Shiver

didn’t deserve to be caught up in this. Also, because he liked her. Plus she was a woman, and pretty, and—well, he wasn’t prepared to let her get herself killed if he could help it, that was all. First he was going to answer her phone and then he was going to wing it, depending on who was on the other end and what they said, figuring out the best way to use the contact as he went along.
    “Anyone finds us through that phone and I’ll kill you myself before the Zetas can do the job,” Sanders threatened as Danny flipped the phone open. Making his thumb and forefinger into a pseudo gun, Sanders glanced around to point it at Danny. “Like this: boom, shot to the head.”
    Danny ignored him.
    “Mm-hmm,” Danny said into the phone, his voice a little higher pitched than normal. He didn’t want to give away immediately that it wasn’t Sam who was answering, just in case whoever it was had no interest in talking to him or anyone who wasn’t Sam.
    “Mom?” The voice on the other end was soft and quavery, kind of. A kid’s voice. Jesus, it had to be Sam’s kid. Whispering.Danny sat up straighter, and to hell with the pain. “Mom, where are you? Some men are here.”
    Danny racked his brain. It was a piss-poor time for it to be shrouded in layers of fog, but there was nothing to do but . . .
    “Mom?” The kid’s voice was even smaller. And definitely scared. “They broke in the kitchen door. They’re in there with Mrs. Menifee. They’re hurting her. What should I do?”
    Danny’s blood ran cold.
    “Tyler.” The kid’s name popped into his head just like that. It was like he could hear Sam’s voice saying it. “Shh. You want to be real quiet. Don’t let them see or hear you.”
    “Who are you? Where’s Mom?”
    “I’m a friend of your mom’s, okay? She isn’t here right now.” He hoped, no, he prayed, that she wasn’t there, either. But he knew as well as he knew the sun would rise in the morning that she’d been heading home for her kid. Had she made it? Was she there, too, somewhere?
    The possibility scared the bejesus out of him.
    There was a sniffle. The sound made Danny’s stomach twist.
    “Are you Carl?” the kid asked.
    “Shh,” Danny warned again. He had no idea who Carl was, but he wasn’t going to claim to be him. The name Rick stuck in his throat. Anyway, to give him that much information would be to put the kid in more danger than he was in already. He sure as hell couldn’t tell the truth, either. “I’m Trey.” A nickname bestowed on him at Texas A&M, where he had been the sixthman on the Aggies basketball team whose specialty had been three-point shots.
    “Are you a stranger?” The kid sounded wary. Danny supposed Sam had drummed the “stranger danger” bit into his head. Danny was familiar with it from his own nephews. Important information, but definitely not helpful now.
    “No. I’m a friend of your mom’s, remember?”
    “I don’t know if . . .”
    A woman’s scream in the background interrupted, sending the hair on Danny’s nape shooting upright. His heart leaped. Sam? was his immediate, gut-wrenching reaction. But he didn’t say it. Not to her kid. Anyway, it couldn’t be her, or the kid would be having a cow. It had to be that Mrs. Menifee the kid had been talking about.
    “No! Please, please, I don’t . . .” The woman’s voice was shrill with terror. The rest of her plea degenerated into unintelligible syllables. Listening, Danny gritted his teeth, consumed with his own helplessness. He knew what was happening. They were trying to force his—or maybe Sam’s—whereabouts out of her.
    “They’re hitting Mrs. Menifee,” the kid whispered, his stranger-danger problem clearly having been overridden by events. “With their fists. They shouldn’t do that.” He sounded angry now as well as scared. “Mrs. Menifee is nice.” Danny found that his hand was clenched so hard around the phone that he had to consciously ease his grip or risk breaking the plastic. “I need my mom to come home. I need her right now.”
    That was the last thing any of them needed, but Dannydidn’t tell the kid that even as he prayed that Sam stayed far, far away.
    “Don’t let them see you,” Danny warned.
    The kid didn’t answer.
    “Tyler—”
    “Mrs. Menifee’s crying.” It was the merest breath of sound. “They’re tying her up in a chair now. One of them’s got a big knife.”
    Telling the kid to hang up and call 911 sprang to the tip