Shiver

the other flat on the carpet at his feet. The foot of his injured leg barely touched the ground, and he was grimacing with pain.
    Her inner worrywart got the best of her.
    “What, have those stupid pills quit working or something?” she asked him sharply.
    His grimace was overridden by a gleam of amusement in the glance he shot her way as he gave a single negative shake of his head. “I quit taking them. They got me in trouble.”
    She absolutely refused to go there. “So you’re just going to hurt.”
    “Seemed like the best idea.”
    Sam realized that she hated the idea that he was in pain, and then hated that she hated it. It occurred to her then that, much as she disliked having to face it, she and Tyler needed him. If, for example, he should have to go to a hospital to get his leg reoperated on, they would be left alone with the marshals. Or not. Because every single one of their guardians had made it clear that their job was to protect Marco, and she and Tyler were nothing more than excess baggage. Sam was pretty sure that she could count on them only as long as Marco was around to insist they protect her and her son.
    All the more reason for the insurance policy she’d tried to put in place.
    “Did you change the bandage on your leg?” If she sounded irritable, it was because she was feeling irritable. Constantly battling back fear did not have a good effect on her, she was discovering.
    “Not yet.”
    “You’d better do it.”
    “Everything I need is upstairs, and I’m not going upstairs again until it’s time to go to bed. Getting up and down those stairs on crutches is too damned much work.”
    He bent over, swiping at the crutch on the floor in a failed attempt to pick it up. Lips compressed, Sam watched as he finally snagged it, in two minds about whether or not she should offer to help him with the changing of his bandage. She pictured the location of the wound and the degree of closeness to him that would be required, to say nothing of the hands-on nature of the task, which she had already experienced. Then she rememberedlast night—and this morning. No way in hell, was her deciding thought on the subject as at last he got the crutches situated beneath his armpits. With that she turned and went upstairs without another word, ignoring him as he called after her. Whatever he wanted to say to her, she was in no mood to hear.
    By the time 11:00 p.m. rolled around, they’d had no more private conversation, and she was wiped out. She’d done several loads of laundry: Tyler’s and her clothes, their bedding (because who knew who’d been sleeping on those sheets before they had arrived), some towels. She had cleaned her room and Tyler’s, and dusted and swept and run the vacuum over the entire house. She’d played cars and hide-and-seek, made a garage out of a shoebox, and baked brownies because Tyler loved them and there was a box of mix in the pantry. All the activity served the admirable goal of keeping her busy, which prevented her from worrying too much about more bad things that might be coming their way. But also, under the guise of cleaning in particular, she had contrived to learn where every window and door (possible exits) were located and how they operated, where an extra house key was kept (on a hook inside a cabinet, along with another, nearly identical key, which she thought might be a key to the town house next door), where the car keys were kept (inside the drawer closest to the garage), as well as where the garage door opener was stashed. As Sanders went off guard duty and was replaced by Abramowitz, she’d learned the code to the security system by watching Sanders type it into the keypad beside the door in the kitchen that led to the garage. When they’d grilled hamburgers for dinner, Abramowitz had sat ina lawn chair and kept guard, Marco had done the actual grilling, Sam had formed the patties for him and made a salad, and Tyler, beaming with excitement about grilling out, which was something he had never experienced because they didn’t have a grill, had been in charge of opening the buns. While they were outside, with everyone else pretty much occupied, she had taken the opportunity to check out the backyard gate, how it worked, what it opened onto. And she had done all those things just in case. Just in case the bad guys should find them, or just in case she should decide to take Tyler and go it alone. Or—well, just in case.
    Having supervised Tyler’s bath