“You’re a tow truck driver?” There you go: the information he’d been missing.
“Yes.”
“That’s good to know. Now listen. My hands are fastened behind my back with a zip tie. I need you to get me loose. Root around back there, see if you can come up with something sharp. Anything. Use it to cut the tie.”
He could hear her breathing, feel her shifting around a little. She didn’t reply.
“Sam? Hello? Did you hear me?” His voice was tense. It was all he could do not to yell. Hell, the situation was dire.
“I heard you.”
“Okay.” His patience was stretching thin. “Could you please try?”
“How do I know you won’t, like, turn around and attack me if I cut you free?” she asked, sounding like her marbles were coming together at last. Unfortunately, they were coalescing into a configuration that wasn’t helpful. “Maybe you’re a bad guy, too.”
Any dithering on her part was as maddening as it was terrifying. He felt like he was in the final minutes of a basketball game, his team ten points behind with the shot clock running down.
“Who’s in the fucking trunk with you?” he countered. Just staying conscious was requiring increasing amounts of effort. Arguing he didn’t need. “I think that puts us on the same side, don’t you?”
Danny got the impression that she was turning the situation over in her mind. The car swayed and bounced and seemed to pick up speed. Was it rumbling through an intersection? Yes, he decided.
“Sam, look, we don’t have much time,” he said. “They’re taking us somewhere remote where they can shoot us in private. Before they get us there, it would be really helpful if you could find something you can use to cut my hands loose. Please.”
He heard her take another deep breath, felt her tense, as if she was gathering herself.
“Okay, fine,” she said.
“You can trust me, I promise. We both want the same thing, to get out of this alive.” The trunk felt hotter and more airless than ever. It was dark as the grave and cramped as a womb. Besides the faint odors of exhaust and oil and sweat, the raw meat smell of fresh blood was inescapable. Of course, she probably wouldn’t recognize the smell, or know what it meant. When she started moving, really moving, rooting around, he let out a relieved breath. He thought, hoped, prayed that she was doing as he’d told her: hunting for something with which to cut him free.
She was the only chance they had.
“How many of them are there?” She was breathing too fast, and her voice sounded a little thin. He deduced from that that she was smart enough to be scared, but at least her thinking seemed to be clear.
“When the trunk opens? Should be two. Maybe three.” He could feel the unmistakably female shape of her pressed close against his back. Under other circumstances, he might almost have enjoyed it, but what it meant now was that there wasn’t much room for either of them to maneuver.
“With guns?” It wasn’t really a question.
“Yes.” He felt the cool touch of her hands on his forearms, sliding down to his bound wrists. Then she found the place where his wrists crossed, where the zip ties were practically slicing through his skin, and seemed to want to explore that, too. What was she doing, checking out the restraints? Mary Mother of God, they were running out of time.
“It’s a plastic zip tie,” he explained again. It was too dark for her to see anything. Like him, she was effectively blind. “Two of them, one on top of the other. You can’t break them. You need something to cut them with.”
He felt her breasts pressing into his back, felt her knees digging into him. A soft sweet scent—shampoo?—cut through the stale air. All potent reminders that she was a woman. Who would die soon if he couldn’t find a way to save her.
If he let it, the thought would make him crazy.
“Hurry,” he said.
“Hold still.” Her fingers on his wrists tightened into a real grip. Then she bore down. Pain rocketed up his arms.
Ow. But he didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t want to do anything that might spook her.
“You’re going to have to cut the ties,” he repeated through clenched teeth. Something sharp stabbed into his left wrist—a blade, the business end of a blade—surprising him so much that he let out a small yelp.
“Sorry,” she said. But it didn’t matter, because between the pressure and the prick of the pointed blade and the subsequent sawing sensation he was beginning to see some light.
“You found something to cut with.” Impossible as it seemed, she’d done it, and incredibly quickly, too.
“I carry a pocket knife.”
The rush of thankfulness that he experienced was devout in its intensity. “There you go. That’s my girl.”
“Hold still.”
Trying to gather his strength in preparation for what was to come, Danny did his best to keep his arms rigid while he took stock of the rest of his body. The pain was bad, so he tried to block it out. He was conscious of his heart thumping. His pulse pounded in his ears. He was swallowing air through his mouth now, drawing in what little there was in greedy gulps, trying to keep his head clear. Thanks to her, it looked like they might actually have a shot at making a stand. But even if she was able to cut him free in time, he was still going to need a miracle to get them both out of this alive. His ears were acutely attuned to the various sounds outside the trunk. They were still rolling, but that wouldn’t last forever. When the vehicle came to a stop—
She said, “You want to tell me who you are and why you’re in a car trunk?” Sawing away, she caught him in the wrist with the blade again. He needed to be free too badly to make so much as a sound.
“I’m the unluckiest son of a bitch in the country?” Danny tried, feeling the sudden release of a portion of the pressure around his wrists like a gift from on high. Then he remembered the state he was in, and didn’t know whether to laugh or howl. Unarmed, weak from blood loss, beat to pieces, with a bullet through his thigh and a possibly broken finger and countless other injuries he hadn’t even begun to try to catalog, he was going to be a hell of a warrior, for sure.
But he was going to give it his best shot. Aside from really, truly not wanting to die tonight, now he had this girl to protect.
“Is that supposed to be an answer?” Voice edgy, she was already sawing through the second zip tie. She stopped sawing as she spoke. He could almost feel her frowning at him.
Jesus, this wasn’t the moment for attitude. The close, airless confines of the trunk were zapping what little strength he had remaining to him. The thought of what was waiting beyond it scared him to the bone.
“Keep cutting that tie. If you want to have a chance of living through this, I need to be free to move before they open that trunk again.”
“Do you have a name? Or not?” But at least she comprehended enough of the desperateness of the situation to start sawing away again.
“You don’t need a name. All you need to know is that I’m the guy who’s going to keep you alive, all right?” He thought about that for a second. “At least, if you hurry and I can.”
The smallest of pauses. “Oh, wow, now I feel all safe.”
The sarcasm was absolutely deserved, and might even have made him smile under less harrowing conditions. As reassurance, he had to admit that his probably too truthful promise left something to be desired. But at least she was still working that knife against the tie.
“So can you tell me why you’re in this trunk?” she asked.
He’d give her this much: she didn’t give up. At the moment, he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad one.
“You don’t want to know,” Danny said. “Believe me. The less you know, the safer you are.”
She snorted. “Like anything you tell me is going to make a difference now?”
Okay, so she was smart enough to realize that she was in deep shit however this played out.
“All you need to remember is that helping me is helping
yourself,” he said. “We’re on the same team.”
She made a skeptical sound. “And I’m just supposed to take your word for that?”
“You got any alternative?”
The second tie broke, which happy circumstance he thought distracted her from answering. God almighty, his hands were free! Relief was accompanied by lightning bolts of pain shooting up his arms, into his shoulders, then firing back down into his hands, as the position into which they had been forced abruptly eased. Gritting his teeth against a groan, Danny brought his arms around in front of him, moving slowly, gingerly shaking his hands out, flexing his fingers as best he could.
The beating he’d endured before they’d pistol-whipped him senseless had done some damage to his hands, that was for sure. How much, he didn’t have time to assess.
“Give me the knife.” He thrust his hand behind him to receive it, ignoring the searing pain that attacked him as he moved.
“Why?” Sudden suspicion laced her voice.
Was it his imagination, or was the car slowing down? The swaying was definitely less pronounced.
“Why do you think? Oh, are you worried I’m going to turn around and attack you with it? I’m not, okay? I’ve got two more ties around my ankles. You can’t reach them. So give me the knife.”
The sound she made defied interpretation, but she pressed the knife—one of those small, Swiss-army-type pocket knives with a million gizmos attached, from the feel of it—into his palm. There wasn’t much room, but difficult as it was he managed to stretch down enough to start hacking away at the ties binding his ankles. The blade was small, the movements required to cut through the hard plastic ties accompanied by a thousand different versions of pain. Through it all, he was supremely conscious of a fresh upsurge of blood oozing from his thigh.
Got to stop the bleeding. That was the next item on his survive-the-night list.
“How sure are you that they’re going to kill us?” The girl’s voice was breathier than before. Probably because she now had enough of a handle on the situation to be really, truly frightened. His initial instinct was to reassure her, to tell her that everything was going to be all right. Under the circumstances, though, his initial instinct was shit. Truth was what she needed to hear.
“One hundred percent. I’d be dead already if they hadn’t gotten interrupted.” The question was, who, exactly, had interrupted them: Crittenden and the cavalry, or more of the contingent of hapless U.S. Marshals out of whose custody he’d been snatched, or someone else hunting Marco? Or even a new player whose moves he wasn’t yet trying to follow around the board? Answer: impossible to know. As Danny assessed the truth of that, he sliced through the first tie, and was on to the second. It wasn’t his imagination: the car was definitely slowing down.
The sudden crunch of gravel under the tires acted on him like a warning siren: wherever they were going now, it was somewhere off the public roads. Which meant they might very well be nearing Veith’s killing ground of choice. Because of course Veith was on his way, planning to rendezvous with Torres and finish the job.
Under those conditions, the sudden turn onto gravel could not be good.
He would be a fool to assume anything other than that they were approaching their destination.
“Hear that gravel? I think we’re just about to get where we’ve been going.”
“We’re probably in the scrap yard,” she said.
“Scrap yard?”
“For old cars and things. They recycle scrap metal. It’s not too far from where I found you. It’s all gravel.”
That made sense. A scrap yard in the middle of the night sounded like Veith’s kind of place. He knew it was probably a waste of time, but still he tried to identify any source of possible help.
“An attendant on duty? Anything around, like a bar or an open-all-night convenience store or something?” Someplace she could head for when she bolted.
“No.” The tempo of her breathing had slowed down, like she was deliberately calming herself. He succeeded in cutting through the second tie: hallelujah, his feet were free.
As soon as he moved his cramped legs, pain shot through his body like a thousand flaming arrows. He felt the hot slide of more blood leaving the hole in his thigh. Who was he kidding? He was going to fight off Veith and his thugs with a pocket knife? In the shape he was in? Hell, he was surprised he wasn’t already unconscious from blood loss. Chalk it up to adrenaline, he thought. Forcing himself to concentrate, he moved on to item two on his survive-the-night list and started tugging his belt from its loops.
“What are you doing?” she asked, clearly having felt the change in his movements. There was definitely fear in her voice now: it was sharper, more tightly wound. Well, he thought as he pulled his belt free, if she wasn’t scared she would have to be brain-dead.
“I’ve got a bullet hole in my leg. I’m going to use my belt to put a tourniquet on it.”
“They shot you.” It wasn’t a question. “That’s where all the blood came from.”
“Yeah.”
“What, is this like a hit on you or something? Who are they?”
“Again, you’re better off not knowing.”
A long, harsh grinding sound from outside, from somewhere toward the front of the car, made Sam inhale sharply.
“That noise you’re hearing? That’s the brakes on the tow truck,” she told him, even as the car lurched and rocked in a way that was different from before. “We’re stopping.”
Queasy and light-headed, sucking in the too-hot, oxygen-deprived air like they weren’t making it anymore, knife tucked carefully away into his T-shirt pocket so there was no danger of him losing it in the dark, Danny was already wrapping his belt around his thigh and pulling it tight. God, that hurt. It made a rough but effective tourniquet, and if he left it in place longer than about the next fifteen minutes he would probably be in danger of losing his leg.
Which, unfortunately, seemed like the least of his problems at the moment.
“As soon as that trunk lid opens, I want you to be ready to go. Jump and run. Just run away into the dark as fast and as far as you can. For your life, you hear?” he told her.
“I hear.” The tempo of her breathing had slowed down, as if she were deliberately calming herself. “Oh, God. I’m scared.”
“In a situation like this, fear’s a good thing. Keeps you sharp.” He reached around, caught her hand. It felt slender and fine-boned and, surprisingly considering the temperature in the trunk, cold as ice. Or maybe not so surprising: he could feel a slight tremor in her fingers that underlined just how truly afraid she was. Her hand clung to his, clutching it, telling him that she needed comforting in the worst way. Pulling her hand around in front of him, he surrendered to the impulse of the moment and lifted it to his mouth, kissed the knuckles. He felt her slight movement and took it for surprise, but again she didn’t try to pull away.
“We got this,” he told her. He was still holding her hand, and she was holding his hand back even more tightly. Maybe it was a lie, but right now he felt she needed to hear it. To stand even the smallest chance of escaping, she was going to need confidence and courage. “We’re going to make it. Just do what I tell you, and you should be fine.”
“I will.” Her voice had steadied. “What about you?”
“You let me worry about me.”
The car stopped its forward motion. Then the rocking stopped. They weren’t moving at all any longer. His body tightened as his heartbeat speeded up. Behind him, Sam caught her breath and quickly withdrew her hand from his. She must have realized what the fact that they had stopped meant, too. He felt her tense, and then her weight no longer pressed into his back as she edged away from him, scooting as best she could back toward the rear of the trunk. While he could still feel the warmth of her touching him in places, she seemed to have put as much distance between them as possible, as if she thought maybe they might overlook her or something when the trunk opened. Which he didn’t have a proble
m with: at least it gave him some room to maneuver. As long as she remembered to jump.
“Here’s the deal.” He fished the knife—the pathetically small and way-less-than-lethal knife—out of his pocket. Ironically, now that he had cut off the blood flow to most of his leg it hurt worse than ever. Enough to where not thinking about it required real effort; fortunately, he had distractions. “I’m going to go after whoever opens the trunk as soon as it happens. They think I’m still tied up, so they won’t be expecting that. You take advantage of their distraction, and jump out of the trunk. You’ll probably only have a few seconds, so run like hell the minute you hit the ground.”
“Shh.” She breathed the warning.
That was when he heard it at last: the slight crunch of footsteps on gravel.
They were coming.
Danny tensed. He took a deep breath, centered himself, and felt his pulse rate slow way down: battle mode. At least now, unbound, he had a chance, however slim it might be. He braced the foot of his uninjured leg against a protuberance at the side of the trunk, the better to help him spring out, and got a good grip on the knife. His hand-to-hand combat skills were top-notch, but the sad truth was that, virtually weaponless, it was hard to defend against one gun, let alone two. Uninjured, he might have stood a fighting chance, but as it was . . .
The footsteps stopped. Danny’s every sense went on red alert. From the sounds, he knew that there were still only two of them, even knew where they were. Both stood behind the car, one in the center, one to the left.
Torres and Thug Two, he presumed. If Veith was there, or anyone else, they’d arrived earlier. He would have heard another vehicle crunching over the gravel.
“Heads up,” he whispered.
Just as Danny realized that he couldn’t hear her breathing any longer, a metallic click sent the hair on the back of his neck into bristle mode. It also gave him a split second’s warning: someone had hit the trunk release button on the BMW’s key ring.
This is it.
His gut clenched. His muscles bunched. Adrenaline shot through his veins like a speedball rush.
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