Shiver

like uneven teeth getting ready to take a chomp out of the star-sprinkled charcoal of the sky.
    “Turn off the lights,” he directed, and she did. The nightswallowed them. Sam immediately felt safer: at least no one chasing them down Story would be able to look over and see where they were.
    Of course, the bad guys didn’t need to see them to find them, she reminded herself grimly. They had the Beemer’s GPS.
    Wincing a little as Big Red rumbled noisily into the lot, she steered it around in a circle so it was facing forward again, haunted by the fear that they might need to make a quick exit. Knowing that at that exact moment a gang of killers might very well be tracking the Beemer’s every movement alarmed her to the point where the only thing she wanted to do was get away from it. Braking, praying the resultant sounds weren’t as loud as they seemed to her, she couldn’t slam the gearshift into park and get out of the door fast enough.
    “Hang on.” Quasimodo grabbed her wrist again even as she wrestled with the damned uncooperative door latch.
    “What?” Yanking against his hold in a futile attempt to free her wrist, she glared at him. If he were weakening, his grip showed no sign of it. His fingers were warm and strong. Except for a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead and maybe an increased degree of tightness around his mouth, he looked no different than when she had first set eyes on him. “Let go of me. Let’s get this done.”
    “Just one thing first.” Without releasing her, he reached over the back of the seat into the rear compartment.
    “What?” Jiggling with nervous impatience, Sam watched as he grabbed the jumper cables she always kept on a pair of hooks above the shelflike rear seat and hauled them into the front. Hisdamaged finger stayed stiffly erect while the rest of his hand curved around the cord. It was now the approximate girth of a hot dog in marked contrast to the rest of his long, tapering fingers, and just looking at it told her it had to hurt. Not my problem. “What do you want with those? According to you, we’re running out of time.”
    “We are.”
    “So?” She yanked at her wrist again, still without results.
    “I’m not taking any chances.” He thrust the jumper cables at her. They were twenty feet long, maybe an inch in circumference, black, with the flexibility of a bungee cord and a pair of colorful clamps dangling from both ends. “Tie the cord around your waist.”
    “What?”
    “Do it.”
    She understood then: he was afraid she was going to run away. Well, she was, first chance she got, but that didn’t stop her from feeling a rush of indignation.
    “Now,” he ordered.
    Her lips compressed. Arguing was a waste of time, she concluded. Taking the cable, wrapping one end around her waist, Sam cast him a fulminating look. “You can trust me to dump the BMW, you know.”
    “Funny thing is, I actually believe that. But can I trust you after, is the question.”
    When Sam didn’t reply—if he knew she was lying, what was the point?—he made a gesture with her gun at the cord she had looped around her waist.
    “Tie it. In a knot.”
    She did.
    “Once more.” He indicated the knot. Sulkily, Sam made another loop. The knot wasn’t anything she couldn’t untie, but it would take a moment, and that would give him time to stop her. She knew it, and he knew it, which was why the look she gave him when she was done was venomous.
    “Satisfied?”
    “For now. Out my side.” Hanging onto the other end of the cable, he opened the passenger-side door—not without having to put some force into it, because it tended to stick, too—and slid to the ground. Since the truck had been modified to carry out its mission of carting off repossessed vehicles as unobtrusively as possible, the cab’s interior light had long since been disabled. Except for random night sounds, the empty lot stayed as dark and silent as a graveyard. Following him out, she was encouraged to see that he was bent almost double and leaning heavily against the side of the truck. She could hear the harsh rasp of his breathing. He was growing weaker, she thought hopefully. Maybe the prospect of him passing out wasn’t quite as much a case of wishful thinking as she had supposed.
    “Cut the car loose,” he ordered as he saw her looking at him.
    She didn’t need him to tell her. In this one matter they were in perfect accord. The idea that the bad guys might be homing in on the Beemer’s