Shiver

man who had grabbed Tyler was wearing a suit, that another man in a suit was racing toward him, and that a black car with its doors open and engine running idled at the curb, double-parked, while Big Red sat waiting directly behind it, across the street.
    Two more men stood behind the idling car, barely more than shadowy outlines at first glance, two-handing pistols that were braced on the car’s hood and aimed at her house. Sam didn’t care about them, just like she no longer cared about the men who at any second now should be bursting out her front door.
    Every last molecule in her body was focused on saving her son.
    “Tyler!” she shrieked, her feet seeming to turn heavy as lead as she tried for every bit of speed she could summon to reach her boy in time. But it was too late, the man in the suit was handing Tyler off to someone in the car, her kid was disappearing inside . . .
    “Mom!” he cried, twisting to look back at her, Ted clutched to his chest, a small hand reaching out for her.
    “Tyler!” Feeling as if her heart would explode, Sam screamed his name again. It was useless. Her son was already out of sight, thrust into the car. If it drove away now . . . but the first man in the suit, instead of disappearing into the car, too, as the other man did with Tyler, ran back to drag the gate open for her.
    “ Move it, Ms. Jones.” Sam’s vision was so blurry that she was seeing shapes rather than details, but she was sure she didn’t know him. Whoever he was, though, he knew her—or atleast her name. Tonight, in this waking nightmare that she was trapped in, it seemed that everybody did. It was horrifying, terrifying, because it meant that these men who were snatching her kid were doing it because of Marco, but then she’d known that from the first instant she’d spotted Tyler being lifted over the fence. Anyway, it didn’t matter now: whatever the cost, she was going after her child.
    Darting past the suit guy at the gate, she yelled, “Give me back my son!” at him, and was surprised at the sound of her own voice: instead of being loud and demanding, it was hoarse and croaky. Her tongue and the tissues of her mouth felt bone dry. A hideous taste—she was guessing it was from the pepper spray—clung to the back of her throat. Swallowing didn’t help.
    Reaching the car, she leaned down to look inside—both passenger-side doors were still open—and found herself being half lifted, half shoved into the backseat.
    “No!”
    Her empty, useless gun was snatched away from her. Hands grabbed and held her, trapping her inside the car, constraining her arms, her legs. She fought like a demon to get away.
    “Let me go!”
    “Mom!”
    Tyler’s voice was drowned out as a cacophony of shouting voices filled the car. They made no sense to her in her panic. Amid the pitched battle she’d been plunged into, both doors slammed shut and the car took off, peeling rubber away from the curb. Through the tinted windows, she saw that her neighbors were not quite as deaf or indifferent as she had thought: alight flicked on in the house next door; across the street, a man holding a baseball bat stepped out onto his porch, looking in the direction of her house. At the far the end of the block, as the car bearing her and Tyler away raced toward the opposite corner then took it on what felt like two wheels, she caught the merest glimpse of the brilliant red and blue flashing lights of a police cruiser lighting up the night as it zoomed onto her street.
    She wanted to scream at it, Where were you thirty seconds ago? But that would have been a waste of breath.
    “Tyler!” Her desperate gaze locked onto her son. They were holding his head out the window now, doing something to him. She couldn’t tell exactly what, but they seemed to be pouring something in his face, something that splattered in a stream down the side of the car. He squirmed like a fish on a hook, his hands restrained by a dark-jacketed arm clamping his arms to his side, his head jerking as little pained cries emerged from his throat: “Ah, ah, ah!”
    “Let go of me!” Throwing elbows and kicking, Sam got away from the arms imprisoning her and practically swam across the backseat—three men were crammed into it shoulder to shoulder—as she fought to reach him. “Tyler!”
    “Watch the leg!” The voice, the words, scratched the surface of her panic, but she was so frightened for her son that they didn’t really register.
    “Lady!