Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (21 page)

He picked up the photo and took a closer look, and another day slammed back at him, that day they’d argued. It was a few months after her birthday and he’d reached for her arm, trying to keep her from storming away from him,
and his hand slid down to her wrist and accidentally snagged the bracelet, ripping it off. She’d gasped, and then picked it up. They had been fighting over the asshole she’d been dating and was giving yet another “second chance” to. Alex. A guy he now knew was a gunrunner and back then, the guy he knew was the bastard who’d turned her inside out with lies and betrayals. He’d wanted her to break up with Alex. What he’d really wanted was to date her, but he’d stopped short of saying that, and she’d stood there, holding the broken bracelet, her face grim.

“Why in the hell can’t you resist doing something as brainless as dating this guy?” he’d asked. Stupid, he knew now. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“You just can’t resist bossing me around,” she’d answered.

If he could go back and shake himself, he’d have said, “I can’t resist
you
.” Corny? Hell, yeah. Truth? Absolutely. Instead, he’d said, “If you didn’t act like an idiot, I wouldn’t need to.”

Cam stared at the photo and dropped into his chair, the wind sucker-punched out of his lungs. First, her hair was found at the murder site. Then he’d found the casings hidden in her trailer. Not that the casings were proof positive of wrongdoing, because they could have been from some other shooting event, since she was the world’s worst at picking up her brass. Next, there was surveillance footage, which was damning all by itself, and then the shirt and eyewitness account Benoit had just told him about.

Now, her bracelet.

He didn’t want to think it was possible that she could have actually pulled that trigger. He hadn’t thought it was possible, really. Until now. But what if she was in trouble so deep that she’d thought murder was her only way out? Would she have done it for herself? No. But to save someone? Or if pushed to do so by some outside force? Cam remembered only too well how crazed she got when her brother had been kidnapped—he was pretty sure she’d have done
anything
to save Roy.

How could he think this? He didn’t know. Whether she was being framed, or whether she’d been coerced, he just didn’t know. He only knew that this was something he might not be able to save her from.

John had lost Bobbie Faye in Iowa, the tiny town to the east of Lake Charles, where Highway 165 intersected with I-10. The Harley had stopped to gas up, and when he’d followed the bike at a distance, he thought it was still Bobbie Faye and Emile’s lackey, but when they were a few miles up 165 near Kinder, he got a little closer and realized he’d been had. There was some other couple on the bike—Emile’s guy and Bobbie Faye must’ve switched rides.

This was not going as planned. The night before, it should have been easy, but it turned into a fucking nightmare. Neither he nor his men had been able to get a shot at her, and there were several Fed types positioned all around the perimeter of the building—he couldn’t get close enough to set off an explosion without getting himself caught.

He radioed the men he’d hired and they all turned back toward Lake Charles. He knew Bobbie Faye had been heading east when they first left the city, but he didn’t know her ultimate destination. He did, however, know someone who might. It was a simple matter of timing.

The advantage to having Mollie along, Aiden grinned, was that she could put on a wig and slip into just about any place and not a soul would pay her any mind. It was not that she wasn’t good-looking, because to Aiden, she was beautiful. She just had a chameleon quality to her—something Sean appreciated.

“You see her, then?” Sean asked when Mollie got back from the restroom in the gas station and climbed in the Subaru they’d switched to driving.

“She’s getting in a red GTO.” Mollie pointed to the muscle car and Aiden saw Sean smile. It was the second vehicle change that morning—and Mollie had spied both by simply hanging around when Bobbie Faye had hurried through a store or, in this case, a gas station. “She’s definitely carryin’ a different purse.” She looked a little impish. “I asked her for a light.”

“You’re supposed to stay in the background,” Sean griped.

Mollie pulled off her blond wig. “She tumbled into me, what the fuck would you have me do? I had to say something.”

“You’ve got a fuckin’ accent, you moron.” Sean looked like he was on the verge of clocking Mollie upside the head—something he’d routinely done with other women, but never with his cousin. He’d practically raised Mollie.

She smiled, and drawled in a great honey-filled Southern
accent, “I hate to bother you, but do you have a light?” She was spot-on for American. Maybe not one from south Louisiana, but at a truck stop, there were always tourists and travelers. Aiden beamed, quite proud of her, though Sean remained grumpy.

“Okay, but see to it next time you fuckin’ do what I say, and nothin’ extra.”

“Oh, yeah, Sean, and then I wouldn’t get the chance to drop the new little tracker thing into her purse.”

“Fuck, woman, say so next time,” Sean spat, and Robbie already had the laptop humming.

“I can’t believe that guy at the gas station let you borrow this car,” Bobbie Faye said to Trevor, her hand running across the immaculate black leather seat of the fully restored classic 1966 GTO.

“I gave him enough money to buy it three times over, but yeah, if this thing gets scratched, the car gods are going to burn me at the stake.”

“Why do I feel like there’s a cosmic short-order cook who just shouted
order up, one Federal agent, extra crispy
?”

He chuckled and she went back to staring out the window. She had to ignore how he made her feel.
Manipulation
, she reminded herself. That’s what he used. Just because he made her think she could have more—have
him
—didn’t mean she ever could and the sooner she accepted that the better. Besides, even
she
could learn to use common sense when it came to a guy. Damn it to hell.

Bobbie Faye could see the silos of the grain-drying mill long before they turned off the interstate just west of Crowley. If she closed her eyes, she could see the images still, the same as when she was a kid. Seven huge cylindrical buildings, some ten, twelve stories tall, one or two about half that height, grouped at a 45-degree angle to the dual driveways (one for eighteen-wheelers, one for cars). When she opened her eyes again, she noticed the subtle differences twenty years had wrought: the once shiny metal
buildings were faded, more worn-looking, as if they were slowly becoming an organic part of the landscape. There was an office building, low and squat, at the base of the silos, with rough limestone parking.

On this summer day, a fine silt dust—created when the rice hulls were dumped into the silos from the conveyors at the top of the buildings—settled over everything in sight. Even the trees and the house set much farther back and on the opposite side of the driveways looked muted and bland.

Trevor stopped in front of the house, and she stared at the one place she’d sworn she’d never set foot in for the rest of her life: a plain brown-brick ranch-style home, its low-slung roof shadowed by the oaks surrounding it. There was—well, there had been—a swing set in the backyard. A slide that was already rusted all those years ago, though Old Man Landry made plenty with his successful farm and mill. Or so Bobbie Faye had heard when she was a teenager.

As the memories flooded back, she mostly remembered knees. She’d been young, small, and kept occupied digging for odd treasures in the furniture cushions (a pocket watch, the tires off a toy truck of one of her cousins, a nail file, and more spare change than she’d typically see in a month). She remembered the smell of coffee strong enough to get up and walk, the thrum of overhead fans beating a rhythm against the summer heat, and the always-full candy dish on the kitchen counter that she could reach on her tiptoes.

Mostly, she remembered the arguing of her mom and the man she’d sort-of known was supposed to be her dad, though he’d never claimed her and seemed to resent the hell out of her presence when they did attend Sunday dinners. Her mom had said at the time that they had to try to maintain family—that family was everything, even though she and Bobbie Faye’s dad hadn’t worked out. Her mother never explained the yelling, only that she wasn’t supposed to worry about it, but it was kinda hard to ignore when she heard her own father say he’d never wanted a brat. She’d flat refused to go back with her mom after that lovely day.

When she climbed out of her memories, she realized Trevor stood on her side of the car, holding her door open, his hand out to her. She wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been standing there. Or where the hell his double shoulder holsters and SIGs had come from. Yeah, nothing said “meeting the family” quite like being decked out in semi-automatic weapons. He waited here, his hand still out, trying to tamp down an amused grin, but not entirely succeeding. She put her hand in his and as he helped her up, she’d bet he could feel her shaking. That earned her a full grin.

“We’re not visiting a guillotine,” he reminded her.

“At least that would be more fun.” They heard a rifle ratchet a round into a chamber, that distinct slide of metal against metal, and then there were two more. She and Trevor looked at the house, where rifle barrels poked out of the two front windows as well as the slightly opened front door. “Yeah, there’s no place like home.”

The front door cracked open another inch.

“Hi, Aunt V’rai. It’s Bobbie Faye. I need to talk to you.”

The door swung out to reveal a woman in her sixties. Bobbie Faye gaped, startled. She hadn’t seen V’rai since she was eight, and now it was like looking at an aged version of herself. Even Trevor seemed awed by the shocking mirror image. V’rai’s once brunette hair was shot through with gray, and she had laugh lines creasing her eyes—eyes which didn’t focus on anyone or anything. V’rai could make out light and dark, Bobbie Faye knew, but was mostly blind . . . something that made her holding that rifle just a tad scary. She was about an inch shorter than Bobbie Faye and slightly stoop-shouldered, and she tilted the bolt-action rifle toward the ground.

“I figured you’d be showing up,
bebe,
” V’rai said, her Cajun accent light—but then, she’d lived all the way over in Baton Rouge, “but that circus isn’t coming in with you.”

“What circus?” Bobbie Faye asked, and then heard a loud vehicle turn off the highway into the drive and when she turned around, she saw the Hummer. “Oh. Hell.”

“I’ll second that,” V’rai said as the Hummer stopped and all four cousins bailed out and jogged (Francesca in purple stiletto heels) toward the front door. “Hold on, Missy,” V’rai said, aiming her gun toward Francesca, who clutched her hideously pink purse to her chest. Feathers clung to her clearage. The purse was molting.

“Good grief, Frannie. Somewhere, there’s a really embarrassed naked flamingo,” Bobbie Faye said. “How’d you find me?”

“Oh! That was easy. Aunt V’rai told Aunt Aimee that she thought you were coming by today and Aunt Aimee told her hairdresser that she couldn’t come in today because she had to be here, and her hairdresser told her sister, who told her mom, who lives next door to Kit’s mom, who called Kit, who told me.”

Bobbie Faye looked at Trevor. “GPS has nothing on the Southern Gossip System.”

“How’d your Aunt V’rai know?” Trevor asked her and she had to smile. So his research hadn’t told him everything. The poor man just did not know what he was getting into.

“You’ll see.”

“Hi, Aunt V’rai,” Francesca called over Bobbie Faye’s shoulder. “I came to help, too.”

“
Mais non
,” V’rai said. “You and your cousins need to climb back into that contraption and go on back down that driveway. You’ve caused enough trouble for your mamma as it is.”

“But I’m trying to help!” Francesca whined.

Trevor moved between them, back in fine form as an asshole mercenary as he grabbed Bobbie Faye’s elbow and steered her toward the door.

“Go in, now,” he said, and to Francesca, he threatened, “You, go home. Your dad’s warned you: he’ll put a hit out on
you
if you interfere and I’ll be happy to give him a discounted rate if you get in my way.”

“I’m supposed to shoot someone,” Mitch said helpfully.

“I think it’s her,” and he pointed to Bobbie Faye.

“Not Bobbie Faye,” Donny said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Donny, your mamma’s going to be real upset with you.”

“She’s gonna be proud of me, Aunt V’rai. Just you watch. I’ve got agents already interested in taking me on.”

“Get your butt in here,
chère
,” V’rai said to Bobbie Faye, and as she stepped over the threshold, she motioned to Trevor. “And bring him.”

“But Aunt V’rai!” Francesca griped. “Mamma’s your baby sister! You
can’t
let him in there. He’s one of Daddy’s thugs!”

“Hmph,” V’rai said. “I can do whatever I want. You go home.”

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Damn it. We lost them. Any sign of the cousin, Francesca?

From:
JT

To:
Simone

Sending coordinates now.

Lori Ann stood at the pay phone in the rec room of the rehab hospital, tucking and untucking her short blond hair behind her ear. She’d gotten Roy’s voice mail three times in a row, and wanted to reach out and smack him. She knew he was sleeping at some bimbo’s house. When he finally answered with a muffled “ ’lo,” she didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed off that he was barely awake.
She’d
had to wake up at freaking 7
A.M
. because the
state wanted to wring out every single second of torture that they could in a day of sobriety.

“Have you talked to Bobbie Faye?” she asked him, once she was certain he was alert enough to comprehend language.

“Why on earth would I do that this early?” he asked. “I don’t have a death wish.”