Charmed and Dangerous (16 page)

“So,” Cam asked, “you’re telling me that Bobbie Faye was the grand mastermind behind all of this?”

“Just a minute,” Dellago said, putting a beefy hand out in front of the Professor, stopping him from speaking. Professor Fred cringed. “Do we have a deal?”

“Oh, that all depends on just how convincing the Professor’s story is.”

Bear jaws loomed and filled Bobbie Faye’s vision until the entire world was reduced to bear teeth the size of the LSU stadium. She suddenly, completely, totally recanted her entire stance on never buying bear rugs on account of some stupid, cockamamie principle. Bear rugs for everyone! For your dog! Canary! Maybe car seats!

She slipped a little on the vine, nearly falling, catching herself as she reached the log just as the mama bear swiped at her. The abrupt swipe shifted the bear’s weight, jostling the log, which tilted and suddenly fell away from where it was anchored. Taking the bear with it. The bear and the log hit the ground with a thudding bounce, rolling away from where she hung on the vine until both were very still.

Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod
. She shuddered, nearly falling again, clinging to the vine with the last of her strength. She looked down as she felt Trevor catching the vine, holding it steady as she slowly eased down, arms shaking. She dropped the last few feet to the ground, and the mama bear didn’t move.

“She’s breathing,” he said, “but out cold.”

Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod
.

Trevor grabbed her hand and led her away, and she let him, what with her brain set on skipping through a few thousand more
ohmygods
. When they had gone a mile or so, Bobbie Faye knew she had to stop moving. Her body was doing the damnedest thing: it was shaking. Hard. Holy
fuck,
she’d almost been bear breakfast.

Trevor had stopped and was breathing harder than she’d seen him do so far that day, and she knew he wasn’t winded from his run; hell, he’d hardly broken a sweat. He was looking at her with a mixture of fury and awe.

“I don’t know if you’re fucking brave or just plain crazy,” he said, fury apparently winning.

“Yeah, that’s me. Crazy with a side order of nuts.”

“This isn’t fucking
funny
. You were almost killed.”

“By a
bear
!” She could feel herself rambling headlong into a sort of shocked hysteria and she couldn’t stop herself from waving her arms around. “I mean, I know south Louisiana has black bears, it’s one of the weird things about this state a lot of people don’t know, you know, that bears live here. Even at the salt mines around here, they have bears getting in and the bears are protected by law or something, and they climb the fence and the really fat ones sort of throw themselves over and thump to the ground and then everyone has to stay inside until the bear gets tired of rummaging for garbage and I know all of this and I know that they’re here and they’re dangerous and
did that help prepare me
? No.
No, it did
not. Because there it was! With the big! And the hairy! And the teeth! And the grrrrrrrrrrrrr!” She rubbed her arms, her voice rising. “And I am allergic to grrrrrrrrrrrrs!”

He looked away a moment, his jaw working in an effort not to laugh; he took a couple of deep breaths, then turned back to her. “That was very fast thinking, though.”

She was shaking so visibly now, she was sure he could see it, and the last thing she wanted was to lose it in front of this guy.

“I just,” she tried, swallowing to keep her voice from trembling, her voice pitching a little too high. “Well, it’s the Bobbie Faye hostage guarantee: we don’t let you get eaten by large mammals. Usually.”

She ended it with a small chuckle—lame, really—and she felt the shock of the morning rattling her, making her light-headed, and she thought she was in total control when Trevor pulled her into an embrace. She didn’t know why. She couldn’t understand what he was doing, but all of a sudden, she knew she wouldn’t be standing if he wasn’t holding her up, and instead of fighting him like she ought to be doing, just this once, she gave in. Just this once, she put her head down on his chest and let someone hold her and she cried. She wouldn’t have admitted to crying, and she’d have drop-kicked him into the next state if he said anything remotely mushy or condescending right then, because she, Bobbie Faye Sumrall, did not break down. She just didn’t.

He was quiet.

When her nerves settled, she stepped back and faced away from him, taking a moment to wipe the tears from her cheeks. When she turned to him again, he grimaced a little, then stepped forward and used the tail of his shirt to clean the mud from her cheeks. He seemed to take forever as she studied the concentration on his face, mesmerized by the scar just below his eye, well-faded now, noticing the slow rhythm of his breathing. It calmed her, this rhythm.

“You ready?” he asked when he was done. It was as if by silent agreement that the tears hadn’t happened.

“I was born ready.”

“Yeah, you and General Custer.”

They turned back toward the swampy edge of Lake Charles.

Cam watched Dellago aim a hard gaze at the Professor, and the Professor broke out in a sweat.

“Um, well, um,” the Professor squeaked, and then stopped and swallowed and fidgeted. “She, uh . . .” He glanced helplessly to Dellago, who simply increased the steeliness of the glare. “Uh, right. Um, she was kinda fed up, she said, with, um, her status in life. I was supposed to get the money and she was, um, going to watch, like an innocent bystander.”

“She was just going to watch you rob the bank with you being armed with the fake dynamite?”

“Uh, yes, and she made me bring the gun.” Cam noticed him struggle not to keep peering back at Dellago. “I was supposed to kidnap her so everyone would think she was innocent and then we’d split the money later.”

“So why didn’t you kidnap her?” Cam asked.

“She took over, see. I—I don’t know why. Then I slipped and she left me there.”

“Right. And you did all of this for her because? . . .”

Dellago intervened, saying, “You know how persuasive Ms. Sumrall can be, once she gets an idea.”

Yep, Cam thought, he knew
exactly
how persuasive she could be. But he also knew how smart she was.

“And how long have you known Ms. Sumrall, Professor?”

“Oh, uh. Um. Well. I’m not sure.”

“Round it, for me. A few months? Weeks? Days? A year?”

The Professor tried looking toward Dellago, then quickly faced away and proceeded to swallow, cough, and fidget. “Maybe, um, maybe about a year.”

“Really? And how did you meet Ms. Sumrall?”

“This isn’t important, Detective,” Dellago said, scraping back his chair.

“Of course it is. He wants to plead down, he needs to explain how he met her and how long she had this idea.”

“I—I—I. I met her at the festival,” the Professor said. “Uh, last year.”

“Oh, that was the year her sister had to stand in for her as Contraband Queen,” Cam said. As an aside to Dellago, “Since Ms. Sumrall had the flu.”

“Right! Right, that’s it,” the Professor said before Dellago had a chance to interject.

“And she came to you to do this because . . .”

“She, she trusted me, I guess. A beautiful woman like that, everyone’s always trying to take advantage of her. You know?”

Cam didn’t answer.

“So, so, see, she could tell I wasn’t the type to do that. I’m not exactly a ladies’ man. She needed help; she was very determined.”

“I think that’s enough,” Dellago said. “Do we have a deal?”

There was a brief knock on the door and Detective Benoit stuck his head inside. “Cam? You got a call you have to take.”

Cam excused himself to Dellago and the Professor and just as he reached for the door, he turned back to them.

“Oh, Professor. You ever heard of a guy named Trevor Cormier?”

The Professor blanched, swallowed repeatedly, and Cam thought he saw the man clamp his legs closed beneath the table. Finally, the Professor shook his head emphatically.

“Uh, no. I can’t remember meeting anyone by that name.”

Dellago watched Cam as Cam nodded solemnly, giving nothing away as he left the room.

One of the twins handed Ce Ce the private line again, and she was surprised to find Nina on the line.

“Aren’t you busy enough?” Ce Ce teased, and instantly regretted it when she heard Nina’s tone.

“I’m hearing some bad things.”

“What kind of bad? And from who?”

“Just my . . . contacts. In my modeling world.”

Ce Ce shuddered.

“I’m hearing there’s something B has that someone wants, and he’s going to kill her once he gets it.”

“What in the hell could that child have that anyone would care that much about? She’s perpetually broke!”

“I don’t know, and so far, neither do any of my contacts. Maybe if you called Cam? I know B is still furious with him, but—”

“I’ve already talked to him, honey, and he don’t know much more than us. There’s some guy with her Cam thinks means her harm.”

“The one she kidnapped?”

“That’s the same one she kidnapped? This guy that Cam thinks may get her killed?”

“That sounds like Bobbie Faye. Have you learned anything else?”

“Honey, all I know is what I’ve seen on TV. And that she came and got an advance on her paycheck to pay for her electricity to get turned back on.”

“On
this
trailer?”

“That’s what she said.”

“If she gets out of this alive, I’m going to kick her ass for not asking for help.”

“I think you’re gonna have to line up behind a few people, honey.”

“I’ve got to go, Ceece. The boys are getting restless over here. I think they’re determined to take another stab at the trailer.”

The Bobbie Faye protection charms are our biggest sellers.

—Eluki B., owner of the New Orleans Voodoo Jamorama

Once Cam had left the interrogation room, and before he could hear what Benoit had to say, his phone rang. After a moment on the phone with Ce Ce, he knew his suspicions were grounded.

When he hung up, Benoit spoke low, saying, “Got bad news. Kelvin called. The dogs? They lost her.”

Cam paused a moment and it took every ounce of willpower not to kick the wall.

Benoit glanced around them, making sure no one was paying undue attention. “They dead-ended downstream and Kelvin turned ’em upstream, but there’s a couple of gators sunning themselves and one of our guys spotted a mama bear who’s done pissed off and aiming for a fight. Kelvin said he doubted they got by that ol’ gal, and even if they did, he ain’t sending the dogs that way. He’s trying t’ go around her now and see if they can pick up the scent.”

Cam stared at the cinderblock wall, the industrial gray paint peeling in a few places. He could see why a lot of cops ended up smoking: it gave you something to do with your hands besides punching brick walls.

There were two things of value he’d learned from his quick interrogation with the Professor: one—the Professor was lying about when he’d met Bobbie Faye. She so loved the Contraband Days Festival, she would have dragged herself to the festival even if she’d been shot and was on her deathbed. Her sister had never substituted for her. Cam wasn’t entirely sure if Lori Ann had ever even gone to the festival. The second thing was that Bobbie Faye was just as good as dead. Someone high up in organized crime didn’t want her around. Dellago would only offer up Bobbie Faye if he was fairly sure she wasn’t going to be alive to rebut the Professor’s statement and tell whatever it was she knew that could harm them.

“So what was the deal asking him about Cormier?”

“The professor obviously doesn’t really know Bobbie Faye. We know Cormier was at that bank. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Cam pressed his forehead to his fist and leaned against the wall, buying a moment to think.

Bobbie Faye was marked for a kill from two, possibly three, different directions. There was the FBI, who couldn’t care less if she got in the way. There was whatever Dellago was up to, probably having something to do with the information Ce Ce had passed along. And that may or may not mean the man traveling with Bobbie Faye was out to kill her, as the FBI suggested.

Apparently one contract out on her life wasn’t challenging enough. And she was still running. To what, God only knew.

It occurred to him, just then, how much that summed up Bobbie Faye. She was always running. Running away.

Unbidden, he had a flash of her laughing, her long wild hair flying across her face as she grinned over her shoulder at him. He’d mentioned he might have to go into work that day instead of spending it with her. She’d grabbed his keys in a mock threat to toss them in his backyard, a wooded lot on a lake. He’d been joking, of course, and she’d known that, and was teasing back, and she ran through the house, impish and grinning and eyes sparkling.

She made him laugh. He’d grown up serious, rigid. Straight “A” student, class president, senator at LSU. Everything right and expected. But laughter—deep joy—was new to him. She had a way of looking at him as if he was the greatest gift in the whole world, and she couldn’t believe he was for her. She shrieked as he tried to catch her; he’d doubled back through the living room where he hurdled the coffee table and pinned her to the sofa. Only to discover she’d somehow hidden the keys and refused to tell where until he took her to bed.

He hadn’t needed a lot of convincing.

He remembered waking hours later to find her kneeling next to him, the light from the bedroom window casting a suffused glow over half of her face, the other half in shadow. She had an odd expression he couldn’t quite read, and when he asked her what she was thinking, she had shrugged, saying she was happy.

All gone. Everything. This woman, this person who used to be his best friend, who now hated him.

It shouldn’t have been that way.

He paced, ignoring Benoit’s amused grin until it grated.

“What?”

“You’re kicking yourself because she didn’t come to you for help.”

“Like hell. She’s insane, putting everyone in jeopardy, never asking for help. She’s pathologically incapable of accepting help. She’ll destroy everything before she’ll ask anyone, especially me. She’s doing this to herself and there’s no fucking reason for it.”