When a Man Loves a Weapon (38 page)

“I have resources to pull that JumboTron video. Make still photos,” Trevor added, giving her a wicked grin. “Or I’m sure I could dig up one with the
SHUCK ME
shirt.”

“A collage,” Moreau offered, the crowd noise louder over his mic, nearly drowning him out.

“Okay, now you’re making me long for the death-by-bloomers.”

“Shit,” Moreau said and Trevor stopped, his hand on the zipper of the tiny white suit she now wore, knowing this was bad. “I think I found the bomb.”

The crowd roared, another good play, and Moreau’s voice was drowned out.

“We refer to the sudden skyrocketing need for orthopedic surgeons the ‘Bobbie Faye Effect’.”

—ER Supervisor Meredith Goudin Castillo

Nina fought off the grogginess and the pain in her right shoulder. She wasn’t entirely sure what the asshole had stuck her with, but it was designed to keep her just alert enough to know she was in trouble, but not alert enough to be able to marshal any sort of defense.

The lights from the city blurred as she looked out the window, and the whir of the engine and talking of the men blended into a disjointed mix. They’d been jamming that damned needle into her since they had grabbed her, almost overdoing it when she’d fought back the first two times.

She was pretty sure her jaw was fractured. Two broken fingers on her left hand. And her right knee had started to swell after this last go-round. But two of MacGreggor’s men were now unconscious.

She knew what Bobbie Faye was going to do. She knew it, and hadn’t been able to stop it. Her best friend had to know by now that she’d lied to her all these years. She had to be furious, and hurting.

But she’d still walk straight into MacGreggor’s trap because she thought she could save Nina. The world got blurry again and Nina bit the inside of her cheek, using the pain to focus.

Suds’s helicopter landed on the parade grounds in the heart of LSU; he leapt out, body bent beneath the blades until he’d
cleared them, and met one of the officers as he ran from the machine.

The cop handed him a communications unit and he plugged it into his ear.

“You’re already connected, sir,” the cop said.

“Any other bomb techs here?” he asked, wanting to know just who’d inspected his handiwork thus far.

“No sir. They’re on the ground in several other places—they’ve got to clear the refineries. There’s another bomb in Poly-Ferosia—there were two there, one detonated, the other intact. The contact officer here is Detective Moreau—he’s the one who found it.”

This just gets worse and fucking worse
. Cam was a good kid. Man. Hell, he felt about Bobbie Faye the way Suds had felt about Chloë.

“Moreau’s off the radio,” the young cop continued, but Suds knew Moreau knew the job and would follow protocol: get people away from the bomb, no radios, no cell phones, nothing that could potentially trigger anything electronic on the bomb, establish an inner perimeter—where the worst of the damage would be done—and an outside perimeter, and get help.

“Where is it?”

“Stadium. North bay. Right below the student section.”

Fuck
. The crowd’s stomping alone could set the damned thing off. Suds dug in harder, ran faster.

Cam eyed the enormous generator tucked into the back of the huge garagelike bay area, and he knew they were in big trouble. There was a camera on top, and there was absolutely no reason for there to be a camera on top of a generator. He’d moved fast, clearing back to an outer perimeter, pushing everyone out, locking down the area. No cell phones, no police radio. No staff, no overzealous fans, nobody.

Except for the minor detail of a few thousand people in the bleachers directly above him.

He couldn’t see a bomb apparatus on the generator. But
this fit the description of what Old Man Landry had seen, and so far, that man had been unerringly right.

Cam had to wait ’til a tech got here. One was supposed to be on the way—and he needed someone with more expertise than he had to check this thing and see if there was a bomb inside. No one wanted to start a dead panic, no one wanted hysteria.

He scanned the bay again, remembering what Landry had described—the eye of the tiger, he’d said. He’d kept seeing a tiger eye, but it wasn’t the actual tiger, or even the eye painted on the field. It turned out there was a tiger eye painted on the side panel of the big monster truck that had pulled the cage. It was parked close enough so that the generator was reflected in its gleaming paint job, and at the right angle, the compressor’s image was so sharp that it and the tiger eye seemed to overlap like a double exposure.

He moved further out when one of the stadium cops motioned to his earpiece that Cam had an incoming message. He couldn’t take the call close to the generator—the wrong frequency and the place could turn into dust. It was a pure judgment call as to where that outside perimeter ought to be; how big was the bomb? The whole generator? Probably not, he thought, cocking his head, assessing the machine. It had been rented, he’d guessed, as a backup generator. Useful after hurricanes or, ironically, in case of an emergency. He’d seen the rental company logo—LSU would have never let something like that in here without it being authorized and inspected. So whatever bomb it held had to be hidden well, something no one would normally see. Or the paperwork allowing it to be delivered had been forged.

Once he’d moved past the stadium walls to what he hoped like hell was a safe distance, he activated his radio and the earpiece crackled.

“Moreau here,” he said, dispensing with codes. They were of course using the Incident Command System (ICS): keep it simple, stupid. Multiple agencies had to respond to big emergencies, and had to keep in contact without possible confusion. He’d remain the contact on site, in command of
the area; LSU security staffed the command center, but Trevor was in charge as the most tactically experienced person on the site.

“Moreau,” Trevor said via his earpiece as he turned on his unit, “the LSU staff says that piece was rented a few days ago and was delivered yesterday. Paperwork says it passed sweep inspection at the outer perimeter before being allowed on site.” He was referring to the security sweep done with bomb-sniffing dogs that was always performed before the games. “Are you sure it’s the one we’re looking for?”

“Not a hundred percent. The description matches. But what worries me is that there’s a small camera on top of the generator—and it swivels. I’m pretty sure it’s live and able to track motion.”

“Shit,” Trevor responded.

Yeah. No fucking kidding.

“I’ve got incoming. More instructions.” There was a long pause and then, “Fuck.”

The pause lasted too long. Cam stood there, his arms crossed, assessing the bay area, trying to catalog in his mind everything he needed to do, a checklist, willing away the stress and allowing himself to float in that hyperfocused state where nothing mattered but the task at hand and remembering his training.

“Fuck. Moreau, he knows you’re by the bomb. He says you have to move back next to it or he’ll blow it. We’ll coordinate evacuation.”

Sonofabitch
.

“No!” Bobbie Faye’s anguish snapped through his earpiece.

“Baby, I’ll be okay. Just don’t let the bastard get you.”

He signed off. No good-byes. She could decide later which bastard he meant.

He headed toward the generator just as a young cop ran up, with Suds following.

“I’m your tech,” Suds explained before Cam could even ask. “Let’s get to it.”

Thank God
, Cam thought. Finally, someone he could trust. Maybe, just maybe, something about today was going to go right.

“He wants you
where
?” Bobbie Faye asked Trevor as he barked orders over his mic. He had his hand at her back, guiding her up the sidelines as the seconds wound down toward halftime. “You can’t,” she said when he didn’t answer, didn’t elaborate on the snippets she heard. “If you’re up on that stand, unarmed, you might as well paint a big-ass target on your back.”

Sean had Nina, he’d pinned Cam to a bomb, and now he’d instructed Trevor to be up on the drum leader’s stand—which would put him head and shoulders above the field. He leveled her a furious gaze, because that’s exactly what she’d done to herself: drawn a honking big-ass target on her back.

Just once, just freaking
once
, she wished she was up against a really stupid bad guy. Someone along the lines of Moe Moe Balentine, who tried desperately to rob the same bank repeatedly (the one where his sister worked) by using a handwritten note on the back of his deposit slip. Or Winky the Wonder Clown, who thought it was okay to rob the store where he bought the mask. Could she get someone like that? No, indeedy
not
.

Trevor’s hand rested on her shoulders, and her hands on his waist as he talked, coordinating with what he kept referring to as ICS. Everyone had moved fast, snapping into some sort of hierarchy they all understood as if there was one big Group Think, trying to get everyone into position as the last few seconds of the half wound down and LSU made a play that she couldn’t see for all of the players standing on the sidelines between her and the field.

It really didn’t matter if there was a hot pink polka-dotted Jesus standing out there right then, because Trevor was about to have to climb up onto the drum leader’s stand. She memorized his face, everything about him, particularly his singular determination. She had a glimpse then of the leader he’d been in the field in Spec Ops: cold, clear, calculated.
There was a knife’s edge to him. He was precise, relentless. Ice.

The only thing warm about him in that moment was his hand on her shoulder. His fingers slid against the muscles just beneath her hair, and she thought,
I am his one point of weakness
.

She was going to get him killed.

He’d held back the truth about himself because he didn’t know how to trust her with it. He had not realized yet that he could. She knew he’d do it again, if he thought it meant protecting her.

The band had lined up, per normal halftime routine, and they were getting their new instructions. She watched a wave of confusion ripple across their faces as they digested the information. Many were clearly upset—they wanted to march onto that field at halftime and perform the show they had undoubtedly practiced an insane number of hours to perfect.

The halftime buzzer sounded, the cameras swooped away from the field to the end zones where the teams headed and she knew the network would be cutting into close-ups of the coaches giving their pointless content-free halftime reports.

“Where do you think he’s set up?” she asked, knowing that Trevor and his men had been scanning every inch of the stadium, searching for Sean. He had to be there somewhere, and yet, there was no way Sean could have gotten into the stadium with weapons—the security was intensely tight at these games. On the other hand, he didn’t have to have weapons; he had the bomb, a trump card, pure and simple. The fact that he
might
be able to set it off would keep SWAT at bay until Cam could assess the bomb threat.

The fact that there was still another bomb, somewhere, with an unknown location, meant Sean had two trump cards, really. He could even have the second bomb with him. Wherever he was.

She followed Trevor’s gaze as he scanned the crowd; people moved to the aisles going for bathroom breaks, concession breaks, or visits with friends, although many were
glancing out onto the field, wondering why the band hadn’t started playing. Neither the LSU nor the Alabama band had moved into position, and she could see from the restless crowd that they were starting to notice.

She wondered if the LSU band still played the Darth Vader song when the defense rallied on a great play. “The Imperial March,” was that what it was called? They really should, if they didn’t still, because that song would just be so fucking
fitting
right now. Hearing that song would make this disaster unfolding in front of her feel like a big halftime show, an act, and she could pretend that none of this was happening. She wanted to pretend that the last few hours were simply fiction on a movie screen in front of her, that this man,
her world
, standing next to her wasn’t giving her a final look, one that held his entire heart, one that said his biggest regret was not going and finding Sean and killing him when he’d had the chance.

He’d wanted to. It wasn’t legal and he was an FBI agent and she’d reminded him of that, over and over. She’d dissuaded him from acting on his own. She’d made him promise, because she knew it would ruin his life, because she knew he would have killed Sean to protect her.

He’d do any damned thing he could to protect her. Any. Damned. Thing. He’d sacrifice everything.

And suddenly, she understood. She
understood
, and he had already started to move away from her and climb that stupid stupid
stupid
drum major platform and she grabbed him and kissed him, hard.

“If you get hurt,” she said, “I’m going to fucking kick your ass. In front of everyone.”

He grinned and said, “Good to know.” Then he frowned at her. “And follow the plan, do you hear me?”

Yeah, she nodded. She heard him.

But he ought to know by now she wasn’t really the planny type.

“We’ve got incoming,” one of the SWAT team on the outer perimeter—the bank of the Mississippi just west of the
stadium—said on Trevor’s earpiece, toggled now to the open circuit where he could talk to everyone and hear status updates. “Three helicopters. JetRangers.”

Trevor fully expected them. MacGreggor favored helicopters. What he didn’t know was which parking lot MacGreggor would choose to land in, what sort of danger the various tailgaters would be in, and which entrance he’d try to use. Everyone on the LSU staff had strict instructions to not try to stop the man—for one thing, Trevor didn’t want the staff shot and for another, there was the other bomb. He wouldn’t put it past MacGreggor to have more than one bomb on site and blow one just to make the point that he could.