Shiver

with no neck, dark hair and skin, got his jollies hurting people. The fact that the girl had absolutely nothing to do with any of this wouldn’t weigh on him in the least. The thought of yelling for help while the opportunity existed occurred, only to be discarded for two reasons: one, he was fairly certain, if Torres was cold-cocking a girl, that there was no one nearby; and two, he was absolutely certain it would earn him a clout over the head, if nothing worse. Danny was just cursing himself and God and the universe in general for his absolute inability to do anything to help her, or to take advantage of this split-second opportunity to shout for help, make a break for it, something, when Torres straightened with the girl in his arms—
    —and dumped her into the trunk behind him. Just threw her in like she was a load of garbage. Limp as a rag doll, slumped against his back, she was warm, solid, not particularly heavy, but took up all the extra space there was. The weight of her landing against his hands, bound behind him at the wrists by a pair of plastic zip ties, was excruciating. They’d quit hurting a while back, and now Danny knew that it was because they’d gone numb.
    They were numb no longer, and he grimaced as he cautiously moved his injured fingers. At least one of them felt like it was broken.
    That was when Danny realized that he was in a weird kindof semifetal position, all scrunched up against the lip on the open end of the trunk. And the reason for that was that the front of the car seemed to have been raised up in the air while he was unconscious. Whatever, the shift had scooted him forward and left a small amount of space behind him. Which the girl’s body now filled.
    “See you again soon, Marco,” Torres said.
    The trunk lid slammed shut. Once more Danny found himself trapped in cavelike darkness.
    Shit. He’d missed his chance.
    To do what? He’d already nixed yelling. Jumping from the trunk and running for it likewise wasn’t going to happen, not bound as he was, and not injured as he was. Hell, even if he wasn’t hobbled hand and foot he wasn’t even sure he could walk. Talking them into letting him go wasn’t going to happen, either.
    So just what exactly did he think he should have been able to do?
    Good question. Answer: something. Because the alternative was lie there and wait to die.
    “Why the hell didn’t you just shoot her?” Thug Two demanded. Muffled as they were by the closed trunk lid and the sound of the girl’s breathing and his own pulse hammering in his ears, the words were still audible. Danny heard them, but didn’t recognize the voice.
    “Out here on the street?” That was Torres replying. “Anybody could be watching.”
    “I don’t see nobody.”
    “Doesn’t mean they don’t see . . .”
    Danny lost the rest of it as they apparently moved away from the trunk. He lay there in the stifling darkness, feeling like there wasn’t enough air in there to permit him to draw a good breath, woozy as all get out, hurting all over, although the pain in his thigh was the worst by far. The carpet covering the floor of the trunk was scratchy against his cheek and the bare skin of his arm. The metal floor beneath was hard as granite.
    Jesus Christ, where had the girl come from? Whoever she was, they were going to kill her, too. Nothing else they could do now that they’d thrown her in the trunk with him.
    The fact that she was an innocent, a civilian, with nothing to do with any of this wouldn’t even slow them down. Although Danny had never had up-close-and-personal contact with Veith before, Veith was well known to the FBI. He was as ruthless a killer as any hit man the Bureau had ever tracked, and the fact that he was now working for the Zetas would make him an even higher-priority target, providing Danny lived long enough to tell anyone about it. The Zetas themselves were the most notoriously brutal of Mexico’s drug cartels. Just a couple of weeks before, a video had surfaced of them beheading six members of one of their rival gangs, the Gulf cartel. The fact that one of those killed was an undercover DEA agent named Carlos Ramirez was known only to a very limited circle within law enforcement. But it had been that murder that had allowed the newly busted Rick Marco to make his sweetheart deal with the government he had betrayed. It had also created the job opening that called for Danny, who in height and weight and coloringbore enough of a general