned.” That voice—it belonged to the guy who’d come around the front of the van. Sam recognized it instantly. A thrill of horror ran down her spine. The man in her house—the one who had stepped into view in her kitchen as poor Mrs. Menifee’s life had drained away—the one who had called her by name—it was him. She would never forget his voice for as long as she lived. Average height, average weight, completely ordinary looking, and to her, now, totally unmistakable. Cold sweat washed over her in a wave. He had a gun in his hand. It was aimed at Marco. The passenger seat guy had a gun pointed at Marco, too. Behind them, the van doors were open and the engine was running, although the van itself appeared to be empty. There was a reason, and the only reason Sam could come up with—she was about to be forced into the van—was horrifying. Terror chilled her blood. Her stomach churned. The orange glow of the raging fire gave everything a hellish aspect, elongating shadows, distorting faces. The roar of it blocked out any sounds from farther away. Hot flakes of ash floated earthward like a flurry of black snow.

“You want to take me on, Veith? Even if I only got one shot off, I’d make sure it drilled right through your skull. You want to live, let the girl go.” Marco’s voice was hard. His weapon was aimed at Veith now.

“You fire a shot, and she’s dead. And you know it.” Veith gave a jerk of his head, which, from the tightening of the arm around her throat, Sam deduced was a signal to the man holding her. Clinging to his arm, she fought to suck in air. In the distance, the barely audible wail of a siren gave her a flicker of hope. They were in an empty lot at the very end of the street, blocked off from seeing much of anything except the raging fire by the fence and the van, which also kept them from being seen. But people had to be spilling out of the neighboring houses. With the explosion and fire, help in the form of police and firefighters had to be on the way. And Sanders and Groves and O’Brien—where were they? God, were they even alive? Casting desperate glances in every direction, Sam searched for help: nothing. She searched for Tyler. He was nowhere to be seen.

Thank God he got away.

Veith said, “Here’s how this is going to go down, Marco. Either you drop your weapon and come with us like a good boy, or we’ll leave you here and just take the girl. And the next time anybody sees her, she’ll be chopped up into so many pieces she’ll look like fish bait.”

“Back up, bitch.” The low voice in her ear was accompanied by the grinding pressure of the gun barrel against her temple.

Sam’s heart slammed against her rib cage as the man holding her started to pull her backward. She tried to resist, but with his
arm crushing her windpipe and a gun to her head there wasn’t a whole lot she could do other than be clumsy and drag her feet, which earned her a quick, vicious tightening of the arm around her neck. She choked, gasping for air. Her eyes fastened despairingly on Marco. His expression was impossible to read, but his stance hadn’t changed, and his weapon remained fixed on Veith.

“Let her go and I’ll come with you,” Marco said. Dread twisted Sam’s insides into knots as she recognized the desperation that underlay the offer. It was the sound of fear, of defeat, of knowing that they had him and he couldn’t win. Hearing it beneath the studied calm of Marco’s voice rammed the almost unthinkable truth home for her: on this terrible night, both of them were probably going to die.

“No.” Dragging her heels, Sam managed to gasp the word out even as she was forced right up to the side of the van, right up to the open sliding door.

It was an instinctive protest, made because she loved him. She couldn’t bear the idea that he would sacrifice himself for her. For Tyler’s sake, if it came right down to it maybe she would have let him, but she knew, and she was sure Marco knew, too, that the bargain he was trying to make just wasn’t going to happen. They weren’t going to let her go no matter what he did, so the best thing he could do was stay out of their reach and save himself.

“Goddamn it, Veith, let her go!” Marco’s gun tracked Veith. “You want me, not her.”

“I want you both,” Veith said, confirming what Sam already knew. “But I’ll just take her if I have to.”

“Get in,” said the voice in her ear, and when she wouldn’t, when she refused to climb into the van, the gun jabbed harder into her temple and the arm around her neck tightened so viciously that she choked and gagged and went instantly light-headed. Then, without ever removing the gun from her head, he stepped up into the van and she had perforce to step up behind him or be strangled to death. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that the van was configured with two front seats, a small, empty cargo area in the middle where she and her captor were positioned, and four bucket seats in the rear. The floor was carpeted, and there were three doors, all of them open.

Veith made a gesture. Then he and the other man started backing away from Marco, keeping their weapons trained on him but moving toward the van.

“You coming, Marco?” Veith asked.