When a Man Loves a Weapon (34 page)

Trevor helped her to her feet, making sure she was steady.

“They still have Nina,” she said, and he nodded.

“I cannot fucking believe this,” Moreau said.

She whirled as his own gaze jerked up toward Moreau, but Moreau wasn’t looking at Bobbie Faye—for once. He was already running toward the people whose truck was stolen, and Trevor and Bobbie Faye followed at a quick jog. Then stopped, abruptly.

Three old women and one old man. Old Man Landry was how she referred to him.

Her dad.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Bobbie Faye asked V’rai, as her dad glowered. “They stole your truck!”

“Don’t you fuss at your aunt,” her dad said. “You fuss at me, you want to yell at someone.”

“Do I
want
to?” she asked, whipping around, furious.

“Sundance, we don’t have time for this,” Trevor said as she reached for him. He wasn’t even sure she knew she was doing it, her hand landing on his arm, sliding down ’til she had his hand in hers, fingers intertwined. He wondered if she understood what she felt. “We have to go,” he continued, forcing the personal out of the here and now. “We’ve got bigger problems.”

“Bombs,” Old Man Landry said, and every single one of them stopped and gaped at Bobbie Faye’s father. “Four more,” he said, and Trevor felt Bobbie Faye tremble as her dad said, “I can find them.”

“Etienne!
Mais non
!” V’rai exclaimed.

“Why not?” Bobbie Faye asked.

“You’ll die,
chère
,” she said. “You’ll die if we go down this path.”

“She’ll die if I don’t,” the old man said.

Moreau leaned forward into the old man’s space and said, “You’d better not be just screwing with her.”

Landry looked in Moreau’s direction. “You know I can do it. I helped you find what you lost.”

Moreau grimaced, and Trevor was instantly sure that the old man had somehow helped Moreau find that engagement ring he’d bought for Bobbie Faye and had thrown in the lake behind his house in a fit of anger.

Trevor could not go there. Not right now. They both had too much to lose, and the clock was ticking. He’d seen the instructions, she hadn’t. She had no idea.

“Let’s go. And you,” he said to the old man, “had better not be slowing us down because if she gets hurt again from something you’ve done, there won’t be a single place to hide.”

“She’s going to get hurt,” V’rai said. Landry turned to the old woman, who had tears streaming down her face and both her sisters supporting her where she stood.

“V’rai had a vision,” Lizzie offered.

“A couple of them,” Aimee added.

“We’re just making things worse,
ma petite
,” she said to Bobbie Faye. “Much, much worse.”

“Where’s th’ whahoozie stuff?” Monique asked as Ce Ce dug in her purse for . . . something. Fuzzy. So very fuzzy. Must remember to tell Monique . . . something. Strong margaritas. Yeah.

She couldn’t remember what she was digging in her purse for, and it was hard to hear Monique, even with her shouting in Ce Ce’s ear, especially with the band blaring. Really good blaring, but holy pickles, it was loud.

Maybe it was the margaritas that made it so loud. Or sitting so close. Bad breath close, and she really needed mints for the kid on the . . . some sort of horn.

She squinted at the clock on the big JumboTron counting down to the game: one hour, twenty-three minutes. To . . . the ball thing. Kicking it. Lots of bending over. She was looking forward to that part.

The cute grill guy was seated next to her. He’d traded seats. For here. Near the student section. End zone. Mike the
Tiger, grrrrrrr, oh yeah, she was searching for something. He smiled and she felt around in her purse. For . . .

What was it again?

“Binoculars!” Monique reminded her, and she gripped something round and out it came, but it wasn’t binoculars. It was juice. Icky-looking stuff.

“The whahoozie juice!” Monique said, grabbing it and shaking it up and Ce Ce’s adrenaline spiked and she grabbed it back.

“Careful, hon! Dangerousss stuffs here. Big with the danger.” Then she focused on the chicken foot bracelet she wore and adrenaline slammed into the base of her skull so hard, it might as well be a cast-iron frying pan.

The chicken foot was not only striped, it was
moving
.

She blinked, stared at it, turning her head sideways a little, wondering if margaritas could make her hallucinate. She held it up to Brand-Brett-Briggs, who hadn’t drunk anything stronger than lemonade, from what she could remember, and she asked, “Is this . . . moving?”

“Shit,” he said, jumping back a foot, leaning away from her arm, “what the hell is that thing?”

“Chicken foot,” she said. “Is it moving? Because moving would be very bad.”

“Holy shit!” he said, moving farther away.

And aw, damn, he was going back to his original seat. Cute ass, though.

Not that she could worry about that right then, because the foot was
moving
.

If she could just pluck her heart out and put it in a Ziploc bag and store it somewhere, she could deal with this pain. Anxiety waged a game of doubles with Anger, and so far, they were pretty even up. Her skin felt taut and stretched over infinity, and pain stabbed between her eyes. Every part of her ached. Her
hair
hurt, how the hell?

Bobbie Faye stood in the corner of an old dress shop, sawdust thick in the corners of the concrete floor where someone had hastily swept construction debris. The Feds
and cops had moved the joint command center to the building across the street from Sean’s apartment and the remodeling job had barely made it to third-date earnest on this side of the street. Three people had tried to get her to eat one of the sandwiches someone had brought in, but she’d just throw it up, so there was no point.

Trevor handed her some sort of drink with electrolytes; sometimes she’d swear he materialized things out of thin air.

He should have taken it for himself.

“Drink. Don’t argue,” he said.

She studied him as she sipped it, wondering when the last time it was he’d slept. Eaten. He conferred with one of the billion people crammed into that storefront, where the worry was nearly as palpable as the sweat; she looked at the lines of his shoulders, the way he held the angle of his jaw, and saw he was exhausted, in pain, and determined not to show it.

She picked a back corner where she could watch the room. Riles had, at some point, leaned several abandoned tattered, silk-dressed headless mannequins in a front window.

She hoped the “headless” audience wasn’t an omen.

The street had been cordoned off and the amber glow of the streetlights seemed tinted a queasy green in the big plate-glass windows. Bobbie Faye had no idea how the impromptu command had been set up so quickly, or how the sheer volume of people had squeezed in there to do whatever it was planny types did during crises. Police chiefs. Sheriffs. A mayor or two. Homeland Security. Someone had set up tables on sawhorses, taped a big city/parish map of Baton Rouge on the wall, and laptops and high-tech equipment she couldn’t identify were scattered everywhere.

She wrapped her arms around her shoulders, pressing in, feeling as if she was going to fly in bits across the room from the sheer rhythm of
Nina Nina Nina
at the base of her brain; she felt like one of those black holes that just suck the life out of the universe, the center of all destruction. Nina. Nina
held captive by a madman who’d think nothing of torturing her to get what he wanted. Nina. Her best friend who was practically a stranger to her. Who’d lived some sort of covert life all of these years.

She closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the freshly painted wall. Nothing made sense anymore. If she’d woken up yesterday morning and thought, “Hey, I’ll go bungee jump off a short building,” it would have made more sense than this craziness.

Nina. The one rock-solid relationship she’d had most of her life. Who wasn’t at all the woman Bobbie Faye thought she was. Who had probably known where Trevor was when Bobbie Faye had gone stir-crazy, painting, thinking he might be dead somewhere and nobody telling her.

A band of pressure, a hurricane front of emotional wreckage bore down on her heart, inexorable, waylaying what little had made sense in its path. How in the hell had it become okay for people she loved to not tell her the truth? How do you move forward with a relationship based on half-truths and the other person constantly gauging and deciding what you could and could not know? And the question that made her sick: Why hadn’t she been aware enough to know that people were lying to her? What kind of person was
she
?

Was there something she’d done to communicate to the two people she loved that she couldn’t be trusted?

She watched her fiancé as he braced on his fingertips, leaning over a table, his hands on either side of a laptop. Everything about him screamed
poised
and
lethal
: tense muscles, corded sinews, dead-angry expression. He and Cam coordinated with SWAT and ASAC Brennan. Trevor had been on the phone since they’d left Sean’s apartment, dealing with a thousand things at once. When Trevor had led her, Cam, and Riles into this makeshift command center, she’d seen the shift in the room, the confidence the other leaders had in him as they analyzed and attacked the problems.

He suddenly met her gaze as if he’d felt her watching him. She knew that he was listening to what the SWAT
leader said, and simultaneously tracking the movements of everyone in the room, but those clear blue eyes softened, asking, in his way, if she was okay. She wanted to say
yes
. Just to give him some peace of mind while he had so much to do. She wanted to do that, because it was their second nature to reach out to each other. It had defined them as a couple. As a team.

He’d know she was lying.

But were they a team? Not really.

His expression shimmered from concern to pain, a mawing abyss of hurt, for her, for them both, and then he shuttered it down, and
just like that
, all emotion shut off from her, though he held her gaze. She wanted to close her eyes and look away, but not even that would bring relief; closing them would just mean that Fear would hopscotch from one pain to the other: the instructions written on that wall in Sean’s apartment, burned in her memory, black words scrawled like disease against the white wall.

She closed her eyes and saw the image all over again:

1 hostage
4 bombs
thousands dead
demands @ 7:00

She saw the chair where Nina had been tied up. Saw the blond hairs a crime scene tech had bagged already. She’d almost thrown up right there, right in the middle of Sean’s apartment, right in the middle of a crime scene.

“She shouldn’t fucking
be
here,” Cam had snapped at Trevor, who’d kept one hand on her shoulder, beneath her hair, his thumb kneading the knots there, and she leaned into that hand.

“Not knowing is much worse for her,” Trevor had snapped back, and Irony wanted to walk up and smack the crap out of him, though she admired his own restraint. He wanted to hit Cam. No doubt about it, but he held back. After she’d stared at the message for five million years, he
walked her back to the command center where, she threw up, twice, in the bathroom in the back of the store. The SWAT commander’s voice brought her back to the present, and she opened her eyes to see Trevor still watching her.

“Twenty-six teams, feet on the ground, another four forming up,” the SWAT commander was saying, and Trevor turned his gaze back to the man. “We’re pulling in everyone, but we don’t have enough dogs.” Bomb-sniffing dogs, she realized, were breaking down the city and surrounding areas into sections of most likely versus least likely to attract Sean’s attention.

There were dozens and dozens of chemical plants in and around the Baton Rouge area. Any one of them could be the target. So far, three plants in other cities had been bombed, and no one had tied them to one central concept or common product. It was too early to know exactly how Sean had gotten the bombs in place, but every single plant in the area had been put on terrorist alert and evacuations were underway.

Major corporations were shutting down. Billions of dollars were at stake. No one had a single idea where Sean would strike next, but they knew his threat was utterly credible.

“And he could hit anywhere in the state,” SWAT reminded.

“I can’t pull teams out of the outlying region ’til we have a more credible threat here,” SWAT continued. “He may be trying to draw us away from some other area, just so we don’t find what he’s really up to.”

“Landry’s got a vague hit,” Cam said, nodding toward Old Man Landry, who sat in the opposite corner. Bobbie Faye was as far away as she could get from her father without having to leave the room. Even from this distance, he looked as worn as old paper, crumpled and faded. His once-black hair had gone completely silver and she squinted, trying to remember when that had happened. The man who’d been her father when she was five had been tall and redwood-straight, a broad-shouldered, black-haired knight.

He stared into space, in some sort of “zone,” frowning,
and the FBI agent taking notes next to him was obviously frustrated. From the consternation on the old man’s face, Bobbie Faye thought Old Man Landry was about to have a heart attack, except he was too mean to have an actual heart, so that was out.

Thank God Trevor had ordered her aunts to be taken to a hotel two blocks over where they were being baby-sat by two agents who had been told that, under no circumstances, were the wily old women to be trusted.

From the table in the center of the room, the mayor, crisply dressed and as big as a bear, said, “I’m not putting this city’s well-being in the hands of some sort of hocus-pocus. I don’t care
what
the old man’s track record is. I can call up the National Guard.”

“And put them where?” Trevor asked, glancing at his watch. “MacGreggor’s going to call in three minutes. He’ll have a plan, and you can bet he’s going to strike fast. He has no reason to delay, because there’s nothing you can give him that he wants.” He turned to ASAC Brennan. “MacGreggor said
the money I
will
make
in the video. So far, the three bombs have hit chemical plants—are we tracking any sudden jump in futures? Anything related to the petrochemical industry?”