“I do that, and I’m a dead man. You’re dead, too. They know I’ve been shot, and believe me, they’re hoping to capitalize on it. I’ve got no doubt that they’re already keeping watch on all the hospitals in the area. We show up at one, they’ll grab us both. Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “Who are they?” was the question he read burning in them, but this time she didn’t even bother to ask it. Smart girl, she was learning.
“You bleed to death trying to treat yourself, and you’re just as dead.” Her voice was flat.
“Do your part, and I won’t bleed to death. And maybe we’ll both get out of this fiasco alive. Ready?”
She looked alarmed. “No.”
“Too bad. Here goes.” Taking hold of the dangling end of the belt, bracing himself for what he was about to do, Danny nevertheless succumbed to the smallest of grim smiles as he got a good grip on the buckle that was digging into his flesh. She looked so apprehensive that he couldn’t help it. Her eyes were big, her mouth was tight, and she was gripping the pad—white-knuckling the edges of it, actually—in both hands.
“Probably you should know that I’m not a fan of lots of blood,” she said, unexpectedly meeting his eyes.
“Me neither. Especially when the blood’s mine.” Gritting his teeth, he eased the leather free of the buckle, then groaned as the belt loosened, blood flowed in a warm gush, and a wave of agony rolled down his leg. Not pain, mind you. Pain he had been prepared for. But this was something different, like a chainsaw chewing up his leg from the inside out. Gritting his teeth, he lifted his rear off the seat and shoved his jeans down his legs, moving fast before the pain had a chance to overwhelm him. To his surprise, she helped him, gripping the waistband and yanking hard. The feel of the bloody fabric of his jeans releasing its hold on the wound was a revelation, and not in a good way.
“Ah, shit,” he breathed as the world receded and he had one final second of clarity in which he knew he was going to faint.
Then he did.
The surprise was that he woke up again. He became aware of something jabbing uncomfortably into the right side of his neck and opened his eyes and turned his head to find out what it was. An outdated, knob-style car door lock, he discovered, was gouging him right in the tender flesh just below his jawbone because his head had been slumped against it. The reason his head had been slumped against it was—it took a second, but then he had it—that he’d passed out. The top of his head protruded through the open window. He realized that when, still slightly disoriented, he glanced up and saw the dense black of the night sky punctuated by stars. The chirping of insects and the rustle of the tall grass surrounding the truck he was sitting in filled his ears. He was . . . where? Then something in his brain clicked on, and the events of the preceding four hours fast-forwarded through his mind in what was basically the highlight reel from hell.
He should be dead already. But he wasn’t, not because of the overwhelming might of the various government agencies charged with keeping him safe, not because of his own smarts and physical prowess, but because he’d gotten lucky.
Well, lucky worked. So far.
And he was lucky again, he thought as he shifted position so that he was more or less sitting up back inside the cab, that the window he’d landed on had been made of safety glass and had exploded into nothing when he’d shot it, or he would have been in danger of cutting his throat on the remaining jagged shards when he had keeled over.
“Don’t move.” A sharp voice caused him to glance down in surprise. A girl—the girl: Sam, he identified her almost instantly; yeah, he knew who she was, he wasn’t as out of it as all that—crouched in the foot well beside him. She was close, close enough so that he could smell the same faint floral scent he’d caught a whiff of in the trunk earlier, close enough so that his hand brushed the soft cotton covering one warm, firm breast when he moved. He shifted his hand away, of course, but not before registering the unexpected sexiness of the sensation. She’d lost the baseball cap long since, and long, wavy strands of inky hair that had worked loose from her ponytail were tucked behind her ears. Turned slightly sideways as she leaned in over his still-teeth-clenchingly-painful thigh, she filled the space where his legs would have rested under normal circumstances. At the moment, though, he was sprawled in a semireclining position along the cracked vinyl seat with both of his legs from the knees down hanging off into the driver’s foot well. His feet were hobbled together by his jeans, which from the feel of things were down around his ankles. After he’d fainted, she’d clearly pulled them well out of her way and gone to work on his wound on her own. So his dignity was in tatters; at least he was alive.
“I passed out.” Stating the obvious, he was chagrined to realize that his voice was thin.
“Yes, you did.”
Danny took a second to absorb the fierce expression on the pale oval face that she turned up to him, and to appreciate the slender flexibility that allowed her to curl so efficiently into the foot well. Then his gaze moved on to her hands. Even while she frowned at him, she kept a firm hold on the end of the Ace bandage she had apparently just finished wrapping around his injured thigh. She was, he saw, in the process of securing it with small metal clips.
“How’s the bleeding?” he asked, his eyes on her. It was dark, but moonlight flooded the truck and her slim fingers moving against the bulky bandage were easy enough to see.
“It was bad. I got it stopped. Lucky for you.” There was that word again; he supposed that if he survived this he ought to get it tattooed over his heart. She was no longer looking at him. Instead, she was working the clips into the bandage with deft efficiency. The pertinent leg of his bloodstained blue boxers had been shoved up as high as it would go, presumably to get it out of her way. His bare thigh above and below the bandage was caked with blood. A lot more blood than he remembered seeing when he’d pulled his jeans down, because of course the act of removing his jeans had wiped most of the old blood away.
“So, what happened?”
She shot another quick glance up at him. “You blacked out. You bled like a stuck pig. I saved your life. Again. You owe me. Big time.”
If he’d had any strength at all, her truculence would have made him smile. “Duly noted.”
Jesus, he felt like shit. The absolute agony in his leg had subsided, but it still throbbed and ached and burned like napalm bubbling through his veins. Even his foot was getting into the act: the only way he could describe the sensation was pins and needles to the nth degree. That was good, probably, because it meant his circulation had been restored, but it hurt like a mother. He had a feeling that, best-case scenario, he wasn’t going to be walking anywhere that required more than a few limping steps anytime soon. In addition, he was woozy, with an overall sense of physical weakness that warned him that another fainting spell wasn’t out of the question. He couldn’t afford to faint again. For whatever reason, she had stayed put the first time, and helped him. He couldn’t count on her not booking it if there was a second. And the death squad on his trail was good. He might have lost them temporarily, but if one thing was absolutely certain it was that they hadn’t given up. They were going to keep coming until they were stopped, or he was dead. He should try to find a phone and call Crittenden—no, wait, he couldn’t. Rick Marco didn’t know Crittenden. That was what the fuzzy-headedness was doing to him: putting him in danger of forgetting that he was Marco, and the guiding principle behind this run for his life had to be, what would Marco do?
Shit.
“You okay?” She was frowning at him. Probably he’d gone a little glassy-eyed there, remembering that he had to play this thing out like Marco.
He focused on her again. For whatever reason, that made him feel more on his game. Probably because her life depended on what he did next, too.
“Relatively. How’d you control the bleeding?”
“Pressure point.” She shot him a glinting look. Remembering how rucked up the
leg of his boxers was, he got the picture: she’d stuck her hand in his crotch to apply the necessary pressure, which he appreciated, both for the unexpectedly sexy image it conjured up and for the fact that it had worked. “Followed by direct pressure to the wound. After that, I packed the wound with gauze and antibiotic ointment, put my shirt on top of that, and wrapped the whole thing up with more gauze, and tape, and this. Be glad I’ve taken some EMT classes.” She carefully smoothed the bandage. “I think as long as you don’t go moving around too much, you won’t bleed to death.” Her hands were busy, and she wasn’t looking at him any longer. Instead, she was gathering up her supplies. “There’s no way to be sure, though.”
“You’ve taken EMT classes?” Talking kept him in the moment, which was a good thing. He felt light-headed and queasy, probably from blood loss.
“Yes.” She grimaced. “Three, actually. If I keep going at the rate I’m going, I might even manage to get licensed by the time I’m, like, fifty or so.”
“So how does that work if you don’t like blood?”
She shrugged. “I don’t like a lot of things. But without a college degree, there are only so many jobs I can get that pay enough to give my kid a decent life. Being an EMT is one of them. So I suck it up about the blood.”
“What about this tow-truck thing you have going on?”
“It works for now. But I only have the one truck, and it’s old. When it finally breaks down for good, where am I going to get the money to buy another?”
“What about your kid’s father?”
This time the look she shot him was wary.
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing. Just seems hard that you should have to provide for a kid on your own.”
“Life’s a bitch, or haven’t you heard?”
He studied her averted face as she crammed the last of the remaining supplies back into the box, then restored it to the glove compartment. She could have let him bleed to death, but she hadn’t. Well, he meant to repay her by keeping her alive.
“You want to help me get my pants back on again, we’ll be good to go.” Having his jeans down around his ankles was almost as bad as having his legs tied in terms of what it did to his mobility. Plus, it was embarrassing. But he had a bad feeling that he might not be capable of the effort required to do it all by himself. What he needed was some time to recover his strength. Unfortunately, time was something he didn’t have to spare.
Her lips compressed, but she reached for his jeans and started pulling them back up over his calves. The feel of her cool hands brushing against his bare skin triggered another one of those instant, instinctive moments of awareness of her as a woman, which was, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how he looked at it, a little muted by the circumstances. When he could reach the waistband without shifting around too much, he grabbed hold.
“I got this,” he said, even though his head swam alarmingly as he moved. Jesus, he felt weak.
“Don’t be an idiot.” Ignoring his directive, she helped him get his jeans up, which was a good thing. In the end, he wasn’t sure he could have managed on his own.
“Ah.” Despite his efforts at stiff-upper-lipping it, the sound emerged as he sank back onto the seat less gently than he’d intended and the wound got jostled. She shot him a look, but didn’t say anything. Instead, while he fastened and zipped up his jeans, she began to extricate herself from the foot well, moving carefully so as not to jar his injured leg. Her snug white tank was liberally covered with dark streaks now, he saw, and it didn’t require much of a mental stretch to figure out that they’d been made by his blood.
“Thank you,” he said, meaning it.
“It’s only a temporary fix. You still need to get to a hospital,” she warned, slithering around him until she was once again sitting behind the wheel. Clearly drained, she slumped against the door, letting her head rest back against her intact window as she looked at him warily. Moonlight played over her face. She was exquisitely pretty: her skin was creamy smooth, her cheekbones were high, her jawline determined but delicate. Her lips were full and soft looking. Her nose was small and straight. Her eyes—by moonlight they were a deep, clear blue—were thickly lashed and faintly slanted. Now that she was minus the shape-concealing uniform shirt, he was able to see that her shoulders were slender but well formed, her arms firm and sleek, and her breasts—well, suffice it to say that even under current conditions he was definitely a fan. The cable cord was still tied around her waist, which was slender and shapely; apparently she had been too consumed with patching him up to take the time to untie it. He undoubtedly would have been feeling guilty about now for forcing her to tie herself to him if what he had told her hadn’t been 100 percent accurate: she was in too deep to get out. Without him, she was a dead woman walking, unlikely to live out the next few hours, collateral damage as Veith et al came after him full bore.
“So why’d you do it?” he asked, as he finished inventorying long, slim legs in blue jeans over sturdy black hiking boots and his gaze returned to her face.
“What?”
“Stay. Bandage me up.”
“I couldn’t just let you bleed to death.” Her tone was testy. It didn’t take a genius to infer that she was having second thoughts about the wisdom of what she’d just done. Using her teeth to tear open a small foil packet that she’d produced from somewhere, she pulled from it a pair of wet wipes, unfolded them, and proceeded to wipe her face and arms then scrub at her hands. “I’ll drive you to wherever you’re going—as long as it’s fairly close—but then I’m out of this. I have to get home to my son.”
Something in her tone told him that she thought the tide of power had turned in her favor. Danny frowned. Arguing with her at this point seemed counterproductive, however, since she had professed willingness to drive at his direction; his best bet was to wait until she was no longer willing and revisit the discussion then, when hopefully his head was a little clearer. He was just coming to that conclusion when an alarming possibility occurred to him. Thrusting a discreet hand down into the door pocket at his side confirmed what he already suspected: she’d taken the gun.
He withdrew his hand slowly. She watched him. From the expression on her face, she knew what was up.
“We’re both better off if I have the gun.” His tone was even, reasonable.
She snorted. “I don’t think so.”
“How about if I give you my word I’m not going to shoot you?”
“How about if I give you my word I’m not going to shoot you?” She paused. “Unless you deserve it.”
“Professional killers are hot on our tail. I need to be able to shoot them.”
“If they find us, I’ll shoot them.”
“No offense, baby doll, but—”
“Just so we’re clear, I’m not your ‘baby doll,’” she broke in. She was busy untying the cord around her waist as she spoke. Concluding that since she hadn’t bolted while he was unconscious she probably wasn’t going to anytime soon, he merely watched as she undid the knot and, with a hard look at him, gathered up the jumper cable and dropped it into the back, where it landed with a clatter on the floor. “And you’re not getting my gun back, so you might as well give up trying. Where do you want me to drive you? If I were you I’d make up my mind fast, before I decide my best bet is straight to the nearest police station.”
“The police can’t protect you. Even if they threw you in jail you wouldn’t be safe. These people can get to you anywhere.”
“So you say. I just have your word for that.”
They exchanged measuring looks.
“Let’s get out of here. Head for the expressway.” With that, he tacitly conceded that he wasn’t going to be wrestling her for possession of the gun anytime soon. Staying on the move was vital if he wanted to keep them one step ahead of Veith. His original intention had been to head across the river into St. Louis. The breached safe house, as well as the other nearby house where Crittenden’s group was bas
ed, was located over there, in the Riverview neighborhood. But then he remembered that Marco would know nothing of the second house, or hovering FBI agents. All Marco would know was that the U.S. Marshals guarding him hadn’t been able to keep him safe, that Veith and the cartel had found him, that he’d escaped by the skin of his teeth, and that he was running for his life.
So what would Marco, badly wounded and panicking, aware that it was just a matter of time until Veith or somebody else equally lethal caught up with him, do?
If he were smart, he’d turn himself back over to the marshals. First of all, he needed medical attention. The patch-up job on his leg wasn’t a long-term fix by any means, and if the way he felt was any indication, he needed to get it, as well as his other injuries, seen to pronto. Plus there was the girl, whom his version of Marco was determined to keep safe, which in his present condition he wasn’t going to be able to do on his own. All things considered, and tonight’s fuck-up notwithstanding, the marshals were probably Marco’s best bet for staying alive. And the thing about a fuck-up was, it looked bad on the records of everyone involved. The marshal’s office would be pissed, embarrassed, reeling from the black eye. They would pull out all the stops to make sure Marco was safe under their protection. Nobody would be getting through their defenses a second time.
Danny caught himself: he was thinking like an FBI agent again. He had to be careful about that. Nobody, outside his contact and supervisor, Crittenden, and Crittenden’s small, elite group, knew that he wasn’t Marco, or what his mission really was.
If at all possible, until this operation was over, he needed to keep the deception in place. He wasn’t going to die as Marco if he could help it, but as long as he considered that he had at least a decent chance at staying alive he was going to play this out like Marco would.
“So why don’t you give me that phone in your pocket?” He held his hand out for it. Watching her slight start and widening eyes flash a look in his direction as he revealed his knowledge of what she undoubtedly considered her guilty secret would have been amusing if he hadn’t felt so bad, so light-headed and nauseous and like he was growing weaker by the second. As it was, he just wanted to get them both somewhere safe as quick as he could. Before, as he feared was going to happen soon, he was no longer able to function. “There’s a call I need to make.”
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