Shiver

“He’s four. What kind of monsters are they?”
    “You said it: monsters.” He hadn’t objected to her left turn, but now he pointed right. “Pull into that alley.” He indicated a shadowy path that snaked between a broken-down service station and a closed Italian restaurant to disappear into the darkness beyond. “We’ll cut the BMW loose there.” He threw her a sharp look. “And if you’re thinking of cutting and running, just keep in mind that if you do, when they find the BMW—and they will—they’ll find this wrecker still attached to it. They’ll use it to track you down.”
    Sam felt her stomach tighten. Finding her wouldn’t be hard: the license plate was registered to her. To say nothing of the fact that the name of the business—Sam’s Towing Service—along with her cell phone number was painted in big, glow-in-the-dark white letters along both sides of the truck.
    What could she say? It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, just thinking about how big those letters were and how easy they were to read in the dark made her want to give her clueless previous self a swift kick in the butt.
    “Yeah, that’s right, your name’s on it.” It was like he could read her mind. “And a phone number that I bet is yours is on there, too. Great big. Hard to miss.”
    “Both those men back there are dead,” she said in a constricted voice as she followed his directions and pulled into thealley. “They were the only ones who saw me. There may be an army of killers after you, but they’re not after me. Once I get the BMW unhooked, they won’t even know I exist.”
    “That’s one of the reasons I finished them off. I was trying to make sure you’d be safe.”
    Her expression must have been doubtful, because he continued, “It’s the truth. And look at the thanks I got: you tried to run off and leave me. No, you tried to run over me. Not nice.”
    Sam shot him a look. “Sorry if I didn’t quite get that you were trying to help me out back there by killing two men.”
    “You shot them first, baby doll.”
    “I had no choice! You were right, they were going to kill me! And you.” She shot him a furious look. “I saved your ass. And look at the thanks I got: you’re kidnapping me!”
    The slight quirk at the corner of his lips almost could have been the beginnings of a smile. It vanished as quickly as it appeared.
    “What can I say? Shit happens.”
    “Shit happens?” Her voice quivered with indignation. “We’re talking about my life here. And my son’s life. Those two men are dead. They can’t identify me. You’ve got to let me go.”
    “Can’t.” He shook his head. “Now that I’ve had time to consider it, I don’t think those two jerk-offs being dead is going to be enough to get you off the hook. I grant you that they’re looking for me, but what do you think the odds are that somebody didn’t see you hooking your truck up to the BMW to tow it away? Then there are always surveillance cameras. Google Earth, even. They’ll be moving heaven and earth to find me,and the smart money says they’re going to stumble across you in the course of the hunt. I wouldn’t want to bet against it.”
    Sam went cold with fear as she remembered the partying going on across the street from where she had picked up the Beemer. As noisy as Big Red was, it was more likely than not that somebody had noticed what she was doing. And Google Earth—there was no escaping Google Earth.
    She almost wailed, “I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything.”
    “Yeah, well. These guys aren’t the type to take a chance on that. They’re big believers in scorched earth. Pull in here. This should work.”
    They were behind the service station now, approaching an empty lot that already held the chassis of an eighties-era Impala riding on cement blocks where its wheels had once been. He indicated the lot with a gesture. It was dark, shadowy, strewn with trash. A gravel parking area just off the alley at the front of the lot was overgrown with weeds. Scrub bushes grew tall against a broken-down privacy fence at the rear. A single-story building that Sam took to be a garage shielded the near side of the lot from view, while what appeared to be a metal storage shed squatted on the other side. The backs of various three- and four-story brick buildings crowded together across the alley. All the structures were dark and seemingly deserted, forming a wall of dense black rectangles that looked