Fury slammed her adrenaline up another notch; at any moment, the back of her head was going to pop clean off, especially as the cold water wicked farther up her PJs. The scrapbook was Bobbie Faye’s hold on a tenuous place, the “before” as she liked to think about it. Before her mom started wearing the big floppy hats when her hair was getting inexplicably thinner and thinner, before she started wearing the weird combination of clothes and her morning eggs smelled just a shade more like rum than eggs ought to smell, before Bobbie Faye recognized her mom was a little too dancey-happy most days, jitterbugging on the coffee table (before it broke), before Bobbie Faye knew what the word cancer meant. She looked back at the destroyed scrapbook she held. If Roy had shown up like he promised and fixed the damned washing machine, this wouldn’t have happened. Bobbie Faye stared out her front window, past the gravel road, and fantasized briefly that she could zero in on wherever Roy was with a laser intensity that would fry his ass on the spot.
There was just no telling where he was, and getting him on the cell phone would take an act of God. Check that. It would take an act of some willing life-sized Barbie type. He could be anywhere: his fishing camp south of her trailer park, where there were hundreds of little bayous and marshy wetlands (or as Roy put it, plenty of escape routes); or, just north of her trailer park, hiding in a hole-in-the-wall bar somewhere in the muddy industrial city of Lake Charles, a place Bobbie Faye thought of as the kind of cranky, independent southern town that had never really given a rip what its image might be, although if someone had labeled it “home of the hard drinkers who make Mardi Gras revelers look like big fluffy candy-asses,” it might have staggered to attention and saluted. Knowing Roy the way she did, she figured he wasn’t anywhere near his own apartment in the heart of the city. Probably in some stupid poker game or, God help him, at one of his many girlfriends’ places. He can run, she thought, but he can’t hide.
Hiding was exactly what Roy was trying to do right at that moment. He slammed on his jeans and then squirmed his six-foot frame into a large, dusty compartment under the window seat situated in the bay window of his married girlfriend Dora’s house. He wriggled silently to try to ease the contortion, but his toes were already starting to cramp. The layers of dust inside the seat tickled his nose and he pinched it to keep from sneezing. He squinted through the decorative tin grill on the facing of the window seat and saw two sets of Muscles of the steroid persuasion barge into the room. Dora, his very tanned, very bosomy (bless Jimmy and his penchant for giving his wife all the plastic surgery she wanted), very blond girlfriend who was sitting above him on the window seat, shifted her legs to block the view into the grating, to better hide him.
“Where’s Roy?” the smaller of the two sets of Muscles asked Dora.
“I ain’t seen Roy since he left the bar. Besides, I’m married. What would Roy be doing here?”
“Same thing he’s been doing ever since your Jimmy’s been out on the oil rig,” the shorter man said. He peered around the room and allowed himself a small shudder. “You get attacked by lace or something? This is a fucking nightmare. No wonder Jimmy’s always gone out on the rig.”
Roy knew without being able to see her that Dora had poufed out her collagen-enhanced bottom lip, pouting.
“Nice doorknobs, though,” the larger man said, and Roy grimaced. If he was in a bar, and really really drunk, he’d fight a guy that size for mentioning Dora’s boobs. Even if you’re boinking another guy’s wife, there was a certain etiquette to maintain.
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Roy,” Dora insisted.
“You know where he is,” the smaller of the Muscles said. “Roy’s got something we want, and we know he came here.”
“Yeah,” the other mountain of muscles chimed in. “He always comes here. Don’t he, Eddie?” He broke into a giggle, and although the Mountain was almost double the smaller guy’s size, Roy pegged him as younger and a little simple, maybe; despite the fact he lost at poker every other Friday, Roy considered himself a pretty good judge of character. Whoever they were, they couldn’t be here for his bookie debts because he was kinda sorta caught up, and the three he still owed usually didn’t send knee breakers until you were more than a couple of months past due (he still had eight days). And he was pretty sure the guy who bought that boat hadn’t figured out that Roy hadn’t owned it in the first place. No, these guys had to be here about something personal. Nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of. God knows he’d done it a hundred times before.
Roy saw Dora’s calf contract as she inhaled quickly. Past her very fine calf, Roy could see that the smaller set of Muscles, apparently named Eddie, had a gun aimed at her.
The seat creaked as Dora shifted above him, and dust fell into his twitchy nose just as Roy’s cell phone, adjusted to maximum volume so he could hear it in the bar, vibrated against his jean pocket and trumpeted the LSU fight song. His heart ramped up three billion beats in .02 seconds as he frantically tried to slap the phone off.
And managed to turn it on so everyone in the room could hear Bobbie Faye’s shout, muffled, but not nearly enough, by his jeans.
“Roy! You sonofabitch! You promised you would fix this washing machine for me and I even paid you already! Now get your ass—” He slapped it off and stayed very still, pretending to himself it hadn’t really happened and no one heard it.
Bedroom light flooded into the window seat as the lid snapped open and Eddie bent over, grinning, his horribly disfigured face inches away. Roy flinched at the grotesque features where his nose zigzagged from having been broken too many times and the right side of his face looked slightly caved in and sagged lower than the left.
“H’lo, Roy. I know somebody who wants to see you.”
“Uh, well, um, thanks. But see, that was my big sister on the phone and I gotta get over there and fix that thing, or she’s gonna kick my ass.” Roy eased out of the window seat, trying for nonchalant, until Eddie pointed the gun at his chest.
“Seriously, guys. She’ll kill me.”
“If there’s anything left of you when we’re done,” Eddie said, “we’ll pay to watch.” He jammed the gun into Roy’s side and Roy turned to Dora with a pleading gleam.
“Babe? Can you call Bobbie Faye and tell her I might be running late?”
“No calls,” Eddie told her. “You stay quiet, we don’t need to come back. Got that?”
Dora nodded, clutching her robe around her as they hustled Roy out of the room.
“Man, I hafta call her,” Roy said, turning his charm smile onto full wattage. “You have no idea how crazy Bobbie Faye is.”
“That’s the least of your worries,” Eddie said.
“Hmph,” Dora said, following them down the hall. “Y’all don’t know Bobbie Faye.”
By five in the morning, as she banged a wrench against the shut-off valve of the washing machine, Bobbie Faye was beginning to feel like the poster girl for the “Pissed Off and Deadly” crowd. She had pulled the machine away from the wall and partially into the hallway in order to get to the pipe; the water had not only not shut off, it spewed at a rate that would make a firefighter putting out a five alarm fire proud. It also happened to be a rate matched only by the speed of new swear words she’d been muttering under her breath.
There was an odd, rubbery scrunching sound behind her and then the watery echo of waves rippling against the walls. Bobbie Faye turned around to find Stacey hell-bent on “rafting” on her plastic Big Bird floatie, her butt dragging on the floor as she scooted it down the hall.
“Stace. For. The. Last. Time. This is not a swimming pool. Go find your sand bucket like I told you to and bail the water out the front door.”
“What’s ‘bail’? Mamma says you bail Uncle Roy outta jail a lot.”
Aaaaaannnnd it was official: they had screwed her up by age five, a record even for the Sumrall family.
“Well, kiddo, it’s kinda the same thing as scooping up water and throwing it out the door. It’s getting somebody
outta trouble and Aunt Bobbie Faye ends up broke before it’s done.”
After settling Stacey to scoop out water at the front door, Bobbie Faye had the distinct impression that everything around the perimeter of the room sloped toward the center. She walked to the middle of the room, and sure enough, the water was deeper there—nearly four inches versus just two near the door. This little funhouse event definitely fell into the oh fuck category.
Bobbie Faye decided she wasn’t going to panic. Not at all. There would be no panicking in the Sumrall household. Which was just when she noticed the trailer starting to make creaking and groaning noises. So not helping with the whole not-panicking decision.
As the daylight ripened into actual morning, Bobbie Faye ventured outside to see if there was any other way to cut off the water. It struck her that the trailer looked swollen, and with the floor sagging on sad little piers supporting the structure, it looked like a bloated PMS-ing woman forced to wear stilettos.
No word from Roy. No clue how to shut off the stupid valve. No choice.
She was going to have to call the emergency line at the water company. Which meant talking to Susannah. Who still blamed Bobbie Faye for the entire Louisiana State University hearing Susannah lose her virginity to the Assistant Dean of Accounting when Bobbie Faye inadvertently left the intercom system turned on in the Dean’s office during an extremely brief stint as a student-worker. (And really . . . who knew accountant types could be so loud?)
It didn’t help that Susannah’s parents were faculty and heard everything firsthand.
But this was a certified emergency, and Susannah was just going to have to dispatch someone.
The larger of the two sets of Muscles, which Roy had silently nicknamed The Mountain, zip-tied Roy’s hands behind his back and then shoved him into the rear seat of an all-black Town Car. By the time they had hit the interstate heading east, Roy’s arms ached, his nose itched, and he was starting to think these guys might be worse news than pissing off Bobbie Faye.
He leaned forward a little, scanning from Eddie, who was driving, to The Mountain, whose stomach was growling in the passenger seat.
“Is this about Dora?”
Neither of the men answered.
It was unlikely; Jimmy was a roughneck, but he was also pretty straightforward, and if he had suspected Roy of boinking Dora, Jimmy wouldn’t have wasted good money on goons. He’d have just beat the hell out of him.
“Ellen?” No answer. “Or . . . Vickie? Thelma?”
Still nothing.
Maybe it was the thousand bucks Roy owed Alex after dodging out of the last poker game. But . . . as much as Alex might want to kill him, Roy knew Alex didn’t want to have to deal with Bobbie Faye again. Ever. And hurting Roy would mean lots of Bobbie Faye in Alex’s face. The other guys at the poker table had made Roy promise not to mention Bobbie Faye any more because every time he did, Alex twitched, and nobody wanted a gunrunner twitchy.
As Eddie and The Mountain drove Roy toward Baton Rouge, Roy pondered his ever-growing list of ex-girlfriends and their husbands who might want him hurt (or a little bit dead) if they’d been able to find him, but he couldn’t see any of them going to this much trouble and expense when a good rifle and a bateau were enough to drop him to the bottom of some little-known bayou.
Bobbie Faye grabbed her cordless phone and dialed the water company’s emergency number.
When Susannah heard Bobbie Faye’s voice, she hung up.
Fifteen minutes later, Bobbie Faye managed to force her to stay on the line and listen to the problem.
Susannah laughed.
And called the local radio station.
When she finally got back on the line, the DJ could be heard on the three-way conversation as he broadcast her latest disaster, and Bobbie Faye knew Susannah was enjoying her revenge. To make it even more fun, Susannah’s big helpful advice to Bobbie Faye was to shut off the water at the valve.
“Well, duh. I did everything but sacrifice chickens to get it to budge. If God Himself tried to turn it, He’d get an inferiority complex.”
“Fine,” Susannah said, a bit too happily. “I’ll send someone out. They’ll be there sometime between noon and three.”
“I can’t wait until three for someone to show up. You ever see Titanic? Nothing. Nothing compared to this, Susannah. And I can’t turn off the main valve—there’s a lock on it and the lot manager is gone for the wee—”
Click.
She looked at the dead phone and then at the base unit perched on the arm of her more-shabby-than-chic sofa when it struck her that the lamp was off. And the hall light. She growled her way past Stacey, who had not only ceased to scoop out water, but had somehow found not one, but two, frogs, and was letting them swim around the living room.
Something clinked and rattled outside on the side of her trailer.
She sloshed her way through the sagging living room to her front door, pulling the wet and now clingy PJs away from her body, knowing she ranked skankier than a nutria straight out of a mud pit, but if it was who she suspected, she didn’t have time to waste changing into clothes. Sure enough, there on the gravel drive, facing out, its engine running for a fast getaway, was a Gulf South Electric Utilities truck.
She hurtled down the stairs and around to the electric meter. The utilities worker saw her just as he clipped the red tag-wire onto the metal box, preventing her from rigging her meter back on when he left. He cringed as she marched toward him, using his clipboard to shield his face, then his groin (then his face, then his groin; he finally chose his groin).
“Good choice. Which is not going to help you one little bit to keep that”—she gestured—“area. Safe. If you don’t turn my electricity back on.”
Before she could launch an actual attack, he looked at her and then blushed, thoroughly, from his oversized collarbone to the tips of his rather large and now crimson ears. Then, pointedly gazing away from her, he thrust a letter into her hands.
“I’m sorry, Miss Bobbie Faye. But your check bounced.”
She snatched it, read, and fumed.
“How in the hell am I supposed to come up with a deposit of two hundred and fifty bucks when I obviously couldn’t come up with one-freakin’-eighty-seven for the bill in the first place?”
He had inched a step back with every word she spoke, still not meeting her eyes. “I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t do this to you for anything in the world, you being the Contraband Days Queen an’ all, but, you know, it’s my job. They would fire me.”
“You work for dickheads, you know that? I can’t get this money until later, but I’ve got to have the electricity on so I can borrow Nina’s wet-vac to suck up the whole freaking lake in there.” She gestured at the trailer and he gaped a moment at the small trickle of water leaking from one of the bottom seams. “See that? You gotta cut me some slack here. I’m supposed to be at the festival’s starting ceremony in just a couple of hours!”
“I . . . I just can’t. I’m really sorry!” He turned and fled, climbing into his truck before Bobbie Faye could catch up.
“Coward!” she yelled as he peeled out. “Come back here and fight like a man!”
She examined the bill he’d handed her and made a mental list of items she might be able to pawn to cover it, then remembered she’d already pawned them to help pay for her sister’s stay for her “sobriety mummification” (Lori Ann was ever the positive thinker) in a decent detox addiction center.
Bobbie Faye stood in front of her trailer, water dribbling from the front door. The good news was, as bad as things were, at least they couldn’t get any worse.
Roy’s stomach dropped a little when the Town Car veered into the industrial heart of Baton Rouge, where the black-water Intercoastal Canal intersected the roiling Mississippi River. They parked behind a plain brown stucco building which squatted with all the glamour of a working-class hooker, bland and scarred and ignored by most of the city passing by. Cast-off broken-down desks and chairs, many fr
om the sixties, were piled in haphazard stacks, filling the lobby, and it looked more like a government-surplus auction center than an office space. The acrid scent of stale body odor mixed with tobacco clung to the stained veneered walls of the ancient elevator.
They stepped out into the tenth floor, where a utilitarian sitting area was lined with rickety metal chairs listing in rows. Eddie didn’t bother to press the call button beside a door whose green paint was chipped and mottled and looked as though it had leprosy; instead, he reached below the last broken chair to a lever. A hidden panel beside a dusty plastic ficus swung open. Roy thought that might be a big bloodstain under the ficus, but he wasn’t about to ask. His balls retracted a little (only a little) when they stepped into the room beyond the leprosy door. His adrenaline jumped and his sense of balance wobbled as though he’d stepped through some sort of portal. A line of sweat beaded just above his collar and the air frozen in his chest acted like it hadn’t a clue how to escape back out again.
This might be something I can’t talk my way out of.
The foyer sported an impressive imported rug, rich in honeys, golds, and russets. Sculptures perched on granite pedestals and were specially lit from above. There were fancy paintings on the wall, and Roy started wondering just who in the world he had screwed whose dad might have been in the Mafia. This place reeked of money, and not the kind the IRS knew anything about.
They walked through the foyer and into an even more sumptuous office. A thick blue tarp covered yet another expensive rug. Roy looked from the tarp to Eddie.
“Please tell me that’s ’cuz y’all have a roof leak.”
The Mountain clocked him on the side of his head and Roy crashed down on the tarp, jamming his shoulders when they caught the brunt of his weight, sending waves of pain through to his toes and back again. Nausea spun through his stomach and swam upwards, and then The Mountain yanked him up, planted a fist into his face, and this time when Roy hit the tarp—well, once the black dots cleared from his eyes—he saw the toe of an expensive wingtip inches from his face.
Charmed and Dangerous Page 2