Charmed and Dangerous

by Toni McGee Causey

  The elevator dinged behind her, and she broke away, giving him one of her rare, high-wattage smiles, seeing her smile reflected in his own surprised grin. As the elevator doors opened, she spun around, and Trevor looked past her . . .

  At an older man dressed in a guard’s uniform, his gun still holstered. He seemed just as surprised to see them as they were to see him, and his eyes widened and his hands shook as he tried to pull his gun.

  Then he squinted, and recognition drove his bushy brows skyward.

  “Oh, no no no! You! You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re that Contraband Days Queen!” and he promptly turned to flee, apparently forgetting he was standing in an elevator car and smacked squarely into the frame of the door, knocking himself out cold. Trevor caught him just before he slammed to the floor.

  “Ooookaaaaay,” Bobbie Faye said as they peered down at the unconscious man. “That’s a new one.”

  “You’re like some sort of stealth weapon.” Trevor dragged the guard backwards into the elevator. “I’m stunned the governor lets you roam free.”

  “It’s not from the lack of trying on his part.”

  She stepped in the elevator car and the doors closed.

  “Let’s see that tiara,” Trevor said before they pressed the up button. He examined it, running his fingers over the markings and the inscription.

  “What does this mean?”

  “Ton trésor est trouvé? Oh, that just means your treasure is here. You know, found. Like this.” She put the tiara on and motioned, voila. She spun and when she turned back, there was a gleam in his eyes that raked her up and down, and she blushed.

  “Um, my great-great-great-Paw Paw said this phrase all the time, apparently. You know, like we should treasure ourselves, what we have.”

  “Not that your, er, Paw Paw wasn’t a great guy or anything,” he said, “but maybe he meant treasure, like money treasure. As in the real thing. It would explain why this tiara is so important to the kidnapper.”

  “Couldn’t be. My great-grandma said they were really poor. He’d been a blacksmith. She used to joke that there was a sign-up sheet for use of the spoon at supper.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  She took off the tiara and examined it. What the hell had the old great-great-great-lunatic meant by that saying, though? She squinted and turned it to see if she could read the part of the inscription which had worn off over the years, but the letters were too obliterated to make them out.

  If there had been real treasure, her family would have already grabbed it and blown it on something completely insane and inappropriate—something which would have very likely gotten them into more trouble or destroyed their lives in a spectacularly memorable way. She’d have heard about that by now, if it had happened to one of her great-greats. Nah, her family would have scrabbled after any sort of treasure with all of the finesse of a circus clown.

  Then again, just the whiff of the idea of a treasure would make some people crazy. What if someone misunderstood that inscription? What if the guy holding Roy thought this crazy tiara was really worth money?

  Trevor punched the up button and she drew her gun, aiming it at the door as the elevator lurched upwards.

  Everything was going to have to have precise measurements for the spell to work, and Ce Ce needed to be able to concentrate. Amid the snoring from the Social Services worker and Monique’s singing of folk ballads, Ce Ce was a little concerned this might not be the ideal work situation.

  She cleared a space on the countertop and sorted out all of the supplies, pulling unlabeled items from her shelves. She had the candles lit, the ingredients ready, her measuring cups and spoons. Boiling water from the kitchenette off her office was nearly ready.

  She turned back to her earthenware bowl. It was missing. She knew she’d set it on the counter.

  “You know,” Monique slurred, “for a place called a Cajun Outfitter and Feng Shui Emporium, Ce Ce, Voodoo ain’t really Feng Shui. Didja know that?”

  Ce Ce glanced over to Monique. Who was wearing the earthenware bowl as a hat. Ce Ce took it back, explaining, “This isn’t Voodoo. It’s more positive, affirming. Getting everything to flow the right direction. It’s . . . Feng Doo.”

  “Feng Doo? Doo doo doowhop,” Monique sang.

  Ce Ce hoped like hell this spell worked.

  When the elevator doors slid open onto a small, industrial gray room, two guards immediately dropped their weapons and threw their hands up in the air in the face of two guns aimed at them.

  Bobbie Faye quickly checked out the room: one large desk, a phone, a TV set (which had a video game hooked up to it), and discarded lunch remnants in the trash.

  The older guard, Bobbie Faye guessed him to be about sixty, said, “There ain’t a damned thing here but salt, and you’re welcome to it.”

  “But ain’t there a safe in the manager’s office for payroll?” the young guard asked.

  The older guard rolled his eyes and his shoulders sagged.

  “Kids,” he grumbled.

  “I’m not a kid! I’m nineteen.”

  The older guard turned to Bobbie Faye. “I promise to say he provoked you if you’d just shoot him.”

  “Why don’t you sit down instead?” Trevor asked, indicating their chairs.

  He pulled rope from his satchel and cut it into appropriate lengths. As he was tying the older guard, he had the younger one tie up the unconscious guard. The kid kept stealing glances at Bobbie Faye, and then the surprise of an epiphany slacked his jaw.

  “Hey! You’re the Contraband Days Queen!”

  “What the hell is wrong with all you men, recognizing me without makeup? Looking like something roadkill would turn its nose up over. Don’t you know the least you can do when you see a woman like this is pretend not to know her?”

  “You look the same to me.”

  “Let me guess. You don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Or a long life expectancy,” Trevor chimed in.

  “Hey. Could you autograph my uniform or something?”

  Trevor thankfully gagged the boy and Bobbie Faye focused on the markings of the tiara. If someone believed the rumors, if someone had misunderstood the inscription, then they must think the tiara itself was some sort of clue, right? That had to be it, but for it to be a clue, then it would have had to have been made by someone who knew where a treasure was, and there was only one—

  Oh, holy fucking shit.

  That really couldn’t be it.

  No. No freaking way.

  She rattled around the thought, not quite touching it, and she stared off into space, her breathing slowed, her every movement stilled.

  Could it?

  She looked at the kid. “Am I going to bring down a bunch of guards if I use this phone?”

  He shook his head, and the older guard sighed, clearly annoyed that the kid had no concept of what exactly a guard is for.

  “You’re onto something?” Trevor asked, moving from tying up the guards to sabotaging the elevator.

  She simply turned to the phone, punched nine, got a dial tone, and dialed Ce Ce’s private number.

  Thirty-Six

  We now guarantee all of our ferry rides are 100 percent Bobbie Faye free.

  —notice on ferry dock in Plaquemine, LA

  Ce Ce had a vial of the crushed leaves of a rare orchid held above her measuring spoon. She needed to put exactly one milligram into the bowl, and as she tapped the vial, her private line rang.

  She jumped, snatching the vial away from the bowl and spun, yanking the handset from its cradle.

  “Bobbie Faye?”

  “How the hell did you know it was me?”

  “I kept hoping, hon, that you’d be okay and call. Are you?”

  “I’m okay, Ceece. Just running real short on time, so no time to explain. I need to know something important.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Was Jean Lafitte a blacksmith?”
<
br />   “Sure, honey. Everyone knows that. And his brother, too.”

  “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything. Look, do you know if he had a special mark or something that he used as a signature?”

  “Hang on. Lemme look.”

  Ce Ce put the vial down safely away from Monique, who was now decorating the snoring Social Services woman with glitter (where in the world that came from, Ce Ce didn’t know). It took a couple of minutes to find the right book. She blew the dust off the jacket, the pages cracking and some loosening as she slowly opened it, gently turning to the section she remembered.

  While she read the text and scanned the drawings, she heard Monique pick up the phone behind her.

  “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyy, there be Bobbieee Faaaaaye,” Monique sang into the handset. “How’ya doin? Yanno, we’re gonna have to change your hair, give you some highlights and such if you end up in jail ’cuz I don’t think orange is gonna suit you all that great with your coloring.”

  Ce Ce grabbed the phone away. “Sorry, honey.”

  “How many screwdrivers has she had?”

  “Five, I think. I still haven’t figured out where she stashes the flask.”

  “Did you find the mark in the book?”

  “Yeah, honey, it’s in here. Old Marie St. Claire had a real thing for Lafitte, apparently. Thought he was handsome. She wrote all about—”

  “Ceece. Just the marking. What does it look like?”

  “It’s a lot of cross-hatching. And if you turn it on its side, it should look like a cursive ‘L.’ Sort of.”

  “Sonofoafreakingbitch.”

  “Honey, you okay?”

  “Not yet, Ceece. I’ve got something to do. Have you found Stacey yet?”

  “Not yet, hon, but I’m working on it.”

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “Honey, you’ve got to tell me—”

  “I have to go, Ceece. And thank you. For everything.”

  The line went dead, and Ce Ce immediately looked at the caller ID: unknown name, unknown number.

  Her hand shook as she hung up the phone, and when she turned back to the bowl of ingredients, Monique was playing with the vial of orchid leaves, her screwdriver spilled onto the counter near the bowl. Ce Ce grabbed the vial back before Monique could pour the entire contents onto the Social Services woman.

  “Are you okay?” Trevor asked, as Bobbie Faye paced back and forth in front of the phone.

  “Oh, sure, I’m okay. I’m perfectly okay. Do I not embody the profound okayness of an okay person? I’m so freaking okay, they’re going to make posters of me for ‘Okay, Central.’ Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “Well, the head spinning and fire emanating from your ears might be a sign that all is not well.”

  She gawked at him as he paused a moment in his efforts to block the stairwell with the guards’ desk. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, waving the tiara in his direction as they moved away from the guards, presumably to an exit.

  “Well, in my universe, it’s a tiara.”

  “Ha! Then you’d be wrong. This, this thing my great-great-great-grandfather made is valuable because of who he was. Jean Lafitte. Jean Lafitte. I’m related to Jean Lafitte. Me. Related. To a crazy, blackhearted pirate who ran over everyone to get what he wanted.”

  “I’d say ‘pot’ meet ‘kettle,’ but I like the arrangement of all my limbs.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “What’s so hard to believe? He lived around here. Someone’s bound to be related to him.”

  “Oh, no. No, you don’t understand. You know what I know? I know that my great-great-great-aunt Cora’s corns hurt her whenever she was going to have company, but that conveniently happened every Friday when the local butcher came by to make his deliveries. I know that my brilliant uncle Ansean and his friend decided to rob the liquor store and hung around all night playing pool and drinking and decided when it was getting daylight, that he wanted to take the pool table with him, and he couldn’t understand why in the world the police stopped him to question him. I know fifty kazillion useless stupid things my idiot family has done and you know why? Because this is the South and we tell every single one of our crazy family stories to anyone who will listen for the sheer entertainment value, so you would think that, at some point, a couple of my relatives could have rubbed a few of their brain cells together and remembered to pass along the little nugget that we’re related to a freaking pirate. At least I might have known why the kidnapper wanted the stupid tiara.”

  She stopped venting a moment, having to draw a breath, and heard a rumbling sound she couldn’t place, and she looked to Trevor, who frowned.

  “I think your ex found the stairwell. And the barricade. It won’t hold him for long.”

  She snatched a leftover piece of rope from what he’d used to tie the guards. “Great. Just freaking lovely.” She tied the tiara to a front belt loop. “The way things are going today, Cam will find out I’m related to a pirate and somehow, everything they ever did will be all my fault, and he’ll put me in jail so long there’ll be another ice age before I’m out.”

  “What in the hell did you do to him?”

  “Why does everyone always assume I’m the one who’s done something to the guy, huh? Why can’t it be that he did something to me? Is it because there’s some sort of testosterone signal that goes out and you instantly agree with each other to blame the woman?”

  “Okay. So what did he do to you?”

  “He arrested my sister.”

  “What was she doing? Murder? Aggravated assault? Some other sort of genetically predisposed mayhem.”

  “Geez. Thanks. It was a simple DUI.”

  “Ah. You broke up, and he got revenge by arresting your sister.”

  “No, we were dating. I’d told him she had a problem and I was worried about her and wanted to get her into detox, and he went and arrested her.”

  Trevor scowled, puzzled. “You were still dating?”

  She nodded.

  “Seriously? As in, long term?”

  “About a year.”

  “And he arrested your sister?”

  “Yep.”

  “Was he suicidal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, assuming he planned on seeing you again and possibly sleeping with you, he’d had to have had a death wish to pull a stunt like that. You don’t do that to the woman you’re dating, especially if you’re serious.”

  “Thank you. He thinks he was doing the ‘right thing.’ ”

  Metallic grinding and whirring noises filtered into the hallway and they slowed, listening to the sounds grow as they approached a large manufacturing area. There were giant chopping machines and packaging equipment and shipping conveyor belts all rusted from long-term exposure to drifts of salt. The conveyor angled up up up to what must be an exit several stories above the floor.

  Bobbie Faye and Trevor hung back in the shadows. She counted seven workers on the floor and a manager on an elevated glassed-in platform where the glass protected the computer from the salt. On one wall, at a right angle to the manager’s platform, there was a plate glass window: a break room. Inside, a TV played the aerial footage of the bank robbery, and the anchors droned on and on. Two workers sat transfixed by the footage. Between the break room and the platform were two secretarial desks facing the promised land: another elevator.

  The cutting machine shaved the salt blocks into smaller blocks, which were being wrapped in a plastic label and set on a conveyor. There were dozens of other smaller machines, all banging and whizzing and chirping, doing God-knows-what, motors running loud enough to drown out Bobbie Faye and Trevor’s whispered conversation.

  She squinted and could see the footage details. She couldn’t be seeing what she thought she was seeing.

  Her trailer.

  Lying on its side.

  Broken into halves.

  She was going to k
ill Claude and Jemy, whose trucks and winches were still tied to the trailer as they tried to pull one of the halves upright.

  No. Do not think that. She was just going to think positive this time. What was Ce Ce always yammering about? Something about positive thinking creating the reality that you want to live in, and by thinking it, you create it?

  So fine. Positive thinking. Positive fucking thinking. She could do positive thinking. Buddhist monks were going to line up to learn how to think as positively as she could think. She’d give seminars.

  She heard the sound of dogs baying. Dim, far far away.

  Growing louder.

  The positive doohickey thing in her brain was apparently in the “off, and fuck you” position.

  Thirty-Seven

  South Louisiana resident makes first million selling “Bobbie Faye” debris on eBay. Expects to double his sales next quarter.

  —lead story in Entrepreneur magazine

  Cam, the SWAT team, the FBI agents, the dog handler, and the dogs lined up in the crowded stairwell. The disabled elevator forced them up the stairs, which were, of course, blocked. The SWAT had tried kicking the door in, to no avail.

  “Blow it,” Zeke said.

  Cam shook his head, and pressed an ear against the door. He’d heard something. Muffled. Grunting.

  “Someone’s tied up just on the other side. We can’t blow it or we could kill them.”

  “Well, we don’t have the luxury of just waiting around,” Zeke barked. “Cormier could be getting away.”

  “Since when did your mandate include killing innocent civilians?” Cam asked, enjoying the way Zeke had to bite back an answer.

  Cam turned to Aaron. “We have any acetylene left?”

  “A little.”

  “Enough to cut off the hinges here? We could pull the door forward to us if we make the cuts right. Then move whatever’s blocking the door.”

  Aaron nodded, and in a few seconds, two of his team flared up the torches, one tackling the top hinge, the other, the bottom.