When a Man Loves a Weapon (37 page)

“Riles, we really have got to work on this bashfulness issue.”

“You’re a complete raving moron.”

“Would you do any different?” she asked him, pissed off. “Seriously, Riles, if you thought for one second that he’d take you instead, if offering yourself would keep him from killing people, wouldn’t you do it?”

“I’m trained. And he’d never take me alive.”

“Well, we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t take me alive, either.”

Riles stopped moving and zeroed in on her with a gaze so acute that she thought it’d bore a hole straight through her. But, God help her, she had a plan—and she needed to have Riles on board.

She’d already caught the gist of what the SWAT and other strategists behind him were saying. Even if they knew for a fact that the bomb was in the stadium, there was no way to evacuate the stadium in the time they had. And even if they had a prayer of evacuating in an orderly manner, any sort of announcement would cause a stampede, or worse. (Bobbie Faye shuddered from images of people drunkenly hurling themselves off the top of the stadium, trying to get out.) At best, after a game, it took several hours to get everyone out of the stadium and into their cars. There were at least thirty to forty thousand people in the parking lots, tailgating and watching the game on their big-screen TVs, and another nearly 93,000 inside.

And the bomb could be anywhere. Or it could be a complete bluff, and the bomb was somewhere else.

She glanced over at her dad, who looked tired, his face haggard and gray, and his arms folded as he watched her.

“Do you know where it is?” she asked him, and didn’t realize until she’d spoken that her body language mimicked his with her arms crossed, fists clenched. She slammed her hands in her pockets, and asked, “
Tu fait à-rien
?”
Will you do nothing?

“
Bouche ma chu
,” he said—
kiss my ass
—his vehemence bouncing the words like marbles off the walls. “It’s not here,” he said, tapping his head. “I don’t always get a whole picture. It’s not like I have a GPS homing device up my ass,
chère
, and it’s not like I can think
à t’disputé avec moi
.”
With you arguing with me.

He closed his eyes and she wanted to argue that he’d managed perfectly well to find
her
for Cam once before and perfectly capable of finding insane things like T-Boy’s lost hunting dog who’d gotten stuck on a barbed-wire fence four miles out in the bayou away from any known humanity, but if a little tiny thing like a bomb was eluding him, maybe he just had a fucking problem with priorities. But then again, she’d always known that, ever since he’d walked out. . . .

And now was not the time. She could not go all fourteen-year-old
oh woe is me
on his ass right then, because people were frantically working through every possibility for a bomb location, looking for access and egress points, straining to set up superfast and coordinate with LSU officials to try to keep thousands of people from dying.

She looked back at Riles, and said the thing she’d never imagined saying to him, ever, and it absolutely sucked to have to say it now.

“I need your help.”

“I don’t have a Rolodex big enough for all of the psychiatrists you need for help.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t need another psych eval to know I’m crazy. Shut up, don’t even touch that one,” she said. “I just need to know which guns you like best. Because you’re gonna have to shoot me.”

Trevor and Cam thrust through the shop door right at that moment and they stopped and gaped at her, both men going pale. Identical stares, and she couldn’t decide if she should be more shocked over them both being in one piece or that they seemed to be in synch. Her last statement had clearly, instantly, given them both second thoughts about trusting her.

“I have a plan,” she said to Trevor.

Riles shrugged at Trevor’s glare. “So far, I’m pretty happy with it.”

“He is
not
shooting at you,” Trevor said, “and if you even
think
about it again,
I’m
going to lock you up. Don’t argue.”

“If you ladies,” SWAT intoned behind them all, “have kissed and made up, we’ve got some instructions coming in.”

Cam gave her a soft, unreadable look, and she knew he was hurting, badly, from not being able to stop her. She knew he’d intended to have her best interests at heart. She knew he loved her. He’d marry her right that second and whisk her out of there, if she said to. He’d even forgive her Trevor, because he thought he’d pushed her away—if he’d been willing to talk to her the times she’d tried before she’d met Trevor, then she and Cam would not be here right now, at this heartbreak. She knew he’d learned. He’d learned the hard way. She could see the pain radiate out from him, see that he would do whatever it took to make the two of them work.

“I think Old Man Landry,” and she glared at the old man, “can ‘see’ some of the area where the bomb is, but he doesn’t recognize it, but maybe you will? You know the campus better than anyone here.”

Cam nodded, broke the gaze, and shuttered the pain and whatever it was he and Trevor had discussed outside. Instantly he was focused and back on task as he moved straight to her dad. A concrete bunker didn’t sound familiar to her—though LSU had a large number of basements which were designated as fallout shelters. Then again, so did the state capitol buildings.

“Jesus,” SWAT swore behind her.

Trevor grimaced as he moved to see the instructions coming in by text and then his grim expression just got worse. He had an expanded scale of
grim
expressions—from “annoyance” to “craptastic” to “stupid squared.” Currently, he seemed to be displaying the “and now nominated for the Darwin Award . . .” disgust.

When he turned the phone so that she could see the text Sean had sent, her heart sank. She skimmed through the main instructions because yeah, they were bad and she’d expected them to be—she could tell from his expression Trevor had, too—but it was the very last directive on the page which fucking pissed her off . . . the bastard had gone
way beyond acceptable bad-guy asshole code: He’d told her she had to wear one of the skimpy, itty-bitty, barely there, do-not-breathe-or-the-girls-will-pop-out cheerleader costumes. So he’d “know if she had a weapon” on her.

That was just damned mean.

Ce Ce wasn’t entirely sure if she could handle the game if she sobered up. The noise was ear-bleed level, and when it did occasionally subside (commercial breaks), she thought she’d gone temporarily deaf. If LSU huddled, people cheered. If the other team in the red uniform huddled up, people screamed, shouted, and stomped the stands about a thousand times louder. This effort was apparently an attempt to make the other team forget whatever play it was they were about to call. Heaven knows that the very act of bending over and having nearly a hundred thousand people yell at her on national TV would have caused
her
instant amnesia and she’d have wanted to stand up to check to see if her dress had caught in her ass or worse, so maybe there was logic to this plan.

On the other hand, there was lots of bending over by young men in very tight pants, and she was pretty happy with the net results. She was not, however, happy with the chicken foot. It pulsed and throbbed and there was a rising pain in her right arm, a numbness tingling up to her elbow. She thought maybe it was the result of using that arm to lift so many beers (she wasn’t entirely sure when they switched from the margaritas), but from the way the foot was twitching, she was pretty sure it wasn’t just the drinking. She’d already performed two booster spells (she had been a teensy bit worried—not that she wanted to say that out loud, and tempt fate or anything, but boosters couldn’t hurt, right?). Even so, in the last few minutes, the chicken foot’s behavior had taken a turn for the worse: it was trying to crawl up her body.

“Honish,” Monique slurred, “tha’ looks really grossh. I dink you need to stoo, shtoo. Do. Shomething.”

Ce Ce nodded, trying to blink away the brain fog. Monique
had a point. She had to do something. Another plain ol’ booster wasn’t gonna cut it. She needed the superbooster. She needed help.

She looked around at all of the people screaming and realized she had exactly what she needed. Mostly. Sort of.

The problem with a five-year-old on a sugar high, Lori Ann had tried to explain to Marcel, was the five-year-old-on-a-sugar-crash aftereffect. Two purple sno cones, a pack of M&M’s, and one massive box of sugarcoated lemon drops (which Marcel kept sneaking her), and it was not pretty.

LSU maneuvered their spread offense into a Dash Right 93 Berlin and the instant the wide receiver broke free, the place thundered. Cam would be proud. He’d used that same play in a game against the Gators and won. (One advantage to being the little sister of the girl who dated the star quarterback was enough LSU trivia to be a hit at every sports bar. For life.) But the Gators game was the one where he’d gotten hurt, where his knee had been hit so hard, he almost didn’t recover in time for the SEC championship game. Where he got hit again.

Knee surgery had ended his career. And saved her life, because he’d become a cop. He’d told her that she was his little sister-in-law as far as he was concerned, and he sure as hell wasn’t letting her drive around drunk off her ass. He’d arrested her when she wouldn’t stop drinking and driving.

She gazed down at Stacey clinging to her like kudzu and realized she owed Cam Stacey’s life, too. Cam had never told Bobbie Faye that Stacey had been in the car when he arrested Lori Ann. He’d called his own sister, had her pick up Stacey and bring her to his mom’s house, had filled out the police report that no one was in the car, and had irrevocably changed all of their lives, and she knew Bobbie Faye didn’t know about Stacey.

Everyone screamed and danced at the extra point, and Lori Ann sat still, holding Stacey in her lap. If she was brave enough, she’d go ahead and tell Bobbie Faye. Cam had said not to, and Bobbie Faye hadn’t understood why he’d done it,
why he’d defied her request to “let her handle it” and gone ahead and arrested her sister.

She put her chin on Stacey’s golden curls and closed her eyes, the deafening cheering blanketing her. If she’d been a decent sister, she’d have told Bobbie Faye anyway. If she hadn’t been completely chickenshit scared. After years of being the biggest lush this side of the Mississippi, she’d barely gotten back Bobbie Faye’s respect and trust. Barely. One very feeble day at a time.

LSU kicked off to Bama after the touchdown. She and Marcel and Stacey had “box” seats—which was not a box after all, but the row in front of the big bay opening below where the truck had driven through—so no one sat in front of them and she watched the game through the goalposts at the north end of the stadium. Marcel turned to hug her—every good play got hugs—and he frowned.

“Hon,” he said in her ear, “she looks really tired.”

Lori Ann rolled Stacey a little in her arms so she could see her face—Stacey, who had three lemon drops stuck in her hair, and wasn’t
that
going to be a joy to get out—and sure enough, Ms. Cranky-Takes-After-Her-Aunt-Pants had fallen asleep against Lori Ann’s shoulder.

“You want to go stretch out in the truck?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she shouted in his ear, nodding hard for emphasis. The crowd roared again as the defense recovered a fumble and LSU had the ball again.

It was going to be a great night.

She reached for the keys as he dug them out of his pocket and he shook his head. “I’ll make sure you get in there okay,” he said, and he followed her out the row as four people behind them belly-butted and high-fived.

The sound dampened down to low-level-nuclear-bombardment as they walked into the coolness of the big bay. Thank goodness. They wove past guards, event staff, and LSU personnel, having to show their special passes to get back to the truck, which was parked toward the back of the bay (just beneath the bleachers), near the generator. The cheering went unabated and Lori Ann wondered how on
earth anyone who worked there wasn’t permanently deaf. She wouldn’t be able to call Marcel when Stacey woke up. Between the vibration of the stands and Marcel bouncing around shouting, he wouldn’t even feel it vibrating.

“I’ll come check on you at halftime,” he shouted and she nodded as he unlocked the back door, moving the car seat and bunching up a windbreaker he had for a pillow. She kissed him bye and he made sure she was safely tucked in, stretched out, feet out of the way of the door as he closed it. Stacey curled on top of her like a kitten. A very big sticky purple and gold kitten, but one who was, thankfully, asleep.

“I’m going to die wearing
bloomers
,” Bobbie Faye said as she pulled on the tiny little white short-shorts that the cheerleaders wore under their uniform.

Trevor worked on putting a couple of his gadgets in her bra—and had a serious time concentrating there for a moment—while she wriggled the bloomers on.

“For the love of God, be still,” he said as he lost the tracking device in her cleavage. They were in a bathroom just inside the stadium entrance, and he’d appreciated how quickly the LSU head of security had managed to grab a cheerleader of the right size and shape and get her out of her uniform just as Trevor and Bobbie Faye had arrived. “Dammit, I’ve lost it again. This bra is crap.”

“Sports bras suck,” Moreau intoned over the earpieces—communication sets Trevor had gotten from the local Bureau. They’d switched over to a secondary channel while Moreau searched for what Landry had described as the bomb location. “They smush you down too much.”

She gasped, shocked, gaping at Trevor as if she couldn’t believe Moreau had just said that in front of—

“And in,” Trevor agreed, seeing where Moreau was going, distracting her. “It’s like the cleavage that ate Detroit.”

Her head nearly popped off her shoulders. “You two are
not
talking about my cleavage. I am
not
remembering this as my last conversation. Geez.”

“Fine,” Moreau said, and Trevor could hear him running. “If you die, we’ll talk about it at your wake.”