Shiver

air.
    He was still trying to process exactly what had happened. No, how it had happened: the assault on the safe house where as Marco he’d been under twenty-four-hour guard, the lightning-fast slaughter of the U.S. Marshals assigned to protect him, his own kidnapping and brutal interrogation.
    They’re coming. Danny held onto the promise implicit in that gasped warning like a drowning man to a lifeline. “They” had to refer to the feds. He was an undercover FBI agent, for God’s sake. His fellow federal agents would not just leave him to die.
     

     
    Two a.m. in gorgeous downtown East St. Louis, which was an oxymoron if she’d ever heard one, Sam reflected glumly. A Friday night turned into the wee hours of a Saturday morning. She was still pretty enough that guys were always hitting on her. She should have been out dancing, partying, or at least seeing a movie and getting a pizza. Something.
    She sighed. Get real. If you weren’t doing this, you’d be working the third shift at Walmart. Or Waffle House. Or somewhere equally shitty.
    Instead she was driving Big Red, a junky hook-and-chain tow truck, down a pothole-heavy street lined with bars and tattoo parlors and seedy restaurants and liquor stores. Getting double vision from looking at too much neon. Ignoring the streetwalkers and drug pushers on the corners. Ignoring the bands of looking-for-trouble punks, too. If they wanted trouble, she had a Smith & Wesson revolver on the passengerseat beside her. And a tire iron tucked beneath her seat. Much as she hated to admit it, these were her people. These mean streets were her mean streets. She could handle herself.
    Didn’t mean she had to like it.
    Her cell phone rang. Her best friend, Kendra Wilson.
    “What?” Sam said into it.
    “I’m just about to leave work.” Kendra cashiered weekends at the local Publix grocery store. They’d been besties since kindergarten. When the shit had hit the fan in Sam’s life some five and a half years ago now, Kendra had been one of the few people Sam had been able to count on. “You need anything?”
    “Could you get me some pancake mix?” Sam answered. “And syrup. Tyler likes pancakes on Saturday morning, and I’m out.”
    “Some five and a half years ago” meaning when she’d found out she was pregnant with Tyler. Fresh out of high school, working as a waitress at Red Lobster while she tried to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, she had been a wild, heedless eighteen-year-old who had just wanted to have fun when the pee-stick had turned pink. Now she was a struggling single mother, and “fun” had given way to “survive.” Which was why she was driving around in a tow truck in the middle of a starry June night. Her “uncle”—actually a geriatric former boyfriend of her great-aunt’s who had been kind enough, after Tyler’s birth, to give her a job in the office of his small towing company that had allowed her to keep the baby with her—had died the previous year, leaving her Big Red, along with his working relationship with A+ Collateral Recovery. Most nights, especially since the economy had tanked, A+ would give her alist of vehicles to be repossessed, and she would go out on the hunt. She was paid a bounty for every collateral recovery (that’s what the contract called it; in reality it was a repo) she completed. She wasn’t getting rich, she wasn’t even getting middle class, but she was keeping a roof over her and Tyler’s heads and food on the table, and that was what counted. And lately business was picking up: last week, she’d towed in ten vehicles. At seventy dollars per, minus expenses, she’d cleared five hundred dollars, which was more than she could make doing anything else except stripping, which she wasn’t yet desperate enough to do. Of course, almost the entire amount had gone for rent, but at least she’d been able to pay rent, even if it was a week late. Out of the check she was expecting tomorrow, she would have to pay utilities and Tyler’s preschool, plus Mrs. Menifee and the usual expenses associated with the truck, and then add a little to her tuition-for-her-upcoming-fall-class account. Which would leave her just about enough for a week’s worth of groceries, if she was careful.
    “Tyler’s lucky it’s Friday.” By that, Kendra meant she had gotten her paycheck tonight. Like the rest of them, Kendra was always broke by the end of the financial week, which for her ended on Fridays. Which