“Even if he did, I don’t know where it is,” I say. “And I’m not going to help you find it. I don’t need to. Of course you’ll threaten us, and we’ll tell you to fuck off, and then you’ll come for me or my brother, or both of us, or maybe you’re the kind of sick fuck who goes after dogs. But one way or another you’ll try to force us to do what you want. So I’d rather just kill you now and hide your body and that’ll be that.”

Finn smiles. “Before you get all trigger happy, you’ll want to see something. I’m going to reach into my pocket and pull out my phone. I’ll do it slowly, no tricks.” He looks me in the eye, and maintaining eye contact he slowly eases his hand around to his back pocket. I raise the pistol to aim directly at his forehead. He looks calmly back at me as he retrieves his phone from his back pocket. Then he swipes his phone open and taps it before holding it up to show me the screen.

I don’t want to see whatever he wants to show me; I know I don’t. I look anyway. In the small glass rectangle, I see a man seated in a straight-backed chair, facing me. He looks like he’s secured to the chair by duct tape, his hands and forearms taped to the arms of the chair, his feet taped together. He’s blindfolded and has a gag in his mouth, but I can see a mop of curly brown hair above the black blindfold. My heart drops like an elevator whose cable has just been cut.

“You recognize Tane, right?” Finn says. “Ran out the kitchen door right there while you were talking to the feds in the front yard. Practically ran right into me when he tried to cut through the trees. I had to choke him out and get him away from here before he did anything stupid like call for help. We had a nice chat. Funny kid. Likes hamburgers. Good with money. Which is fortunate, actually. Because whatever your dad did with that money, Tane can make it disappear and reappear clean as a nun’s ass. But you’ll need to find it first.”

My mouth and throat are dry, but I force myself to swallow. “And if I don’t?”

Slowly Finn leans forward, extending his phone toward me. I look again at the screen, at Tane tied to the chair. That’s when I see the red digital clock on the floor next to the chair. It’s counting down by seconds, and right now it’s at forty-seven minutes and change. And then I see the wires leading from the clock to the bottom of the chair.

“Suze?” Ethan says.