When a Man Loves a Weapon (4 page)

—Brandee Crisp, in an internal HR memo

The mechanic examined the modified gas tank with care. Most people who knew him today would probably have been surprised that he actually had mechanic skills, since he went to the trouble of having his car serviced instead of doing it himself. After all these years, he couldn’t tolerate grease underneath his fingernails, the deep stains embedded in the lines of his knuckles or coloring the tips of his fingers, his prints standing out in sharp relief like a drunken crosshatch etching. Even when he’d made a living as a mechanic, he’d hated the sharp, gagging smell of the gas; it reminded him of too much—too much pain, too much work to overcome, too much bitterness. Now he wore gloves, a Tyvek jumpsuit, and kept the work area in immaculate, surgical conditions.

He wasn’t worried about being caught. He
planned
on being caught.

No, the precautions were for the new detonators, computerized versions which needed to be installed under pristine conditions.

He could have hired this installation job out, but loyalty was getting more and more difficult to buy and frankly, there was too much at stake. There was no way he’d risk someone else catching on to what he was doing to the gas tanks of the various pieces of equipment he’d rented. Rentals that would, eventually, have been traced back to him regardless of
whether or not he was caught initially. He had no doubt about the ATF’s ability to trace connections, tunnel through corporate veils, and find out that he owned a piece of the companies who regularly used this type of rental equipment. As soon as his name surfaced in that search, red flags would sprout all over the place—they would immediately suspect his involvement with the bombs. He had the motive. And now, the means. The ATF would be fools not to suspect him and he knew the ATF were no fools.

It had taken him years to set it up—he wasn’t about to be sloppy about the technique now. It was essential that each tank appear to be completely normal. He only trusted his own eyes, his own sense of smell. His own attention to the smallest detail.

The gas tank lay on the workbench in front of him. It was a precision job; once the placement of his modification was complete, he’d reassemble the tank. Carefully, he attached the wires he’d cut to length to the C-4. After he had them connected, he’d work his magic, attaching the other ends to the relays, the backups, the trip wires, the computer timer, and ultimately, the detonator. He’d been a bomb tech, years ago. He’d made it a point to keep up with the latest technology, the latest methodology of stopping a device, and he knew how to take a normal bomb squad’s expectations and use them. If someone tried to defuse his creation, they would end up hastening their own end. Oh, he’d leave warnings, inside the bombs. They’d be there, plain as day, a professional courtesy.

It didn’t have to be this way. He knew that. He’d tried to solve the problem by other methods. Using every other legal channel, in fact. But he’d been left with no choice.

And now there was absolutely nothing that was going to stop him.

He glanced up and over to Chloë’s urn, and thought, for the ten-thousandth time, that she would have at least loved the color: cobalt blue, like her eyes. He had to stop for a moment to breathe. Eleven years, and he still had to remind himself to breathe in, breathe out, put one foot in front of the other, try not to worry the family. Try not to be a burden to
his friends. His employees. Chloë had faded to a dim memory for so many, even her closest friends, and the sharp, jagged truth of that sickened him.

He placed the tank back into the machine, screwing it into place, and worked for an hour with an airbrush technique to spread the grease and dirt until he was satisfied the tank looked identical to any normal tank with typical usage and wear and tear. He closed the lid of the machine and stood there, contemplating his perfect plan.

He pulled out a cross and said a prayer, asking God to please guide home the souls this machine would kill, to please keep them in His loving care, each and every one of them, because they didn’t deserve this.

“How much trouble can that wan be?” Sean had said all those months ago. Fucking eejit, Lonan thought again for the millionth time. He’d tried to go with the crew on the last run, going after the diamonds. But Sean had been insistent he stay behind in Dublin and handle the Castle Brothers problem. They had been properly buried (if one could call being dumped in a low bog being
buried
), just in time for Lonan to learn Sean’s crew had been shot and killed. In fucking Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

He hadn’t even been able to claim their bodies.

And someone was going to pay for that.

Someone about five-foot-six, long brunette hair.

The crew was the only family he knew. Lonan had been Sean’s right hand long enough to know how to make their organization work. Growing up in Tallaght, west of Dublin, Sean had taught them everything. They’d fought hard, fought dirty, and won. They were on the verge of international leverage in the arms business and the money—and lifestyle—that came with it. There were a couple of members of the team who seemed to think he’d take over Sean’s enterprise, when Sean was first arrested, but those feckless idiots did not understand family.

Lonan owed Bobbie Faye. He was very
very
good with payback.

*  *  *

“Six gross of nipple rings,” Gilda said, and Nina looked up from the subtle display of her S&M magazine,
Branded
, fanned out on the ebony foyer table. “Are we giving these things away as prizes somewhere I should know about?”

Nina eyed her assistant, who was sleek in her gray Armani suit, her jet-black hair slicked back into a chignon. “Is this the same company that sent us three extra gross of butt plugs last month?”

Gilda nodded. “All extra large.”

“Extra large? That says something about either their perception of the South or of us specifically, but either way, I think I’m insulted.”

“You want me to return them?”

“You checked the boxes already?” Nina meant checking for bugs, the electronic kind. This relatively new little S&M club, an offshoot of her magazine, was a cover—deeply hidden for a government agency which would pretend to be completely appalled and which would disavow the club (and the magazine’s) existence as a covert entity, should anyone suggest a connection. And given the nature of their business, she wouldn’t put it a bit past an enemy trying to record the conversations that went on in this ultra-private enclave. Although a butt plug as a recorder would just be
wrong
.

“All clear.”

Nina followed Gilda from the opulent foyer with its creamy butter walls and black granite floors and into the warm honeyed tones of the living room. The Chagall on the opposite wall still soothed Nina. It had hung there for the three years of the magazine’s reign and, when they’d expanded four months ago to include the club, she’d savored the juxtaposition of its class versus the business done just yards away from it.

“What would you like me to do with them?” Gilda asked, her pen poised above her clipboard.

“Send ’em back. And tell them that if they’re determined to send me extra merchandise for use in the club, or for endorsement in the magazine, they have to clear it with you, first.”
Gilda checked off that item on her clipboard and moved on to the next order of business.

“About Lavey’s sister . . .”

“No.”

Gilda grimaced at the abruptness of the answer, the small frown barely creasing her round baby face. Nina smoothed her own Versace suit—mostly nude sheathing with daring crisscross undergarments. “Absolutely not. She’s abusive of our employees. I won’t have her back.”

“But Lavey’s offering twice the fee.” Two hundred thousand to buy his sister back into Nina’s good graces.

“Tell him no, thank you, and not even at ten times the amount. I don’t need the money.” And this wasn’t an ordinary business. The elite clientele only got in by referral, a very large fee, and because Nina wanted them there. Specifically, because there was
one man
she wanted there, and he had to believe the club was real, that there were other patrons, and that she was extraordinarily exclusive.

And that he was safe from blackmail.

She was there today because his appointment was in fifteen minutes. This was his third, and she was afraid they were running out of time.

“You have a call,” Gilda said as the cell phone cupped against the clipboard chirped. She glanced at the caller ID and handed Nina the phone. “Your friend.”

There was only one person in the world Gilda knew to accept calls from during business hours.

“Hey B,” she said into the phone as the front buzzer rang early—the client—and Gilda moved to answer it, “Please tell me you’re not hanging off something, about to plunge to your death.”

“Sadly, not today. Am I interrupting any hot guys posing for photos?”

“No, not exactly,” Nina said, as Gilda escorted the client in through the foyer. This client was middle-aged, fifty-six, white-haired, slight paunch but mostly fit, and fairly wealthy. He would be leaving through the one-way-only private elevator in the back of the club—preferred by the clientele because
they were usually exhausted and had welts on them they had not had when entering. She sometimes wondered how the clients explained away the bruises to family or business associates. She returned her attention to Bobbie Faye. “I’m actually cooking.”

“
Really
?”

“It happens.” She’d already run the man’s prints through every known law agency she had access to, but he seemed clean. She just had a pretty good hunch he wasn’t. “A soufflé.” Gilda escorted the man to the holding area, where he voluntarily disrobed in the glass booth. “We ran long on a shoot, and I’m in a friend’s apartment. I’m trying to show off my mad skills and see if it’s going to rise.” Gilda put the cuffs on the man, his hands behind his back.

“You’re kidding me.”

Nina laughed. “Yeah.”

“Okay, that was scary. And mean. Don’t ever do that again.”

“Not a problem.” They shared a moment of silence, and Nina regretted not being able to tell her friend exactly what she was doing and hear the creative mockage she’d come up with. “So, you okay?”

“Sure. Except for Trevor getting called in and leaving me with a baby-sitter, I’m just peachy.”

“A baby-sitter? Does Trevor have a death wish?”

“That’s what
I
said.” Nina listened while Bobbie Faye filled her in.

Damn. Trevor had called in Riles.
Fuck
.

“You can’t paint the entire inside of the house while he’s gone,” Riles said. “Besides, we have to stay here and I don’t want to smell it. Paint stinks.”

“It does not stink. It’s odorless paint.” She rolled on the red. It was a deep red, very satisfying against the white trim. An old barn sort of red. “Though the smell’s making me think of butter-cream icing.”

“Which means it has a smell, you nut job, which means it stinks.”

“Look, if you can’t be helpful, you can leave.”

“I was helpful.”

“Patting down that poor eighty-year-old man in Home Depot was not helpful. I’m pretty sure he damned near had a stroke.”

“He came at you with a drill. I’m supposed to keep you alive. And you missed a spot.”

She turned to him, the paint roller in her hand. He sat in a lawn chair he’d bought—a chair he’d positioned just outside of her arm’s reach with the roller—and boy, had he learned that the hard way. Though she was pretty sure the red blotch had improved the grotesque orange and green shirt. He sat there drinking water and spitting sunflower seeds on the drop cloth.

Trevor had been gone a whole day and already she’d had to lock up the duct tape and her own ammo to keep from using it on Riles. She was hoping that having to go through the extra steps of getting the key out of the barn to unlock the gun safe in the closet would give her a couple of minutes to remember that she’d promised Trevor that she wouldn’t kill Riles.

She was beginning to think, though, that she could make that trek to the barn and back in under thirty seconds.

“Can’t you do something else useful?”

“Sure, I could. But then I wouldn’t be here to tell you that you missed another spot.”

“What time is it?” she asked him, and when he didn’t answer, she frowned at him. Many more days of Riles and her face was going to be stuck that way. It was day three.
Three.
Trevor would be home soon, and she could quit worrying. She wasn’t worrying. She didn’t want him to think she’d been worrying. She didn’t want him to take that as lack of faith in his ability, because that wasn’t it at all. Trevor had ability out the wazoo. She was simply concerned. Worrying? No. Maybe.

Manic. Maybe she was manic. She probably should have slept. But the bed seemed huge and empty and wrong and she hadn’t been able to get comfortable. Painting was good.

“Time?” she asked again.

“Fifteen minutes after you asked last time. And twenty-five from the time before that. And you missed a spot.”

“Thank you, Big Ben.”

She rolled the paint on, a nice
schick shick shick
of fresh wet hopefulness onto the wall. Pale gray green was perfect for a living room. She’d changed her mind from the red. The red was too dark for a room this small; she didn’t know what she’d been thinking. Neither had the Home Depot people, who sold her the primer she’d had to use to cover the red. Two coats of green. Pale gray green. Yeah, Trevor would like this.

“He’s going to hate this color,” Riles said.

“Shut up.”

“It’s the color of camo. He lived in camo for years. Trust me, he’s going to hate it.”

“It’s the color of my eyes, he’ll love it. What time is it?”

Why in the fuck she’d thought green was the right color, she didn’t know. Butter cream—a perfect color. A “neutral.” That’s what she should have gone with. It was day four, and this was the right color and maybe yeah, maybe she should have slept, but really, who could sleep with walls the color of dying grass, it was a depressing color, and she didn’t need ‘depressing’ right now, she was tense enough. Not that she was, you know, really tense but maybe sometimes, yeah, sometimes she was, and maybe she should have painted the primer again, but it had seemed like the butter-cream color was going to cover that stupid green well enough, except now the green showed through the hint of yellow in the “creamy” color and the whole room looked like it had been splattered with baby poo, but maybe one more coat would work and what time was it?