Charmed and Dangerous

by Toni McGee Causey

  “Mrs. Banyon, everyone here can attest to the fact that I haven’t left this store all day. Nor have I sent anyone over to the school to pick up Stacey. I am as alarmed as you are, honey. Why don’t you sit a moment while I make some phone calls and see if I can sort this out?”

  Monique returned with a tray of glasses of ice and a pitcher of tea. Thank goodness. Ce Ce eyed it to make sure it was the correct tea, and not too dark or it would taste bitter.

  “Would you like something cold to drink while you wait?” Monique asked, and Mrs. Banyon frowned at Ce Ce.

  “It’ll take me ten minutes, tops,” Ce Ce said, taking one of the glasses and pouring the tea. She handed one to Mrs. Banyon, poured the other two. Monique meandered down one of the aisles while Ce Ce took her own glass over to the counter where Alicia manned the ever-ringing phone.

  “I’ll only wait ten minutes,” Mrs. Banyon said. “Then I’m calling the police.”

  “That’s fine,” Ce Ce replied, picking up her phone and dialing the school. “I’ll want you to get them involved if I can’t find her.”

  Mrs. Banyon sipped the iced tea, sighed appreciatively, and pressed the cold glass to her forehead.

  “This is quite good,” she said. “What am I tasting that’s different?”

  “Oh, just a little mint combination I love. Makes it sweet without having to add sugar.”

  Mrs. Banyon searched the aisles until she found a low stack of boxes filled with crystals. They were sturdy enough to hold her weight. She settled there, continuing to down the tea. Ce Ce watched her as Monique circled the aisle and eased up behind Mrs. Banyon. The entire crew of customers looked on with morbid fascination, but Ce Ce knew they needn’t have worried. Monique was in the exact right place to catch the tea glass when Mrs. Banyon dropped it as she slumped backwards against the shelves.

  It was cheating, Ce Ce thought, but no way was she letting that woman file that report.

  Twenty-Four

  Bobbie Faye? Oh, we just love her. You know, from a safe distance, of course.

  —Contraband Days fans of Bobbie Faye who wish to remain anonymous

  When Ce Ce picked up on the private line, Bobbie Faye bounced for joy and nearly overturned the bateau.

  “Oh, honey, thank goodness,” Ce Ce exclaimed. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t have time, Ceece. This cell’s gonna die. Have you talked to Cam? Do you know if he’s got Stacey or if she’s still at school?”

  Bobbie Faye definitely did not like that pause before Ce Ce answered. Because during the pause, she could hear someone in the background saying, “I think she’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead? Please God, not Stacey!”

  “No, no, honey,” Ce Ce said. Then Bobbie Faye heard her muffle the phone with her hand and say to whomever had made the “dead” declaration, “She’s not dead. She’s just out for a little while.”

  “Who’s out?” Bobbie Faye asked.

  Adrenaline had just hit a line drive up her spine to the base of her brain, smacking her with all its force, as if to say, “You think it was bad earlier? That was just the preliminary round. Watch this.”

  “Um,” Ce Ce stalled. “See, honey, this Social Services woman waltzed in here with a really bad attitude, and—”

  “You killed the Social Services woman?” Bobbie Faye shrieked, leaping up, forcing Trevor to stop the trolling motor and grab her before she fell in the bayou.

  She heard Adrenaline’s maniacal laugh as Trevor forced her to sit.

  “No no no, honey, she’s not dead. She’s just a little bit unconscious.”

  “What do you mean, a little bit unconscious? How can someone only be a little bit unconscious?”

  “Well, it’s better than a whole lot dead. Besides, the FBI is supposed to have Stacey in protective custody, only she said they don’t and now she thinks we squirreled Stacey away from her and she was about to have us arrested and make sure that you never saw Stacey again, ever. I couldn’t let her do that.”

  “Ceece!” Bobbie Faye said, processing Ce Ce’s words a helluva lot slower than she ought. “What do you mean, she thinks you squirreled Stacey away?”

  Ce Ce didn’t answer. All of the phone’s background noises had stopped as well. Bobbie Faye drew the cell away from her ear and realized she didn’t have any service.

  This was so beyond not funny; she could hear Adrenaline opening the door and welcoming Hysteria and Abject Fear to the party. Her head was spinning, her arms were going to fall off her body, and she was going to shoot into the heavens like some spastic Roman candle with its trajectory all wonky.

  “Breathe,” Trevor instructed.

  Fat lot of fucking good that was going to do.

  Cam’s phone vibrated that he had a voice mail. How the hell did he have a signal up here? He peered out the window of the police helicopter, scanning until he saw the cellular tower. Ah. He instructed the pilot to hover near it and when he dialed in his password, Bobbie Faye’s quietly panicked voice shocked him.

  “Cam, I know you’re out there, chasing me. I know you’re pissed. I don’t have time to explain. I don’t have much battery left on this phone. I need you to go get Stacey from school. Just you, nobody else. Get her somewhere safe.”

  There was a pause, and Cam could picture her closing her eyes, squeezing the phone.

  “Please, Cam. I’ll explain later. I promise. I wouldn’t put you on the spot like this, and I know you’re all Rambo about hunting me down and arresting me, but there’s nobody else I trust to do this. I—well. Thank you.”

  The phone went dead.

  He was trapped in this hamster cage, not able to get up and pace or hit anything or . . . sonofabitch, it was just like Bobbie Faye to find a new, deeper way to torture him when he didn’t think it could be done. Cam forced himself to breathe calmly in and then out again to keep from actively seething and ripping his phone in half.

  She didn’t have the decency to tell him what kind of trouble she was in, the common sense to let him know where she was so he could pull her out of danger. Sure, he’d have to arrest her, but she had to know there was a veritable army after her now, and the odds in her favor had tanked so long ago, he suspected the bookies had closed the bets.

  What in the hell was she thinking? What had crawled up her ass and lit a fire? Idiotic freaking woman.

  He checked the caller ID and the number was blocked. Sonofabitch. He listened to the message twice more, trying to pick up on the nuances of the background noises, and got mostly static. Maybe Jason could wash it through the computer and pick up something.

  He called Benoit. “Anything else on the family?” he asked, and he heard Benoit swear.

  “It ain’t tidy, that’s for sure,” Benoit said. “We’ve canvassed every bar in the area of those you named. Couple of people remember seeing Roy last night barhopping, but so far, no definitive word on the last place seen or who he might have been with. We’re expanding the search grid.”

  “What about Stacey, the niece?”

  “Yeah, that’s weird. School teacher says the FBI picked her up a little while ago and put her in protective custody.”

  Oh, hell. Cam remembered the recorded Fibbie conversation Jason had played for him. They weren’t saying Bobbie Faye’s “piece.” They were saying “niece.”

  Why in the hell would they have preemptively put her niece under protective custody, but leave the sister in the rehab center?

  “Call them, find out where they’ve taken her, and make sure she’s safe.”

  He was trying not to conjure the image he had of Stacey’s fourth birthday, when he’d shown up with a big stuffed green dog and Stacey dove for him, calling him “Uncle Cam.” He was not going to think of that hug or the cake in her hair or the big toothy smile. He was not going to get a huge lump in his chest from fear, he was not going to forget how to breathe.

  He hung up with Benoit and motioned for the pilot to continue his forward sweep of the area.

  He was
n’t sure if he was furious with Bobbie Faye for not telling him where she was or what was wrong . . . or relieved she trusted him with something so important.

  Or . . .

  Had she? Would she stoop so low as to use her own niece to pull him off the chase?

  She had to have known that it was the one thing he’d do for her. She had to have known that tremor in her voice would remind him of the times she was really vulnerable, really needed him. Just him. Even though she had a hard time admitting it, he’d drop everything and run to help when she was like that.

  Fucking brilliant.

  God, he hated that woman.

  “You should eat something,” Trevor said, and Bobbie Faye stared at him for a full minute before the freak-out party in her brain subsided enough to register his words.

  “I’m sure as hell not carting you out of here if you faint.”

  She didn’t move. Her arms were heavy. How’d they get so heavy? When did she gain two wobbly elephant trunks for arms?

  “In your purse. Remember? From the store?” he said, brows knitted together.

  She couldn’t decide if his scowl was from annoyance or concern.

  “You’re in shock,” he continued when she hadn’t moved. “Eat something chocolate—it’ll help.”

  The words slowly connected to meaning, which finally eased into action, and she dug into her purse, pulling out a bottled water and a chocolate bar.

  “Can you hand me a soda?” he asked, and she frowned, digging in her purse for a Coke and an energy bar for him.

  Soda.

  Okay, so he’s not from the South. Especially not from Louisiana, where everything was a “Coke” first, and then the next statement would designate the brand. So he was a stranger, not even a native. She might have lessened some of her suspicions of him helping her if he was just a local, one who’d revered the Contraband Days Festival and her mom, the way Marcel and Alex’s guys did. Definitely a big fat check mark in the worry column.

  She nibbled her chocolate bar.

  Her mind swerved from his odd word choice to the image of where they’d purchased the Cokes. Maybe it was the fact that Trevor had mentioned the store, or maybe it was simply that she finally had a moment of quiet to reflect, but the surveillance images of the bank heist that old man Earl had been playing on his laptop looped on a permanent replay behind her closed eyes.

  Watching the footage was as close to an out-of-body experience as she hoped to get; seeing it had given her a weightless, disconnected feeling, floating above her own “self” in the lobby.

  The images circled again, resetting and starting over, pummeling her senses. Shouldn’t she be doing something more productive? She nibbled on the chocolate bar, squeezing her eyes shut, tuning out Trevor, the boat, the world, hoping to find some sort of balance, some blank peace.

  And yet, the images moved forward, oblivious to her willpower to stop. There was the nerdy guy, fiddling with his windbreaker, adjusting his collar over and over, rubbing his hands through his hair. It was weird how he was so nervous. She’d thought it had just been her presence, her boisterousness, which had made him so anxious, but when she’d disappeared into the safe-deposit box area, the lobby camera caught him fidgeting and twitching. Then he let a few people up ahead of him, which was just . . . odd. You’d think he’d want to get out of there faster, seeing how he planned to rob the bank. Why let people ahead and prolong it?

  This was not helping.

  The day’s events jumbled together, blending into psychotropic trippy rubble. She was beginning to think she was pathologically incapable of thinking clear thoughts, of being calm in the face of danger. Maybe you only get a certain quota of clearheaded thinking in times of crisis, and she’d used up her allotment. Probably had used it up by age eleven.

  It was odd, her thoughts rubberbanded back, just how the nerdy guy had kept looking off toward the safe-deposit room while she was out of the lobby. Why would he keep looking in her direction? Why did he wait until she’d walked out of the safe-deposit room to toss the stick-up note onto the teller’s counter?

  The beginning of understanding closed in on her, and she focused on that thought. Everything went quiet. The birds and crickets and bullfrogs and wind and trolling motor all ceased as far as she knew. The sun dimmed except for the small pinpoint where she stared into the swamp forests ahead.

  He wasn’t there to rob the bank.

  He was there to rob her of the tiara.

  Which meant that someone was trying to double-cross the guy who had Roy.

  Twenty-Five

  You are insane. We have more than eight hundred miles of pipeline up here, for crying out loud. Do you know what she could do to us? Forget it.

  —the governor of Alaska to a plea from the governor of Louisiana

  Bobbie Faye stared down at her candy bar, soft from the heat and squished to an hourglass shape from her grip.

  “Are you okay?”

  She looked at Trevor, blank. Unable to register his comment.

  “You just turned so pale, I think you went translucent.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Someone was double-crossing the bad guys. Someone else wanted that tiara, and knew where she would be. She had no idea why they wanted it—that was just as confusing. This nerdy guy had helpers in the bank. College kids? Right. Could there have been others in the bank in on the robbery? Or out in the parking lot?

  She assessed Trevor, who was consulting the map Marcel had drawn. Everything about how he reacted to the situation today was too . . . convenient.

  So did that mean that everything about him was wrong?

  The frozen surveillance image of him driving his truck as they sped from the bank flared in her mind, a lit match waiting for a place to burn.

  “What made you help me today?” she asked.

  He frowned, giving her the “are you an idiot?” eyeroll.

  “Seriously. We both know you could have kicked me out of your truck whenever you wanted. You disarmed me in a split second.”

  “First,” he said, “I tried to kick you out of my truck, and then people were shooting at us. I have a real aversion to being shot at, and it was easier to keep going. Once we hit the lake, I figured I was all in, whether I liked it or not.”

  “Bullshit.” She cocked her head, waiting. When he didn’t answer, she gave him the stink eye, the evil look she’d mastered when she wanted to convey to Roy that she hadn’t believed excuses one through twelve he’d given her for skipping school.

  “Look, Bobbie Faye. I’m sure the bank’s exterior surveillance cameras caught you getting into my truck and us taking off together. When you said that they thought you’d robbed the bank, I knew they would assume I was an accessory. I figured I’d better help you get whatever was stolen back and catch the real thieves to clear my own name.”

  “Hmph.” She looked away from him, wondering how much of that she really bought, and honestly not knowing the answer. Everything he said made sense, and he said it with just the right amount of annoyance and earnestness to be believable. In fact, it was such a perfect mix, he was so unflapped throughout this whole ordeal, he said everything so matter-of-factly, he couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.

  “Or,” he said, giving her a wolfish grin, “maybe I just liked your shirt.”

  She looked down at the remaining SHUCK ME, SUCK ME part of her T-shirt and a blush rose from her chest and warmed her face and man, it was a bitch not to have something handy to hurl at his head. She glared at him and he grinned that freakishly sexy grin, and she really wanted to bop him, because she’d had more than she could stand of stupid come-on lines and dumb-ass trying-to-get-laid grins in her lifetime, and then she saw by the warmth in his eyes that he meant it. There was something genuine there, something real and sexy as hell, and a connection between them that her body was whooping in delight over, and damn, but a man who could make her feel hot and bothered on a nightmare day like this maybe should get a couple of points in th
e benefit-of-the-doubt column, in spite of her suspicions.

  “I think I liked you better when I hated you,” she said, and Trevor laughed.

  Cam calculated that it had been a little over four hours since he’d seen Bobbie Faye on the bank of the lake, and three hours since the rig had blown. There were a helluva lot of places she could get to in three hours. Especially in south Louisiana. Lake Charles emptied into small bayous, some of which wound toward Lake Prien, and then, south of that, there were more bayous and canals, and then Moss Lake, and ultimately Calcasieu Lake, which had shipping channels and bayous winding to the Gulf.

  His radio headset crackled and Benoit popped on the line.

  “Any news?” Cam asked.

  “If by ‘any’ you want to include every crank phone call we’ve had sighting Bobbie Faye, then yeah.”

  “How many?”

  “So far, Collier just counted thirty-six hundred, seventy-three. From all over the state. Either she’s cloned herself—”

  “For the love of God, don’t even suggest that.” Cam motioned the pilot to push on in a southerly sweep. “Any word from the roadblocks?”

  “Yeah. You’re a sonofabitch for ordering it during the festival, according to a few festival-goers. That one’s from my mom, in case you’re curious.”

  “Great.”

  “No word on the brother, yet,” Benoit continued, “or the niece. The FBI are stonewalling me. The only good news is we have a fraction of news footage from when the FBI picked the kid up from school. Definitely a guy in a suit, but no one got them getting in a car. There wasn’t much press there at that point yet—that’s not the major flashpoint, I guess, so it was more second-unit types. They weren’t allowed on school property and had set up in front of the school and he must have parked in the back. We’re sending this over to the FBI now to make sure they identify him as one of their own.”