Charmed and Dangerous (20 page)

She quickly dialed Nina and watched on TV as Nina answered her cell phone.

“Honey girl, am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

“Yep,” Nina said, cracking her whip. “The odds on the betting got so high against them, Claude and Jemy decided they could make a bundle if they could prove the betters wrong. I can only do so much with my whip. And with live TV, I can’t pull out any bigger arsenal.”

“Can’t that whip thing puncture a tire with a really good crack at it?”

“I tried. Have you seen those tires? They’re off-road, which makes them a lot stronger than your basic wheels. I gotta go, Ceece. I’ve got pilferers.”

Nina hung up and Ce Ce watched the aerial coverage on the TV as Nina cracked her whip again to disperse would-be thieves (one man of a particularly large nature holding up one of Bobbie Faye’s pieces of lingerie—a satin teddy—as if trying to judge whether or not it would fit him). Meanwhile, the two four-wheel-drive trucks attempted to use their winch cables to pull the trailer back to an upright position.

It was clearly not working.

“Monique,” Ce Ce called, and the redhead waddled toward her, her freckles a calm pale pink. “I need the jar on top of the green cabinet back there.”

“The one with the red wormy-looking things?”

“Yep, that’s the one. It’ll help increase the positive flow, and I think we’re gonna need it.”

“You ever planning to tell me what those things are?”

“Honey, you don’t want to know. Just trust me on this.”

Monique nodded and hurried to the back to get the jar.

Bobbie Faye throttled the motor to its maximum speed and kept rubbernecking back at the other boats.

They were gaining.

Trevor was making another call when the motor sputtered and spit and backfired. Apparently, the boat had not read the “escapee contract,” obliging it to work perfectly.

They heard gunfire, coming from the gunrunners. The bullets fell short, but at the rate Trevor and Bobbie Faye’s boat was slowing down, that was only a temporary reprieve.

Trevor snapped the cell phone closed.

“Hey Mr. ‘I have a plan.’ In case I don’t live to tell you? Your plan sucks.”

He ignored her as he jumped to the controls and then to check the fuel line. Bobbie Faye opened the electrical panels.

“Don’t touch anything!” he commanded, and Bobbie Faye hmphed.

“Just who the hell does he think he is?” she grumbled while she poked around in the electrical box. “I’m the one who slowed down the other boats by sabotaging them, I’m the one who got this boat started, I’m the one who shot the tie rope”—she jiggled a couple of wires, revving up into her rant—“I’m the one who’s going to fix the damned motor so we don’t get shot by the stupid gunrunners he stupidly decided to stupidly steal from, the stupid man.”

She thought fondly of the moment earlier that morning when she shot his truck and he had gaped at her, furious, and she wished she could go backwards and shoot it a couple more times, just because. Damned man, always thinking he knew what the right thing to do was.

There was a red wire loose from a connection, which was obviously the problem. As she fiddled with it, the boat bounced across the tops of the lake’s waves, jostling her. She stumbled a bit and the wire connected to something and
wham,
the boat surged forward, the motor maxed out.

“I fixed it!”

She looked at Trevor, who was trying to steer the boat, and nothing was responding—not the steering, not the throttle—
nada
. He gaped at her.

“I didn’t fix it?” she asked, her voice a whole lot smaller.

“What the hell did you touch?”

“The ‘fuck up everything’ wire, apparently.”

Bullets stitched the water just behind them.

Lovely. Just freaking lovely. How could this day get any worse?

Bobbie Faye looked ahead to the shoreline and boggled at what she saw there.

No. No no no no no no no.

There, straight ahead of them in one of the man-made canals dug at the perimeter of the lake was an oil rig on a floating barge. A big oil rig, with a huge crane on board to off-load barrels of product onto waiting barges.

She tapped Trevor, who was still focused on trying to fix the throttle.

“Are those . . . pilings I see?” She pointed to the necklace of huge concrete posts sticking up from the surface of the lake in front of the barge.

They were headed directly at these posts, their boat skimming the surface of the lake at more than sixty miles an hour. Just fast enough to smash into smithereens and not leave anything identifiable behind.

Roy flashed in her mind, then Stacey, and stupidly, the fact that she was going to die in a
SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW
T-shirt for all of the state to see.

So this is what it’s like to know you’re gonna die, she thought, watching as Trevor jumped forward, grabbing a long rope out of the satchel of goods they’d taken from the gunrunner’s shack. He seemed to be frantically tying knots.

“It’s not gonna do you much good to tie me up now.”

“Don’t give me ideas.”

Bobbie Faye looked over her shoulder and saw the gunrunners slowing down, gaping at them like they were crazy. Beyond the gunrunners, the WFKD and state police helicopters flew toward them.

“Great. I’ll blow up on the news. At least they won’t see the shirt.”

“Oh, with your luck, I’m sure they’ll see the shirt.”

“Thank you so freaking much. I’m going to be dead in a moment. Let me have my fantasy, okay?”

Trevor hung one of the satchels over her, then shoved what he could from the second one into her purse.

“Stand here. We’ve got one shot. Hold onto me, because I won’t be able to hold onto you. Got it?”

Well, no, she didn’t have it. Not really. Then she saw him start to swing the rope in circles and realized he’d made a lasso and was going to try to nab the crane on the oil rig. But their boat wasn’t going to fit through the pilings anyway, and they weren’t going to get close enough to the crane to reach it, though she admired him for trying.

She held on tight. Partially because she just couldn’t process anything else, and partly because if she had to die, she might as well get to feel his back beneath her arms. She tried to close in tightly to him, to make herself as small as possible and stay out the way of his swinging the lasso, and there were the pilings, right there, a few feet ahead.

Trevor stepped on the side of the boat with a sudden force, tilting it hard, and the motion dipped one side down into the water.

Shoving the other side up.

At that angle, their width scraped past the first row of pilings just as—

Trevor released the lasso.

It arced . . . slicing across the impossibly blue sky, hanging there for a thousand years . . . moving toward the crane . . .

“Hold on!”

The rope snagged the crane and Trevor held the rope as it snapped taut, lifting them out of the boat, the momentum swinging them forward as the boat raced out from under them.

Bobbie Faye strained to hold onto him, her arms burning with the effort. As they glided through the air, she heard his heart jackhammer in his chest, heard him cursing under his breath, smelled the aftershave he must’ve used that morning.

The boat kept going, racing forward.

Their momentum swung them toward the rig.

The boat rocked back down into the water.

Just as her feet touched the deck of the rig, the boat
smashed into the next set of pilings, exploding. The rig’s deck jerked and undulated.

Bobbie Faye only had a second to see the horrified shock of the crane operator and the worker on the barge.

“Life rafts!” the barge worker yelled, and pointed. He and the crane operator leapt into one as she and Trevor dove into another. Behind them, flames from the exploding boat licked at the oil rig as Trevor fired up the motor on the life raft and raced up the canal, away from the lake and the rig.

There are five grown men in the waiting room all experiencing shortness of breath, anxiety attacks, dizziness, hives, and one of them has curled into a fetal position, is sucking his thumb, and wants me to call his mommy.

—Dr. Pam Dumond to RN Jennara B. on the influx of patients during the last Bobbie Faye disaster.

The state police helicopter rocked hard from the rig explosion; metal shrapnel whizzed outward from the former rig-turned-scrap heap, and a rolling fireball boiled upwards a hundred feet. Cam’s pilot regained control, spun around, and faced the lake. There, in front of him, was a forty-foot roiling blaze feeding on the oil from the rig, mirroring the knot in his stomach.

His mind, at first, was a blessed blank.

He stared at the flames, stared at the destruction, and everything was quiet as the color leached out of the world and there was nothing. No feeling, no warmth, no sound, no color. Then, one by one, images of Bobbie Faye ticked into his memory. If he was the kind of man who let his subconscious lead him around, he’d have noticed how he hadn’t been able to conjure up one single image of her angry or wild-eyed with fury or giving him a difficult time. Instead,
he would have noticed that every image that clicked past was of a moment he had enjoyed, of her smile, or the way she smelled or snuggled into the crook of his arm. But he wasn’t that kind of man, and he closed his eyes, pushed the images away. He wouldn’t even let himself think about Bobbie Faye. There just wasn’t anything to think about; that had been a part of his life that was long over, final, finished.

He had a hard time feeling the radio switch, and he fumbled the mic, his fingers numb, why are they numb? Why is there no sound? And he struggled to remember how to contact Jason, the words robotic as he told Jason what had happened, and to dispatch the emergency crews trained to handle this kind of disaster.

There was nothing to think about. Nothing.

His helicopter hovered a safe distance from the oil rig until the radio crackled with a call from the news helicopter; they’d switched to the same frequency Cam was on in order to coordinate efforts.

“We’ve got something!” the cameraman shouted over the airwaves. “Seriously, we got something. Y’all have to see this.”

Cam radioed back a landing zone suggestion and realized the FBI had been monitoring his frequency when they cut in and announced they’d be joining the party.

Bobbie Faye had felt the force from the blast before she actually heard it. Or, at least, that’s what she thought happened, because she never really heard anything. Of course, it was a little difficult to hear with her brain screaming
holy shit holy shit
as if it were trying to gold medal in the freak-out Olympics. The concussion threw Trevor forward, which knocked her down into the bottom of the life raft, and he sprawled on top of her for a long moment before he seemed to shake it off and pull himself up.

He motored them a decent distance away in the canal, a U-shaped affair which worked its way back toward the lake. She sat up and watched him try to tend to a wound in the back of his left thigh where a small, jagged piece of metal
protruded. Shrapnel from the oil rig, she supposed. He grimaced and made such a face and, for crying out loud, she’d had worse wounds in her own backyard. She yanked the metal out before he could say anything just to show him how unimportant the wound was.

“Sonofabitch!” he said, gritting his teeth and clamping his hands down, putting pressure on the gash.

“Oh, good grief. It’s not even bleeding.” She looked closer. “Much.” She looked closer still. There was an awful lot of red oozing out. “Ewwww. You really should do something about that,” she suggested, and then stepped back in case the “something” which occurred to him would be to toss her out of the life raft.

Trevor throttled the life raft down to barely a crawl as he tried to observe the wound, but he couldn’t quite see it, from its position on the back of his upper thigh.

“Oh, fine, give me your knife,” she said.

“Like hell.”

“To cut your shirt for bandages, idiot.”

Trevor pulled up the small trolling motor attached to the life raft, and pulled out his knife and cut his own shirt. They drifted for a few minutes. She crossed her arms, frustrated that he couldn’t get to the wound and wouldn’t ask for help.

He finally gave in and reluctantly handed her the shirt material as a bandage. She barely resisted the
neener neener neener
comment perched at the tip of her tongue as she expertly folded the material and tied off the bandage.

Trevor examined it thoroughly.

“It worries the hell out of me that the one thing you’re good at is tying bandages.”

The sound of shotgun shells ratcheting into chambers echoed off the trees around them.

“That ain’t all you got to worry ’bout,” said a voice behind Bobbie Faye.

“Y’all show your hands,” another man’s voice instructed, and she and Trevor raised them as the life raft bobbed gently in the water.

“Oh,
hell,
” she muttered just to Trevor, as she had yet to turn and see the men behind her.

“I’ll handle this,” he whispered. “If it gets bad, swim for the rig. Cops should be there by now.”

It wasn’t going to help. She’d never make it to the rig; she’d heard enough to know this was a helluva lot worse situation than Trevor thought.

It was everything Cam could do to keep his hands off the controls of the state police helicopter and land faster. He leapt out before the runners hit the ground and sprinted to the news helicopter, meeting Zeke and one of his FBI colleagues halfway there.

“Detective Moreau, this is special agent Wellesly,” Zeke explained as they reached the news helicopter together to find the cameraman setting up a playback monitor.

“I’m telling y’all, I think I got them on tape.”

The cameraman pushed the tape into the player, fast forwarding until he found where his footage of the boat chase started. He tapped the screen, showing the boat with Trevor and Bobbie Faye.

“I’m pretty sure this is them. I zoomed in here, but as you can see, we’re still a little too far away to get a crystal-clear image. This was when we started flying toward them.”