“Odd, how?”
“Well, I can’t say exactly, but when I asked if they thought she had died in there, most of them avoided looking directly at me and were too nonchalant in their answers. The really bad actor guy—the one in those commercials?” Cam nodded. Donny. “He started to act all sad, like she’d died, and he was totally overselling it.”
“Which sounds like . . .” He couldn’t say it. He took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the headache away. “Good job, Luke. You get anything out of the other guys?”
“Nope. They clammed up. They’re supposed to be bikers but there’s something weird about them.”
“Put everyone in a squad car and haul them in. Call the captain and tell him we’re going to need several rooms cleared for questioning.”
As Luke headed back for the cousins and the bikers clustered in the broiling sun near one of the squad cars, Cam spied Reggie near one of the fire trucks, bugging the hell out of Jordan, from the grimace Jordan sported. She was smiling—always a bad sign. He strode toward her. There was a decent possibility she’d gotten footage of Bobbie Faye going into, and maybe coming out of—
“Sir,” another patrolman called out, jogging over to Cam. “Overheard one of the newscasters say there was some shooting out in the trees way in the back of the property just a minute ago—one of the stations tried to get some footage, but it’s all trees back there and they had no real visibility. Something about a motorcycle racing away, maybe had a couple riding it?”
Cam’s gaze immediately went back to the motorcycle parked in front of the house. One Harley. He glanced over where Luke had corralled the cousins and the two extra men. Two. One bike. Both guys looked like bikers, and he doubted one of them was riding bitch. There was a GTO with tires shot out, and Trevor had been with her just that morning.
He looked back at that single bike again. Two minutes later, he’d commandeered the keys.
* * *
From: JT
To: Simone
What do you mean, lost her? Like lose lose? As in dead? Or just misplaced? Please, God, tell me you just misplaced her. Go look in the silo. Maybe she’s only singed a little around the edges.
* * *
Bobbie Faye and Trevor raced away from the mill on the Harley. Blackened smoke from the burning silos and house billowed upward, inking the clear blue sky with an ugly scrawl. They sped along an old dirt road, packed hard over the years with a smattering of gravel lining the ditches that ran alongside it. Big live oaks and pecan trees shaded them, protecting them from the notice of the helicopters as they passed farms and the occasional rural business. A tractor distributor, a tiny convenience store, and a farm supply warehouse were scattered among the small farm homes.
She rode behind Trevor and for once, she didn’t care where they were going, just that they were getting out of there and leaving the would-be assassins and kidnappers and deranged cousins behind. She hugged herself closer to Trevor to avoid the brunt of the wind (well, hell, that was her story and she was sticking to it), and she laid her face against the center of his back, careful of where he was scraped and burned from the fall, and she snaked her arms around his waist to hang on. He laced one hand into hers. Then he lifted it and kissed the palm and then held her hand back at his waist and her heart raced with pure Fear.
It scared the living hell out of her. Not really the kiss. The look he’d given her. The connection she’d felt going over that rail and looking into his eyes. How could she trust her instincts when she had such a crappy track record in the past? He’d killed people in front of her and she should have been afraid of him then, but she hadn’t been. He’d stepped in front of bullets, and she’d taken that in stride. They’d dangled over death, and he’d nearly sacrificed himself for her—and her for him—and she hadn’t questioned why. It was some sort of normal for them, this way of working dangerously in sync. Could she trust it?
Gunshots. Not far behind. She chanced a look over her shoulder and damned if it wasn’t the merry crew of psychos belonging to the Irish guy. She wondered just when she’d been reincarnated as the mad leader of this deranged, never-ending Conga line. Two of them were shooting out of the back passenger windows of a souped-up Subaru, aiming wide to get their attention.
The Subaru tried to pass them (and they had better traction on the gravelly road than the bike). They shot again, trying to force Trevor to the right. Trevor moved her hand to his gun. As she grabbed it and pivoted enough to squeeze off a couple of shots, he reached back, holding onto her so she wouldn’t fall. The Subaru backed off as she unloaded a few rounds—putting bullets into the car but not doing enough damage to stop them. She couldn’t bring herself to shoot the driver or the passengers. They must have realized her hesitancy, and the car inched closer.
Close enough to see the deadly expression on Sean MacGreggor’s face and—seriously? They could use his image for Scared Straight! posters and every delinquent kid in the country would line up for devotionals and charity work.
She tried shooting out a tire, and the gun clicked. Empty. “Do you have another magazine?” she shouted above the engine and Trevor shook his head. Instead, he reached down beneath his left leg to some sort of saddlebag and she peered over his arm in time to see him retrieve a grenade the same casual way Lori Ann would have reached for another beer. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified that she’d lusted (past tense! This time she swore!) after a guy who actually thought to carry around grenades for a day’s outing with her. Now there was a personal ad just waiting to happen:
* * *
SWF looking for sexy, strong, and muttering type, must dangle well from burning buildings. Able to kill people and have your own grenade stash a plus.
* * *
“Hang on tight,” he shouted, and he pulled the pin with his teeth and dropped the grenade into the middle of the road. Two seconds later, the grenade exploded a few feet shy of the mark of Sean MacGreggor’s car and shrapnel from the grenade blew the tire. The Subaru spun off the road, going nose-down in the ditch.
Trevor gunned the bike around a curve and when they came to a crossroads, he turned to the right even before Bobbie Faye could make the suggestion. She wondered where they were headed, because surely, the fact that Roy had a camp this direction . . . a camp no one knew about . . . was a coincidence.
Cam realized he’d taken the wrong road as soon as he heard gunshots and then, God help him, what sounded distinctly like a grenade on Old Mill Road. There were two roads which ran perpendicular to Landry’s property—he was on one, and the grenade had come from the other. He turned his bike around, heading back to the Mill Road, “road” being a euphemism for the compacted ruts with loose gravel that ran for miles before it joined up anything resembling a paved highway. On the Harley, it was not an easy ride. He couldn’t imagine why Trevor would choose that direction, because it wound southeast and . . .
He knew where they were going. Assuming they survived the grenade blast.
Up ahead, he saw a crater in the center of the road and a Subaru in a ditch—with a couple of suits milling around. A black SUV had parked to block the road and a tall redhead, ugly haircut, like she was trying too hard to not look feminine in the workplace, put her hand up to stop him. She flashed a Homeland Security badge . . . a Simone someone . . . and he pulled out his own detective shield and ID, which she read carefully.
“We’re working a crime scene here, Detective,” the woman said, her silky voice floating on the summer air, a timbre much lighter and sweeter than her sour expression would have led him to believe possible.
He nodded toward the car—there didn’t appear to be a bike mangled beneath it. “Any fatalities?”
“No,” she said, “but you’ll need to answer some questions. We want to know the whereabouts of a Bobbie Faye Sumrall.”
He revved up his bike. “You and half the country. Good luck with that.”
“You can’t leave,” she yelled, and two of h
er cohorts were headed his way as he fishtailed the bike out of there. The crater in the road had prevented the SUV from going forward—and they couldn’t get back to their vehicle fast enough to follow him. He had one chance of overtaking Bobbie Faye and Trevor and finding out just what in the hell was going on.
Aiden followed the old dirt road in a car stolen from a farm supply place—an old Crown Victoria some farmhand had parked with the keys inside. It was like driving a boat in choppy water as the car bounced over every little rut and bump in the road. He’d taken over driving from Sean as Mollie tore part of his t-shirt into bandages to deal with the cuts from the shrapnel that had flown in the window of the Subaru. She seethed in fine form, something to admire, Aiden thought, though he wasn’t stupid enough to say so, especially not with Sean stewing violently next to her. Robbie’s knife wound leaked blood onto a makeshift bandage Mollie had already tied, and Aiden wasn’t sure if his features were drawn into a stark frown from pain or embarrassment.
They wound through a couple of towns that weren’t large enough to be dots on the most detailed of maps, and then they followed a river until they rounded a bend. Aiden had to stop the car as they all gaped. In front of them was a drawbridge, but instead of splitting in an inverted V, the part suspended over the water lifted straight up by two large hydraulic pistons on either end. It hovered twenty or so feet in the air, which wasn’t the surprising thing. No, that was the woman, jumping down from the drawbridge’s control tower, onto the bridge, then running across and leaping from the bridge onto the muddy shoulder of the road on the bank opposite from where they sat. She jumped on the back of the waiting motorcycle with the ops guy, and as they sped off, she glanced back at them blocked by the unmoving bridge . . . and waved.
Aiden braced for a tirade of wrath from Sean, but instead, his boss smiled.
“Are your legs broke?” Sean asked Robbie, who—in spite of having a shoulder sliced through—didn’t complain as he bailed out of the car and climbed up the ladder to the control tower.
“Well,” Aiden said, to break the silence. “She sure isn’t worried about offending you overmuch, is she?”
“She’ll be a handful, I imagine, but useful when I have her.”
“You mean useful to get the diamonds, right?” Mollie asked in that half-annoyed way women have of not-quite-stating that you’ve lost your marbles.
“No, I meant exactly what I said. I’ll have the diamonds, too, o’course, but that sort of initiative is a fuckin’ handy thing t’ have.”
Mollie rolled her pretty blue eyes as Robbie was heaving back from the control booth.
“It’s not comin’ down,” he said when he returned to the car, panting from the exertion, and his wound bleeding even more. Mollie grunted, annoyed, and set to rebandaging it as Robbie explained, “She’s jigged somethin’ or stolen somethin’. I can’t tell.”
They could watch the small GPS tracking unit signal that was still emanating from her purse where Mollie had put it, but Sean wanted her—wanted to intercept her and be there when the diamonds were found. Aiden suspected his boss was cursing himself for keeping this operation as small as he had. “How much trouble can one woman be?” Sean had said at the time.
“How are we goin’ t’ follow her?” Aiden asked.
“It’s time,” Sean said, “for Mollie m’girl to find out what her ‘long lost’ American cousin might be doin’ headin’ this direction. Someone’s bound t’ know. Let’s go make friends.”
John hid in the field behind the burning house. The top of the silo had blown just before he’d arrived at the field, and he’d run for cover. He was down three men so far. Including his best sniper. Another one of his men had acted as lookout, and had seen the freaking woman get clear of the silos and disappear with the asshole Fed on the back of a bike. She was still running. He couldn’t get his payday if she were alive, and after what this fiasco cost him, he wasn’t about to give up on that—or those diamonds. She owed him.
He limped off, heading for his car, knowing he had two possibilities of locating her. She might not check in with many people, but she did check in with her brother and sister. After something like this, she’d call. He just had to be persuasive enough to get one of them to talk. In Lori Ann’s case, a fifth of Jack ought to do the trick.
Bobbie Faye and Trevor stopped several cabins away from Roy’s fishing camp—well, it was technically Roy’s; it was listed under a friend’s name and Roy didn’t tell many people he owned it—too many pissed-off husbands had shown up to kill him at his previous camp. Even Roy’s anti-intuitive survival instinct could comprehend “impending death” after a few dozen attempts on his life. The run-down camp looked empty, unlike those near it, where smells of frying catfish and a crawfish boil or two permeated the heavy afternoon air.
The cabin was set on poles out over the lake itself—tall poles, which allowed a good twenty-feet clearance when the lake was swollen from heavy rains. Someone would have a hell of a time ambushing them from the perimeter. The wraparound porch connected to the land by a pier—wide enough for a motorcycle, but not wide enough for a car.
“Your brother’s off-shore, right?” Trevor asked as he cut the engine. Just one more reminder that he’d surveilled her enough to know every freaking detail about her life. Jesus, he probably even knew about the chocolate she hid in the freezer. Was she a job to him?
Were the kisses calculated?
How in the hell was she supposed to know? Really know? It wasn’t like her decent-guy-ometer had ever actually worked, especially when they kissed like Trevor.
Oh, hell, nobody kissed like Trevor.
Was she staring at his mouth? Damn, she was. A mouth that was now grinning a wicked, wicked grin.
Holy geez.
Where the hell was Self-Preservation when she needed it? Probably clubbed to death by Hormones.
Hormones had never been right. Not about a single solitary guy.
“Roy?” he asked, snapping her attention back to the fact that he’d asked her a question eons ago.
“He’s supposed to be, but you never know with Roy,” she snapped, harsher than she’d meant to. Her Poker Face was seriously in need of a rehab from the bemused expression on Trevor’s bruised face. “He could be in there with the governor’s wife, for all I know.”
“I’ll go check it out.” They hopped off the bike and he knocked the kickstand in place. “Alone. Unless you’re in the mood to see your brother having sex?”
“Okay, ewww, scarred for life, thank you.”
“Glad to help. I’ll be right back.”
He stepped away and she looked down for one second, then back up, and he’d melted from view into the swamp that surrounded Roy’s place. He was just . . . gone. He was very good at that. At his job. Being able to blend, to disappear. To go undercover. He’d fooled a lot of people when he’d helped her with Roy—everyone had believed him to be a completely amoral renegade FBI agent on the take. Someone who’d kill for money. He’d convinced Emile in believing he was still that guy, and Emile—a man who wouldn’t have trusted his own mother to bake him poison-free homemade cookies—had hired him. So who was to say this wasn’t a role?
She shook herself free of the thoughts and pulled out the photos, which were practically burning a hole in her back pocket. When she held them side by side, they were very similar. They each were taken in V’rai’s living room, with family gathered on the sofa. Everyone was older in the second photo, which was the only one to include Bobbie Faye and Francesca as toddlers—maybe they were three years old? Bobbie Faye had on threadbare shorts, a shirt with a juice stain, and peanut butter in her hair. Francesca was the one wearing the pink dress, the pink shoes, the pink purse, and the pink hat over her curls.
Poor Francesca. She never had a shot at being anything other than a princess.
“Let’s get you inside,” Trevor said in her ear, and she jumped and yelped and he caught her before she plastered her face in the gravel road.
“Holy geez, make a noise next time.”
“Why would I want to do that?” He grinned as he set her down and hopped back on the motorcycle to ride it the rest of the way to Roy’s.
Reggie and DJ waited a short block from the police station, keeping the front door in sight. Donny finally ambled out with that half-hopeful expression she’d seen some actors get when they wear huge sunglasses and big floppy hats and wildly ugly “stylish” clothes while they were supposedly incognito, but which screamed recognize me! His expression fell when absolutely no one paid him the least bit of attention. He scanned around, saw her wave, hurried over, and climbed into her car.
“You’re not going to regret this,” she told him as he peered around, apprehensive. She’d worked too hard and put too much of her future on the line for him to chicken out now.
“Just go. I don’t know where Francesca went and if she sees that we formed a secret liaison, she’ll be really mad at me.”
“Sure thing,” Reggie snorted. “Because the last thing I’d want is for the makeup queen to force me to buy that extra concealer she babbles about every time I see her. Woooo, scary.”
Benoit had kept up with the silo disaster while he finished canvassing Bobbie Faye’s neighbors. He’d been avoiding the captain by being conveniently out of his vehicle. The rumor mill worked overtime with any Bobbie Faye–related gossip, particularly on days like today, and so many people knew he had a copy of the surveillance video, he was surprised he hadn’t been offered bribes for it. Reggie would have had a heart attack trying to get her hands on it. The only thing preventing the captain from finding him personally and reaming him out for not logging the security footage into evidence was the minor detail of having to organize the police effort at the silo plus the questioning effort when Cam had everyone rounded up and sent to the PD. Cam was a genius.
Girls Just Wanna Have Guns Page 22