But he’d lingered in the store just a little too long, and when he’d come out, Cade had already second-guessed his own decision to keep the kid alive. He hadn’t been thorough with Stone O’Bannion—who according to the news hadn’t been a detective after all, the bastard—and look where it had gotten him.

Here, a virtual prisoner in the old pedo’s house, with an infected leg and a fever that had climbed over a hundred and one. Cade wasn’t a doctor, but he sure as hell knew that a fever was bad. And that the greenish pus oozing out of the wounds on his leg was likely to blame.

So he’d dragged the kid to the back of the store and put a bullet in the back of his head, listening with his stethoscope to make sure he was actually dead.

“Thank you,” Evelyn said quietly, taking the thermos. “Jimmy’s hungry.”

Cade scowled. “I know. I could hear him screaming all the way upstairs. Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is a mile away.”

She looked down at the thermos. “What are you going to do with us?”

It was a valid question and asked respectfully, so he answered it. “I’m going to use you to get out of here once my leg is healed. You’re going to tell the press that I’m not a bad person. That I was good to you and Junior and performed a vital service to the community.” He looked around the basement. “This house? It belonged to an old pedo who’d drugged a kid and had him tied up in the back of his Toyota Sequoia.”

“The same SUV that you blew up with a hand grenade?” Evelyn asked, but it still wasn’t a disrespectful question, so he shrugged.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time, but like all my plans for yesterday, it bombed abominably.” He chuckled at his pun, but Evelyn wasn’t smiling. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to need your help, but I do. The way I see it, you can cooperate and you and Junior live, or you can play the judgmental hero and watch your kid die of starvation, because nobody knows you’re here.”

She nodded once. “I have been cooperating.”

“Yes, you have. Which is why I got the damn baby formula. Which you should give to your kid before he bursts a blood vessel crying.”

She pulled an empty bottle from her diaper bag—which Cade had thoroughly searched—and scooped formula from the can, adding water from the thermos. “So this house belonged to a pedo?” she asked, shaking it hard.

“Yeah. I left the kid he’d snatched in the park for the cops to find, fed the pedo to the fishes, then came here. You know what I found?”

She swallowed. “No.”