“Okay. You got me,” Rose says. “No need for bait. Let Mel out. She’ll leave. All she knows is you gave me a lift home. Nobody believes kids anyway. Then you lock me up by myself for a couple of hours, and then come let me out. If you do that, I won’t yell or be a nuisance.” Rose tries to sound as if this situation is perfectly normal. She is just bartering. I’ll give you ten cents a pound for those carrots. All good. All sane.

Stella ignores her. “I’m going to walk around the back of the car. If I see either head move, that head gets shot off. You get out of the car when I say.” She climbs out, slams the Jeep’s door, and presses the remote locking device. Her right hand is still in the tote bag, a bit of it crumpled as if she holds a wad of bag along with the gun butt to keep it covered.

“Do you think she really has a gun?” Mel asks without turning her head.

“I don’t know,” Rose says. “We better assume she does.”

The locks thump open. “Get out,” Stella says. In the side-view mirror, Rose can see her gesture with the bagged gun.

“Wherever she’s putting us has to be better for her and worse for us,” Rose whispers hurriedly. “Otherwise she wouldn’t bother. On three, we open our doors. I’ll distract Stella. You run.”

Rose sees Mel’s head nod once.

“Seat belt off?”

A second nod.

“One, two, three.” Both passenger-side doors fly open. Mel leaps out and darts toward the hedge and the house. Rose stands and whirls around. Stella is not where she’d been a moment before. As they’d opened the doors, she’d moved up next to the vehicle directly behind the rear passenger door.

Rose catches a flash of blue from the corner of her eye, then is driven to her knees, hanging on to the door to keep from pitching onto the concrete. Her brain is knocked to the far side of her head. Consciousness scatters onto a gray plane; vision works but doesn’t connect things to thoughts.

The blue bag comes up. There is an odd phwump and a ping. Mel pitches forward, striking the ground with tremendous force. Stella’s gun has a silencer.

A silencer, Rose thinks stupidly.

Mel has been silenced.

CHAPTER 30