Shiver

as cold and merciless as the black waters of the Mississippi River that ran behind the warehouse. The river where, unless Danny was mistaken, his corpse was shortly going to end up. “I’m gonna ask again: where’s the money?”
    Shit. Danny realized that he was panting like a dog. He could feel blood gushing from his leg, soaking his jeans, and knew that blood loss was going to be a problem if he lived longer than the next few minutes. Which, face it, meant it probably wasn’t going to be a problem at all. A black wave of anger hit him: somebody had fucked up big time. But this wasn’t the moment to get pissed about it. This was probably the moment to be making peace with his maker, but he’d rather try to come up with some way to survive. Forget cringing. Now that he’d gotten a real taste of what was getting ready to come his way, he would have begged if he’d thought it would do any good. Despite his efforts to block the pain, it threatened to overwhelm his senses. Jesus, when he’d signed on for this gig he had accepted the possibility that he might die—it came with the territory—but getting himself blasted to bits before they killed him was worse than anything he had foreseen.
    Damn Crittenden anyway. Where was he, where were they all, while this shit was going down? The key here was that he wasn’t actually supposed to die.
    Veith’s gun hand moved, almost imperceptibly. Danny’s heart lurched. He thought of his mother having to identify his mutilated body, pushed the image out of his head.
    “Santos has it,” he groaned. It was a lie, but if lying worked to buy him some time, he was ready, willing, and able to lie like a two-dollar whore.
    Veith didn’t fire.
    “Santos?” Veith repeated. Except for one dim lightbulb swinging from a wire high overhead, the warehouse was dark. If you didn’t count Danny, Veith, two other thugs, and the BMW Danny was crammed into the trunk of, it was also deserted. The better for torturing and killing you in, my dear. Given Danny’s present position, reading Veith’s expression was nearly impossible. But he could hear the sudden interest in his voice.
    Veith thought there might be a possibility that he was telling the truth. Danny automatically filed that information away to be passed on to Crittenden later before he remembered that he most likely was not going to be passing on anything.
    Because he was going to be dead.
    Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he didn’t want to die. He was thirty-two years old. Had a big, boisterous extended family. A hot girlfriend. A good (although dangerous, see present situation) job. Tickets to the NBA championship game in two weeks. Lots of things in the works.
    “You have five seconds to tell me everything you know.”
    Veith was taking careful aim at his right elbow. The one that was uppermost. If a bullet tore through his elbow at that angle, the pain would make the blazing agony in his leg feel like amosquito bite. To say nothing of the fact that it would shatter the joint and he would probably never regain the full use of his arm. Not that he was going to need it where it looked like he was going anyway, but still.
    Shit.
    “One. Two. Three. F—”
    It was the thought of more pain that pulled his foggy thought processes together enough to allow him to try to improvise.
    As a new wave of sweat enveloped him, he broke in on Veith. “Like I said, Santos—”
    “They’re coming. They know where we are.” Thug number one—Danny hadn’t gotten a good enough look at either of them to be able to identify them—came running, his feet thudding on what sounded like a concrete floor. From where? Danny didn’t know, although he presumed a lookout was being kept.
    Theoretically, he was too valuable to the feds who’d been holding him for them to just abandon him. Veith would expect a search-and-rescue team to be coming on strong.
    So did Danny, for entirely different reasons.
    Veith swore under his breath. To Danny’s immense relief, he lowered the pistol.
    “We’ll finish this later, Marco,” Veith told him.
    Yeah, Marco, as in Rick Marco, because Veith had no idea who he really was. Which was the only reason Danny was still alive.
    Then Veith stepped back, and the trunk lid slammed down.
    A moment later, the car was peeling rubber out of there. Danny lay in the trunk, blind as a mole in the pitch dark,woozy with pain, fighting to find enough oxygen to keep him conscious in the superheated, carbon-monoxide-tainted