It didn’t help one whit that her purse strap was slung across her chest, and with the purse itself hanging behind her, bouncing with every step, the straps cut into her shoulders and amplified the pain. In spite of her determination to not think about it, she realized she’d been having the mental background noise of “Boobs hurt, boobs hurt, boobs hurt,” with every step (and please, God, let that have been an internal dialog).
At that moment, Bobbie Faye felt an unbridled hatred for every movie heroine who’d ever raced away from the villain in Jimmy Choo shoes, looking all perfectly coiffed and ready for an afternoon tea. That was just wrong. When the pain finally got to her, she tossed pride way the hell away and pressed her free arm across her chest to hold her boobs a little steadier. Unfortunately, that shortened her reach and she was unable to block briars and limbs and vines at face-level. Unwilling to admit defeat, Bobbie Faye held her forearm across her breasts while twisting her wrist so that her hand flapped in front of her to help with deflecting the underbrush, all while holding her hair with the other hand. She hadn’t quite perfected the coordination of running to flapping when Trevor glanced over his shoulder. As he turned away, she distinctly heard something that sounded a little too much like “spastic, hobbled penguin.”
“Bastard,” she muttered. She hoped he came down with a bad case of chiggers in his boxers.
The only way she managed to maintain a (somewhat) positive attitude was to remind herself that all of the running had helped her clothes dry a little, in a rancid sweat-soaked damp sort of way. She hadn’t thought she could get any skankier than that morning, but she’d achieved a new personal low. At this point, she figured roadkill had her beaten on the beauty scale. Maybe when she showed up with the tiara, she’d just scare the kidnappers to death and she and Roy could get away safely.
Her relief at finally being dry was cut short when she heard the dogs’ deep baritone barking, closer now, frenzied. The goddamned dogs were gaining on her.
Damn freaking Cam and his freaking overachieving ass. It was the thing she had both admired and simultaneously loathed about him. Whether it was winning a Heisman Trophy, tracking a criminal, or flaming out a relationship so angrily that fourteen years of prior friendship were nothing more than crispy ashes in the aftermath, he didn’t do anything halfway. Anything. She shuddered and wobbled a moment just thinking about the other things he didn’t do halfway, but that was gone. Which was probably just as well, because he was so fucking sure he was always right and their battles had been so epic, she would have had to kill him in his sleep probably a lot sooner than later, and she really didn’t look good in jailhouse orange.
Trevor pushed their speed up a notch, and she was panting hard when they stumbled out of the brush and onto a small bayou, about twenty feet across.
More. Freaking. Water.
It was as if she’d kicked God underneath the table and He was smiting her with humiliation. Over and over. Where was that handy pillar-of-salt deal when you needed it? Much, much easier on the smiting scale.
She glanced at Trevor, who was scanning up and down the bayou and realizing, as she’d just grasped, that there was no place where the banks were closer together, making it easy to jump across.
“No,” she said. She may have even stamped her boot.
“Big fan of dogs, are you?” he asked, and she could have sworn he had the beginning of a grin beneath those devil blue eyes.
“Remind me to tell you later how much I hate you.”
“Sure thing,” he said, scanning downstream. “We’ll go upstream—that will get us closer to the place where I know a boat is located and if we get really lucky, they’ll think we were in such a hurry, we headed downstream because it’s more logical if we were heading for the road out.”
“But they’ll track our footprints.”
“Not if we’re in the middle of the bayou.”
She stared at him a moment, the idea of more water in her immediate future. “Really, really hating you.”
“Got the memo.” He pulled out his knife.
Twelve
Every morning you’ll take the weather helicopter and fly over her trailer park, watch for her car, and when Bobbie Faye gets to work, give the “all clear.”
—instructions to new Traffic Watch newscaster Jerry Gill
“Whoa,” Bobbie Faye said, backing up a step, her heart rate pinging in the about-to-stroke-out zone. “It was more of a mild dislike, actually. And you’re sort of growing on me. In a nonfungus way. And really really sorry about that truck.”
“We’ve got to give the dogs something of yours to scent.”
“I’m keeping all of my appendages, thanks.”
He rolled his eyes, clearly annoyed. “Sundance, get over here. I’m going to slice a piece from the hem of your shirt.”
“Great—you’ve nicknamed me after a guy who dies in that movie. I’m not feeling all swooney happy over that knife.”
He seemed genuinely puzzled. “If I didn’t do anything to you when you shot my truck, why would I start now?”
“Better cover?”
He laughed. “We have really got to work on these delayed survival instincts, Sundance. Now c’mon, we don’t have much time.”
And dammit if she didn’t find herself smiling and stepping forward. The man could probably charm the snakes clean off Medusa’s head and make her think it was her own idea. He cut a couple of inches from the bottom of her shirt, tearing at the piece until he had made several jagged strips from the original section. Bobbie Faye watched as he found objects along the bank—a small stone, a twig, a larger chunk of bark from a rotting tree. He wrapped the small sections of the shirt around these items, or tucked them into crevices—anything that would give the cloth some weight.
“A good dog handler’s probably gonna know this isn’t something torn from your shirt in the process of running,” he explained as he tossed the lightest one nearby on the bank, and then the next heaviest farther downstream. “But he’s gonna have to check it out to be sure and let the dogs scent it and see if there’s any trail of us leading from these into the woods somewhere.” He continued tossing each piece. “It might buy us ten, fifteen minutes of confusion.” The last item was the heavier chunk of wood, which he threw in a beautiful, powerful arc far downstream and across to the other side. It landed with a splud into a tree and the bark disintegrated, and the white cloth from the shirt fell to the foot of that tree.
She gave Trevor a “hang on a minute” gesture and sprinted down the bank in the downstream direction ignoring his sputtering questions behind her. As she stretched her pace into a hard run, she pulled closer to the water, slipping and sliding a little, making fine, detectable footprints and then crossed into the water and waded back upstream to where Trevor waited for her. When she reached him, he had an expression she couldn’t quite register; it was almost as if he was marveling at her, but he shuttered the expression as fast as it had appeared.
“We’ll get farther, faster, if we swim as long as we can hold out,” he suggested as she approached, and Bobbie Faye nodded.
Cam moved through the woods, listening to the dogs twenty yards ahead baying their normal “found the scent” tone, but not feverish enough for Cam to feel as if they had Bobbie Faye in sight. He squatted back on his heels, examining the muddy tracks this Cormier guy and Bobbie Faye had left as they’d hurried, and it was clear from the way Bobbie Faye’s overlapped the renegade agent’s that she was following the agent and not the other way around. There went the theory that she was taken against her will. Of course, he would have pitied the poor soul who tried to take Bobbie Faye against her will. They’d probably draw back a nub.
Still. She was running behind the man. Cormier didn’t have a gun on her. It made him shudder to think of someone as accidentally destructive as Bobbie Faye teaming up and helping, however naïvely, someone as purposefully violent as the rogue agent. He wasn’t sure the state would survive them both.
His phone vib
rated and he snapped it open to hear Jason in dispatch sound a little concerned.
“Cam, the guys in the helo say the Feds are circling closer to your position. They’re going to end up on top of you and the dogs in a couple more passes.”
“Hang on.” Cam stood, surveying the sky. He didn’t want the Feds overhead where they might spot Bobbie Faye before Cam could get her in cuffs. After that, they could have their damned agent. “I want a way to contact the WFKD helicopter without patching through to the pilot where the Feds might listen in.”
Jason put him on hold, then came back with the cameraman’s cell phone. “If it even works up there,” he cautioned.
When the cameraman answered his cell and Cam introduced himself, the man asked, “What can we do for you, Detective?” It was the tone of voice that told Cam this was going to cost him something he was going to regret.
“I need you to swerve back toward the bridge and act like you’ve seen something over there. I need the Feds to get curious and get off my tail over here.”
“Hang on,” the man said, and Cam could hear him conferring with the pilot. “Sure,” he said, “but on one condition.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“You make a statement on the record after all of this is over.”
Sonofabitch. Everyone knew he didn’t comment on the record about Bobbie Faye. People had tried to grab that sound bite for several years now, and the press was especially relentless ever since he and Bobbie Faye had broken up.
“I don’t make comments on the record,” he said. “But I’ll give you an off-the-record comment with details.”
“Well, we don’t usually try to con Feds, either. Besides,” the cameraman said, “I got ways to get most of the details anyway.”
Cam listened to the staccato thwapping of the air by the blades of the Fed’s helicopter as it flew closer to his position. GoddamnfuckingBobbieFaye.
Cam suspected the Feds had a sharpshooter buckled at the crew door, watching through a scope, waiting for that perfect shot for Cormier. If Bobbie Faye was still running behind the man, the Feds could accidentally shoot her while trying to get the shot at him. He’d seen enough gung ho hotshot SWAT snipers lose perspective when a hostage situation was relatively calm and stable; this chaos was begging for mistakes. He needed every advantage he could get.
“Fine,” he said. “One statement. Only after the whole damned thing is over.” He slammed the phone shut. Assuming I’m still alive.
He called Jason back, gave him the plan, and instructed him to dispatch their own helicopter over in the same area, mimicking the news helicopter. He doubted it would fool the Feds for long, but if the dogs were as good as they usually were, he only needed a few minutes of distraction.
Cam headed in the same direction as the dogs when his cell phone vibrated again, and he snapped it open without losing stride.
“You said to call when I found the something weird,” Benoit said by way of a hello. “This guy, Fred? The thief. He’s a professor of antiquities over at LSU. No priors, nothing. Fine, upstanding citizen. I’ve got Crowe and Fordoche going over his financials.”
“He have any history of mental illness?”
“Not before this morning when he was reported associating with Bobbie Faye. Whoa—hang on. Sacre merde. His attorney just arrived. It’s Dellago.”
What in the hell was the sleaziest, highest-paid attorney for organized crime doing defending a joke of a burglar? One who didn’t even manage to take anything?
Dellago’s appearance could only mean one thing: whatever Bobbie Faye was into was a helluva lot worse than Cam had thought. Arresting her might be the least of his problems. Keeping her alive until time for trial . . . he didn’t want to guess how hard that was going to be, if Dellago was involved. He needed to know. He looked around at the sheer manpower (and dog power) chasing after her. She simply had no chance of escape. She’d be in custody. Safe.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he told Benoit.
Cam hung up and spun around, heading back to the lake and the accident site. He called Kelvin.
“The dogs are riling up,” Kelvin said. “Fresh scent. We’re gaining on ’em. Should have ’em in sight in a few minutes.”
“You’ll have to wrap her up. I’ve got to go back.”
“I’m gonna lose twenty bucks in the pool if you’re not the one to cuff her,” Kelvin drawled.
“Go to hell.”
He hung up on Kelvin’s laughter.
As he jogged back to the bank of the lake where his boat was waiting and running, manned by a patrol officer, Cam glanced toward the bridge. Sure enough, the news helicopter had dropped and hovered low over a section of woods a few clicks away from where Bobbie Faye had originally seemed to be heading. His own state police helicopter was circling near it and it looked like the Fibbies had gotten curious and were sniffing around over there.
Kelvin and SWAT could take her. Unless there was a hostage situation, and frankly, he thought he’d have better luck if a cold-blooded killer like this Cormier guy was holding Bobbie Faye hostage rather than the other way around. The only good news he could think of was that, if cornered, Bobbie Faye wouldn’t shoot the dogs. The men, he hoped, were smart enough not to get in her line of fire.
They swam a half a mile around the bend in the bayou when Trevor motioned for Bobbie Faye to stop. Standing in the middle of the water, they could see a hundred yards upstream where two alligators sunned themselves on fallen logs. Trevor glanced over Bobbie Faye’s shoulder. “Going back is asking to get caught. We need to get a little farther upstream before we move out of the water.”
“Maybe we can walk past them. I’ve been told gators are pretty shy.”
“You’re sure this was someone who actually liked you who told you this?”
“Um, not entirely.” He caught her unsure expression and shook his head, bemused.
They waded in the dark, brackish water; the strong smell of fish battled the pungent odor of wet earth and rotted leaves in an effort to overtake her senses and render her numb to thought. She needed to think. There was something important tingling somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind.
She felt poised above recognition, like when she was in school, fidgeting in her desk, her pencil hovering over two similar answers on a multiple choice test. Both familiar, and she’d go back and forth, trying to decide if this answer was familiar because it was the right answer or because it was the one she’d said most often, but gotten wrong? This suddenly seemed like the multiple choice test for the decade, where there was something shadowing her answer and she was pretty sure she’d picked the right answer, but the nagging feeling of having forgotten something important continued to itch at the base of her skull.
Maybe that nagging feeling was just the stress of the day. Maybe it was because she had thought the most difficult decision she was going to have to make that day was whether to hit the crawfish boil early before they ran out or try to time it for later, when the crawfish were spicier and had absorbed the seasonings better, but when, of course, everyone else would be aiming for them as well. She focused her gaze upstream at the log which protruded almost halfway across the bayou and accepted that maybe that niggling feeling of fear had to do with a ten-foot-long alligator not so far away. Even if they were shy, they were freakishly, primordially scary.
Thinking of alligators, and chomping, reminded her of stub-footed cousin Alfonse, lying in pieces and parts under a tarp. This was not helping. She was not going to think about alligators.
Of course, the very thing you try not to think about is what you think about and maybe she could think about something else, instead, but nope, it wasn’t happening. Why couldn’t she have decided not to think about pretty flowers or chocolate or fluffy bunnies? So her brain complied with the mental image of an alligator chomping and tearing a chocolate brown fluffy bunny and she nearly yelped from the sudden vivid imagery, and she stumbled in the water.
Trevor
caught her, one strong arm wrapped around, hard steel as he steadied her against him; he held her tightly and she felt the length of her own body plastered all along the length of his and suddenly, she didn’t really mind the water. And that gator was quickly earning a special place in her heart because now she was close enough to see the blond and red glints in his stubble, see the stitch marks in the old scar beneath his eye, see the flecks of green in the blue of his irises. Then he looked at her. Really looked at her and his whole demeanor changed as something in his expression went molten and holy freaking geez, that expression ought to be illegal. It was the kind that said if they weren’t standing waist-deep in water in the middle of a bayou, she’d be naked already, and be really really happy about it, too. She felt herself inhale, as his body hardened, and she knew he could feel her heart rev.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Mmmm hmmm.” She didn’t trust herself to answer.
“Next date,” he whispered, “it’s my turn to pick the venue.”
She chuckled into his shoulder. Damn. A really good-looking, sexy man who could make her laugh in the middle of a disaster . . . well, that sealed it. He had to be Satan incarnate, or doomed, given her luck with men. At least, she noticed, the helicopters had veered away from them. Maybe all of this was going to work.
Ce Ce stared at the TV, watching how the various helicopters (there were three news helicopters now) along with the state police and the FBI had all congregated near the bridge, as if they’d spotted Bobbie Faye. The excitement in the shop was palpable and the nervous energy seemed to radiate off the walls and reflect in the dozens and dozens of crystals displayed everywhere, magnifying the negativity.
She had to do something about that. She needed something to redirect that energy. She nodded to Monique, who nodded back and then ducked behind the counter, heading to one of the back rooms as Ce Ce ripped into cartons of crystals stacked in every available space in the shop.
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