Another slap, this one with nails trailing after it that tore through the flesh over my left cheekbone.

She drew back on the hammer of the gun and placed the muzzle between my eyebrows and screamed in my face, her mouth a gaping hole of furious, disrupted insolence. Spittle boiled at the corners of her mouth, and she screamed again, her index finger turning deep pink as it curled around the trigger. The shock of her screams, the violent residue of them, eddied around my skull and burned my ears.

“You will fucking die,” she said in a wet, ragged voice.

“Twenty-seven minutes,” I said.

Julian came bursting through the doors and she pointed the gun at him.

He held up his hands. “A problem, miss?”

“How fast can you drive to Dorchester?” she said.

“Thirty minutes,” he said.

“You have twenty. We’re going to show Mr. Kenzie his partner in the garden.” She looked down at me. “Then you, Patrick, are going to give us your friend’s address.”

“Julian’ll never get through the door alive.”

She raised the gun over my head, then paused halfway through her strike. “Let Julian worry about that,” she hissed. “The address for a look at your partner. Deal?”

I nodded.

“Untie him.”

“Dear?”

“Don’t ‘dear’ me, Julian.” She bent by the back of my chair. “Untie him.”

Julian said, “This isn’t wise.”

“Julian, by all means tell me what my options are.”

Julian didn’t have an answer for that.

I felt the pressure leave my chest first. Then my legs. The sheets fell away and spread across the floor in front of me.

Desiree knocked me out of the chair by pistol-whipping the back of my skull. She crammed the muzzle into the side of my neck. “Let’s go.”

Julian took a flashlight off the top of a bookcase and pushed the French doors open onto the back lawn. We followed him out as he turned left, the light dancing across the grass ahead of him in a halo.

With Desiree gripping the back of my head and her gun against my neck, I was forced to bend to her height as we stepped off the lawn and followed a short pathway that led around the corner of a shed and an overturned wheelbarrow, broke through a thicket of trees and out into the garden.