“No, it’s my stalker. They both are. Goddammit.”
“Oh, the one whothinksshe’s your mom?”
“And the other one thinks we’re married. I didn’t know they’d joined forces.”
“Baby!” the older woman shouted. “I knew when you didn’t come home that something was wrong. You always come home on a Friday night! No one had seen you! But we figured it out—you got left behind! Well, mostly it was Momma who figured it out.” She pointed to the redhead. “Sweetie here doesn’t say much. And look! I was right!”
“Could we get a ride with her to Fitch?” Lana said. “You said she was harmless, right?”
“I’ve never put that to the test.”
The goons were coming—three running, the woman limping. Griffin let a shot go into their midst and was rewarded with a cry of pain. A handful of prop pellets wouldn’t hold them off for long.
“Uh, Griffin?” Lana said. “I’m not sure we have any other options.”
Chapter 9
Lana
The older woman perched on the driver’s door, peering into the dark. “Who are they, baby?”
“They’re the bad guys, Maggie.” Griffin had assumed his blank expression, though the angles seemed sharper.
“Momma!” she corrected. “Have they hurt you, baby?”
“At this point, I think they’d like to.” He lowered his voice so only Lana could hear. “Even if we leave with Maggie, they’ll come after us. I’ve driven that Chevy before—fast on a straight but a bitch on a switchback. No way can we lose a couple of late-model SUVs on that road.”
Lana grunted in agreement. The coastal road was scary enough on the lumbering bus, with its sharp turns, instant-death bluffs, and kamikaze coyotes. “Wait, is that the car from your movie—Blind Corner?”
“Yep. Maggie bought it at a charity auction. I owned it for a while, but it was too recognizable.”
“Momma!” the woman yelled. “I’m gonna be paying it off the rest of my days—but it’s worth it!”
“I have an idea,” Lana said, looking at the SUVs. “Think you could hold those guys off for a couple of minutes?”
“With a slingshot? They’re almost in tasing distance.”
“Aslingshot? That all you got?” Maggie jumped to the gravel, marched to the trunk and opened it, obscuring Lana’s view of her. There was a click, then a boom shook the ground, the echo cracking through the hills. Lana and Griffin swore in unison. Maggie strode out from behind the trunk, wielding a shotgun. “Which one should I take out first?” she shouted, loud enough for the goons to hear. That stopped them.
“You’re not supposed to be armed, Maggie!”
“Momma!” she said, swinging the barrel his way.
Griffin pulled Lana behind an SUV. “Don’t shoot them,” he said to Maggie in an undertone, “or us. But can you make them think you might?”
Maggie leveled the weapon at the goons and fired. Lana yelped.
“Maggie!” Griffin warned.
“Momma! Just giving them a fright, that’s all,” she said in a stage whisper. “They’re running for it! Get in!”
“Is it weird that they’re not pulling out guns?” Lana said to Griffin.
“Is anything about this not weird? I didn’t see any guns, did you?”
“I don’t think they were expecting real resistance. Their orders were to take Vivien alive.”
“You said you had an idea?”
