Shiver

reality started to intrude—his leg had hurt like a mother and there’d been an operation on it. He was still lying flat on his back, still on a gurney, but now he was strapped to the damned thing, across the chest and, he thought, the hips, which worried him, although probably less than it would have done if he hadn’t been high as a kite on whatever narcotic elixir they had him on. He was in a small, narrow room with a curved ceiling. A half-full IV bag hung on a pole beside him with clear plastic tubing that allowed a golden liquid to drip down into his arm. It was cold, and he was covered by a white blanket to the armpits. His hands and arms, he was glad to discover, were free, and further groping exploration found that the buckles securing the straps were within reach, which meant that he could free himself if he had to, although probably not with any degree of speed. What light there was came out of weird little circular openings on either side of the ceiling. There was a sound, a deep, throbbing sound that made the room vibrate—a generator of some sort? An engine?Then a figure stirred in the shadows at the far end of the room, separating itself from the wall. As Danny craned his neck to see better, whoever it was came walking toward him.
    Danny tensed. He was feeling way too mellow to go on full-body alert, which would have alarmed him except that he was feeling way too mellow to feel particularly alarmed. He would have swung into a sitting position, except the straps securing him to the gurney wouldn’t allow it.
    Oh, yeah, the straps. Why the hell was he strapped down?
    He felt for the buckle around his chest. But his hands were slow and his fingers were clumsy, and the hard truth was that freeing himself quickly just wasn’t going to happen.
    In worrisome evidence of how slow his thought processes currently were, yelling for help had just crossed his mind when the figure came close enough for him to identify it.
    “Crittenden.” He said his boss’s name out loud. He should have felt relief, but he didn’t.
    “You left a hell of a mess for us to clean up, Panterro. Five goddamn bodies.” A solid two hundred pounds at six foot one, with short, graying, dark hair, sharp features, and a perpetual deep tan, forty-eight-year-old FBI Special Agent in Charge Timothy Crittenden looked less than happy. He also looked the part of the National Guard officer whose uniform he was currently wearing. National Guard officer? Uniform? He even had an ID badge affixed to his chest. Danny blinked, turning that over in his currently slow-as-a-paddleboat mind. It didn’t compute. Then he realized: Crittenden was undercover. Of course he was. Just like Danny himself was undercover,as federal-agent-on-the-take-turned-federal-stoolie-who-was-marked-for-death Rick Marco, also known as the Dirtbag for short. Nobody, including U.S. Marshal Bruce Sanders and his band of clowns, currently charged with his protection, could be allowed to know that the “Marco” they were guarding was not the real one, or that he had any connection whatsoever to the FBI. On the heels of that aha moment of remembrance, a frightening thought—if Crittenden could infiltrate Sanders’s security arrangements then Veith and the Zetas probably could, too—caused Danny so little internal agitation that once again he had to chalk it up to the drugs.
    “I only killed two of them,” Danny protested. An urgent piece of information he needed to impart to Crittenden surfaced. “And, by the way, Army Veith is working for the Zetas now. He’s the one who came after me.”
    “Veith, huh?” Crittenden’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “They must really want you—ah, Marco—dead. Well, maybe we can end up taking him out as part of this operation, too.”
    “A happy thought.”
    Crittenden frowned at him. “So what the hell happened back there?”
    “You tell me.” The whole thing was slowly unspooling itself in Danny’s mind. The assault on the safe house. The dead marshals. His own near-death experience. Sam. And Tyler. Anger, mild but measurably there, which given the apparent strength of the drugs he was on told him something, bubbled up inside him. “Where the fuck were you guys?”
    “We couldn’t get to you in time.” Crittenden didn’t soundparticularly apologetic. More like he had been late to an administrative meeting. An unimportant administrative meeting. “Hoffman and Lutts had eyes and ears on the place, but the