Shiver

wildly as the maneuver threw him off balance again. Only his arm hooked around the strut kept him from being flung off. Warm night air gushed in.Without the barrier of glass between them he suddenly seemed way too close, much closer than before. She thought, hoped, prayed he might lose his grip on the strut—or at least the gun. “ Stop, you crazy . . . !”
    “No fucking way!” Sam screamed back. The words had no sooner left her mouth than Quasimodo launched himself right in through the window he’d blown out. Cursing a blue streak, he torpedoed through the opening.

CHAPTER FOUR
     

     
    “G et out! Get out of my truck!”
    “Like hell,” Quasimodo growled.
    Driving one-handed, Sam leaned over and shoved his broad back as hard as she could. When that didn’t work—might as well have shoved at a fallen tree—she pounded at his head and shoulders with her fist in an effort to force him back out of the window.
    “Ouch! Shit! Goddamnit, stop that!”
    “Get out! Get out of here!”
    The tire iron was out of her reach beneath the seat; her phone bounced near the passenger door; he had her knife and gun. Knowing that she had left herself basically defenseless made her nuts. They battled, her to push him out and him to slide the rest of the way inside, as Big Red zoomed through the gate. It careened with squealing tires out onto the street, which besides the scrap yard was home to an abandoned factory and a number of other now closed and mostly derelict commercial buildings. The street was dark as pitch and deserted except for a man, almost certainly drunk, staggering down the shoulder in the direction of the river, where Sam knew the homeless congregated to sleep on the bank on warm summer nights. Caught in the headlights, face a study in horrified astonishment, he leaped for the fence surrounding the factory across the street as the truck hurtled in his direction. At the last moment Sam corrected course with a frantic yank of the wheel. An old car parked on the shoulder barely missed being flattened. Then the truck was back on the street, bouncing on its tires, barreling toward an intersection that would take them someplace more populated. It veered drunkenly as Quasimodo tried to heave himself the rest of the way inside while Sam, driving one-handed, fought to keep him out.
    He won.
    Shit.
    “Both hands on the wheel!” he roared as he used brute strength to defeat her frantic efforts to expel him, then surged into a sitting position on the passenger side of the bench seat. Facing her, he was off balance, but still solidly there. Sam’s lips tightened as she saw that her gun was now aimed at her.
    Would he shoot her? He hadn’t yet. She didn’t think he would, although being wrong was always a possibility. But whether he would or not, he was still inside her truck, with no way to get him out.
    Shit again. Her clenched fist, primed to deliver more blows, lowered. Then the truck jolted over a pothole and she automatically gripped the wheel with both hands.
    “Keep ’em there.”
    Like she’d done it because he had told her to. She shot him a filthy look. He was panting, sweating, glaring at her as he leaned back against the passenger door. Flexing the fingers of his left hand—the ring finger was swollen and seemingly immobile—he grimaced. In such close quarters he seemed bigger than she had thought. He was broad shouldered and muscular, bad-ass-looking enough to be intimidating, if she had been the type of person to ever let herself be intimidated, which she emphatically was not. His black hair was just long enough to be ruffled by the wind blasting in through the destroyed window. About a day’s worth of black stubble darkened his chin.
    “What the hell is wrong with you?” he growled.
    Sam clamped both hands tighter around the wheel as a means of controlling her impulses, which urged launching another all-out attack on him. Knowing that anything of the sort would be stupid to the point of suicidal, she cast him a furious look instead.
    “Get out of my truck!”
    “Yeah. No.”
    She was so wired, so upset and scared and angry, that the fact that he could shoot her at will didn’t seem to be registering with her like it should. She was in mortal danger: the gun he was pointing at her was proof positive of that. But she wasn’t as terrified as she should have been, and she blamed the adrenaline that had to be flooding her system by now for that.
    Or maybe it was the lingering memory of