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shooting up his arms, into his shoulders, then firing back down into his hands, as the position into which they had been forced abruptly eased. Gritting his teeth against a groan, Danny brought his arms around in front of him, moving slowly, gingerly shaking his hands out, flexing his fingers as best he could.
    The beating he’d endured before they’d pistol-whipped him senseless had done some damage to his hands, that was for sure. How much, he didn’t have time to assess.
    “Give me the knife.” He thrust his hand behind him to receive it, ignoring the searing pain that attacked him as he moved.
    “Why?” Sudden suspicion laced her voice.
    Was it his imagination, or was the car slowing down? The swaying was definitely less pronounced.
    “Why do you think? Oh, are you worried I’m going to turn around and attack you with it? I’m not, okay? I’ve got two more ties around my ankles. You can’t reach them. So give me the knife. ”
    The sound she made defied interpretation, but she pressed the knife—one of those small, Swiss-army-type pocket knives with a million gizmos attached, from the feel of it—into his palm. There wasn’t much room, but difficult as it was he managed to stretch down enough to start hacking away at the ties binding his ankles. The blade was small, the movements required to cut through the hard plastic ties accompanied by a thousand different versions of pain. Through it all, he was supremely conscious of a fresh upsurge of blood oozing from his thigh.
    Got to stop the bleeding. That was the next item on his survive-the-night list.
    “How sure are you that they’re going to kill us?” The girl’s voice was breathier than before. Probably because she now had enough of a handle on the situation to be really, truly frightened. His initial instinct was to reassure her, to tell her that everything was going to be all right. Under the circumstances, though, his initial instinct was shit. Truth was what she needed to hear.
    “One hundred percent. I’d be dead already if they hadn’t gotten interrupted.” The question was, who, exactly, had interrupted them: Crittenden and the cavalry, or more of the contingent of hapless U.S. Marshals out of whose custody he’d been snatched, or someone else hunting Marco? Or even a new player whose moves he wasn’t yet trying to follow around the board?Answer: impossible to know. As Danny assessed the truth of that, he sliced through the first tie, and was on to the second. It wasn’t his imagination: the car was definitely slowing down.
    The sudden crunch of gravel under the tires acted on him like a warning siren: wherever they were going now, it was somewhere off the public roads. Which meant they might very well be nearing Veith’s killing ground of choice. Because of course Veith was on his way, planning to rendezvous with Torres and finish the job.
    Under those conditions, the sudden turn onto gravel could not be good.
    He would be a fool to assume anything other than that they were approaching their destination.
    “Hear that gravel? I think we’re just about to get where we’ve been going.”
    “We’re probably in the scrap yard,” she said.
    “Scrap yard?”
    “For old cars and things. They recycle scrap metal. It’s not too far from where I found you. It’s all gravel.”
    That made sense. A scrap yard in the middle of the night sounded like Veith’s kind of place. He knew it was probably a waste of time, but still he tried to identify any source of possible help.
    “An attendant on duty? Anything around, like a bar or an open-all-night convenience store or something?” Someplace she could head for when she bolted.
    “No.” The tempo of her breathing had slowed down, likeshe was deliberately calming herself. He succeeded in cutting through the second tie: hallelujah, his feet were free.
    As soon as he moved his cramped legs, pain shot through his body like a thousand flaming arrows. He felt the hot slide of more blood leaving