Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

by Toni McGee Causey

  She still clutched the camisole in her left hand—she must have picked it up before they’d run for the kitchen—and she set the gun down to put it on. She moved to Roy’s kitchen cabinets and dug out the headache meds she’d once kept there.

  “What are you doing here?” Trevor asked. She looked back at him and knew he was livid, though the only thing that gave it away was the tiniest tic in a muscle in his jaw. Anyone else would have only noticed the nonchalant, unworried stance as he leaned casually against the wall at that window, his arms crossed at his chest. She noted he still held his gun.

  “That’s what I came to ask you,” Cam said to her, ignoring Trevor. “The silos? Shooting? And now the drawbridge—which fucked up traffic for hours. Was that really necessary?”

  “If we wanted to live, it was,” Trevor said.

  She grabbed a glass, filled it with water.

  “I knew I should have locked you up earlier,” Cam griped, “for your own damned good. You don’t have sense enough to stop, and you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  She held out the meds and the water to him. “Do you want to take these orally, or should I just shove the bottle up your ass? And I have sense, you jerk. I just didn’t have a choice.”

  He gulped down the medicine and handed her back the glass. “You do have a choice. You could have turned this over to me. Or the Feds,” and he said that last word like someone else would say maggots, “and we would have investigated. Instead, you damned near got yourself killed three times—it’s only a matter of time before you end up in the morgue.”

  “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  He ignored her, speaking to Trevor. “This is your fucking job, not hers.”

  She thumped Cam in the chest with her index finger. “If you don’t stop talking about me like I’m not in the room, I’m going to drop-kick your ass into tomorrow, with or without that badge, and I don’t care if you have a headache. This wasn’t just a job—people in my family are going to be killed. I have to find those diamonds.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re not trained for this,” he seethed.

  “Whose fault is that?” Trevor asked, deadly calm. Too calm. She cast him a worried frown and he met her gaze, settling down a fraction. “You could have made sure she was trained.”

  “And I suppose that’s what you’ll do now,” Cam said, and she knew they were talking about way more than her knowing how to throw a punch.

  “Yes.”

  Although knowing how to really throw a punch—a knockout kind of punch—would come in freaking handy right about now.

  “They’re just fucking diamonds,” Cam said to her, “and he”—he jabbed his finger toward Trevor—“if he cared about you at all, he would know better than to let you put your life on the line for some stupid rocks. I don’t care how valuable they are.”

  Bobbie Faye leapt into rant mode, all set to tell Cam how she wasn’t some pet whose actions could be dictated, when she felt Trevor’s palm on the back of her neck, beneath her hair, stroking his thumb there. She wasn’t sure if he did it to calm her, or himself, and he’d moved so fast, she hadn’t heard or felt the motion until he was there.

  “You have no idea how much I care about Bobbie Faye,” Trevor warned, and Cam’s eyes slitted down to hatred.

  “Why don’t you tell me what it is I don’t know, Cam,” she said, “because you didn’t come all this way to yell at me.”

  When he looked at her, there was so much pain behind his eyes, she wondered just what could be so bad . . . because this pain? This was more than a headache.

  “First, you’re going to tell me why the Feds are so hot over some stones,” Cam said to Trevor, “or else I haul her in right now.”

  “No,” Trevor said, very quietly, “you won’t.”

  The two men glared at each other and Bobbie Faye was certain that if testosterone poisoning was tracked by the CDC, it would throw up its hands and run around like a freaked-out Chicken Little at the epidemic proportions of the disease. She plopped down on a dining chair and before she’d even exhaled, Trevor had taken the chair next to her, forcing Cam to sit opposite.

  “Start with the diamonds,” Cam said, and both he and Bobbie Faye looked expectantly at Trevor.

  “They’re fakes,” Trevor said, and she felt a little woozy. She was putting her life on the line for a bunch of fakes? Was he crazy? “They’re so well done, they can only be detected one of two ways—by a specially rigged Geiger counter or under an electron microscope. At least one of them has the formula etched inside it on a microscopic level, and since they can be duplicated, they’re worth millions—and more if they’re mass produced.”

  Oh, okay, something every terrorist would want. That was much better.

  “Holy fucking geez,” she said, and she pressed her forehead against the cool tabletop.

  “Your turn,” Trevor said to Cam, though he put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, which was hunched so high from the stress, she probably looked like a turtle.

  “We have surveillance footage with Bobbie Faye on it, shooting the jeweler.”

  She sat up so fast, she nearly toppled over.

  Cam watched Bobbie Faye’s reaction and he knew she was stunned. She’d never been that good at a poker face and she never lied, even when she was pulling a prank, like lowering all of the furniture in the principal’s office every other week—then raising it back up each time—to confuse the new asshole principal. (He’d made her clean chairs for a week, until everyone kept sliding off them and the principal realized he’d neglected to specify what she had to use to clean everything with, so he couldn’t suspend her for the heavy use of WD-40.) Right then, though, she’d gone so pale, Cam wished he could take back the announcement of the video, give her the blow softer—but he’d needed to see her reaction.

  “I . . . what?”

  He detailed the evidence piling up, and with each additional layer, she looked more and more bewildered and devastated. When he got to the part about the casings, he knew she was going to be furious. He pulled out the plastic bag he’d kept with him in his back pocket and set them on the table. She recoiled as if he’d set a bag of water moccasins in front of her.

  “So that’s what you were after in my trailer?”

  “No, I wanted DNA to prove that wasn’t your hair at the murder site. I saw these by accident—someone had shoved them behind the sink. I thought it was jewelry—I was going to fish it out and leave it for you on the counter.”

  She blinked. He’d always done little things like that—fixed things, built her shelves—well, in the last trailer—made sure she hadn’t left stuff in her jeans before she washed them.

  “Why aren’t these in evidence?” she asked.

  “I didn’t turn them in.” He met her gaze and saw that she grasped the enormity of what he’d done. They’d lived together for nearly a year—you didn’t live with a cop and not learn the procedure.

  “He didn’t have a warrant,” Trevor added, and Cam hated the man right then. “It wouldn’t hold up in court.”

  “I have Stacey at my mom’s,” Cam said evenly, “and there are any number of things she could have needed from the trailer, which would have been a justifiable excuse, if I’d wanted to manufacture one and if I’d wanted to turn these in.” He looked at Bobbie Faye. “I hate to ask who you’ve pissed off lately, but is there anyone specific who would hate you enough to go to this trouble?”

  “There are too many to count.”

  “That’s not the question we should be asking,” Trevor said, and Cam looked at the man. He didn’t know if the agent realized he was holding Bobbie Faye’s hand, but odds were, it was a premeditated choice. “We should be asking: How does implicating Bobbie Faye in the jeweler murder benefit anyone looking for the diamonds?”

  “How is Sal connected?” Cam asked.

  “We knew Marie had the diamonds because she’d paid him with one just a few days before he was murdered. When he sold it on the black ma
rket, we traced it back to him and we learned Marie was the source. I believe the Bureau was closing in on her when she realized what was happening and disappeared—setting up a sale for the rest of the diamonds with an unknown buyer from Italy.”

  “He made fakes for Marie,” Bobbie Faye muttered. When both men looked at her, she shrugged. “It’s what I would have done in her place. Have Sal make a bunch of fakes, and no one would know which were the real diamonds unless they had the right equipment.”

  “We don’t believe even Sal realized what he had,” Trevor said. “He’d have charged way more for it on the black market.”

  “Still, the fakes would work for Marie. Scatter ’em around to a bunch of places, make it look like she was putting some in her textiles that she was shipping overseas—have everyone running around in so many directions, finding stuff, no one would see the real ones. So someone probably wanted him to tell them how many fakes he made—process of elimination . . . even if they didn’t know which ones were the real deal, they would know if they had all of them.”

  “This is why you have to stop looking for the diamonds,” Cam said, thumping his fist on the table. When she looked confused, he explained, “Because every step you take toward finding them just gives you a stronger and stronger motivation for murdering Sal.”

  “If I stop now,” she said, furious, “then someone gets away with this. And no fucking way in hell am I letting that happen.”

  Reggie and DJ and Donny were stationed in the Capitol Lakes park when Benoit drove up. Ever since Donny had let it slip that everyone was running after diamonds, Reggie had one goal: catch Bobbie Faye in the act. That story would at least give her a segment on the national news—and that was the sort of thing a reel was made of—great stories to show producers to move up the news ladder.

  For Donny, this was a chance to be on camera, babbling on and on about how he’d been forced to help, how he was an upstanding citizen, and by the way, if there were any acting agents interested, here was his number. Reggie had met quite a few Kato Kaelins in her time, but she’d never seen someone like Donny, who’d viewed the O. J. Simpson hanger-on to be a personal hero.

  “Are you sure the diamonds are here?” she asked Donny.

  He posed for the camera before affecting a deeper voice and said, “Why yes, Reggie, I have it on good authority that the diamonds . . . and Bobbie Faye . . . are going to be here.”

  “Doofus, the camera is off if the light isn’t on.”

  “And when I’m pointing it at the ground,” DJ said helpfully.

  Donny deflated, and Reggie shushed them both when Benoit came into view, calling for Bobbie Faye. DJ started rolling, using the zoom lens from their position a few yards away in the thickest batch of shrubs. Bobbie Faye appeared, and in a blink, Reggie heard a pop and the cop fell. Then another pop and Reggie realized Bobbie Faye just killed her friend and Reggie must’ve made some noise, some gasp at having gotten that on tape, because when she looked up into the woman’s eyes, she realized two things: she’d been seen and it was the biggest mistake of her life.

  A bullet sliced through DJ’s chest before he had a chance to know what happened. He dropped to the ground and the camera bounced and rolled.

  “Donny, you’re an idiot,” the woman said, and then there was a pop and Donny clutched his stomach and fell to his knees.

  “Bye, Reg,” was the last thing Reggie heard, and she felt herself go white hot and then cold, and realized she was on the ground, bleeding out. She thought, stupidly, about how pissed she was that she finally had the kind of exclusive that would have gotten her on every morning talk show in America, and she wasn’t going to live to use it. And then she thought of her son, Nathan, how he looked holding that tiny fish, his smile practically as big as his body, and then he was waving at her.

  Twenty-five

  Bobbie Faye spread the two photos on the table and said to Trevor, “This is what I was rushing to show you earlier.” She tapped on the right-hand side of each photo. The time elapsed from the first to the second was probably about ten years, from the changes she could see in her aunts’ appearances and clothing styles. Marie sat in the center of the sofa in both photos. There was a young man roughly her age to her left in each picture, but not the same man.

  “I remember this one,” she tapped the later one where she and Francesca huddled on the floor in front of the sofa. “And that’s Emile.” She tapped the deeply tanned man in the latest photo. “That, isn’t.” She tapped the man in the other photo. “Familiar?” she asked the men, and while she wasn’t entirely sure Trevor would recognize the man, she knew Cam would.

  “Holy shit,” Cam said, once he pulled it closer. “I didn’t know Marie dated the governor.”

  “I don’t know the details, but they broke up in college and that’s when she met Emile.”

  “She doesn’t look as much like you as V’rai does,” Trevor said, scrutinizing one of the photos. He was right—it was eerie how much V’rai looked like her; Bobbie Faye had never noticed because, well, duh, the family had never included her from her preteens forward. Even when she first glanced at the photo, the hair and clothes of a different era distracted her from seeing the similarities.

  “What I really don’t get,” she said, “more, even, than the whole ‘frame-me-for-murder’—”

  “That should tell you something right there,” Cam muttered, and when she glared at him, he said, “that you live in such a way where ‘framing you for murder’ can somehow not be the biggest thing that confuses you.”

  “Bite me,” she said. “What I was saying, though, is why would Marie have put that note in her day planner, indicating me?” She had to explain to Cam what that was.

  “Cute. You didn’t mention that this morning.”

  “You were being the King of Annoying this morning. And I haven’t talked to Marie in . . . well, I think since Francesca was a senior.”

  Cam’s phone rang and he stepped away from the table to answer. She brainstormed over all of those threads tangling, and as she started unraveling them, she had an idea—and then Cam doubled over, leaning against the peninsula as if he’d been kicked, hard, and he said, “Dear God, no. Is he—” and he shook as the caller answered. His skin took on a clammy sheen. “No fucking way. No, I’ll tell you later. I’ll be there.”

  “What?” she asked when he turned to her, and oh, God, “Stacey?”

  “No, Benoit.” She froze, because she knew he’d only be reeling if it was terrible. “He’s been shot.” She couldn’t even form the words to ask him the next question and he shook his head. “He’s breathing, but he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s on his way to surgery now.”

  She’d moved before she realized what she was doing, going to Cam, wrapping her arms around him in comfort as he continued. “She shot him in the back,” he said, enveloping her, his voice cracking. “Fucking shot him in the back. They don’t know if he’s going to make it. And that’s not all,” he said, leaning her so that she tilted up to see his face. “Reggie and her cameraman are dead. Your cousin, Donny, shot in the stomach. They think Donny’s going to live, but he’s also going into surgery.”

  “Who?” she gasped and then realized that Trevor was on his phone behind her. She turned to him as she heard him curse and hang up.

  “According to a preliminary view of the cameraman’s tape,” Trevor said, his expression grim, “the killer . . . is you.”

  The world tipped on its axis then. Just fucking flipped over, Hi there, floor, how ya’ doin’? Think I’ll splat down here for a while. Except she never hit the floor—and she thought maybe Cam had caught her, but she opened her eyes and realized Trevor cradled her as he sat on the sofa. She had nearly passed out.

  “I need to—” she said, trying to get up. Trevor held her in place as the world spun.

  “Just a minute,” Trevor reassured her. “You’re okay. This will be okay.”

  But it wasn’t. The police thought she was the killer. As she tried to wr
ap her mind around the news (which it determinedly stamped “return to sender” each and every single time), Cam handed her a glass of juice. Orange juice.

  Benoit had been shot.

  Orange juice. Shooting. Orange juice. Shooting.

  She stared at that glass, locked on the color, lost in the memories of drinking juice Saturday night, the night the jeweler was murdered. Drinking the juice and then feeling strange, and having such terrible dreams about shooting . . . Sal. Odd voices piped into her memory, voices she recognized, but had thought were a part of her warped imagination, until now. When she looked up, she realized Cam had said, “She needs to eat, dammit, she’s never done this.”

  “She has eaten,” Trevor answered, words which might as well have had a big comic strip bubble above them with “back the fuck off” in all caps.

  She stared at the orange color of the juice and pieces of memory fell back into chronological order; it hadn’t been a dream. She should have suspected the next morning when she had a gun in her hand, should have wondered a little more about the cotton mouth. She’d been roofied: the date-rape drug. She’d been given just enough of a dose to make her compliant. Enough to fuck with her memory, so that she’d think it was all a dream. That she had had a premonition of the murder before she read the details of the jeweler murder in the paper. She had thought she’d been coming down with the crazy, the way her Aunt V’rai had, able to see things ahead of time.

  “I’m okay, Cam. Benoit’s in Baton Rouge?” He nodded. “You go see him. See how he’s doing. We’ll be headed that direction as soon as I can arrange stuff.”