Shiver

tugged at Marco’s arm.
    “Hang on a minute.” Instead of moving as both she and Tyler were now urging him to do, Marco let go of her and balanced on one leg while he did something with his crutch. Sam’s mouth dropped open as he flipped it into the air, twisted it, and the thing came apart in his hands. Seconds later, he extracted a gun—a gun!—from inside it.
    “Wow! I didn’t know that was in there.” The gun’s appearance seemed to fascinate Tyler. He watched with awe as Marcosnapped the slide back on the small black pistol and then thrust the gun into the waistband of his sweats. Marco then dumped something out of the crutch’s shaft into his hand and thrust whatever it was into his pocket.
    Sam goggled.
    “You’ve had that this whole time ?” She recovered the power of speech to hiss at him even as Marco grabbed his other, still-in-one-piece crutch and the three of them headed en masse for the door.
    “ Shh. You two stay back.” Gun in hand now, Marco stepped into the hallway like a capable professional who knew his way around a dangerous situation. Sam remembered with a little spurt of thankfulness that not so long ago he had been a federal agent. A moment later, blocking them out from any threat that might emerge from the staircase with his body, he made a gesture for them to move out behind him and head for Tyler’s bedroom. Clutching Tyler’s hand, moving as quietly as possible, Sam ran down the hall with her son at her side. The whole second floor was dark except for the faint glow coming up the staircase. Now that she knew what lay down at the bottom of that staircase, just looking in that direction gave Sam the willies.
    What was even scarier was the thought that they couldn’t have much time. Whoever had killed Abramowitz had to be looking for Marco, and any minute now they would come up the stairs and . . .
    She couldn’t finish the thought.
    As she and Tyler darted into Tyler’s bedroom, Sam saw thatMarco was headed for the stairs. Her stomach turned upside down. She wanted to call after him, to beg him to come with them, but anything she could say that he might be able to hear would be too loud. And her first priority had to be getting Tyler to safety.
    “Where’s Trey?” Tyler whispered, looking around as Sam rushed toward the window. Instead of staying beside her, he pulled free. Out of the corner of her eye, as she raised the shade as quietly as possible and then reached for the cool brass window latch, she watched as he grabbed Ted from his bed and, in a gesture that brought a lump to her throat because she knew that it meant he was aware of how expensive shoes were to replace, stuck his feet into the slip-on sneakers she’d just bought him.
    “Come on, Tyler.” She unlocked the window easily. The town house was new: nothing had as yet been painted shut. The window was triple-glazed and designed to crank out. Sam cranked with all her might, wincing at the very slight creaking sounds that resulted as it slowly opened. The night air was cooler than she had expected, midsixties maybe, and heavy with the promise of rain. The moon and stars were hidden beneath a dense cloud cover. As a result, it was very dark. But down below, in the yard, the kitchen light shone out through the sliding glass doors so she could see as far away as the tree.
    At the thought that someone might be waiting for them down there, Sam shivered. Her heart pounded like a piston in her chest.
    “Here, Mom.” Tyler thrust her shoes and the bear mace at her as he rejoined her, and she took both with a quick spurt ofsurprise that he’d thought to gather them up and appreciation for the levelheadedness it indicated. She’d left her shoes under his bed when she’d read to him earlier, and the bear mace had found a permanent home in his nightstand because she had figured that if anyone broke into the house, the place where she was most likely to make a stand was at Tyler’s bedside. Dropping the bear mace into her pocket, grabbing Ted from Tyler—“I’ll hold him!”—and tucking him under her arm, she helped Tyler out onto the cedar shake overhang that ran along the back of the house and shaded the sliding glass door.
    “Be careful,” she warned, because the overhang, while not steep, had a definite slope to it. At the same time, she thrust her feet into her shoes, stuck Ted into her other pocket, and looked back over her shoulder one last time in hopes that she would see Marco coming toward