Shiver

take stock of her surroundings. She was outside, close enough to the river so that she could catch a glimpse of its rolling waters, standing in the middle of a shadow-filled open space. The moon and stars gleaming down from the black sky high above, the distant glow from the city of St. Louis across the river, and her truck’s white beams pointing like twin light sabers away from her made it plenty bright enough to see what was going down, even if darkness obscured a lot of the details. As she had suspected, they were in the scrap yard, a football-field-size cemetery for junk cars and trucks and discarded metal of all types, in which she personally had scrounged numerous times looking for parts for various vehicles, including thetruck. Piles of would-be scrap were stacked up everywhere like mini-mountains, some reaching as much as twenty feet high. Two long, low warehouses formed a wall between the piles of scrap and the street. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence designed (unsuccessfully) to keep scroungers out surrounded the entire property. Making an instantaneous visual sweep of the area, Sam concluded that there was no one else around.
    Except, of course, for the man who had clambered out of the trunk in her wake. Catching his laborious movement toward her out of the corner of her eye, she turned in his direction, of two minds about whether or not she ought to just go ahead and shoot him, too, and be done with it. Her lips compressed. It was obvious that he was badly injured. His right leg dragged. His shoulders hunched. His face looked like somebody had used it for a punching bag.
    As she hesitated—cold-blooded murder wasn’t really her thing, although she guessed she could change if she had to—a dozen conflicting thoughts whirled through her mind. He hadn’t thrown her into the trunk; he had been imprisoned with her. He had tried to reassure her. He had held her hand, kissed it even. The feel of his lips against her skin had provoked a wayward tingle. On the other hand, he had been in the trunk in the first place. Her gut might tell her that he was a good guy, but good guys usually didn’t end up in trunks. Anyway, when it came to men, her gut wasn’t worth shit. She was still wavering between pulling the trigger and not when he reached her side.
    “Give me that.” The pistol was snatched from her handbefore she realized what he meant to do. So, choice made: she should have shot him. Only too damned late to do anything about it.
    “ Hey. That’s mine.” She grabbed at her gun to no avail.
    The man who’d been in the trunk with her—her ally? Yeah, no, to hell with that, that kind of thinking was dangerous—gave her a reproving look before limping away toward the men she’d shot.
    “Jesus, you could’ve told me you had a gun,” he flung over his shoulder at her.
    “I could’ve.” Except he would have taken it from her, and she had needed it to protect herself: trusting him to that extent had never even been something she had considered. For an instant she watched him: for all the Hunchback of Notre Dame lurch he had going on, she could see that he was indeed tall and athletically built. Handsome? Hard to tell, but she was going with probably yes. Along with his bloody jeans, he was wearing a gray T-shirt that showed off the kind of muscles that would have made Kendra, for one, drool, and well-worn sneakers. End dangling from the belt he had pulled tight around his right thigh. Clearly injured in ways other than the gunshot he’d told her about. Weakened as he plainly was, he was still big and muscular enough to lead her to conclude that trying to physically fight him for her gun would be a gamble. Even with him injured and limping, trying to wrest the gun away from him was likely to end poorly for her. Whatever he’d done to get himself beaten up, shot, and thrown into a car trunk to die, it couldn’t have been anything good. Odds were that he was as much a bad guyas the thugs who had hit her over the head and thrown her into the trunk with him. She could very well wind up getting shot, or being taken captive again, or something equally horrific, by him, and anyway the fight itself would take up valuable time. Let him keep the gun, she decided: all she really wanted was to get away in one piece. Survival was her goal, and to hell with everything else. Taking advantage of his concentration on the men on the ground, mindful that an unwary crunch from the gravel underfoot could swing his