Shiver

by Karen Robards

  Even as Sam bristled, she heard Marco’s reply: “Kid’s part of the package now. So’s the woman. End of discussion.”

  “Fuck,” Sanders said bitterly. Then the door closed behind Sam, and there was no way to hear more.

  A few minutes later, the door opened again and Marco maneuvered through it, then swung across the patio toward her.

  After that first quick glance, prompted by the sound of the opening door, Sam didn’t look at him, except peripherally, which she couldn’t help. But still, by the brightness of unfiltered daylight she saw that the swelling in his face was definitely going down. His nose was almost normal size again. It was going to be straight and high-bridged, a handsomely masculine nose, when it had healed. Put him out of your mind, she told herself fiercely, and in the spirit of making sure that happened deliberately concentrated all her attention on her son. Tyler was already climbing onto the tire swing. Despite everything, his obvious enjoyment, coupled with the absolutely beautiful weather, made her feel a tad more cheerful. As in, a little more optimistic that maybe they would actually get out of this alive. Now that she had reminded herself of the danger, though, she darted apprehensive looks around, searching, she supposed, for places a would-be killer might lurk. Close at hand, the second story of the town house next door, the one in which the marshals had set up base, looked into their backyard, and next to that she could see the tops of two more, nearly identical town houses that all seemed to be connected. At the very back of the yard, appearing to be maybe a back alley or another backyard away, the black-shingled roof of what she thought must be a single-story house was just visible. From the apparent absence of any residences on the other side, Sam deduced that the one she and Tyler and Marco were staying in must be the last town house in the row. Since she didn’t spot snipers on any of the roofs, or gunmen in the windows, she allowed herself to relax enough to take in the rest of the view. In the distance, a line of purple mountains iced with snow drew her eye. Overhead, the sky was a perfect pale blue. The temperature, which was in the midseventies, felt wonderful after the ninety-plus-degree heat East St. Louis had been enduring. Sam took a deep breath, savoring the fresh-cut-grass scent in the air.

  “Listening to Sanders, I get the feeling that if bad stuff starts going down, Tyler and I are on our own,” Sam said without looking at him as Marco stopped beside her. She could feel the connection between them, feel the attraction like a physical pull. Folding her arms over her chest, she grimly ignored it.

  “No worries.” Marco leaned on his crutches, his eyes on her face as she resolutely kept hers fixed on Tyler. Still, she couldn’t help seeing the slight smile that curved his mouth. “You’ve got me.”

  At that, Sam shot a look at him. Out here in the bright sunlight, it was all too easy to see the tightness around his mouth, and the shadow of pain in his eyes. The pills might be making him too loopy to get a handle on whom he was kissing, but they clearly weren’t doing a whole lot to relieve his distress. Not that she cared. Not one bit.

  “Like I’m really going to count on that,” she scoffed, and stepped off the patio to give Tyler a push on the swing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Later, after Sam had cleaned up the kitchen and fed herself and Tyler a peanut butter sandwich for lunch—everyone else was on his own, as she said maybe a little too forcefully to Tyler when he suggested that she make Trey one, too—she took Marco’s suggestion and presented Sanders with a list of the obligations that she needed to have taken care of in East St. Louis so that she didn’t lose everything she owned. While Sanders was looking it over, pursing his lips and frowning, she announced—didn’t ask—that she needed to make a quick trip to the Walmart they had driven past on the way in, and added that since she obviously couldn’t use a credit card (not that she possessed one that worked, although she didn’t tell him that), she needed a means of paying for her purchases. Although she hadn’t invited Marco to take part in the discussion, he emerged from the den where he’d been holed up in time to hear the last part of what she had to say, and told her (and reminded Sanders) that the marshals had plenty of government-issued cash and could easily fork over the funds she needed. Once Sanders was made to understand that the marshals could either go out and find and purchase the clothes and other personal items she and Tyler needed or she could do it herself, he quit insisting that the trip to Walmart was a nonstarter. Instead, after telling Marco to butt the hell out of the conversation and then, a little later, not to even think about it because he wasn’t going with her, which last part at least Marco didn’t dispute, Sanders agreed to let her go and deputized Groves to go with her. Sam hated leaving Tyler behind, but as he was barefoot with only his pajamas and a choice of too-big white T-shirts to wear, and was emphatic in saying he didn’t want to go anyway, there wasn’t much choice.

  The urgency of her mission was such that leaving him behind was something she was prepared to do.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” Marco told her. It was not the ideal setup, but since she was actually quite sure that he would do as he said and Tyler was perfectly happy in his company, she bowed to necessity. Trying to keep Tyler away from “Trey” was something she was going to have to put off until later.

  A little stiffly, she said, “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” he replied, and smiled at her. That smile did really unwelcome things to her insides, so she turned away without another word.

  Since the house had come equipped with a washer and dryer concealed in a closet off the kitchen (there was no basement), Sam already had laundered the clothes she had arrived wearing. She had feared that her tank top might be permanently stained with Marco’s blood, but once washed, it was wearable, and her jeans and underwear were perfectly fine. Confining her hair in a long braid that hung down her back, she was good to go. Just another Walmart shopper, ready to blend into the aisles.

  “I won’t be gone long,” she promised Tyler, who was ensconced on the couch in the great room watching TV. A quick glance reassured her that what was on was the Disney Channel, and she immediately understood why he looked so entranced. At home, they didn’t have cable, because she couldn’t afford it.

  “Bye.” Her son waved her off, clearly unconcerned about her pending absence. Having eased himself down in the same chair Sanders had occupied earlier and picked up the newspaper, Marco regarded her sardonically.

  “You can relax. He’s still going to be here when you get back,” he said.

  Sam was already heading out the door when she realized that she really wasn’t anxious about leaving Tyler at all. As soon as she figured out why—the reason stood about six-two and walked on crutches—she frowned ferociously. But it was too late. She was in the car by then, and there was nobody who mattered to see.

  “Sun in your eyes?” Groves asked solicitously, and flipped down her sun visor for her to block the rays that she hadn’t even noticed. He was driving the Toyota Corolla that had been in the garage. It was blue, it was a four-door, it was nondescript. In other words, it was perfect.

  “Thanks,” Sam said from the passenger seat beside him without explaining that her fierce look had had nothing whatsoever to do with the blinding summer sun. Banishing the Marco-induced scowl, she slid a sideways look at Groves. Sanders might be about as chatty as a wall; she might not feel like having any kind of real conversation with Marco. But Groves was friendly. Groves she liked. Him, she might get to talk, and in this case knowledge just might prove to be a valuable thing. “So where did the car come from?”

  Groves shrugged. “It was there with the house.”

  “Just like this T-shirt”—Sam plucked at the one she was wearing—“and the rest of the clothes we’ve been wearing were there with the house?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who put them there?”

  Groves shrugged again. “The house was set up fully equipped for us to use. What can I tell you?”

  Sam felt a chill. If the house was set up for them, then the number of p
eople who potentially knew where they were was larger than she had realized. What was that saying about three people being able to keep a secret if two of them were dead? What about a whole bureaucracy full of people? Suddenly the quiet neighborhood no longer felt so safe. They’d left the street with the town houses behind, and were now driving through a suburb filled with single-family homes. Late-model cars sat in driveways and kids rode their bikes down sidewalks while the adults did things like mow the yard and water the flowers. It was the kind of place that Sam would have given just about anything to be able to raise Tyler in, but even though the houses didn’t look especially pricey they were as totally out of reach for someone like her as the moon. Home for her and Tyler had never been so picture perfect, but still it had been home. Sam suddenly longed for the normalcy the neighborhood represented with a fierceness that surprised her. She wanted to be back in her own life, back in her own house, her job, her routine, in the worst way.

  Instead of how to pay the bills—her worst pre-Marco worry—she now had to worry about how to keep herself and her son alive. The trade-off totally sucked.

  “When we left St. Louis, nobody was supposed to know where we were going,” she protested uneasily. “So how could the house be set up in advance?”

  “It wasn’t set up for you—or rather, Marco—specifically. It’s a safe house; the service maintains a bunch of them in various locations across the country. The couple who was supposed to be sent here got diverted somewhere else at the last minute, when our emergency came up.”

  “Greg and Laura James? And their son, Tyler?” From the first time she’d heard the names, it had seemed beyond odd that her son and their son were both called Tyler.

  Groves shook his head. “Those are cover identities. Greg and Laura James are the names that this couple was going into hiding under while they stayed at the house you’re in. They didn’t have a kid, so there wasn’t a cover ID for him, but that’s okay: your kid got sandwiched into the deal, and they decided to keep his real first name. It’s easier.”

  “Who decided?”

  Groves shrugged. It was clear from his expression that if he knew, he wasn’t saying. “The good news is nobody changed the paperwork on the previous couple, so even if there is a mole they won’t be able to find you—uh, Marco. At least, not by going through the paperwork.”

  Sam suddenly had trouble catching her breath. “A mole?”

  Groves looked at her. “Somebody found out the address of the house where we had Marco stashed in St. Louis. How? We got to consider a mole. People are looking into it, but in the meantime we did what we could to keep this location off the grid.”

  Sam could feel her stomach twisting itself into a knot. “If they found him in St. Louis . . .” Her voice trailed off. It occurred to her that Groves had been checking the rear- and side-view mirrors a little too often. Now she knew why: he was keeping an eye out to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  “Like I said, we’re off the grid.” Sam was sure his tone was meant to be reassuring.

  Because they were pulling into the Walmart parking lot, Sam let the subject drop. But the fear stayed with her, making her tense and jumpy in a way that she hadn’t been before.

  Persuading Groves to wait for her by the entrance wasn’t hard. All she had to do was mention that her first stop was going to be in the ladies’ underwear section and the deed was done. Instead, as soon as she was out of Groves’s sight she made a beeline for the hunting gear department. What she wanted, what she needed, her most important objective, was to acquire a weapon. Totally relying on the marshals—or Marco—to defend her and Tyler in a pinch was something that she was not prepared to do. After a quick consultation with the clerk behind the counter, she armed herself with a slender can of bear mace (the clerk described it as pepper spray on steroids, able to stop a charging grizzly at a distance of a couple of yards). Supplementing that with a folding knife small enough to fit in her pocket but lethal enough to do some damage if she had to use it, she cast a regretful glance at the gun case as she passed it—the background check, which usually required a minimum of three days to complete, plus the attention that said background check might attract, plus the price of the guns, ruled out trying to buy one—and hurried to make the rest of her purchases.

  The Walmart wasn’t particularly busy on that Sunday afternoon, but that just made each individual patron stand out more. Sam found herself casting surreptitious looks at her fellow shoppers, just in case one of them might not be a shopper at all, but a Zeta assassin on a mission to kill her. Finding herself worrying about being murdered in the middle of a Walmart was mind-boggling, but it was also a sure symptom of the hideous, horrible turn her life had taken. What made it so hideous and horrible was that her worry wasn’t even particularly far-fetched. The only thing improbable about it was that the assassin would attack in the store. He (or they) was far more likely to follow her home and try to kill the whole party there.

  By the time she rejoined Groves by the front entrance, she was so on edge that she jumped when a shopping cart clattered. Spotting the security cameras trained on the checkout lanes had made her heart thump: what if the people hunting them somehow gained access to the footage? Or what if there was an informant in the store, or . . .

  Stop it, she ordered herself. All you’re doing is making yourself crazy. Still, she was relieved to get out of the store. Neither she nor Groves said much on the way back to the town house, but they both did their fair share of checking the mirrors for tails.

  “You buy out the store?” Sanders asked when she walked into the kitchen carrying two big plastic bags loaded with the clothing she and Tyler needed, along with a chapter book (Silver Wings, a story about a bat) and a ten-pack assortment of Matchbox cars for Tyler (he loved Matchbox cars), a hair dryer (if she had to live with her unrestrained curls for much longer she would be feeling murderous herself), and a few essential cosmetics. Plus her weapons. “What’d you do with Groves?”

  Having pulled into the attached garage, the interior door of which opened into the kitchen, Groves had been busy making sure the overhead door was secured when Sam had last seen him, which had been when she had walked into the house.

  “Dumped him.”

  “Be glad I don’t believe you.” He was seated at the table eating what looked like a bologna sandwich and his eyes—they were small and blue in his blunt-featured face—squinched up suspiciously as they met hers. Like he was wondering if she really had somehow managed to dump Groves. She even thought he might have gotten up to check, except Groves walked into the kitchen just then.

  “Any problems?” Sanders asked him.

  “No.”

  Sanders grunted, and went back to eating his sandwich.

  Groves opened the refrigerator and started rooting around in it as Sam dumped the change from the money Sanders had given her on the table in front of him. It amounted to five dollar bills and some coins, which he glanced at with a curl of his lips.

  “Receipt?” he asked around a mouthful of sandwich.

  “In one of the bags.” She kept on walking, bags in hand, no big deal, heading for the great room.

  “I’ll need that,” he called after her.

  She didn’t answer. The truth was that she had deliberately left the receipt behind at the checkout, because she had no intention of letting anyone see it. Putting five plus dollars down in front of Sanders was an action that she had carefully calculated in advance. Instead of not giving him any change, she had given him that small amount as a decoy, so that he wouldn’t suspect she had any more. Sanders had given her two hundred dollars for the shopping trip, which Marco had assured her was expense account money. After a lifetime of pinching pennies, one thing she knew how to do was buy a lot with a little. Even after giving Sanders his supposed change, ninety dollars still remained in the back pocket of her jeans. (Since she already had her new knife in the front pocket, she had opted for the back for the cash so as to keep the evidence that she
was thinking outside the box as unnoticeable as possible.) Sam felt like the knife and the neatly folded cash made lumps as big as boulders and were practically sending out bursts of light in an effort to be seen through her clothes, but Sanders didn’t appear to notice anything amiss. Keeping the money might make her feel like a thief, but under the circumstances she had decided that she had to do what she had to do. If something were to go wrong, if she had to take Tyler and run, she had no money. A little cash might make all the difference to them in an emergency. Like buying the bear mace and the knife, keeping the amount she had spent at just around half of what she had received had been a kind of insurance policy.

  As Sam walked into the great room, the sight that greeted her stopped her in her tracks.

  The TV was on. Focused so intently on it that they didn’t even hear her enter, Tyler and Marco were side by side on the couch. They were not lounging comfortably, even disregarding Marco’s injured leg, which thrust stiffly out in front of him. Instead they were sitting forward as though whatever was on the screen was of vital interest to them. For a moment Sam blinked at the TV, not understanding the images she saw. Cartoonish soldiers—a sparse terrain—the crosshairs of a rifle—gunfire.

  “Got him!” Marco exulted as the TV soldier went down and a bright red spot blossomed on his back. “Good job, Tyler!”

  “There’s another one, Trey!”

  “Shoot him!”

  Pow! Pow! Boom! Boom! Even as the sound of gunfire filled the room and more soldiers went down, Sam registered the controllers in their hands, saw the game system, and realized that what she was seeing was a video game. A violent, bloody video game that was absolutely unsuitable for a four-year-old.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Dropping the bags on the floor, she walked over to the couch and stood there glaring—not at both of them, because Tyler, having only ever been exposed to Pokémon video games at his friend Austin’s house and educational video games at preschool, could hardly be blamed for this, but at Marco, who certainly could.