Page 80 of Stay in Your Lane!

“Uh… well…” I cleared my throat. “So we were asleep, and?—”

“Detective Reardon broke in and started shooting, so we stole his squad car, then ditched it and stole some random car, which we definitely need to bring back in good condition because I don’t want to go to jail.”

My brother genuinely looked like his brain was shorting out. How his eye hadn’t started twitching, I had no idea. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Kyle, what’s the real story?”

“Exactly what he?—”

“Hey!” Everett glared at Colin. “I’m not a fucking liar, dude.”

Colin sat back a bit, staring at Everett.

“Reardon left his car running outside,” Everett growled. “Kyle realized that probably means he wanted us to take it. Especially since Reardon wasn’t actually shooting at him all that much.”

“Shooting at—wait, he shot at you?”

I nodded. “And I shot back, but I wasn’t trying to hit him, and I don’t think he was trying to hit me either. He wanted to flush us out. It didn’t occur to me in the moment, but like—a cop car, outside, with the engine running?” I flailed a hand. “He fucking wanted us to steal it, probably so he could track usandso he could charge us with stealing a patrol car.”

Colin’s expression reminded me a lot of my piranhas. Not as pissy as Steve, but the sort of wide-eyed, open-mouthed look that Bill always got. After a second, he shook himself. “So you… ditched the squad car and stole?—”

“Yes!” Everett threw up his hands. “Now can we figure out a solution before Reardon finds us? Because I don’t think we have a lot of time before?—”

Right then, the Goth kids started making pig noises.

I whipped around.

And, oh… fuck my life.

One… two… six patrol cars came parading into the lot, filling the whole restaurant with flashing blue lights as if aliens were landing outside.

“Oh, what in the world?” Our long-suffering hostess huffed with annoyance and glared toward the kitchen. “Chet, I swear to God—if you brought your stash to work to sell again, I will fire your dumbass! Your mama won’t be able to get you out of?—”

“What?” came the affronted squawk from the kitchen. “I ain’t got none of that on me! Calm the hell down, Carol!”

With that, Chet and Carol were yelling at each other.

The Goth kids kept snorting like pigs.

And the cops had Waffles? surrounded.

CHAPTER 23

EVERETT

Every now and then, when I woke up in the morning, I wasn’t sure whether I was still dreaming or not. This usually happened when I’d been in the middle of a really monotonous dream, like having to fold a ton of clothes that kept multiplying somehow. Or trying to make my bed, but the bed got bigger and bigger and I could never get the fitted sheet around the farthest corner. I’d wake up and for a while, never more than half a minute, I’d just try to keep doing what I’d been doing in the dream, only slower and more groggily, until I snapped out of it.

Staring around me now, I pinched myself so hard in the side that I felt the skin bruise.

Wake up, wake up, wake up!

Nothing happened, of course, except now my side hurtandI was kind of, sort of, hyperventilating. Luckily, Kyle was too wrapped up in talking to his brother to notice.

“They can’t do this.” Colin said it, but it was more of a whisper than a promise. “They can’t…just let me go and talk to them, I can straighten this out.”

“No!” Kyle grabbed for his arm and held on so tight his knuckles blanched. “You can’t go out there—they’ll shoot you!”

“They won’t do that,” Colin snapped. “These are my colleagues. They havenoreason to shoot me!”

“Never stopped them before!” one of the Goth kids shouted over.

---