“Illegal as all get-out,” one man said loudly.

“Yeah, we’re just going to have to smoke them and destroy the evidence,” another shouted back. “It’s the least we can do for an old friend.”

This made the men laugh, like it was funny that any of them might be friends with Mr. Talbot Or maybe it was that Mr. Talbot had thought they were friends, but they weren’t.

Trey could never understand what people meant when their words and meanings didn’t match up.

That’s called irony, he reminded himself. I don’t get irony. I admit it. Okay, Dad? Are you happy now?

He was so busy carrying on an imaginary conversation with his father that he missed the exact moment when the last car drove away For hours, it seemed, there had been a general hubbub all across the Talbots’ property — raucous laughter, bossy shouts. But suddenly the entire area was plunged into an eerie silence. Trey strained his ears again, listening. He risked another peek over the top of the flowerpot. There were no more cars within sight or earshot. But he didn’t have to wonder if he’d hallucinated everything, because the uniformed men had left behind plenty of evidence of their visit: trampled flowers, skid marks on the driveway holes scattered in a seemingly random pattern across the yard.

Trey ducked out of sight again.

Maybe the chauffeur will bring Nina and the others back now, he thought. Maybe the chauffeur knew somehow that the uniformed men were coming. And he’ll know that they're gone now and it’s safe to come back and get me.

Trey didn’t want to think about how the chauffeur might have known about the uniformed men. He didn’t want to think about what that probably meant about whose side the chauffeur was on. He just wanted to be rescued.