When a Man Loves a Weapon (32 page)

“Which is why I didn’t log in. If I stay off the computer, our bosses can’t give me a terminate order on her,” Gilda said, a little too carefully, and Bobbie Faye felt Trevor stiffen next to her.

“Why in the hell do I think your version of ‘terminate’ doesn’t mean a nice farewell party with a bunny cake and pterodactyl cookies?”

Gilda scrunched the almost invisible eyebrows on her very round face at Bobbie Faye, then scowled at Trevor as if she’d just made a connection. “How in the hell did you get your SAC to let a civilian on this mission?”

“That’s the first question you should have asked after you’d ID’d us,” he chastised her, but without rancor—more like a senior agent to a junior, and Bobbie Faye had to remember all over again just who he really was. “She’s with me,” he said, as if that was explanation enough.

When Bobbie Faye frowned, puzzled, he leaned close to her and said, for her benefit only, “I pointed out that if you were gone, I was gone.”

“You’re breaking about seven hundred different federal codes,” Gilda stated. “I’m sure they’re going to have a field day with you when this is through. You could always come to work for us.”

Trevor exhaled,
hmph
. “For a boss who’s about to terminate one of his best people in the world?”

Gilda gave him a grimace, and then turned to Bobbie Faye. “Nina had information she thought would save your life and the lives of other people. She dropped everything to go there. She knew she was risking breaking cover, but she did it anyway. I hope you understand what that means.”

Bobbie Faye swallowed, words choking her. Trevor took her hand in that moment, understanding her need, and simply did it, naturally. It was almost as if he thought better of it a second later, and he crossed his arms, breaking his grasp of her hand.

Gilda waved their attention back to the computers. Riles focused on one monitor and said, “Damn, you had infrared and weight-bearing monitors.”

Gilda nodded at him, swooning a little again, then caught herself and jerked back into professional mode. “You broke the perimeter, but we get that all day with people walking around the building. It wasn’t ’til you knocked out the cameras that we knew for certain something was up. We pushed the backup system and watched you, but you were very good at not facing the cameras. If you hadn’t ID’d yourself—and if I hadn’t been able to see Bobbie Faye behind you on the camera—we’d have implemented a couple of secondary systems you don’t want to know about right now.”

“You have Nina on GPS?” Cam asked. “Because I can’t believe MacGreggor didn’t check for that.”

“He’d have to catch it at just the right microsecond to know where the signal was coming from.” And then she proceeded to speak Geek with Extra Nerd thrown in about “microbursts” and “directional awareness” and something that sounded like “pink elephants,” but was probably a tad more technical, and ended with, “ten-minute delays” unless something insanely annoying told the unit to go into hibernation mode.

“So this thing shuts itself off if it detects that you’re trying to detect it?” Bobbie Faye asked.

“Not if
we’re
trying—if someone else is wanding her. If they’re actively checking for outgoing signals, the unit will hibernate for ten minutes. If there’s no sign of active sensing, it’ll send out a new burst. We haven’t had a new burst in the last couple of hours, but Nina’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, and the unit transmitted her vitals last burst—so she’s alive. I had no reason to suspect she wasn’t still undercover. She’s disappeared before.”

“She knows she’s on GPS. That means she sent us to you so you could give us her location.”

“We can nail Sean?” Bobbie Faye asked.

“Don’t,” Cam said, “even think you’re gonna participate in that, baby. It’s too dangerous.”

“Hallmark really needs to make those ‘Happy Lobotomy’ cards,” she muttered and she saw a smile twitch at Trevor’s lips. Because no way was she not going to participate. This was
Nina
. She’d have to be dead to not participate—she’d already seen the blip on the GPS map pinpointing Nina’s—and Sean’s—location.

“You said information to save our lives,” Trevor said. “What information?”

“Bombs. We had lured the seller of some high-tech detonator chips in here—we’d been working on uncovering who the supplier was, and how many he was selling. Or, in this case, had sold, because we got to him after the fact. I understand that you,” Gilda looked at Trevor, “were working on uncovering the buyers, right?” At Trevor’s nod, she continued, “Nina had gathered enough intelligence from some of the darker places she goes”—and that was the first time Bobbie Faye realized that this nicely lit, beautiful clubhouse was only a part of Nina’s cover, that she’d probably trolled a lot less savory places—“that,” Gilda continued, “she suspected this man of being the seller. If he hadn’t had certain proclivities, she’d have turned him over to you and your tactics.” She glanced at Riles then. “Or you. But she knew she could get information out of him.

“I think he felt an intense guilt, and I’m almost certain he knew he had a heart condition—I think he wanted to confess, which is why he put himself into a position of stress. Heidi,” and Gilda nodded toward an excessively intimidating woman who was taller than Trevor, “managed to make him talk. He mentioned bombs. He’s a huge U.S. patriot and knows that some freelance contractors to the government sometimes buy things off the books, to better facilitate off-the-books activities. He thought he was selling to a mercenary, former military, who was going to use his items overseas against terrorists. He overheard chatter—we believe from the buyers—that convinced him the detonator chips were going to be used here, in Louisiana—and it somehow involved
you,
” she said to Bobbie Faye. “Today. The last thing we got out of him an hour ago was ‘today’ and then he went into cardiac arrest.”

“Dead?” Trevor asked.

“Almost. He’s in surgery now. We covered it up as overzealousness. My boss will decide later if we want to use the seller’s . . . proclivities . . . to blackmail him into testifying or working for us.”

“Did he say how many bombs?” Cam asked.

“Seven. We aren’t sure about that—he was pretty far gone by the time we realized what the problem was.”

“
This
information,” Trevor barked, no kindly mentoring tone now, “was what you should have said first.
Sonofabitch.
You need to learn field ops—you protect the public before you save your ass. Or anyone’s reputation. Goddammit, we’ve lost too much time and you knew he sold detonators for seven fucking bombs? Set to go off today?”

Seven. Bobbie Faye met Trevor’s gaze. Seven bombs.

Trevor had shot Sean seven times. To save
her
.

There was a soft knock on his door, and the mechanic crossed his workshop to answer it. His assistant, Pam, eased in with a batch of paperwork in hand.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” she said, softly, knowing he hated any of his employees to come into his personal shop. Her eyes averted after landing momentarily on Chloë’s urn. “I’m really sorry to bother you, boss, but you’ve got to sign these.”

“Not now, Pam,” he told her, his eyes going back to the TV.

One bomb. Detonated. In the wrong fucking location. How in the hell had the delivery gone wrong?

“But it’s the insurance forms, and the casino’s on the line, wanting to know how you want to proceed with the salvaging of the bar?”

It took him a moment to come back to this place, this place where he was something other than the mechanic who’d created death, where a very nice woman was trying to help him; Suds turned toward her and she stepped back from the fury he was sure showed plainly on his face.

“I know that you loved the bar,” she added hastily, “but we’ll salvage and rebuild and it will be better than ever.”

She thought his lack of interest was despondence over the destruction of the bar. About losing what so many thought of as his life’s ambition. The bar that had kept him sane after Chloë died.

He’d been a mechanic before he went into the military, determined to get away from the grease and grime; he’d grown up a mechanic’s son, and for most of his young life, thought he didn’t have a choice. Then he’d enlisted, and had an aptitude for fine, detailed work. They trained him as a bomb tech. And he used the signing bonuses to save up for his dream: the bar.

He’d met Chloe at his first little place. She was his second waitress, and he’d known the second she’d walked in the door that she was it. She could’ve had the whole thing signed over to her in five minutes, if she’d wanted to sweet talk him, but she was a hard worker. He couldn’t even count the number of nights they fell asleep, mop bucket in hand, cleaning after the long nights. But it put Chloe through school, bought their home, built their dream. He expanded. He thought he had everything.

He bit back a reply—Pam didn’t deserve his fury. She didn’t know that his life had ended with Chloë, in that wreck. She—none of them—would ever really understand. Revenge had become his only ambition.

“Not now. You decide. You’re officially promoted—manager, whatever the hell runs everything. Get the papers drawn up, and I will sign them. You are in charge.” He checked his watch. “I’ll call my attorney and tell him to expect the paperwork from you.” She would learn, later, that he’d already drawn up all of the documents that made her the boss, including a will.

“Suds! It’s not that bad. Really, it’s water damage and we lost stock, and yeah, it’ll be a couple of months for everything to be repaired, but the casino’s going to spare no expense and I’ve already got a contractor lined up and—”

“Stop. I don’t care. Just do whatever you think works.” He grabbed the paperwork she still held and signed it quickly. “Just do it.”

She eyed him, worried. She was a kind woman, a beautiful woman; if his heart hadn’t died so long ago, he’d have thought maybe her eyes held a little hope, too. But there was none. Not now.

As she left, he looked back at his TV, at the footage from some news helicopter flying near enough to the twisted pipes and fire and black smoke pouring out over southern Lake Charles. The wrong fucking chemical plant. If all seven had detonated there, the place wouldn’t still be standing.

So where were the others?

Bobbie Faye Repellent Sold Here!

SOLD OUT
!
SOLD OUT
!

—sign on the front of the local WalMart

Trevor strapped a bulletproof vest on her, fussing with it, adjusting it. He’d been silent since they’d left the S&M club.

Waiting, she realized, for her to walk away from him.

They had driven across town in silence, back to the river to where the GPS signal pointed. They were now a block over from the location of the signal source, and it killed her that they’d been just a couple of blocks from Nina when they’d crossed that bridge earlier, and had not known.

They stood in the back of a little coffee and sandwich shop—leave it to cops to set up where there was a steady supply of food, they weren’t idiots—that had the welcome, worn feel of a place that had survived a lot of bad times with plain good functional food. The café squatted downtown amid crusty, ornate buildings from the 1900s, tall glass and steel and marble structures from the mid-nineties, and stucco and concrete buildings from the turn of the century. There was something soft and warm about the place—small round dark wood tables, scarred from years of use, pale yellow walls, faded and bleached from the sun streaming in the big wraparound plate glass windows that faced the corner—windows where decrepit metal slats of blinds that were probably as old as the building itself hung raised to half-mast.

Cam hurried over to them, closing his cell phone. “Another bomb—this time in Morgan City.” Morgan City was a
growing industrial town near the Gulf. “That’s two of seven, and you,” he addressed Trevor, “cannot be fucking serious, putting a vest on her. You cannot think you’re going to let her help.”

“I’m standing right here,” she said to him, “with ears and a brain and everything, and I’m not stupid—I know this is an official deal, you’re all going to go to Sean’s apartment, but I’m going to be here—waiting—and Trevor’s trying to keep me safe.”

“You’d be safer at—”

“Where, Cam?” she asked. “Where, exactly, will I be safer? At some random hotel somewhere? And then you’d have to pull police off this and everything else they’re having to do, because you’d feel like I had to be protected, even though I’m a better shot than
you
are. I’m staying here. I’m going to be careful.”

Cam glared at Trevor and said, “You already lost this argument, didn’t you?”

“He knew better than to try,” she snapped as, with his back to Cam, Trevor’s fingers slid over the last clasp on the Kevlar vest. Trevor met her gaze and there was a long, long look—one that said
if I thought you’d be safer somewhere else, you’d
be
somewhere else
.

“Moreau, Cormier,” a SWAT guy called, and they both peeled away from Bobbie Faye, Cam glaring at her one last time and Trevor reverting back to granite (she swore he had to practice that transformation in front of a mirror somewhere).

They were going up against Sean. If she knew him at all, Trevor would be leading the way.

“I really don’t think we should go to Baton Rouge, Etienne,” V’rai said, after the news had broken on the radio: two bombs in two chemical plants, both a couple of hours from Baton Rouge. It was all coming true. “I think we’re going to make it worse,
chèr
.”

“I don’t know how we can make it worse,” Lizzie said. “This is Bobbie Faye we’re talking about.”

“I’ve got something to find,” Etienne said, finally, after they’d ridden another five miles.

The eerie quiet of the street bothered Bobbie Faye. SWAT and the rest of the loosely formed takedown force had moved toward the rehabbed building in the nearly deserted downtown a few blocks south of the café. Baton Rouge on a Saturday was usually pretty quiet, one of the local state cops said—but on game day, it was a virtual ghost town.