Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (23 page)

He had three men spread out, and if she came out with the diamonds, they were his. Regardless, she was dead, out of his hair for good, and he’d still get the payoff. Sweet.

Trevor listened to V’rai as he followed her out of the kitchen and the only tag Bobbie Faye could put to that expression
was . . . deeply bothered. Though it turned into complete disbelief when he looked up and saw her. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“Shut up,” she said before he could form a sentence.

“How?” he asked, incredulous, joining her in the living room. “I only left you alone for five minutes. The mind reels at the damage you could do with a half an hour.”

“Okay, seriously? I hate you. Shut up.”

He stood way the hell too close, leaning into her space. “I believe we have established that you do
not
hate me.”

“And I believe we have established,” she said in her best maniacally perky voice, “that you’re a manipulative bastard.” She smiled brightly just to put a period on that statement. “What gives?” She nodded toward Aunt V’rai because he had already reverted back to looking uncomfortable—which earned V’rai bonus points, as far as Bobbie Faye was concerned.

“Your aunt apparently has ‘the sight’—something you might have mentioned.” He muttered, low to her, “Your family? Is nuttier than you are, and I would have said that was impossible.”

“Boy,” V’rai said, “I’m blind, not deaf.”

Trevor nodded toward V’rai. “She said your dad has a different kind of sight—that he can find anything that’s missing.”

“Oh, yeah, anything that he
wants
to find. Which is why I’m here.”

“Not just because Marie’s been here?”

She wanted to be there about as much as she wanted a lobotomy. Come to think of it, a lobotomy would have been
much
more fun. Having to put herself in the position of asking her dad for anything? Made her want to shoot something. Several times. And then maybe kick it. “No,” she finally answered. “Not just because of that. The rice husks tell me she’s been here and it’s still a big guess about why. We could spend days looking for her, and we don’t have days.”

“So, you’re going to ask him to help track the diamonds.”

She realized Trevor had given up trying to hide anything from V’rai, which meant V’rai had really impressed him with her freaky-assed “sight” skills with whatever it was she’d been able to see about him. Bobbie Faye wished she could ask V’rai what she had seen, what about Trevor made her trust him—because V’rai seemed to be so comfortable with him—but her aunt was exceptionally close-mouthed about that sort of thing. Of all of the people in all of the freaking South, where everyone would tell you anything if you stood in their proximity, up to and including anything that could completely humiliate a member of their own family, Bobbie Faye had to have the
one
aunt who actually
knew
stuff and wouldn’t talk about it.

She turned back to Trevor’s question. “Old Man Landry—”

“Bobbie Faye,” V’rai chastised, “he’s your dad. Call him something proper.”

“Cranky Old Bastard,” she said pointedly, and V’rai shook her head, annoyed. “He doesn’t need to
track
them. He just sees stuff. Wherever it is. Even if it’s a couple of thousand miles away, he can pinpoint it.” Trevor raised an eyebrow, disbelief evident. “Yeah, I didn’t believe it either, but people call him from all over the country sometimes and he tells them where their stuff is. Unless, of course, it’s a tiara that could be the map to a lot of pirate treasure.” Her mom’s Contraband Days Queen tiara. A map old Lafitte had made for his treasure passed down through the generations. Lost now somewhere in the Mississippi River mud. Then she registered that Trevor had tensed, looking over her shoulder at the kitchen entrance.

“That treasure wouldn’t be nothin’ but trouble,” a man’s voice barked, a Cajun accent thicker than V’rai’s, and Bobbie Faye turned to face Old Man Landry—Etienne—where he glowered at them. “An’ you don’t need no more of dat.”

“Gee, millions to live on. Dear God, the suffering I’d go through.”

“An’ everybody on the planet tryin’ to take dat from you.”

“I don’t exactly recall you giving a damn before, so you can stuff it now.”

“You don’t know nothin’. You a crazy damn
coo-yôn
for lettin’ yo’ ’elf get mixed up in all of this—you don’t got a single damned bit of common sense, girl, do you?”

Bobbie Faye bristled and Trevor dropped an arm around her shoulder.

“At least I have guts,” she told Old Man Landry as he strolled into the living room, setting his cowboy hat down on top of the armory on the dining room table. His tanned leathery face, loose baggy skin, and white hair broadcast his age, though his voice was still strong. But it was his cataract-white eyes that tended to grab people’s attention.

“Guts will get you killed,” he snapped, and V’rai stepped between them and put a placating hand on her brother’s arm.

“She needs help, Etienne.”

“Marie’s in trouble,” the old man said, and then he looked at Bobbie Faye. “She’s the baby of the family and we’re all that’s standin’ between her and a bullet from Emile. I’m not holdin’ a grudge against you, girl, I’m telling you for true.”

“Holding a grudge?” Trevor asked.

“She shot him a while back,” V’rai answered, as airily as if she were saying, “and then we all had ice cream.”

Trevor arched a brow at Bobbie Faye.

“It was a minor disagreement,” she said. “I should have aimed better.”

“Remind me not to piss you off.”

“Too late,” she said, and then back to Old Man Landry, “So you’re really not going to help.”

“
Mais non,
I’m helpin’—you just too damned stubborn to listen. Go home. I got dis covered.”

“And while I’m at it, maybe I should just bake cookies for the people who are trying to kill me—maybe I can
Betty Crocker them into a diabetic coma and they’ll conveniently forget all about me.”

Trevor chuckled and when she glanced up at him, she knew the bastard had one more thing in his research on her than she’d like. “Oh, bite me. It’s not my fault those PTA people got sick on the cookies I sent that time.”

“Although I think fourteen people getting their stomach pumped in one night was a new record for the hospital here.”

“So totally hating you right now.”

“You’ll get over it.”

She hadn’t quite pinged ’til that moment that he had his arm around her and she wanted to smack the crap out of him, but she was too aware of her dad and V’rai watching them, smug little smiles on their faces. “What?” she asked Landry.

The old man jerked a thumb toward Trevor and asked V’rai, “He’s the one?”

“Yep. He’s the one.”

“The one what?” Bobbie Faye asked, and neither of them answered. Instead, they appraised Trevor. Well, it was possible they were appraising him—they’d turned toward him, heads cocked, chins lifted, but since V’rai was blind and Etienne had cataracts the size of a small car, they could just as easily have tuned into some sort of Cosmic Nutcase Radio.

“You,” Old Man Landry said, pointing a finger at Trevor, “better take care of her. She’s a handful, but anythin’ happens to her, I’ll be huntin’ your
coo-yôn
ass down, you got dat?”

“Where in the hell do you get off acting like you care about—” Bobbie Faye’s voice rose and cracked and her heart thudded against her chest because all of those years, all of those damned years, there wasn’t so much as a freaking birthday card, and he was going to stand there and act like he cared? She felt her nails dig into the palms of her hands and it pissed her off that the old man could get to her.

Trevor stopped her with a squeeze, which confused her, and the confusion turned to downright amazement when she caught his furious, disgusted expression aimed at her dad. “She can handle herself,” he warned, and there was no doubt it was a threat. “And if she needs me, I’ve got her back.”

Bobbie Faye tried not to let her breath sound ragged as she exhaled, but she might have tucked herself a little closer to Trevor, might have hooked a thumb in the back belt loop of his jeans, all purely accidental, of course.

V’rai cracked a wide smile and chuckled. “He’ll do,” she said to her brother.

“You’d better be right,” the old man answered.

“Right about what?” Bobbie Faye asked and they all were suddenly preoccupied with the ceiling or the floor. Even Trevor.

Great. Just what Bobbie Faye needed—V’rai to start being cryptic. She hated
cryptic
. Cryptic sawed on her last frayed nerve, jangling its keys and blowing smoke in her eyes. Bobbie Faye started to retort, but V’rai stopped her as she felt her way over to an end table overflowing with photo albums and scrapbooks.

“
Mais non
, hush,
bebe
, you’ll see later. As for now, I want you to have a little something.”

Old Man Landry snapped out something in Cajun that Bobbie Faye couldn’t quite follow, and V’rai tsked him, and said, “Hush, Etienne. Just some family photos.”

“I don’t want family photos,” Bobbie Faye said as V’rai rummaged through a stack. How she knew which photos she plucked from the group, Bobbie Faye couldn’t tell—there didn’t seem to be any bend or tear or mark on the photo surface that she noticed right away—then again, Bobbie Faye pointedly didn’t do more than glance at them as V’rai thrust them in her hands.

“Nonsense,
bebe
, you will. One day, you’ll want to get to know this part of the family, an’ you’ll be glad you have these. You’re a big part of what’s missing here”—V’rai touched her own heart—“an’ one day, you’ll see.”

Bobbie Faye took the photos and shoved them in her back jeans pocket. “So you’re not going to help me find Marie?” Sadness crept over V’rai as she glanced at her brother’s set, stubborn face.

“You’ve got your path,
bebe,
” V’rai said, “and we’ve got ours. I can’t set you on a path. You got to go your way, or die for sure.”

“You don’t need us,” Old Man Landry said, and he sauntered out of the room.

“Just be careful,
bebe
.” V’rai turned to follow her brother, and then reluctantly, as if on second thought, she said, “You’re teeterin’ on the edge of the precipice there, and you watch your back.”

“I ain’t sayin’ I did, an’ I ain’t saying I didn’t,” the scrawny old woman told Benoit. She rocked on the front porch of the manager’s unit in Bobbie Faye’s trailer park, a basket of peas in her lap, her fingers ripping through the hulls as she shelled them. She tossed the empty hull over her shoulder into a larger bucket. “She mighta been here, she mighta been gone. Had the TV on, couldn’t hear a thing.”

Yeah, right. Benoit would be willing to bet next week’s paycheck the woman heard every damned thing that went on in that trailer park. He glanced down at his notes. So far, Walter Coullion, who lived in the trailer just in front of Bobbie Faye, swore he was in a cutthroat game of dominoes with his drinking buddies, for which they did not place monetary bets as that would be strictly against the law. They did not see anything, except maybe a couple of women who may or may not have taken off their clothes. Benoit still had a contact high from Walter’s breath, so there probably was no use in bringing him in for questioning and hoping he sobered up enough to remember anything.

Bethany Meyers lived in the trailer across from Walter, and Bethany had probably been one of the not-dressed women at the domino “tournament,” and she was having a hard time remembering how to button her shirt when Benoit had questioned her.

His one hope was that little Aubrey Ardoin, not related to the Ardoins of the chili cheese dog stands, had defied the restraining order Bobbie Faye had gotten on the kid to keep him from taking photos of her and selling them (for a fortune) on the Internet. Aubrey was driving around in a used Porsche when his parents could only afford the double-wide trailer sitting toward the front of the trailer park, and he certainly hadn’t earned the money from after-school part-time work. Benoit was fairly sure that if Aubrey was to meet up with real work, he’d faint dead away. The problem was that as greedy as the kid was, he was that much more scared of Bobbie Faye since she’d pinned him to a wall—upside down—with well-placed knives the last time she found a cable running into her trailer, which had a tiny little camera on the end . . . which was placed in her shower. If he had a photo of Bobbie Faye, he probably would die before admitting it.

“She’s in trouble, Mrs. Abilene,” he said to the trailer park manager. “Big trouble. Knowing where she was could really help her.”

The old woman popped another pea hull open and raked the peas out, a little bit of the juice staining the tips of her fingers ever greener with each victim. She dipped her bony hand into the basket, scooping up the peas, letting them run through her fingers and studying them the way fortune-tellers study runes. Benoit stifled an irrational urge to bow to the peas. She cocked a wary eye Benoit’s direction.

“Well, if knowing she was here would be a help, then I reckon you oughta be talkin’ to dem people.”

“People? What people?” Mrs. Abilene’s lips thinned in a tight line, but Benoit pressed on. “Honestly, I’m a friend of hers. I really am trying to help.”

Mrs. Abilene weighed the peas once more. “Well, since I done seen you pass by here, lookin’ out for her with that boyfriend of hers, I figure you all right. But if she tells me different, you’re in a world of trouble.”

“Yes, ma’am,” seemed like the wisest answer. And he wasn’t
about to correct her impression that Cam was still Bobbie Faye’s boyfriend.

“I don’t know who dey were, dem folks. Dey come quiet-like, middle of the night. Went into her trailer like they owned the place. It wasn’t like dey was sneakin’ in or nothin’—dey turned on the trailer lights. I started to call y’all since it was so late and some people, dey just give our girl a hard time, but then she came out with ’em, and I done reckon she was intendin’ to go with ’em.”

“How many?”

“Two—a man and a woman.”

“You get a good enough look at them?”

“Nah, once I saw she was with ’em, I came on in to watch the rest of my show. Didn’t see ’em close enough to tell you more’n dat.”