When a Man Loves a Weapon (40 page)

“Trevor says to give you a heads-up,” the young cop at the edge of the inner perimeter said. He’d been running out to the outer perimeter where he could use his radio to keep Cam and Suds informed. “Bobbie Faye just called the bomber a namby-pamby baby with no balls.”

Cam and Suds shared a look.

“Well, that’s good,” Cam said, “because I don’t think this was quite fucking hard enough.”

Suds pursed his lips and went back to work.

“Also,” the cop at the perimeter added, returning already, “they’ve found the second bomb at the Poly-Ferosia plant and want to know how you’re doing on this one.”

“Tell them to watch for multiple traps,” Suds said and then he reeled off a lot of technical jargon.

Cam sharpened his gaze at Suds, apprehension warring beneath the surface with the relief he’d felt that he’d had someone with extensive bomb-tech knowledge show up. If he’d have had to describe everything to someone off-site while trying to follow instructions on how to diffuse this bomb, Cam wasn’t sure he would have been able to do it, as tricky as it was. He knew he wouldn’t be nearly as far along as Suds had already gotten, especially since Cam would have to have a cop there to run out beyond the perimeter to get every instruction and then relay it back in to him, since he couldn’t use his cell phone near the bomb. The time delay alone would’ve been a nightmare. No, he’d been thrilled when Suds arrived.

Except . . . Suds was describing stuff about this bomb that they hadn’t uncovered yet. Traps he hadn’t seen yet. Traps in the other bomb
he couldn’t possibly know about
.

How?

He was about to ask that question when out of the corner of his eye he caught movement. He glanced over at the truck parked twenty feet away from the generator and nearly died, right there on the spot.

Stacey was waving to him from the backseat of that truck.

“Isabella,” Andrea said into her cell phone. “I know you’re the only one your brother is still talking to.”

“Mother, I’m busy.”

“Busy monitoring the feed from the football game. Don’t bother to deny it.”

“What do you want?”

“Henry’s at my laptop, and I want you to send me a routing line so that I can watch the live feed from there. The local station has apparently stopped broadcasting nationally. I can suspect on whose orders.”

“Trevor wants absolutely nothing to do with you, Mother, and you haven’t bothered in years. The last thing he’d want is for you to use this—”

“Route it now, Isabella, or the next board meeting will not be pleasant.”

Andrea hung up. She knew exactly how her son felt, and she’d always been fairly certain that he’d mellow with time. Instead, he’d become worse. And now, if her eyesight hadn’t played tricks on her, that helicopter that the camera had captured hovering just behind him as they cut to the sports desk halftime show had had someone inside with a gun pointed at her son’s head.

“We have the feed,” Henry said.

Lonan could feel it. He could feel something unnatural washing over them.

Something dire and hot burned in Sean’s amber eyes, and Lonan hated the look of it. It didn’t bode well. He glanced over at Ian, who still controlled the laptop with the codes. He knew Ian had overrides, in case Sean changed his mind about the timing. Or lost his mind, as was, clearly, possible.
It was Lonan’s job to blow these bombs, and to make sure the timing was right, and he wasn’t going to fail Sean again.

“I’m comin’ to get you,
àlainn,
” Sean said. “You’ve got style, lass. I’ll give you that. It’ll do you no good, in the end.”

He signaled Sean and they both muted their microphones. “It’s a trick,” he told Sean, but he knew he was wasting his breath.

“What’re they gonna do, then? Shoot me in front of millions? This is the nation that got all squirrelly over a fuckin’ wardrobe malfunction. They haven’t the stomach to do anythin’ wit’ any balls. Not on national TV.

“Set her down,” Sean instructed their pilot, Denny.

The woo-woo dancing grew in the stands, and Bobbie Faye had no doubt whatsoever that Ce Ce was somehow behind it. Every single time those arms pulsed upward and shook their demented jazz hands, the chicken foot clenched and reached for something, and she had no clue what, but it
hurt
. The shimmying had synched up with the boogie of the cadence the drum line paced—and the dancing seemed to be spreading to a second section. Heads bobbed, bodies gyrated, the rhythm and
feeling
throbbing through her like a raw ache, a claw hammer to her heart.

The helicopter in front of her lifted off and circled around to exchange places with the third helicopter flying around in circles. She so wanted to tell Sean he needed MapQuest to find his ass from a hole in the ground, but the dancing in the crowd pulled at her attention as the swaying spread to yet another section. The thump-thump-ratatatatatatat of the drums filled the stadium and echoed back again, swelling and beating and pumping adrenaline into her pores. She fought against the weirdness that seemed to swamp her, taking over her body, and she ground her teeth and clenched her fists, battling for focus.

She looked over to where Trevor stood, his arms crossed so he could key his mic without being seen. The notion slammed into her all over again: he had not trusted her.

Trust was a damned fucking hard thing to break open and
live in. Breaking trust open and living in it, living in the give and take. The give of . . . the
give
. And maybe it was the swaying of the crowd, or maybe it was the bright lights making her dizzy, or maybe it was all of the stress highlighting what was at stake, but the epiphany she had as she gazed at him nearly slammed her to her knees. It was as if her perspective had shifted or had focused, like clear lenses when she’d been blind. With the chanting crowd and the rolling drums and the helicopters moving into their positions, she suddenly realized that love wasn’t always about
what you get
. Love was not just about what you felt, but about what you were able to give, what you ought to give. What the other person needed.

He was standing there, giving her the most important thing he had: being a partner to her in his plan. Trusting her to hold up her end, believing she could do something exceptional in a time of crisis. His life—their lives—depended on her part in this, as well as his.

Faith. He needed her faith in him. In who he was, who he had become, what he’d done with his life, and what they could be, even with mistakes and misunderstandings. He had not fully opened up to her. But she hadn’t fully opened up to him, either. How do you have faith, unless you simply choose? She could see where his fear had come from. See what had held him back, but when she thought about it, he’d shown faith in her over and over again, in the way he treated her, in how he respected her opinion, her abilities. He wasn’t perfect. Thank freaking God, he wans’t perfect. And he needed her. He needed her faith. It was such a startling revelation, she almost turned and ran off the field, just to get to tell him face-to-face, to see the look in his eyes.

Instead, she tapped her leg twice for him to switch to the secondary channel they’d set up. She fiddled with her bra strap, taking the moment to surreptitiously switch channels herself. Trevor’s fancy phone could monitor Sean’s channel while talking to her.
They had maybe ten seconds
.

“I’m done being stupid,” she said.

“From the woman who just called the bomber a big pansy? Sundance, you want to fucking narrow that one down?”

“Good point. I get why you didn’t tell me about you. I get you might’ve had reasons to be afraid. And I’m going to give you an earful of grief later, buster, so don’t think you’re off the hook, but I understand. It’s completely within the realm of possibility that I might’ve overreacted in a knee-jerk sort of way—not that I do that, but mind you, it’s within a statistical possibility that—”

“So you’re saying I was right?”

She had to fight off a wave of dizziness to answer. “I’m saying I’m pissed off that you
might
have been right, which is an
entirely
different thing and you can’t hold me to that, I reserve the right to totally recant when I’m not standing in my underwear in front of a hundred thousand people—”

“Plus the TV audience—”

“And I’m pissed off that you didn’t know for sure how I felt.”

“
I
knew for sure you
felt
, Sundance. I just didn’t know if
you
did.”

She thought about that for a second as he grinned. He fucking
grinned
, with a gun at his back.
God, she loved this man
. She fought against another wave of
crazy
, a feeling of being swamped by a fever as the crowd’s undulations seemed to vibrate through her; she hoped he couldn’t hear the disorientation in her voice. “November eighth. One month. You’d better be there.”

“Just try and stop me.”

As Sean’s helicopter landed in front of her, they both switched back to the main channel, and heard a woman on the line. A woman Bobbie Faye had never spoken to before, but the utter control of the voice, the simple command she had, sent chills down Bobbie Faye’s spine, chills that danced to the rhythm of the drums. Rolling, moving, living, breathing,
drums
.

“No,” the woman was saying. “I am Andrea Cormier, and as I’ve said, Mr. . . .” they heard her speaking to someone, “MacGreggor, according to my DOJ resources, you’re a businessman. This is a business deal. You name your price.”

“For your son?” Sean laughed. “You don’t have that kind of money, luv.”

“Oh, but you don’t know that, do you? Name your price. Half right now, in a Swiss account, the other half when my son is safe.”

“Get the
fuck
off this line,” Trevor said.

Bobbie Faye gaped. First at Trevor, then back at the helicopter.

Oh. Holy. Hell.

This was her future mother-in-law.

“Fine, luv. I’ll play your little game.”

“No fucking way,” Trevor said. “How in the hell did you—”

“Izzy, dear. It’s simple—she caved, pretty quickly, too. She tapped into your frequency. Our company built the little Cor-Tech 940 units you’re using to communicate, and we tracked your phone. I’m on a live feed of this arena, Mr. MacGreggor,” she said, re-directing her conversation back to Sean. “My information from the Department of Justice indicates you’ve been a profiteer for many years and this action is outside of your normal methodology. I haven’t followed all of the dynamics, but given that you have my son unarmed and his fiancée on the ground, I believe your goal is humiliation and then suffering. What better way to accomplish your goal than for his hated mother to rescue him? So. Name your price.”

“Mother, you will
not
fucking do this.”

“Language, darling, language.”

“It’s Saturday, luv. You can’t get the money moved.”

“I can.”

“A hundred million.”

She laughed, a light and feathery brush of something that was just as deadly as it was soft. Bobbie Faye had to practically lock her knees to keep from sinking into the ground because the woman
chuckled
at handing over a
hundred million dollars
.

“Done.”

“I keep the girl,” Sean said.

And without missing a beat, the woman said, “Of course.”

“Well, for my team, I pick Wolverine, Terminator
and
James Bond.”

“Fine.
I
pick Bobbie Faye.”

“Mom!! Kelly’s cheating again!”

—8-year-old twins Dotty and Kelly

“Sonofabitch,” Cam swore, moving toward the truck. “Stacey, be still,” he said, tapping the passenger window to wake Lori Ann. “Lori Ann—don’t touch anything. Don’t open the door—y’all sit still. Do you understand?”

A bleary-eyed Lori Ann nodded, gathering Stacey to her lap. Stacey had a couple of lemon drops stuck in her hair . . . which meant the inside of that truck was about to be destroyed by the little nap-energized dynamo.

“Damn,” Suds said from behind him, then muttered, “fuck fuck
fuck
,” and Cam startled—in all of the years he’d known Suds, the man didn’t curse. Whatever he’d found must be bad. He glanced at Suds, who was staring at the bomb in the generator, and not at the truck, where Stacey and Lori Ann had sat up. The man’s expression had gone from strained to deathly pale.

“Do I need to get them out of here?” Cam asked, knowing that the friction from opening the door could be a big bad bang of a problem. He motioned again for Lori Ann and Stacey to be still.

Suds stared at the truck and then back to the generator. Then back to the truck again. A sudden dawning of realization and then a look of dread spread across his face that made Cam’s tension ratchet up.

“Cam, walk around to the back and see if that truck’s got a rental logo on it.”

“With this paint job? Are you nuts?” he asked, walking around the truck anyway. And sure enough, saw the logo. “Holy shit, how did you know?”

As Cam puzzled over why in the hell a rental would have such a paint job, he saw a “win this truck” sign on the rear bumper—a raffle for a cancer charity sponsored jointly by the LSU alumni and the rental company. Cam looked from that sign to Suds, who had tears streaming down his cheeks. The man sank his face in his hands and mumbled something Cam couldn’t quite make out.

“How the hell did you know this?” Cam demanded. “And what does it mean?”

“It means the last bomb’s in that truck.”

Cam felt every single drop of blood in his body pool in his feet. His gaze went back to Lori Ann and Stacey, watching him for further instructions. “How do you know that?”

Suds lifted his head, his gaze locked on Lori Ann and Stacey. “Because I’m the bastard who built the bombs.”

Dox sat in the helicopter behind the scope on his M110, his breathing even, the Fed in his sights. His orders were simple: shoot the asshole the moment Sean had the girl. Sean wanted the girl to voluntarily walk toward him, because he knew the Fed would lose his mind. He knew the Fed would lunge toward her and that’s when Dox was to mow him down, leave him sprawled out there, lying on the field, watching her climb in the helo with Sean and watching them take off, unable to move or do a damned thing about it.