Shiver

by Karen Robards

  Actually, given all that he had just been through, she would be surprised if he didn’t wake up with screaming nightmares.

  And the cause of all her problems was standing right in front of her, in a robe, barefoot, with a deep vee of tanned and muscular bare chest exposed, giving not the smallest indication that he was concerned with anything except downing way too many pills.

  “You’re not supposed to take more than eight of those pills in twenty-four hours, you know,” she snapped, pausing just outside the bathroom door to glare at him because she just couldn’t help herself. Not that she’d been keeping track, but this was the fourth time she’d watched him gulp down pain pills, and every time she’d counted he’d swallowed at least four pills at a time. She was too tired to do the math, but that brought the count to way over eight pills in way less than twenty-four hours. That she knew of. And who knew how many she’d missed? “What, are you a druggie along with everything else?”

  Groves and O’Brien had taken what had seemed like a great deal of pleasure in filling her in on exactly what “everything else” was while Marco had been having his leg operated on. Learning that he was a corrupt federal agent—“used to be one of us” was how Groves had put it—who had turned against his own side and secretly collaborated with the drug traffickers he had supposedly been targeting as part of an ongoing investigation wasn’t a total surprise, because he was fit and smart and she could totally picture him as a former federal agent and clearly he’d been in the custody of U.S. Marshals for a reason. But the knowledge bothered her, much as she hated to admit it. Until then, she’d almost felt like he was someone she could trust. Now she knew better. He was someone nobody could trust, and she meant to keep that in the forefront of her mind.

  “I’m not a druggie. My leg hurts.” His tone was mild as he set the pill bottle down. Cupping his hand, he took a couple of gulps of water from the sink, shut the faucet off, and turned to eye her appraisingly. Either the bathroom was smaller than she’d thought when she’d helped Tyler take a bath in there earlier, or Marco was bigger than she’d thought. Either way, he seemed to take up a lot of space. The top of his head was almost even with the top of the big mirror that ran along most of the left wall, and his shoulders were broad enough that they seemed to fill most of the space between the tub and the sink. “Anyway, how do you know how many pills I’m supposed to take?”

  “Because unlike you, I was listening when the doctor told you.” Her answer was tart.

  “Ah.” With his hip braced against the sink cabinet, Marco looked her up and down, his expression way too alert for the kind of day he’d had. His hair was wet and shiny black in consequence, and slicked back from his face. His nose was still swollen, one eye was still black, purpling bruises marred his forehead and left cheekbone and the left side of his jaw, and a small cut was visible at the corner of his mouth. But he’d been applying ice to his face off and on for much of the day, and in consequence looked much better. Handsome, even, just as she had suspected. From the dampness of his hair, his bare feet and calves, and his apparent lack of clothing apart from the robe, she surmised that he had just gotten out of the shower. Since she had recently showered and was wearing a white toweling robe herself, over too-large white granny panties and a man’s white T-shirt—the furnished house had come complete with a small selection of brand-new, still-with-the-price-tags-on clothing in the dresser drawers, which had been presented to them as theirs to use as they saw fit as part of their temporary new identities as a married couple, Greg and Laura James, and their son Tyler—she couldn’t fault him for that. But she could—and did—fault him for everything else. The whole damned mess, in fact.

  “Tyler get to sleep?” he asked.

  She didn’t want to talk about Tyler with him. “Yes.”

  She started to move away.

  “Hang on, I need to ask you something. Okay, so I was kind of out of it when the medic was explaining about my medication. I’ve got the pain pills and the antibiotic pills pretty much down, I think. But what am I supposed to do with the lube tube?”

  “Lube tube?” Sam had hesitated and glanced around at him when he’d started talking, but she had been just about to shut him down with the astringent observation that his meds were his problem and then once more head off for bed when that semirevolting description caught her attention.

  “This.” Glancing down, he picked up what looked like a family size toothpaste tube and held it up for her viewing pleasure (or not). It was black and yellow, with a screw-off lid. “You have any idea what I’m supposed to do with this?”

  It was quite possible that she didn’t want to know, but curiosity won out: Sam stepped closer, onto the beige tiled floor—everything in the house seemed to be beige or brown or some other muted earth tone—the better to see the tube. The bathroom was still steamy warm and fragrant from his shower, and a small degree of condensation still clung to the edge of the big mirror behind the sink. The shower curtain was still inside the combination tub/shower, which was beaded with water droplets. Stopping just inside the doorway, she peered at the writing on the tube: Bactroban ointment.

  “It’s an antibiotic ointment. Tomorrow—that would be twenty-four hours after they removed the bullet from your leg—you’re supposed to change the bandages and apply it to the wound. Liberally. Then bandage it up again. Repeat once a day.” She couldn’t help it: she glanced down at his damaged leg, currently not visible because of the sheltering robe, which reached just past his knees. On her, what seemed to be the identical robe went clear down to her ankles, and was big enough to wrap around her twice. Probably, she thought, they were one size fits all, which served as a pretty good indication of just how large he was. “And you’re supposed to keep the bandages clean and dry.”

  “I am keeping them clean and dry. See?” Before Sam realized what he meant to do, he twitched the edges of his robe apart to give her a look at his thigh. For a hideous moment she feared he might be flashing her. Then she saw the barely visible pale blue hem of what she assumed was a pair of boxers, and felt a little spurt of relief. A black plastic garbage bag swathed his leg from just below the boxers to the top of his knee. While she watched, he pulled the bag off so she could see what looked like acres of white gauze wrapped around and around his thigh beneath. “Not even damp.”

  “Oh, yay.” The marked lack of enthusiasm with which she said it made him smile. It was, Sam realized, the first time she had seen him really smile, and it was a revelation. Cute guy. The words popped into her head of their own volition, and she immediately realized that was how she would have described him to Kendra. It didn’t please her. At the look she gave him the smile broadened into a grin that was slightly lopsided, possibly due to his cut lip. It revealed strong white teeth and crinkles around the corners of his eyes, which, she was just now observing, were a deep, coffee brown. It was a teasing grin, and it made him look younger than she had thought. It was also sexy as hell.

  That thought made her scowl again. Sexy was the last word she wanted rattling around inside her head when it came to Marco. Almost as annoyed at herself now as she was at him, she started to turn away. She was so tired she was drooping with it, and the only cure for that was sleep. Sleep, too, would probably cure her headache. And what was that saying about everything looking better in the morning? She could only hope. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she saw that she was as pale as chalk, with shadows beneath her eyes. Even her mouth looked pale. She had washed and towel dried her hair—if there was a blow-dryer around she hadn’t found it—and tucked it behind her ears before going in to put Tyler to bed. Nearly dry now, it hung to the middle of her back in an unruly tangle of midnight black curls.

  She was something else that would hopefully look better in the morning. Or at least when she located a blow-dryer and had time to tame her hair.

  “Good night,” she added over her shoulder.

  Marco stopped her exit by coming out with a hasty, “Uh, by the way, since
you were listening so well, did you happen to hear anything about how long until I’m good to go again? Because if anybody said anything about that, I totally missed it.”

  Turning back around, Sam shot him a scathing look. “You totally missed a lot, didn’t you? Probably because you’ve been high as a kite all day.”

  “I am not high. I’m on pain meds. And that would be because I’m in pain. At least, when I’m not on the meds.” That grin flashed at her again. When she narrowed her eyes at him, he added hastily, “So did you hear anything about how long it’s supposed to take for me to be able to walk without crutches again, or not?”

  “Nope.” He was reaching for his crutches, and against her better judgment she helped him out by handing over the one that was farthest from him. “Although he did say that you were supposed to change your bandages and put ointment on the wound every day for a week.”

  “Ah.” Marco looked pleased. “A week, then.”

  “But, see, I think you’re also supposed to stay off the leg for a week. As in, use the wheelchair they gave you. The crutches were for after that.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t like being pushed around in wheelchairs. And they’re hell climbing stairs.”

  Watching him fit the crutches under his arms, impressed by the muscles that she could see flexing in his chest and arms and then feeling annoyed at herself, first for looking and then for being impressed, she frowned at him. “Since we’re talking about how long things are supposed to take, do you have any idea how long it’ll be before Tyler and I can go home again?”

  Again with the shrug. Accompanied by a quick, assessing glance at her. That she read as meaning, You don’t want to know. And I don’t want to be the one to tell you. Then as her frown darkened he got busy hopping around trying to get his crutches situated. On purpose, she had no doubt.

  That lack of a direct reply made her angry. She folded her arms over her chest and fixed him with a simmering look.

  “Because we can’t just disappear, you know. Not for long. People will be worried about us.” Sam thought about Kendra, and her other friends, and her great-aunt Marla, former girlfriend of her aforementioned “uncle” Wilfred, whom she didn’t see a whole lot of but whom she did see from time to time and who would miss her eventually, and Tyler’s father, whom she saw even less often than she saw Marla but who at some point would surely realize that his son was nowhere to be found, and the people at A+ Collateral Recovery, and . . . “People probably are already worried about us.” She thought about Kendra again. “If they know about Mrs. Menifee, they’ll be going out of their minds.”

  Marco had both crutches firmly under his armpits now, and was standing on his good leg. “You gave your phone to Sanders, didn’t you?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Then he’ll have passed it on to the cleanup crew, and the people you call most often, or who call you most often, will have gotten a text from you saying something like you were called away on a family emergency. It was probably sent even before we got on the plane this morning.”

  “Nobody who knows us is going to believe that!” Sam thought about her great-aunt, who was ninety-two and lived in a nursing home in Wentzville. Kendra might actually believe the emergency concerned Marla, who had been kind of sickly lately. If Kendra didn’t hear from Sam and Tyler in a few days, though, she would almost certainly call Marla, or rather the nursing home where Marla was living, to be told that no, it didn’t, then start calling around to their various friends, to check out other possibilities. If Kendra then found no trace of them, what would she do? Call the police? Maybe, but calling the police wasn’t something that people in East St. Louis did. File a missing persons report? Maybe again, but . . . Sam frowned as one really good reason why nobody would believe she’d just been called away on a family emergency hit her. “Nobody’s for sure going to believe it when they find out that poor Mrs. Menifee was murdered in my house.”

  “Maybe they’ll think that’s the real reason you left. That you were involved in something bad that went wrong. Maybe you found the body and were scared and ran away. Or maybe you committed the crime and fled.”

  “Nobody’s going to think I killed Mrs. Menifee.” Sam’s eyes widened as she made some unwelcome mental connections. “Oh, my God, that’s not what the police think, is it?”

  “She was killed in your house, and when the police got there you were nowhere to be found.”

  Sam must have looked horrified, because his grin flashed at her again. That’s when she knew she was being teased.

  “This isn’t funny,” she said crossly.

  “The look on your face is, just a little bit. Uh, didn’t you say you fired some shots in your house? I bet the police will be able to trace those bullets back to your gun.”

  Sam had an electrifying thought. “What about those two men I shot? Will they be able to connect the bullets they recover from my house to them?” Visions of being charged with murder—maybe three murders if they included Mrs. Menifee—made her stomach knot.

  He shook his head. “I doubt the cops will ever know anything about those guys. They’re probably making the acquaintance of the Mississippi River catfish about now.”

  “Oh, my God.” Sam didn’t know what her face looked like, but it must have been expressive, because he laughed.

  “Anyway, since Sanders took your gun, it’s long gone. No ballistics to compare.”

  “That’s a good thing.” If she sounded slightly doubtful, it was because that was how she felt.

  “Yeah.” His eyes still danced. Then, in response to something he saw in her face—probably stark fear—his expression turned serious. “The cleanup crew—the agents on the ground—they’re pros. They’ll see to it that there’s some sort of cover story about what happened to Mrs. Menifee that most likely won’t involve you as the murderer, and that includes where you and Tyler went, and they’ll wrap it up in a big bow that will make it easy for the local cops to buy. They’ll pacify whoever needs pacifying, and they’ll make sure nobody goes all Nancy Grace looking for you. Believe me, you won’t even make the papers.”

  Sam was aghast. “They can do that?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She looked at him with disbelief. “Who are you guys?”

  The grin came and went. “Your tax dollars at work, baby doll.”

  Remembering that he was no longer entitled to be paid by those tax dollars, Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did, her voice was softer, troubled.

  “Mrs. Menifee—I saw her. Tied to one of my kitchen chairs. It looked like—” Sam took a deep breath. “It looked like they tortured her. There was blood everywhere. I’m pretty sure they”—she hesitated because it was hard to even get the words out—“cut off the tip of one of her fingers.” She fixed him with an accusing gaze. “Because they were looking for you.”

  He wasn’t smiling any longer. His eyes held hers. “I’m sorry they did that to her. I’m sorry you had to see it. I’m sorry any of you got involved.”

  Sam’s throat felt tight. “She had nothing to do with any of this. She was just baby-sitting Tyler.”

  “I know. These guys—they have no respect for human life. They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way.”

  “They would have done something horrible to Tyler if they’d found him.” It wasn’t a question; she knew it for an absolute fact. Even thinking about what could have happened made Sam feel cold all over. “They would have killed him. And me. They will, if they find us.”

  His expression acknowledged the truth of that. “Which is why you and Tyler are staying with me.”

  Sam made a scoffing sound. “Like being at ground zero is going to keep us safe? You’re the one they’re really looking for.”

  “Ground zero or not, you’re safer with me than you would be anywhere else.”

  “So you say. I’m not so sure.”

  “You got some alternative you want to share with me, I’m all ears.”

  He had her there. The
re was no alternative that she could come up with. Kendra, Marla, a host of people might be willing to take her and Tyler in and even help them hide, but after seeing what had been done to Mrs. Menifee, Sam wouldn’t inflict such a danger on her worst enemy, much less people she cared about. She thought about just taking Tyler and running and hiding on her own, but immediately dismissed it. First, not being a professional fugitive, she didn’t have a great deal of confidence in her ability to disappear without a trace, and second, she had no money to run away on. Being broke, as she had discovered a long time ago, tended to severely limit your options.

  The sense of being trapped was suffocating.

  He was watching her. “You got nothing, am I right?”

  Reluctantly Sam shook her head. Still, there was no way she and Tyler could just drop off the radar so easily. He had preschool, and play dates, and she—she had classes. And work. And bills. As the inescapable realities of life started crawling out of the hole where terror had buried them, her eyes widened.

  “I have a class on Monday. I guess I can miss it, but . . . I can’t miss more than three or I don’t pass the course. Plus my electricity bill is due on Monday. I mean, really due. I got a shut-off notice. If I don’t pay by then, they’ll turn the electricity off. And I have to pay Tyler’s preschool Monday, too, or he’ll lose his place. And . . .” As Sam thought about all the things she had coming up, she felt her chest tighten. If she didn’t go to class, she would flunk. If she didn’t go to work, they didn’t have any money. And if she wasn’t home, she couldn’t work. “I have a check waiting for me at A+ right now. I need to pick it up. Oh, my God, I’ll lose my contract with them. If I’m not there to repossess the cars they need to have repossessed, they’ll just give the work to someone else.” Probably Bobby Thompson at Thompson’s Towing, or Al Fisher at Downtown Towing, or—there were so many. At the idea that she could lose her livelihood, Sam felt growing panic. She had worked too hard to find a way to scratch out a living for herself and Tyler just to let it go like this. “I left the wrecker on the street across from the duplex. You can only park there on weekends. If I’m not there to move it by early Monday morning, they’ll tow it. Then I’ll have to pay who knows how much to get it out. I can’t afford it. I have to go home.”