Charmed and Dangerous (28 page)

“You need to back up,” Cormier warned. “You want to live? You back way the hell up.”

With that, the door slammed shut and the bolts cracked into place, the metal sound echoing in the utterly silent swamp. Cam saw guns aimed at him from the windows framing the door and he stepped back. There were sounds of arguing from inside the shack (no surprise there) and the guns moved away from the window. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign.

Cam backed about thirty yards away to the cover of the larger cypress and water oaks. His SWAT team had arrived and were waiting at that perimeter.

He turned to the SWAT team leader, wanting a plan to take the cabin without killing everyone inside, and without letting the FBI get their hooks into Bobbie Faye or Cormier.

Then the shack exploded.

Dial 1-B-O-B-B-I-E-F-A-Y-E to report a sighting or a disaster. Please note this line is not for making wagers.

—memo from Homeland Security.

Cam saw the ball of fire, the metal splintering into a million pieces of shrapnel that impaled in the trees and limbs and dirt in every direction. Black smoke boiled out of what had been the building where Bobbie Faye had stood, alive, breathing, not five minutes earlier. Blood drummed in his ears. He ran for the burning debris, blinking through the acrid smoke and the fire charring the remnants of the siding when members of the SWAT team grabbed him and carried him backwards to safety.

He didn’t want to be safe.

He wanted to dig into that debris and pull the burning wood away with his bare hands and find her, because she was there. She was okay, she was breathing, he knew it. Because it simply couldn’t be any other way. He was going to find her, and when he finished yelling at her, which might take a few years, he was going to cuff her and put her in the hardiest cell he could find and goddammit, she was going to stay put and be safe, if it killed everyone else in the process.

Zeke stormed over to Cam, looking ever-so-slightly unhappy.
Losing-the-winning-lottery-ticket unhappy. Cam wasn’t sure what Zeke was going on about, and frankly didn’t care. He kept staring at the fire, the black remains of the walls and roof, until Zeke got up in his face.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Zeke shouted, “letting that bitch get in the way of—”

Before a single thought had time to form, Cam had Zeke by the throat, slamming him up against a tree. The SWAT team pulled him off Zeke and the agent carefully adjusted his fatigues.

“You’re lucky I don’t feel like doing the paperwork to get you canned,” Zeke said, and Cam laughed.

“Like I give a damn,” Cam said, turning back to the burning shack. A cold, numb sensation spread from the center of his body outward; he barely heard the SWAT leader use one of their satellite phones and call for CSI.

Bobbie Faye stumbled down a spiraling staircase, the burning shack now two stories above her. The near absolute darkness was disorienting and heaven knew she was already winging it on the coherent-meter, and even though she was attempting rational thought, she was pretty sure she’d already pinged over into the “losing your mind” red zone. She was a little suspicious that sanity had taken a header off a cliff right about the time Alex shuffled them into the hidden staircase and threw the delay-timer for the explosion.

Trevor descended in front of her and she kept a hand on his shoulder for balance, since Alex was always two turns ahead of them and he was the only one with a flashlight. Her mind raced and dashed and slalomed from emotion to emotion, hitting desperation every other step.

How in the hell could Cam have not gone to find Stacey? He loved that kid. Then again, she’d thought he had loved her, too, but that didn’t stop him from destroying her sister and niece’s life when he arrested Lori Ann. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the reality that he hadn’t tried to save her niece; that he hated her so much, he’d rather have her in jail than have Stacey alive. There was something crushing
in that realization, and she tried to push it to the back of her mind, but it skipped up front again as they kept descending into utter darkness. Some part of her had thought he still loved her. They’d argued horribly, they’d broken up, they’d moved on, right? Right. But something burned in the center of her chest when she realized he was truly over her. Past whatever they had been together. There was still some little part of her that had thought he’d eventually come to his senses, see how much he’d betrayed her, and want her back. Really want
her,
not some quiet, proper facsimile.

She could hear Alex’s voice echo off the curved stairwell, but she couldn’t distinguish exactly what he was saying when Trevor responded, “Salt dome? You’re kidding. Here?”

They finally spilled onto a level floor, and she fell. Trevor caught her, and held her for a beat longer than she expected. He rubbed the back of her neck gently, and bent, whispering, “You okay?” She nodded against his cheek as a light snapped on, illuminating a large room. It was probably about thirty by forty feet in size, with a long wall of monitors, and two other exits on opposing walls.

Trevor checked his watch.

“Twenty minutes, Bobbie Faye.”

“Where the hell are we?”

Alex clicked on monitor after monitor, creating a three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage of the burning shack, obviously from cameras set up in the swamp. She didn’t fully grasp how worried she’d been until she saw Cam alive and conferring with his SWAT team. She exhaled when she saw him, then heard Alex’s derisive laugh.

“No, Bobbie Faye, I didn’t blow up your boyfriend, though that sure as hell was a missed opportunity,” Alex said.

“Ex-boyfriend,” she corrected, and when she saw the gleam in his eyes, she held her hand up and said, “Don’t even start.”

“Aw,
chère,
I was just going to welcome him to the club. Glad he made it in alive. We should have trophies or something.”

“I repeat, Alex, where the hell are we?”

“This is a long-forgotten back entrance to a salt dome. The property changed hands a bunch of times and a better access and offices were built on the other end when it was modernized. And since no one was even aware this entrance was here—”

“Damn,” she said. “No wonder the Feds never could figure out how you’d get away.” She appraised his satisfied grin, knowing all too well how much he prided himself on strategy. “But, you just blew it up. Are you nuts?”

“He did it to buy us time, Bobbie Faye,” Trevor said, and she looked from Trevor to Alex. They clearly had come to some sort of appreciation of each other. Which annoyed the living hell out of her.

“If he bought us time, it was a nice side benefit. Alex thinks about Alex first,” she said to Trevor, then turned to Alex. “Like, if you blow it up, they won’t find evidence of you having been here, and maybe won’t even find this room. You could wait a fair amount of time, build another cabin above this, and be right back in business.”

“Now, Bobbie Faye, I’m truly hurt that you don’t think I have an altruistic heart.”

“Hmph. I’d be impressed, Alex, with proof that you actually had a heart at all, much less an altruistic one.”

“Ouch,
chère
. That hurts.”

She looked from him around to the other men, and for the first time since she’d arrived at the shack, really focused on the fact that the geeky boys were there, though they were tied up and held between Alex’s guards. She drew her gun on the biggest of the geeky boys and said, “I want to know what the hell was going on in that bank, and I want to know now.” She reached over and pulled his gag from his mouth, and he flutter-danced, ducking down and wobbled. If spastic motion was a defense against bullets, the kid was going to be amazingly safe.

“I don’t know!” he claimed.

“What’s your name?”

“Ben.”

“Well, Ben, I suggest you look over there at that man.” She nodded toward Alex. “He’s a gunrunner, kid. He made sure I knew how to shoot. I shoot better than anyone you’re ever going to meet, so unless you really want to sing soprano for the rest of your life, you’d better talk.”

The kid looked over to Alex, who nodded and said, “Second stupidest thing I ever did.”

Bobbie Faye would have sent him a laser hot glare, but she wanted Ben to break, fast, and intimidation was all she had at this point.

“All I know,” he gasped, “is that the Professor said we had to be there as backup. He said he had to get something, and he thought someone might try to stop him. We were supposed to be there in case he got into trouble and we were the drivers.”

“What did he have to get?” she asked, and the boy shook his head. She aimed the gun at his crotch and he squirmed.

“Honest, lady, I really don’t know! He was really weird about the whole thing, and we’re just his teaching assistants, and he said we had to help out on a project. We were supposed to get an extra week’s pay if we helped! He said if we got separated, to meet up here, and he gave us a map. That’s all I know.”

They came
here
.

She whipped around, lunging toward Alex when Trevor scooped her up from behind and held her back. He’d also quickly disarmed her, which was really starting to piss her off.

“The cops will hear the gunshot,” he said, by way of explanation, when she threw him an acid glare. “Don’t kill your lead time.”

When she turned back to Alex, he was still shaking his head. “No, Bobbie Faye, no. I told you, I didn’t know that’s what was going on. I had a call from a buddy who said he knew a guy that might need to hide a while. The pay was good, so I figured, why not? I had no idea it was something involving you.”

“What buddy? What guy?”

“You know. A guy. Someone you don’t know. Anonymous.”

“Why in the hell should I ever believe you, Alex? You lie for a living.”

“Bobbie Faye, do you think that ever, in any universe, I’d want to have to deal with you again? I’m seated firmly in the crazy, but not stupid section,
chère.
”

She was about to retort when Trevor turned her back toward the monitors.

“I think we have a bigger problem,” he said, pointing out just what Cam was doing.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but even though you really like the governor of Louisiana, you cannot drop a civilian behind enemy lines. No sir, not even if she
could
take out the whole country.

—an anonymous senior aide to the president

Cam stared into the canopy of a tree, trying to ground himself in some semblance of reality. The noises from the crackling of the fire behind him and the smell of burning metal and charred grass and the chatter from the SWAT team and the bitching of the FBI and the thumping of the blades as various news helicopters flew overhead all blended and swirled, becoming a cacophony, fueling a consuming rage. He needed to do something to distract himself from the idea of Bobbie Faye being dead, because he simply wouldn’t let it be true.

He stared into the tree. Ignored everyone yammering at him. Ignored his men trying to get him off the site, into the helo, and back to the station. He was not leaving.

Not until he found her.

And maybe on some subconscious level he couldn’t have explained, he knew there was something odd about the tree.

He needed to find a way into this mess, a way to start wrapping his mind around what just happened. He needed
something on which to focus, and whatever it was that had caught his eye beckoned him, and he couldn’t place why or what it was.

Until he suddenly did.

There was a camera mounted up in the tree. It was inconspicuous at first, disguised as a squirrel’s nest. He stepped closer and realized he probably wouldn’t have ever seen it if the explosion hadn’t blown debris against it, knocking some of the “nest” part away, exposing the waterproof box and a housing for the lens. He turned and scoured the trees around the shack, and found an unusual number of squirrel nests at about the exact same height and size, all positioned in a pattern that nearly ringed the shack.

He circled the cinders and crossed the pier until he found a post topped with what had looked like a birdhouse. With a lens where the bird entrance should be.

Huh.

He scanned the burning shack and hope seeped into the corners of his mind, shushing the rage a little, pulsing with the blood rushing through his ears.

Just one boat tied to the pier. He thought back, remembering seeing at least two or three other people behind Bobbie Faye and Trevor, but he thought he’d glimpsed more. Could that many people have arrived here in that small of a boat? Not impossible. Only, there were no other footprints around the cabin except for Bobbie Faye’s and Cormier’s.

Odd.

So, how did the other people get into the shack?

Maybe he’d imagined other people. Maybe there really were only two others and that boat was plenty big enough.

Maybe he should quit thinking and do something.

He retraced Bobbie Faye and Trevor’s footprints to their bateau.

“What are you looking for?” Zeke demanded. “We already know they were in there.”

Cam didn’t answer him. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Just that there was something else here, and he had to find it. And right then, he really wanted to get rid of
Zeke. He must have given away his disdain, lost a grip on his normal poker face.

“I’m not leaving,” Zeke said, “until I have Cormier in a body bag.
If
he’s dead. Or put him in one, if he’s not.”

Cam held a tight rein on his expression. This contradicted the Captain’s information, but that wouldn’t be the first time the FBI had an agenda in one department that the other didn’t know about. It did, however, make him even more curious about Cormier.

“You sound like you believe he’s alive.”

“I never underestimate Cormier,” Zeke said. “I can’t even begin to count the number of times he was supposed to be dead. I won’t believe it until there are body parts on a morgue table.”

“So, if the man is so good at what he does, why do you think he needs someone like Bobbie Faye?”

Zeke appeared to be weighing whether or not to disclose more, then he shrugged, as if it didn’t much matter now. “We think Bobbie Faye had something valuable he wanted.”