“I reckon so. But there’s a lot of distance between ‘s’posed to’ and actually doing. I can tell you all about that.”

“Have you seen Brody here tonight?” Henry asked. “Is he in there?”

Sleepy licked his lips and nodded. “He’s in there, all right. Just before you got here, two of Brody’s thugs drove up in a van. They took a man and woman into the basement, all tied up.”

Henry felt adrenaline rush into his bloodstream, mixing with the heady cocktail of drugs that were keeping him upright. “Black or white?”

“White, both of them.”

“What did they look like?”

Sleepy ran a hand across his mouth, thinking. “Tall man, dressed pretty good. The woman had dark hair, classy looking. I was prowling back near the garage, and I saw the bastards drag them out of the van.”

Penn Cage and Caitlin Masters. Henry knew it as surely as he knew that he had to abandon his confrontation plan and call for help.

“What you doing?” called Sleepy as Henry turned and opened his passenger door.

“I’m—” Henry slapped his forehead. In his haste at the hospital, he’d forgotten to ask his mother for her cell phone. The drugs were having more of an effect than he’d realized. He turned around. “We need to call for help. Not the local police. We can’t trust them. We need the FBI. Or … wait.” Henry fought through the cobwebs in his head. “Maybe we should call Royal’s house. Let him know we know they have the mayor and his girlfriend in there.”

“The mayor? Hold on,” said Sleepy. “I don’t know any of those numbers.”

“Well, we could call Information—”

“Hands up!” ordered a sharp voice from behind Sleepy.

A middle-aged white man in a dark jacket held a pistol to the back of Sleepy’s head.

There’s the guard, thought Henry numbly. The real one this time.

Sleepy put up his hands, and Henry slowly followed his example. He thought of the shotgun in the backseat of his mother’s car, but he couldn’t make a move toward it without endangering Sleepy. Especially in his current condition.

The guard searched Sleepy’s windbreaker pockets and pulled out his cell phone. Taking a step back, he dropped it on the asphalt and crushed it with his boot heel. Then he walked forward and patted down Henry.

“You got a gun in that truck?” he asked Sleepy, straightening up. Without waiting for an answer, he opened the driver’s door of the truck. “Move back,” he ordered. Then he searched the truck, quickly coming up with what appeared to be a small-caliber revolver.

“Head to the house,” he barked. “Both of you. Walk in front of me. Double time.”

In a daze, Henry began trudging ahead of Sleepy toward Brody Royal’s lake house, which lay some eighty yards away.