Shiver (11 page)

Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at his leg. He followed her gaze: the area around the belt was black with blood and looked—and felt—so swollen that his jeans could have been sausage casing. He got sick to his stomach every time he looked at it. So unless it was absolutely necessary, he just didn’t. Only now, it was necessary.

“You really think taking off that tourniquet is a good idea?” She glanced up at him. Her expression was uneasy.

“It is if I don’t want to lose my leg. Which I don’t.” He handed her the folded shirt, then picked up the roll of gauze that had been in the first-aid kit. Along with an Ace bandage, a tube of antibiotic ointment, some surgical tape, and a small pair of scissors, all also from the first-aid kit, that was all he had to work with. He placed each item carefully on the dashboard, within easy reach of his outstretched hand. Once the tourniquet came off, he was going to have to work fast. The darkness was an issue—moonlight only went so far—but he could see well enough to bandage the hole in his leg, and turning on an interior light would make them too visible. Finally, he pulled the pistol out of his waistband and tucked it down into the pocket on the door beside him, which put it out of her reach but kept it close enough where he could grab it if he needed it. When everything
was ready, he unbuttoned his jeans and slid his zipper down, the better to get his pants out of the way fast when the tourniquet came off. Then he looked at her.

“Scoot on over here.”

“What happens if you bleed out?”

Trepidation showed in every line of her face, but she scooted obediently, sliding toward him until her knee just touched his good leg. Given the angle at which he was situated on the seat, that was as close to him as she was going to get without putting herself through some major contortions. But she was near enough to do what he needed her to do: apply pressure to the wound while he bandaged it up.

“Then I guess you get lucky.” Reluctantly, he slid his fingers along the narrow leather strap constricting his leg to where the fastened belt buckle strained to hold it tight above his lacerated flesh. There was no exit wound, at least none that his probing fingers had been able to discover, which meant that the bullet was still in his leg, but digging for it wasn’t going to happen under these conditions. He didn’t see any way that what he was getting ready to do could be anything but bad, but he equally didn’t see any real alternative. The tourniquet had to come off. The wound had to be bandaged. He looked at her bent head. She was intently watching his fingers as they got reacquainted with the cool silver of his belt buckle. “Or not. Just so we’re clear, me dying does not get you off the hook. They’ll still come after you. And without me around to protect you, you’ve got about as much chance of surviving as a mosquito in a zapper.”

“Protect me?” Her eyes snapped up to meet his. Indignation
sparkled in them. “Since when are you ‘protecting’ me? You said we were on the same side in the trunk, and then you kidnapped me at gunpoint. You ‘protecting me’ isn’t what’s happening here.”

She had him there. At least, he could definitely see things from her point of view. “It wasn’t my fault you got thrown in that trunk. And, believe it or not, I’m trying to keep you alive.”

Her lips curled scornfully. “Get real, why don’t you? The person you’re trying to keep alive here is you.”

“Okay, so I’m trying to keep both of us alive. Same thing.”

“No, it definitely is not.”

“I’m not going to argue about it. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

The sound she made was rife with derision. But she didn’t argue anymore; instead, her gaze shifted to his leg.

“I think you ought to let me take you to a hospital.” She was eyeing his leg as if she wanted no part of what was getting ready to happen. Well, fair enough. He didn’t want any part of it, either, but they both had to deal.

“I do that, and I’m a dead man. You’re dead, too. They know I’ve been shot, and believe me, they’re hoping to capitalize on it. I’ve got no doubt that they’re already keeping watch on all the hospitals in the area. We show up at one, they’ll grab us both. Like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “
Who
are
they
?” was the question he read burning in them, but this time she didn’t even bother to ask it. Smart girl, she was learning.

“You bleed to death trying to treat yourself, and you’re just as dead.” Her voice was flat.

“Do your part, and I won’t bleed to death. And maybe we’ll both get out of this fiasco alive. Ready?”

She looked alarmed. “No.”

“Too bad. Here goes.” Taking hold of the dangling end of the belt, bracing himself for what he was about to do, Danny nevertheless succumbed to the smallest of grim smiles as he got a good grip on the buckle that was digging into his flesh. She looked so apprehensive that he couldn’t help it. Her eyes were big, her mouth was tight, and she was gripping the pad—white-knuckling the edges of it, actually—in both hands.

“Probably you should know that I’m not a fan of lots of blood,” she said, unexpectedly meeting his eyes.

“Me neither. Especially when the blood’s mine.” Gritting his teeth, he eased the leather free of the buckle, then groaned as the belt loosened, blood flowed in a warm gush, and a wave of agony rolled down his leg. Not pain, mind you. Pain he had been prepared for. But this was something different, like a chainsaw chewing up his leg from the inside out. Gritting his teeth, he lifted his rear off the seat and shoved his jeans down his legs, moving fast before the pain had a chance to overwhelm him. To his surprise, she helped him, gripping the waistband and yanking hard. The feel of the bloody fabric of his jeans releasing its hold on the wound was a revelation, and not in a good way.

“Ah, shit,” he breathed as the world receded and he had one final second of clarity in which he knew he was going to faint.

Then he did.

The surprise was that he woke up again. He became aware of something jabbing uncomfortably into the right side of his neck and opened his eyes and turned his head to find out what it was. An outdated, knob-style car door lock, he discovered, was gouging him right in the tender flesh just below his jawbone because his head had been slumped against it. The reason his head had been slumped against it was—it took a second, but then he had it—that he’d passed out. The top of his head protruded through the open window. He realized that when, still slightly disoriented, he glanced up and saw the dense black of the night sky punctuated by stars. The chirping of insects and the rustle of the tall grass surrounding the truck he was sitting in filled his ears. He was . . . where? Then something in his brain clicked on, and the events of the preceding four hours fast-forwarded through his mind in what was basically the highlight reel from hell.

He should be dead already. But he wasn’t, not because of the overwhelming might of the various government agencies charged with keeping him safe, not because of his own smarts and physical prowess, but because he’d gotten lucky.

Well, lucky worked. So far.

And he was lucky again, he thought as he shifted position so that he was more or less sitting up back inside the cab, that the window he’d landed on had been made of safety glass and had exploded into nothing when he’d shot it, or he would have been in danger of cutting his throat on the remaining jagged shards when he had keeled over.

“Don’t move.” A sharp voice caused him to glance down in surprise. A girl—
the
girl: Sam, he identified her almost instantly; yeah, he knew who she was, he wasn’t as out of it as all that—crouched in the foot well beside him. She was close, close enough so that he could smell the same faint floral scent he’d caught a whiff of in the trunk earlier, close enough so that his hand brushed the soft cotton covering one warm, firm breast when he moved. He shifted his hand away, of course, but not before registering the unexpected sexiness of the sensation. She’d lost the baseball cap long since, and long, wavy strands of inky hair that had worked loose from her ponytail were tucked behind her ears. Turned slightly sideways as she leaned in over his still-teeth-clenchingly-painful thigh, she filled the space where his legs would have rested under normal circumstances. At the moment, though, he was sprawled in a semireclining position along the cracked vinyl seat with both of his legs from the knees down hanging off into the driver’s foot well. His feet were hobbled together by his jeans, which from the feel of things were down around his ankles. After he’d fainted, she’d clearly pulled them well out of her way and gone to work on his wound on her own. So his dignity was in tatters; at least he was alive.

“I passed out.” Stating the obvious, he was chagrined to realize that his voice was thin.

“Yes, you did.”

Danny took a second to absorb the fierce expression on the pale oval face that she turned up to him, and to appreciate the slender flexibility that allowed her to curl so efficiently into
the foot well. Then his gaze moved on to her hands. Even while she frowned at him, she kept a firm hold on the end of the Ace bandage she had apparently just finished wrapping around his injured thigh. She was, he saw, in the process of securing it with small metal clips.

“How’s the bleeding?” he asked, his eyes on her. It was dark, but moonlight flooded the truck and her slim fingers moving against the bulky bandage were easy enough to see.

“It was bad. I got it stopped. Lucky for you.” There was that word again; he supposed that if he survived this he ought to get it tattooed over his heart. She was no longer looking at him. Instead, she was working the clips into the bandage with deft efficiency. The pertinent leg of his bloodstained blue boxers had been shoved up as high as it would go, presumably to get it out of her way. His bare thigh above and below the bandage was caked with blood. A lot more blood than he remembered seeing when he’d pulled his jeans down, because of course the act of removing his jeans had wiped most of the old blood away.

“So, what happened?”

She shot another quick glance up at him. “You blacked out. You bled like a stuck pig. I saved your life. Again. You owe me. Big time.”

If he’d had any strength at all, her truculence would have made him smile. “Duly noted.”

Jesus, he felt like shit. The absolute agony in his leg had subsided, but it still throbbed and ached and burned like napalm bubbling through his veins. Even his foot was getting into the act: the only way he could describe the sensation was pins and
needles to the nth degree. That was good, probably, because it meant his circulation had been restored, but it hurt like a mother. He had a feeling that, best-case scenario, he wasn’t going to be walking anywhere that required more than a few limping steps anytime soon. In addition, he was woozy, with an overall sense of physical weakness that warned him that another fainting spell wasn’t out of the question. He couldn’t afford to faint again. For whatever reason, she had stayed put the first time, and helped him. He couldn’t count on her not booking it if there was a second. And the death squad on his trail was good. He might have lost them temporarily, but if one thing was absolutely certain it was that they hadn’t given up. They were going to keep coming until they were stopped, or he was dead. He should try to find a phone and call Crittenden—no, wait, he couldn’t. Rick Marco didn’t know Crittenden. That was what the fuzzy-headedness was doing to him: putting him in danger of forgetting that he was Marco, and the guiding principle behind this run for his life had to be, what would Marco do?

Shit.

“You okay?” She was frowning at him. Probably he’d gone a little glassy-eyed there, remembering that he had to play this thing out like Marco.

He focused on her again. For whatever reason, that made him feel more on his game. Probably because her life depended on what he did next, too.

“Relatively. How’d you control the bleeding?”

“Pressure point.” She shot him a glinting look. Remembering how rucked up the leg of his boxers was, he got the picture:
she’d stuck her hand in his crotch to apply the necessary pressure, which he appreciated, both for the unexpectedly sexy image it conjured up and for the fact that it had worked. “Followed by direct pressure to the wound. After that, I packed the wound with gauze and antibiotic ointment, put my shirt on top of that, and wrapped the whole thing up with more gauze, and tape, and this. Be glad I’ve taken some EMT classes.” She carefully smoothed the bandage. “I think as long as you don’t go moving around too much, you won’t bleed to death.” Her hands were busy, and she wasn’t looking at him any longer. Instead, she was gathering up her supplies. “There’s no way to be sure, though.”

“You’ve taken EMT classes?” Talking kept him in the moment, which was a good thing. He felt light-headed and queasy, probably from blood loss.

“Yes.” She grimaced. “Three, actually. If I keep going at the rate I’m going, I might even manage to get licensed by the time I’m, like, fifty or so.”

“So how does that work if you don’t like blood?”

She shrugged. “I don’t like a lot of things. But without a college degree, there are only so many jobs I can get that pay enough to give my kid a decent life. Being an EMT is one of them. So I suck it up about the blood.”

“What about this tow-truck thing you have going on?”

“It works for now. But I only have the one truck, and it’s old. When it finally breaks down for good, where am I going to get the money to buy another?”