Shiver (38 page)

Frowning, she was just about to say
Tyler
when his demeanor stopped her. From that alone, her heart was already slamming in her chest when she reached the top and looked down the stairs. At what she saw at the bottom, she stopped breathing: Abramowitz lay sprawled on his stomach at the entrance to the great room. By the faint glow that seemed to be emanating from the kitchen, where the light was apparently still on, she was able to see that there was a great gaping wound in his neck and that the dark stain soaking into the carpet around him was blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I
nside her head, Sam screamed like a steam whistle, but she didn’t make so much as a sound out loud. Instead, as her son’s wide eyes swung around to her, she pressed her finger to her lips in the age-old gesture of
hush,
reached out, and caught his hand.

His fingers were as cold as ice. They locked onto hers as if he were never going to let her go. Heart jackhammering, being as quiet as it was possible to be, she drew him back up the stairs toward her. As soon as he was off the stairs and in the hallway she whispered
“Shh”
in his ear and pulled him with her in a headlong run down the hall.

Thank God for the carpet! It muffled their footsteps as they fled as one toward Marco’s room and burst through the doorway that she had left open just a few minutes before. His light was still off, but Sam could see him: he was on his feet by the closet. He’d gotten dressed while she’d been gone, in what, by the dark outline of his shape that was really all of him that she could make out through the shadows, looked like sweats and
a T-shirt similar to what she was wearing. Clearly startled by their sudden eruption into the room, Marco swung around to face them.

“Shh,”
Sam warned him in a barely audible but urgent whisper before he could say anything. She was so scared that she could feel goose bumps racing over her skin.

“They’re here! The bad men,” Tyler blurted, whispering, too, as he made a beeline for Marco.

“They killed Abramowitz! He’s down there on the floor!” Sam only realized that she had rushed for Marco right along with Tyler when she found herself wrapping her arms around his chest while Tyler grabbed him somewhere around his hips. Marco was only using one crutch for support. Despite that he was apparently pretty steady on his feet because he didn’t so much as stagger as they latched onto him. Instead his arm came around Sam to pull her close even as he peered at them through the darkness.

“Abramowitz is dead? How?” Marco’s whisper was sharp. She thanked God that he was astute enough not to waste time on the whole
what?
and
are you sure?
thing but instead cut right to the chase.

“Just dead, okay?” She didn’t want to get too graphic with Tyler listening. “He’s lying at the bottom of the stairs. I think whoever killed him is in the house right now!” Striving for calm, Sam failed miserably. She was practically jumping out of her skin. At any second, she expected gunmen to come storming up to the second floor. At the thought, panic surged through her veins in an icy tide.

“Trey, hurry! We’ve got to get out of here!” Tyler’s whisper sounded as terrified as Sam felt. He looked up at Sam with eyes the size of saucers. Still hanging onto Marco, he was jiggling from foot to foot in agitation. Sam wrapped an arm around him, which pretty much completed the circle for a big group hug.

“Don’t worry, bud. I got this.” From its tone, Marco’s whisper was meant to be reassuring. Tyler obviously trusted him implicitly, because the reassurance seemed to calm him. Despite the fact that Sam had a way clearer idea about whom and what they were facing than her son, it calmed her a little, too. Even with everything she knew about Marco, her heart persisted in identifying him as someone she and Tyler could rely on in a tight spot. In a deadly spot. Like this.

“Tyler’s right. We’ve got to go
now.
” Fear, thick and cold and oily, rose up in her throat like bile. Swallowing hard, Sam remembered her little research project, the one where she’d checked out all possible exits from all possible areas of the house, and realized that she knew the perfect spot for their escape. “We can go out Tyler’s bedroom window. Come
on.
”

She tugged at Marco’s arm.

“Hang on a minute.” Instead of moving as both she and Tyler were now urging him to do, Marco let go of her and balanced on one leg while he did something with his crutch. Sam’s mouth dropped open as he flipped it into the air, twisted it, and the thing came apart in his hands. Seconds later, he extracted a gun—a gun!—from inside it.

“Wow! I didn’t know that was in there.” The gun’s appearance seemed to fascinate Tyler. He watched with awe as Marco
snapped the slide back on the small black pistol and then thrust the gun into the waistband of his sweats. Marco then dumped something out of the crutch’s shaft into his hand and thrust whatever it was into his pocket.

Sam goggled.

“You’ve had that this whole
time
?” She recovered the power of speech to hiss at him even as Marco grabbed his other, still-in-one-piece crutch and the three of them headed en masse for the door.

“
Shh.
You two stay back.” Gun in hand now, Marco stepped into the hallway like a capable professional who knew his way around a dangerous situation. Sam remembered with a little spurt of thankfulness that not so long ago he had been a federal agent. A moment later, blocking them out from any threat that might emerge from the staircase with his body, he made a gesture for them to move out behind him and head for Tyler’s bedroom. Clutching Tyler’s hand, moving as quietly as possible, Sam ran down the hall with her son at her side. The whole second floor was dark except for the faint glow coming up the staircase. Now that she knew what lay down at the bottom of that staircase, just looking in that direction gave Sam the willies.

What was even scarier was the thought that they couldn’t have much time. Whoever had killed Abramowitz had to be looking for Marco, and any minute now they would come up the stairs and . . .

She couldn’t finish the thought.

As she and Tyler darted into Tyler’s bedroom, Sam saw that
Marco was headed for the stairs. Her stomach turned upside down. She wanted to call after him, to beg him to come with them, but anything she could say that he might be able to hear would be too loud. And her first priority had to be getting Tyler to safety.

“Where’s Trey?” Tyler whispered, looking around as Sam rushed toward the window. Instead of staying beside her, he pulled free. Out of the corner of her eye, as she raised the shade as quietly as possible and then reached for the cool brass window latch, she watched as he grabbed Ted from his bed and, in a gesture that brought a lump to her throat because she knew that it meant he was aware of how expensive shoes were to replace, stuck his feet into the slip-on sneakers she’d just bought him.

“Come on, Tyler.”
She unlocked the window easily. The town house was new: nothing had as yet been painted shut. The window was triple-glazed and designed to crank out. Sam cranked with all her might, wincing at the very slight creaking sounds that resulted as it slowly opened. The night air was cooler than she had expected, midsixties maybe, and heavy with the promise of rain. The moon and stars were hidden beneath a dense cloud cover. As a result, it was very dark. But down below, in the yard, the kitchen light shone out through the sliding glass doors so she could see as far away as the tree.

At the thought that someone might be waiting for them down there, Sam shivered. Her heart pounded like a piston in her chest.

“Here, Mom.” Tyler thrust her shoes and the bear mace at her as he rejoined her, and she took both with a quick spurt of
surprise that he’d thought to gather them up and appreciation for the levelheadedness it indicated. She’d left her shoes under his bed when she’d read to him earlier, and the bear mace had found a permanent home in his nightstand because she had figured that if anyone broke into the house, the place where she was most likely to make a stand was at Tyler’s bedside. Dropping the bear mace into her pocket, grabbing Ted from Tyler—“I’ll hold him!”—and tucking him under her arm, she helped Tyler out onto the cedar shake overhang that ran along the back of the house and shaded the sliding glass door.

“Be careful,” she warned, because the overhang, while not steep, had a definite slope to it. At the same time, she thrust her feet into her shoes, stuck Ted into her other pocket, and looked back over her shoulder one last time in hopes that she would see Marco coming toward her. She did not. The house was still and quiet. She couldn’t even hear Marco, much less anything else. But she knew that the quiet was an illusion, knew the most terrible danger could engulf them at any second, and the knowledge made her stomach knot and her pulse race.

“Come on, Mom.”

Sam was halfway out the window when Marco appeared in the doorway. Until she actually saw his tall dark shape swinging toward her, she hadn’t realized how terrified she had been that something might have prevented him from rejoining them. Some of the anxiety that had been constricting her throat eased.

Oh, God, I’m crazy about him.
There was absolutely no future in it, and she didn’t have time to dwell on the implications of it, but there it was: a fact.

“I can’t figure out why nobody’s coming up here after us.” Reaching the window, thrusting his crutch and then his head and shoulders through the opening, Marco said it as if he were talking more to himself than to her.

“You wouldn’t happen to have another gun in there, would you?” Sam whispered, gesturing at the crutch.

“Fresh out,” Marco whispered back.

Seeing her clinging to the shingles just outside the window looking back at him, he added, “Go. Don’t wait for me. Hurry.”

If Marco was telling her to hurry, hurry was what she was going to do. Icy little curls of fear spiraled through Sam’s stomach as she scrambled carefully along the overhang. One thing she didn’t need to worry about was Tyler’s climbing ability, she saw with relief. He was clinging to the layered gray shingles like a monkey, moving in the direction she had indicated, toward the edge of the overhang nearest to the gate in the fence that surrounded the backyard, through which they would ultimately escape the property. Despite having both hands and feet planted flat against the shingles, she wasn’t quite as good at negotiating the shingles as Tyler seemed to be. The surface was uneven and slippery with moss in places, with no convenient handholds. Her boots were having trouble finding purchase, too. Twice she slid almost all the way down to the gutter, but she kept going. Between his bad leg and the need to hang onto his crutch, Marco seemed to be having some difficulty as well. Sam kept casting anxious glances back at him as he moved awkwardly in her wake, but there was nothing she could do to help him. All she could do was keep going.

Tyler reached the edge of the roof, crouched, peered over. Sam felt her heart stutter as she watched his small body teeter in midnight-black silhouette against the charcoal black of the sky. Out in the open air as they were, with no way of telling if anyone was below them in the yard, or anywhere else within earshot, Sam was afraid to call out to him to wait for her, to warn him not to try to jump. But—smart boy!—he stayed where he was anyway, looking back at her.

Reaching him, Sam clung precariously to the shingles and looked down, too. The drop wasn’t that far—maybe twelve feet. Far enough to hurt them? Maybe. Maybe not, if they were careful. What scared her more was wondering what might be waiting for them below. Although they had tried their best to cross the roof as silently as possible, inevitably there had been slithering footsteps and the slight dragging sound made by Marco’s crutch as he hauled it along with him. Had they been heard? Was Abramowitz’s killer tracking their progress across the roof even now? It was a chance Sam knew they were going to have to take. As far as she could tell, this corner of the yard was deserted. It was also thick with shadows; unless someone knew exactly where they were, they should be able to drop down unseen. The gate was nearby. Once they were off the roof, it would only take a couple of minutes to get through it. Then what? If Abramowitz was dead, what about the others? Realizing that she had absolutely no idea what was waiting for them sent a shiver racing down her spine.

Marco had caught up to them. Tyler scooted close to him as Sam looked around at him wide-eyed.