Mal returned to the room. “Drugs and guns in the back room. I put everything in this duffel.” He tossed a dirty duffel on the floor and decided to point his gun at the guys.

The shaky guy sat up, his gaze planted on the duffel. “You can’t take that.”

Wolfe sighed. “We can do pretty much anything we want.” These guys were pathetic. “Just tell me who hired you and who you meant to follow or shoot, and we’ll leave you and your drugs alone.” He was taking their guns, though. Anybody who shot at him deserved to lose their weapons. That seemed fair.

The blond guy looked over at his buddy.

Mal stepped forward, his expression pissed. “Listen. I have no patience for this shit. Talk now, or I’m going to start hitting people.”

Okay. Wolfe didn’t usually play good cop, but what the hell. “You guys want out of this? Believe me—talk and we’ll leave.”

Mal growled. “Let’s just kill them. They don’t know anything, and I’m hungry.”

“I saw an IHOP a couple of blocks over,” Wolfe offered. “I guess we could just shoot them and go, but that’d probably make a bunch of noise.”

Mal pursed his lips. “We could go for blunt-force trauma. There’s probably a baseball bat around here somewhere.”

“Knives would be better,” Wolfe said thoughtfully. “Did you see any when you came in through the kitchen?”

Mal winced. “That’s so messy, and this is a new sweatshirt. Strangulation?”

The blond drooled and sucked in air. “Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.”

“One chance,” Wolfe said, letting the predator in him show.

“There isn’t much to tell.” The shaky guy exhaled, his thin body shuddering with the movement. “Some guy hired us to follow the pretty blond chick. Gave us her address. We’ve been watching her for about a week. Got the text to take her out after the party in the mansion.”

Heat rolled through Wolfe. It had been Dana in danger? He’d known it was a possibility, but he’d truly thought the guys were after him. The tweakers pressed back on the sofa as if somehow sensing his mood had changed.

“You’ve been watching her for a week?” Wolfe asked.

The shaky guy nodded, the movement a painful-looking jerk. “Yeah, kind of. We’ve staked out her apartment building and followed her a few times, but we’ve lost her a lot.”

Probably when they stopped to shoot up drugs.

“But you caught her scent when she went to the party last night?” Malcolm prodded him.

The blond guy’s face brightened. “Yeah. We followed her cab to the car rental place and then to the mansion, and man, that outfit she was wearing was something else. Thought about—” He caught himself and made a strangled noise, heeding too late his sense of self-preservation.