Charmed and Dangerous (25 page)

“Seriously. We both know you could have kicked me out of your truck whenever you wanted. You disarmed me in a split second.”

“First,” he said, “I
tried
to kick you out of my truck, and then people were shooting at us. I have a real aversion to being shot at, and it was easier to keep going. Once we hit the lake, I figured I was all in, whether I liked it or not.”

“Bullshit.” She cocked her head, waiting. When he didn’t answer, she gave him the stink eye, the evil look she’d mastered when she wanted to convey to Roy that she hadn’t believed excuses one through twelve he’d given her for skipping school.

“Look, Bobbie Faye. I’m sure the bank’s exterior surveillance cameras caught you getting into my truck and us taking off together. When you said that they thought you’d robbed the bank, I knew they would assume I was an accessory. I figured I’d better help you get whatever was stolen back and catch the real thieves to clear my own name.”

“Hmph.” She looked away from him, wondering how much of that she really bought, and honestly not knowing the answer. Everything he said made sense, and he said it with just the right amount of annoyance and earnestness to be believable. In fact, it was such a perfect mix, he was so unflapped throughout this whole ordeal, he said everything so matter-of-factly, he couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.

“Or,” he said, giving her a wolfish grin, “maybe I just liked your shirt.”

She looked down at the remaining
SHUCK ME, SUCK ME
part of her T-shirt and a blush rose from her chest and warmed her face and man, it was a bitch not to have something handy to hurl at his head. She glared at him and he grinned that freakishly sexy grin, and she
really
wanted to bop him, because she’d had more than she could stand of stupid come-on lines and dumb-ass trying-to-get-laid grins in her lifetime,
and then she saw by the warmth in his eyes that he meant it. There was something genuine there, something real and sexy as hell, and a connection between them that her body was whooping in delight over, and damn, but a man who could make her feel hot and bothered on a nightmare day like this maybe should get a couple of points in the benefit-of-the-doubt column, in spite of her suspicions.

“I think I liked you better when I hated you,” she said, and Trevor laughed.

Cam calculated that it had been a little over four hours since he’d seen Bobbie Faye on the bank of the lake, and three hours since the rig had blown. There were a helluva lot of places she could get to in three hours. Especially in south Louisiana. Lake Charles emptied into small bayous, some of which wound toward Lake Prien, and then, south of that, there were more bayous and canals, and then Moss Lake, and ultimately Calcasieu Lake, which had shipping channels and bayous winding to the Gulf.

His radio headset crackled and Benoit popped on the line.

“Any news?” Cam asked.

“If by ‘any’ you want to include every crank phone call we’ve had sighting Bobbie Faye, then yeah.”

“How many?”

“So far, Collier just counted thirty-six hundred, seventy-three. From all over the state. Either she’s cloned herself—”

“For the love of God, don’t even suggest that.” Cam motioned the pilot to push on in a southerly sweep. “Any word from the roadblocks?”

“Yeah. You’re a sonofabitch for ordering it during the festival, according to a few festival-goers. That one’s from my mom, in case you’re curious.”

“Great.”

“No word on the brother, yet,” Benoit continued, “or the niece. The FBI are stonewalling me. The only good news is we have a fraction of news footage from when the FBI picked the kid up from school. Definitely a guy in a suit, but
no one got them getting in a car. There wasn’t much press there at that point yet—that’s not the major flashpoint, I guess, so it was more second-unit types. They weren’t allowed on school property and had set up in front of the school and he must have parked in the back. We’re sending this over to the FBI now to make sure they identify him as one of their own.”

“But right now, they’re not saying whether or not they even have her?”

“Right. As for Roy, a couple of drunks think they saw him leave with a Dora Bernadina, who is married to a roughneck, Jimmy. Jimmy’s been out on the rigs for the last month, but came in this morning, and nobody’s seen him or Dora and they’re not answering their door.”

“Get a warrant, get in there, make sure they’re not there. Check to see if they’ve gotten on a plane or bus or whatever.”

While they talked, the pilot swooped low and Cam surveyed the canals and woods for any sign of Bobbie Faye. This wasn’t a needle in a haystack. This was a molecule in the ocean.

He realized Benoit had said something, and he focused again.

“I said,” Benoit repeated, “you should probably know the Professor’s acting all weird and shit.”

“How weird?”

“Freaking out. Saying he doesn’t want his attorney, babbling all sorts of strange conspiracy theories; something about Napoleon figured in one which never did make sense. He’s either scared out of his mind or losing it.”

“You put him in that private cell?”

“Yeah. Vicari makes a pass in there every fifteen minutes.”

“Can you interview him again? Without Dellago?”

“I’ll try, if he’ll just quit crying. And assuming Dellago isn’t still hovering around here.”

Ce Ce’s positive energy matrix was falling apart.

“People, if you have to go to the bathroom, you’ll have to
wait until I put someone in your place. Do not . . . I repeat, do not leave your position. You have no idea how much damage you can do.”

She looked around the room and knew she was going to have to go for more drastic measures than the energy matrix. They’d been at it for several hours, eating and going to the bathroom in shifts, and still there was no good news. Nothing about Bobbie Faye. Nothing about Stacey. The customers were trying their best, but the cold hard truth was, they were tired of staying in one position for such a long period at a time.

Of course, there was the extra little helping of crazy with a now-unconscious Social Services worker.

“Ce Ce,” Monique said, as she took the woman’s two legs. “Next time you decide to knock someone out, pick someone smaller.”

Ce Ce grunted, having taken the woman’s arms. The social worker easily weighed two hundred pounds, and though Ce Ce was fairly well over that mark herself, she hadn’t fully appreciated just how much work moving the woman might be. They dragged her to the back supply room where Ce Ce had a cot they could heft her onto, assuming they had any heft left by the time they got back there.

“I think you’ve been around Bobbie Faye too long,” Monique continued. “You think this is normal.”

She might have a point with that one.

“What are you going to do with her when she wakes up?”

Ce Ce was wondering if she’d knocked out the wrong person.

“I don’t know, honey,” she snapped at Monique. “Since she drank almost the whole glass, I’m just hoping she wakes up.”

Monique jerked her reddish eyebrows up at Ce Ce.

“Well, honey, you never know how this stuff is going to affect some people. I thought for sure she’d have been out cold by the second swallow. I’ve never had someone make it through a whole glass before.”

“I’m hoping you have a plan.”

“Right now, Monique, I’ve got two hands full of social worker, fifty customers out there doing the pee pee dance because I can’t substitute people fast enough, and my girl is running around in the swamps, destroying half of the state. I haven’t quite worked out a full plan yet. Give me a minute.”

Well, ma’am, that $300 warranty does cover all acts of God, but we couldn’t possibly afford to cover acts of Bobbie Faye. I’m sorry.

—salesperson Amanda Eschete to customer

The helicopter’s radio crackled in Cam’s headset. He heard Jason’s call sign announce and then Jason’s excited patter.

“Head to Bobbie Faye’s birthday, and I can give you some news.”

And with that, the radio went silent again. Cam stared at the radio and suddenly guessed that Jason had looked up Bobbie Faye’s birthday—June eleven—so Cam flipped to channel eleven.

“I caught something else,” Jason said once Cam arrived at the channel and hailed him. “They’ve ordered an airboat.”

“The Fibbies?”

“Yep,” Jason said, his voice lowering. “I heard they were putting down at Sabine’s Landing.”

Sabine’s was at the northern tip of Calcasieu Lake, and about three miles southwest of where Cam was currently searching. He closed his eyes, picturing the vast lake that overlapped the Sabine National Forest and the countless rivers
and bayous which spilled out into the Gulf. To the east, there were more rivers and then another large lake, appropriately named Grand Lake. He remembered his childhood, sitting in a bateau, fishing back in hidden canals. Never seeing a soul for hours and sometimes days at a time.

If the Fibbies found them first in that vast, nearly uninhabited sprawl of lakes and woods and bayous, they could put a bullet in Bobbie Fay and Cormier and no one would ever know where to find them.

“Where’s Ol’ Landry?” he asked Jason, and he heard a slight inhalation.

“You’re not thinking of sending him after them, are you?”

“You know a better tracker in that area with his own airboat?”

“But Cam. He can’t stand the police.”

“He hates the Feds more, especially in his backyard.”

“Well, he hates Bobbie Faye more than the Feds.”

True. Old Man Landry was something of a legend in the swamps. Some people said he had the
eye
. That he could see things that weren’t possible to see. Cam believed there was something more logical behind it. (He didn’t listen to the rumors of magical insight.) He had seen the old crank work firsthand and concluded his so-called
eye
was born of a well-honed ability to observe little details, to ferret out what others weren’t saying by tuning into their body language. Cam had hunted and fished a couple of times with the old man, which hadn’t been easy, but Cam had been determined to learn from the best. On his good days, Landry was as welcoming as a porcupine wearing a vest of rusty razor blades.

He never had any good days.

Jason broke into Cam’s thoughts, asking, “Did you ever find out why she shot him? Or why he didn’t press charges?”

“No. But find him. Tell him what’s up and ask him to track the Feds and keep me posted.”

“And Bobbie Faye?”

Was this going to be one of the dumbest things he ever
did? Or the smartest? No clue. He knew that Landry had trapped and tracked in places around Calcasieu Lake where few people had ever ventured. The man knew that area better than God.

“He owes me. Tell him not hurting Bobbie Faye would even us up.”

“Is he big on paying his debts?” Jason asked, and Cam knew it was a question born more from liking Bobbie Faye than it was questioning Cam’s authority or judgment.

“I have no idea.”

Bobbie Faye found herself amused at the look of surprise on Trevor’s face.

“I promise. It’s not even worth two whole dollars.”

“You called it a tiara when you were on the phone.”

“Right,” she said. “It’s just one of those family jokes, handed down from mother to daughter. I don’t even know how far back it went, but one of my great-great-granddads made it for his daughter and it’s just been passed down.”

“So it has no jewels, no gold, no silver?”

“Nada. It’s actually kinda rusty. I need to have it sealed.”

She watched him process this information, struggling to hide his incredulity. Was he disappointed? For himself? Or just stunned, as she’d been, at what felt like a completely insane task?

“I know,” she said, before he could formulate a question, “it makes no sense.”

“Maybe it has some sort of historical value?”

“I don’t see how,” she said, and they fell silent. The trolling motor hummed as they eased through the shallow bayou.

“Why go to that sort of trouble, then?” she asked him. “I mean, if it’s simply historical significance, the kidnapper could have waited until I wore it at the parade and swiped it then. It’s not like I’m sporting bodyguards for the thing while I’m moving through the crowds. It would have been much simpler.”

“True,” he mused, easing them around rotted tree stumps protruding from the still, black water.

“So something made getting it right now a priority. Since the kidnapper wanted me to bring it to him, and there was someone in the bank waiting to rob me of it—”

“Wait,” he interrupted. “You didn’t say before they were specifically waiting for you.”

“I hadn’t had a chance to think about it. But I think they were. Which probably means some sort of double-cross.”

She turned to look out over the woods they were slowly passing. Her purse was still in her lap, and she’d eased her hand in there as she’d been talking, resting her palm on the Glock he’d given her earlier, one of the ones taken from Alex’s storage shed. If he was a part of the double-cross, would he try to dump her now? Or wait until he had the tiara?

“You don’t need to shoot me, Bobbie Faye,” he said, low, quiet, the words falling softly between them. “I’m not after the tiara.”

“Did I just say what I was thinking out loud? Or do you have some sort of microphone in my head? Because, seriously, it’s pretty messy in there and I’d like to clean up first if there are going to be visitors.”

He shook his head. She wasn’t sure if it was from amusement or confusion. Still, she held the gun.

“No, it was a natural thing for you to think. I’m here, I’m helping you, and you know I could have left at any point, especially after the truck went into the lake. So I don’t blame you.” He watched her a moment. “Of course, that’s what any good criminal mind would do right now, try to gain your trust, so you’re just going to have to decide if I’m here because I’m trying to help you or because I’m double-crossing you.”

She considered his calm demeanor, the way he looked her directly in the eyes, the way he never faltered in the tedious navigation of the bayou in spite of the fact that his life was on the line.