Shiver

house cum safe house that he wanted to be under the circumstances and because negotiating the stairs while on crutches was tricky at best. Watching Groves head down, Danny recognized the fact that he’d made a major mistake. Too late: not a damned thing he could do about it.
    He’d kissed the girl.
    “Hey, Marco, I’d keep what I just said in mind, if I were you.” Groves threw that, along with an ugly look, up at him as he reached the bottom of the stairs. It was the tail end of the conversation they’d been having. Danny had said something like, we need to give them some space, you can head on back downstairs, to which Groves had replied along the lines of, I’m just doing my job here, whereupon Danny had said, no irony intended, that he appreciated that, which Groves had taken poorlyand possibly as sarcasm and in reply growled that if it was up to him he, Groves, wouldn’t be laying his life on the line for a damned traitor who deserved to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Or worse.
    Danny had barely stopped himself from saying amen to that. The thing was, though, Marco wouldn’t. So he’d said screw you instead. Thus provoking Groves’s less-than-friendly reply.
    What made it difficult, Danny reflected as he headed back down the hall, was that he could actually appreciate where Groves was coming from. Rick Marco had besmirched the honor of all federal agents everywhere, committed crimes as heinous as those of any of the drug kingpins they were chasing, gotten a bunch of agents and civilians killed, and then, when he was caught, cut a deal and started singing like the yellow canary he was.
    Marco deserved every bit of Groves’s antipathy.
    But that made the relationship tricky for Danny while he was being Marco.
    He couldn’t wait for the damned gig to be over. For many reasons. One of which, of course, was that it would be a nice change not to have to worry anymore about being tortured and killed, at least until the next death-defying assignment came along. Which it would. See, he was a troubleshooter. The Bureau had a team of them, under-the-radar players who were sent in on the most dangerous undercover assignments as needed. For security reasons, none of them knew the identities of the others. Crittenden was their boss. Crittenden knew them all. Except for Crittenden’s superiors, who Danny expected but did not knowfor sure were kept in the loop, and the tight little cadre of agents who were Crittenden’s support staff, Crittenden was also the only one who knew the details of their assignments.
    It helped that Danny was armed again; Crittenden had delivered on the gun. When they had arrived at the town house last night, and he had gotten a good look at the crutches that had been provided for him as they were unloaded, Danny had almost been surprised. Almost, because not much Crittenden managed to pull off surprised him anymore. But this, a piece of masking tape stuck to the underside of the shoulder support of the left crutch with the number 342 scrawled on it, had done the trick—342 was Crittenden’s top-secret extension at Quantico. Only his team knew it. Seeing the tape with the number on it had been like seeing Crittenden’s signature. It had told Danny that there was something up with the crutch. After he’d insisted on switching out the wheelchair for the crutches and then hauled his ass up the stairs on them—an exercise in pain, danger, and frustration that he didn’t relish repeating any more than he had to—he had hobbled into his bedroom, locked the door, and proceeded to take them apart.
    A 9mm model 26 Glock, known in the business as a pocket Glock because of its small size, was concealed inside the left crutch, cleverly inserted into the triangle that fit beneath his armpit. The long shaft that stretched from the triangle to the floor was hollow, and contained two ten-round magazines. In the same place in the right crutch, he’d found a cell phone. Generic, disposable, untraceable. Just to be on the safe side, he’d taken the battery out.
    Hot damn, he’d thought at the time, he was in business again. After careful consideration, Danny had decided to leave both phone and gun concealed in the crutches. Otherwise, Sanders and company might well spot them. And take them: as a fed turned criminal turned protected federal witness, Rick Marco was allowed neither a personal cell phone nor weapons. Then after they took them, they would start asking questions. Like, how