When a Man Loves a Weapon, page 27
part #3 of Bobbie Faye Series
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?”
“Or he could want to ransack your company,” Cam pointed out, and Trevor glared at him a moment. “You have to admit, it’s where he could strike at you and make money at the same time. And it’s clear he wants you to hurt.”
The muscle in Trevor’s jaw worked overtime as he kept perfectly still, his gaze meeting Cam’s as Bobbie Faye started to interject that Cam wasn’t just being belligerent this time. Instead, Bobbie Faye gritted her teeth and saw that Trevor realized Cam had a valid point. “Yes, if I gave a damn about the business,” he said. “If MacGreggor’s done his homework—and he has—he’ll know I resigned from the board the day I signed my commission.”
“Concrete bunker,” her dad said suddenly, interrupting everyone, and then he glanced around, startled, as if he’d just realized where he was. “The biggest bomb’s in a bunker of some sort. Lots of concrete above it. Doesn’t make sense. There’s one moving—I can’t tell you where it is.”
“You can’t seriously be going to listen to this man?” the mayor said, waving hands as big as sails, sweeping aggravation toward Landry.
“But the third and fourth,” her dad continued, ignoring the mayor, “I got a place. It’s in Poly-Ferosia. Look for rental equipment.”
“Concrete bunker?” she asked. “Describe it.”
The old man looked at her then. First time he’d looked at her since they’d left the scene of the carjacking.
“You need to get your butt out of here, chère,” he said. “Go check on your aunts.”
“Describe the fucking bunker.”
“I gave you what I know to be true,” he said to Cam. “That’s all I got. If you had any sense at all, you’d make her go home.”
“Yeah, because bossing me around has been so effective for you in the past,” she said to Cam before he had a chance to open his mouth and make things worse. “Don’t even try it.”
In Cajun, Old Man Landry said to Cam, “You need to make her go—she hasn’t got a speck of sense.”
“She’s tired, she’s hurt, and she’s not thinking clearly.”
“So make her think clearly, you couyon, she’s got to go.”
“Cut it out,” she warned them both. “English. Or shut up.”
“She’s going to come to her senses when this is over,” Cam said, watching her steady, aware she was picking up most of the Cajun.
“Not another fucking word.” She bristled and practically vibrated in place with fury.
“Watch your mouth,” Landry snapped, “or I’ll wash it out with soap.”
Bigfoot could sidle up to her right now, dressed in a tutu and asking to valet park the reindeer, and she wouldn’t have been more floored. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You gave up that right when I was five and you stopped being my dad.”
“Baby.” Cam tried to intervene and she put her hand up and stepped back from him as he reached for her.
“Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.”
Trevor watched them as he conferred with ASAC Brennan and SWAT.
Riles appeared at Trevor’s side—he’d been working the phones on the other side of the room and she hadn’t had a chance to fully appreciate his absence. The Universe so fucking owed her.
“LT,” he said, “I think we have a problem.” He nodded toward her. “Her crazy family.”
Everyone in the room stopped to listen and they stared at her and the old man and she said, “Seriously, Riles, your firm grasp of the obvious is just impressing the hell out of me. My family’s been crazy since birds had wings.”
“Not just crazy. They’re at LSU. At the game.”
“No way. Lori Ann would never go to—”
“She’s there,” he said, turning to Trevor. “With her fiancé. And so’s her boss, Ce Ce, and her friend, Monique. Add in her brother—who we haven’t found yet, but rumor has it he’s already slept with two women and gotten into three fights while tailgating—and that puts all of her main core group, except us, at the game.”
“How the hell?” she asked just as Trevor asked, “Why the fuck didn’t the detail report on this sooner?”
Oh. The security detail Riles had mentioned earlier. People Trevor had hired to watch her family.
“LT, the detail was supposed to make sure they were safe. They were safe—they’re just in the same place, and none of the guys realized it ’til just now, at check-in.”
“No way could MacGreggor get a bomb into LSU,” SWAT said. “Not with the extra security around that place before a game. Not with the two hundred-plus cops we have, and the cameras. Not possible.”
“No way should he have been able to get bombs into the plants he got them into, either,” Trevor reminded him. “Not with all of the security hoops everyone with a backhoe or rake has to go through to get into a plant. He’s found a loophole somewhere.”
“Or had serious inside help,” Cam suggested.
And then Trevor’s phone rang, and as he grabbed it, she angled to see the watch of an FBI agent standing near her: 7:00.
“No, MacGreggor,” Trevor said. “You are not going to talk to her. You can talk to me.”
We Bobbie Faye
Southern Contractors Association
—bumper sticker
Twenty-five
The LSU drum cadence magnified and echoed back from the field to the mouth of the bay where they waited in Marcel’s truck. They were at the student end of the stadium, parked facing the field, and Lori Ann gawked through the windshield, in complete wonder. She’d never been inside Tiger Stadium before, but she had thought she understood the enormity from what she had seen on TV.
It wasn’t even close. The TV version was like looking at a copy of a copy of a copy. It was absolutely nothing in comparison to the sharp colors of purple and gold (and one section of Bama red), of bodies painted with purple lettering, of the frantic, manic movement of the fans, all arms and foam fingers and tiger stripes.
The cheering jarred her bones, and she was sitting inside the monster 4 × 4 truck, with the deep, glossy, gleaming Eye of the Tiger on the hood reflecting the enormous lights banked against the night sky. Word had come in that there was a record-breaking crowd, and the event coordinator who’d been running everything smooth as glass signaled Marcel that it was time to pull the big cat in the cage behind them out onto the field and circle once. As soon as the truck nosed out of the bay at barely five miles an hour, the crowd went insane.
Lori Ann gazed back at her daughter, strapped in a car seat in the extended cab, expecting to see those pom-poms going ninety-to-nothing, but instead, Stacey’s jaw dropped, and she gaped, mouth open. Then turned to her mom and smiled the biggest, happiest smile Lori Ann had ever seen.
As Marcel eased the truck the rest of the way out of the bay, TV cameras dollied alongside them and the big pacing cat.
The roars were deafening. God, no wonder it was called “Death Valley.” The noise alone could kill you.
She reached back and squeezed her daughter’s hand, hoping this was going to be one of those moments as a mom that made up a little for the times she’d been drinking and gone. Emotionally gone. This was going to be one of the best nights of their lives.
“Fuck you, Cormier,” Sean said, “you’ll let her talk to me, unless you wan’ t’ be known as the agent who got thousands of people killed.”
Trevor gripped his cell hard enough to hear the plastic casing crack. The last fucking thing he should have done is tell a hostage-taker “no” and he could see the SWAT leader was already furious. But Trevor knew the way to drag out the call and to possibly get a triangulation on Sean’s cell phone location was to deny him the one thing he wanted: to talk to Bobbie Faye. He’d known Sean was going to ask for her. Two of his agents were at the computers running the signal.
