Manna From Heaven (13 page)

Damn Crittenden anyway. Where was he, where were they all, while this shit was going down?

Veith’s gun hand moved, almost imperceptibly. Danny’s heart lurched.
Showtime
.

“Santos has it,” he groaned. It was a lie, but if lying worked to buy him some time, he was ready, willing, and able to lie like a two-dollar whore.

Veith didn’t fire.

“Santos?” Veith repeated. Except for one dim lightbulb swinging from a wire high overhead, the warehouse was dark. If you didn’t count Danny, Veith, two other thugs and the BMW Danny was crammed into the trunk of, it was also deserted.
The better for torturing and killing you, my dear.
Given Danny’s present position, reading Veith’s expression was nearly impossible. But he could hear the sudden interest in his voice.

Veith thought there might be a possibility that he was telling the truth. Danny automatically filed that information away to be passed on later before he remembered that he most likely was not going to be passing on anything.

Because he was going to be dead.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he didn’t want to die. He was thirty-two years old. Had a hot girlfriend. A good (although dangerous, see present situation) job. Tickets to the NBA championship game next week. Lots of things in the works.

“You have five seconds to tell me everything you know.”

Veith was taking careful aim at his right elbow. The one that was uppermost. If a bullet tore through his elbow at that angle, the pain would make the blazing agony in his leg feel like a mosquito bite. To say nothing of the fact that it would shatter the joint and he would probably never regain the full use of his arm. Not that he was going to need it where he was going anyway, but still.

Shit.

“One. Two. Three. F—”

It was the thought of more pain that pulled his foggy thought processes together enough to allow him to try to improvise.

As a new wave of sweat broke over him, he broke in on Veith. “Like I said, Santos—”

“
They’re coming. They know where we are.”
Thug number one—Danny hadn’t gotten a good enough look at either of them to be able to identify them—came running, his feet thudding on what sounded like a concrete floor. From where? Danny didn’t know, although he presumed a lookout was being kept.

Theoretically, he was too valuable to the feds who’d been holding him for them to just abandon him. Veith would expect a search-and-rescue team to be coming on strong.

So did Danny, for entirely different reasons.

Veith swore under his breath. To Danny’s immense relief, he lowered the pistol.

“We’ll finish this later, Marco,” Veith told him.

Yeah, Marco, as in Rick Marco, because Veith had no idea who he really was. Which was the only reason Danny was still alive.

Then Veith stepped back, and the trunk lid slammed down.

*   *   *

Two a.m. in gorgeous downtown East St. Louis, which was an oxymoron if she’d ever heard one, Samantha Jones reflected sourly. A Friday night. She was twenty-three years old, for cripe’s sake. Slim and pretty enough that guys were always hitting on her. She should have been out dancing, partying, or at least seeing a movie and getting a pizza. Something.

She sighed.
Get real. If you weren’t doing this, you’d be working the third shift at Wal-Mart. Or Waffle House. Or somewhere equally shitty
.

Instead she was driving a junky hook-and-chain tow truck down a pothole-heavy street lined with bars and tattoo parlors and seedy restaurants and liquor stores. Getting double vision from looking at too much neon. Ignoring the streetwalkers and drug pushers on the corners. Ignoring the bands of looking-for-trouble punks, too. If they wanted trouble, she had a Smith & Wesson revolver on the passenger seat beside her. And a tire iron tucked beneath her seat. Much as she hated to admit it, these were her people. These mean streets were her mean streets. She could handle herself.

Didn’t mean she had to like it.

Her cell phone rang. Her best friend, Kendra Wilson.

“What?” Sam said into it.

“I’m just about to leave work.” Kendra cashiered weekends at the local Publix grocery store. They’d been besties since kindergarten. When the shit had hit the fan in Sam’s life four years ago, Kendra had been one of the few people Sam had been able to count on. “You need anything?”

“Could you get me some pancake mix?” Sam answered. “And syrup. Tyler likes pancakes on Saturday morning, and I’m out.”

Tyler being Sam’s four-year-oldson. She had been a wild, heedless nineteen-year-old who had just wanted to have fun when she’d gotten pregnant. Now she was a struggling single mother, and “fun” had given way to “survive.” Which was why she was driving around in a tow truck in the middle of a starry June night. Her “uncle” had died the previous year, leaving her his truck, along with his working relationship with A+ Collateral Recovery. Most nights, especially since the economy had tanked, A+ would give her a list of vehicles to be repossessed, and she would go out on the hunt. She was paid a bounty for every collateral recovery (that’s what the contract called it; in reality it was a repo) she completed. She wasn’t getting rich, she wasn’t even getting middle class, but she was keeping a roof over her and Tyler’s heads and food on the table, and that was what counted. And lately business was good: last week, she’d towed in ten vehicles. At seventy dollars per, minus expenses, she’d cleared five hundred dollars, which was more than she could make doing anything else except stripping, which she wasn’t yet desperate enough to do. Of course, almost the entire amount had gone for rent, but at least she’d been able to pay rent, even if it was a week late. Out of the check she was expecting tomorrow, she would have to pay utilities and Tyler’s preschool, plus the usual expenses associated with the truck. Which would leave her just about enough for a week’s worth of groceries, if she was careful.

“Tyler’s lucky it’s Friday.” By that, Kendra meant she had gotten her paycheck tonight. Like the rest of them, Kendra was always broke by the end of the financial week, which for her ended on Fridays. Which was why she had offered to pick up groceries for Sam. Sam’s week ended on Saturday nights, when A+ Collateral ponied up.

“I’ll pay you back Sunday,” Sam said.

“I know,” Kendra answered. “Will you be done soon?”

“Should be. I’m on the trail of this BMW. When I find it, that’s it for the night.”

“Nice car.” Kendra’s voice perked up. “Maybe the owner will be around. If he owns a BMW, he could be your ticket.”

“If his BMW is being repossessed, I doubt it,” Sam retorted. “Anyway, I don’t need that kind of ticket. Tyler and I are doing just fine.”

“Yeah, I heard it before.” Kendra was determined to get her fixed up, and Sam was just as determined to resist. Tyler was a wonderful gift, but his father—not so much. In fact, as soon as he’d found out Sam was pregnant he’d cut and run. Sam had seen him exactly twice since. He’d contributed zero dollars to Tyler’s support, and since he didn’t have a steady job there was nothing Sam could do about it. They were the same age, and he was still running around free as the wind, while she … she had grown up. And in the process pretty much had sworn off men for life.

“Got to go,” Sam said as the locater affixed to the dashboard beeped, and she disconnected. The beep meant she was getting close. Fortunately, the car she was after was only two years old and fancy enough to have its own built-in GPS, with its own built-in special signal. Sam’s equipment wasn’t exactly state of the art, but it was up-to-date enough to lock onto the signal once she was within a few blocks of her quarry.

Left on First, another left on Hennessey. Right down by the river. The night was black and breezy, and the mighty Mississippi gleamed like an oil slick under the light of the pale full moon. Across the river in St. Louis proper she could see the twinkling lights of the big paddleboats that were the city’s floating casinos. The bridges, the Arch, the tall buildings that made up the St. Louis skyline—all were glowing with light and, from this distance, were beautiful.

Across the river in Illinois, where Sam lived, East St. Louis was like that other St. Louis’s really ugly stepsister.

“There you are,” Sam murmured with satisfaction as her beeper started going off insistently. The car she was looking for was parked at the end of Fortnum, just up from the warehouse district. She spotted the big black Beemer with a satisfied smile. A distant glow from the security lighting on the warehouses was all the light there was. On a nearby corner, the only streetlamp for a couple of blocks wasn’t working. From the look of it, it had been beaten into submission long ago. There were other cars on the street, most of them junkers, none parked too close to her objective. The buildings across the street were brick tenements, condemned and slated for destruction as part of the city’s effort to combat blight. Started before the economy tanked, it probably had seemed like a good idea at the time. But besides moving the tenants out and boarding up the windows, nothing more had been done. And now the buildings were re-occupied, by the local gangs and drug dealers, free of charge. A lot of activity going on over there tonight. Probably something she wanted to keep her eye on, in case the Beemer’s owner was across the street making a buy.

People, especially men, had a tendency to object if they caught her repo-ing their cars. Which was why she worked in the middle of the night, and at least part of the reason she kept the gun and tire iron handy.

Maneuvering the truck to within about nine feet of the Beemer’s front bumper, Sam lowered the winch, shoved the gun into the waistband of her jeans, pulled her work shirt down over it, and got out, casting a quick glance inside the Beemer just to make sure that it was as empty as she’d thought at first glance: it was. All black leather, clean and expensive, with no personal belongings in view.
Good
. Personal belongings were a bitch: people were always claiming they’d been stolen.

A gust of warm summer wind sent a tendril of her long, black hair skittering across her mouth. Impatiently Sam pulled it free, tucked it behind her ear. She’d confined the mass of hair in a low ponytail to keep it out of the way, but it was thick and wavy with a mind of its own, and strands inevitably worked loose. So close by the river, the air smelled a little like dead fish, with a hint of something acrid—probably burning meth or crack—across the way. The chug of her truck engine was loud, and so was the clank of the big metal chain as she got it into position. The racket always made her a little nervous—no covering up that sound—and given the activity across the way it could conceivably attract attention.

Keeping an eagle eye cocked for trouble, Sam got to work. Her truck was a piece of crap, but she’d used it long enough that she knew its quirks inside and out, and could work fast. Grabbing the heavy chain and yanking in order to extend it fully, she hooked it to the BMW, secured the safety straps, and pushed the lever that would haul the BMW up on its back tires.

That done, she was just checking the straps one last time before getting back in the truck when she noticed that the Beemer’s trunk had popped open.

Frowning, casting a cautious look at the boarded-up houses, where things were really starting to hop, she walked around behind the Beemer to shut the trunk before taking off for the drop yard.

She was within a foot of the rear bumper, her hand already up in the air reaching for the trunk lid, when she saw that there was a man, bloody and bound and looking like he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life, in the trunk.

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