Read Shiver for Free Online Page A

Wesson was heavy and warm from her body heat. Her palms were sweaty, which made its metal grip slippery, which made her tighten her hold on it. During the heartbeat it took her to reconfirm the deadly reality of the mess she was in—oh, yeah, it was bad—her stomach cramped. She ignored it, just like she was ignoring the painful throbbing in her head where one of these bozos had clobbered her, just like she was ignoring the fear that would have swamped her if she’d let it. If this was a fight for her life—and Tyler’s—then hell, yeah, she was going to fight. Gritting her teeth, she targeted just above the gleaming black barrel of the bastard’s gun. It was taking careful aim—at her, not her companion. Like he’d said, they were clearly going to kill her first. Tamping down hard on a rising wave of terror that turned her blood to ice and made her pulse race and her heart pound, she fired with grim determination, pulling the trigger multiple times, shooting at both dark shadows, blasting away for her life—and Tyler’s—in big explosions of sound.
    “Holy shit!” the man in the trunk with her yelped, his arms flying up to shield his head, as her targets screamed, reeled away, then dropped from sight with heavy, crunching thuds. Clambering up onto her knees, looking wildly around for any possible new threat, Sam ignored her companion as he rolled onto his back to stare up at her. He said something else to her that didn’t register. Everything—the bang of the gunshots, the sulfuric smell of the recently fired gun, the screams and sounds of bodies dropping, and the terrible reality of the deadly violence that had suddenly forced its way into her life—had such a nightmarish quality to it that she was having a hard time processing that this is real.
    Don’t think. Just get out of here.
    Ears ringing from the noise of the gunshots, mind surprisingly detached in the midst of her body’s knee-jerk panic, she sprang out of that trunk like a gazelle—or a mother whose kid was in danger, which was what she was.
    The men she’d shot were down, dark shapes sprawled on the silvery gravel near the back of the car, she saw as her feet hit the ground. One of them writhed and moaned. The other lay still. For a second, as the gun hung heavy in her hand, she stared at them. The one looked dead; the other clearly wasn’t, but neither seemed capable of posing any kind of a threat. Heart pounding, breathing way too fast, she forced herself to look away from them and take stock of her surroundings. She was outside, close enough to the river so that she could catch a glimpse of its rolling waters, standing in the middle of a shadow-filled open space. The moon and stars gleaming down from the black sky high above, the distant glow from the city of St. Louis across the river, and her truck’s white beams pointing like twin light sabers away from her made it plenty bright enough to see what was going down, even if darkness obscured a lot of the details. As she had suspected, they were in the scrap yard, a football-field-size cemetery for junk cars and trucks and discarded metal of all types, in which she personally had scrounged numerous times looking for parts for various vehicles, including thetruck. Piles of would-be scrap were stacked up everywhere like mini-mountains, some reaching as much as twenty feet high. Two long, low warehouses formed a wall between the piles of scrap and the street. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence designed (unsuccessfully) to keep scroungers out surrounded the entire property. Making an instantaneous visual sweep of the area, Sam concluded that there was no one else around.
    Except, of course, for the man who had clambered out of the trunk in her wake. Catching his laborious movement toward her out of the corner of her eye, she turned in his direction, of two minds about whether or not she ought to just go ahead and shoot him, too, and be done with it. Her lips compressed. It was obvious that he