When a Man Loves a Weapon (10 page)

Riles shrugged. “Few minutes.” He slid his unhappy gaze back to Bobbie Faye. “Long enough.”

Cam started forward. No way was this prick going to give Bobbie Faye a hard time for something he’d done. She shook her head, putting a hand on his arm, digging her fingers in as a sign to let Riles’s smirk go, to let the implications go, that this was
her deal
. She’d handle it.

He felt the surge in his blood of
pissed-off boyfriend
and then the whiplash of the fact of how that wasn’t his job anymore. That’s not who he was to Bobbie Faye. Not yet. And he didn’t want to make whatever-the-hell-this-was worse for her, so he forced himself to check it at the gate, his teeth grinding against the desire to rip the guy a new one.

“Fine. He’s here because?”

Bobbie Faye glanced at him with those big green eyes, her expression resigned, annoyed, and about a hundred other things he knew intimately, and his palms itched to just pull her over to him and push away the world. That’s what he should be doing. If he hadn’t been such a fucking idiot in the first place and created the chasm that ripped them apart.

“He’s a friend of Trevor’s.” As if repeating the fact was an explanation. He scoured her with his
get to the point
glare. He had an entire repertoire of glares, and it haunted him just a little that the majority of them had been perfected on Bobbie Faye during their college years.

“Quit stalling.”

She seemed fascinated with the window drapes all of a sudden. “He’s supposed to be watching out for me. Trevor asked him to make sure I was safe while he had to work.”

The entire time she spoke, Riles fixed Bobbie Faye with a cold smile of icy dislike—or maybe even hatred—in his eyes. Cam loathed him pretty much instantly. And then Bobbie Faye’s full meaning hit him.

“You mean . . . Trevor got you a
baby
-sitter?”

“Apparently. Fido here was supposed to be more of a guard dog, and he’s enjoying the hell out of using that assignment to annoy the living fuck out of me.”

“Perks of the job,” Riles said, shrugging again.

“Are you gonna make those calls?” she asked, ignoring Riles, which only seemed to amuse him.

“You don’t have any contact with Trevor?” Cam asked the man.

It seemed to pain him to say no, but Riles shook his head. “Not since his first day. And before you ask, yes, I’ve tried checking with all of my old buddies and sources and
everything else. If I really thought he wasn’t in trouble, I’d have chained her”—he nodded toward Bobbie Faye—“to the floor and kept her at home, where it was much easier to do my job and shut her up at the same time.”

Bobbie Faye lunged forward and Cam blocked her from kicking the living crap out of Riles. “I’ve always heard Spec Ops people had death wishes,” Cam said, more to himself, and then he regretted it when she flinched beneath his hands; Trevor had been Spec Ops at some point before FBI. Cam did not need Bobbie Faye going all batshit crazy, zipping down the bunny path of hysteria.

“I’ll make some calls,” he told her. “Try not to kill Trevor’s friend in my house.”

“Mamma!” Stacey chimed. “Mamma mamma mammammammammmamma!”

Lori Ann held onto her five-year-old daughter who’d jumped up on the beginning of every word, and at the rate she was going, would be the first child to orbit the moon unassisted.

“Stacey,” Lori Ann laughed, “Stacey Stacey StaceyStaceyStaceyStaceyStacey!” And she jumped with her.

Tiger Stadium. Lori Ann’s eyes were nearly as wide as her five-year-old daughter’s. They stood a few yards away from the immense stadium, a new cobblestone path absolutely hell on her low kitten heels. She held Stacey’s hand as they crossed the street—Marcel had a VIP pass that allowed him to park next to the stadium—and she guided Stacey over to the newly, gorgeous renovated Mike the Tiger’s cage. Mike, who was just a big cub, really, lounged at the edge of his spacious pool, half in, half out, thoroughly sated and happy. How he wasn’t up, pacing, jittery with nerves with the noise of the crowds all over the various parking lots surrounding the stadium, Lori Ann just did not know, but she was glad he didn’t look too scary.

They were going to be pulling him around the football field in twenty-four hours.

She hoped like hell they had something like Tiger Xanax.
LSU games had been known to register on the Richter scale for the noise and pounding of fans’ feet, and the last thing she wanted to be around was a nervous tiger.

She watched her daughter, who now waved her little purple LSU pom-poms and wanted to do somersaults in her little LSU cheerleader outfit Marcel had bought for her. “No, honey,” Lori Ann cautioned. “There’s all kinds of crap in that grass that I don’t want you to wear.” People were barbequing all over the freaking place and dropping things and spilling things. “You’ll look like a walking condiment aisle.”

Whereupon Stacey started cheering for “Condomees Condomees” and every single family looked over at her as if she’d failed the “good mom” pop quiz.

“Y’all okay?” Marcel called, and she turned to see the bandy-legged man, short, kinda stumpy, as he moved around the big monster truck he’d tricked out with the Eye of the Tiger. She knew he was nervous—this was a big moment for his little fledgling company, getting to pull the tiger around in front of nearly ninety-three thousand people on the inside of the stadium, and of course, the insane forty thousand tailgating outside would see his truck, too. He’d gotten lucky, since the original truck and driver were in a wreck a few days ago. They weren’t hurt, thank goodness, but they were out of commission for the game. The truck was the centerpiece of a big raffle—someone would win the truck, provided by a vendor for LSU—and Marcel was going to get the free publicity for having killed himself getting the paint job done on time. Now he circled the truck, attaching the poles to the truck bed to which he’d later attach big LSU and American flags.

He smiled, a little shyly, as she nodded and waved—he’d quit chewing the tobacco that stained his chin and teeth, had gotten his teeth whitened (ended up, he had a nice smile), and had started wearing nicer jeans and shirts that Lori Ann helped him pick out. He called it his personal “upgrade” but Lori Ann thought it was maybe that nobody had ever really taken an interest in him before. Well, not including the one-night stands who were happy as hell to do whatever one of
Alex’s gunrunning team wanted them to do because all of the gunrunners were rolling in money. Marcel, though, had been tired of running, tired of hiding, and wanted to build a life.

She felt her phone vibrate, and saw it was Bobbie Faye. She sighed.

Just as she started to answer, one of the tailgaters pumped up the volume of Marc Broussard’s “Home” and everybody at their barbeque pits, their grills, their coolers, their RVs, and their tents started dancing. It was just that kind of song, and Stacey got into the rhythm immediately, holding out her hands for Lori Ann to join in.

Lori Ann shoved the cell phone into her pocket and started dancing with Stacey; she wouldn’t be able to hear Bobbie Faye, anyway.

It was easily still ninety degrees outside in the early dark of October and the shushing of the air conditioner kicked on for a cycle as Cam made the calls. Bobbie Faye tried to keep busy, but Lori Ann hadn’t answered. Nina hadn’t answered. Her Aunt V’rai hadn’t answered (they talked nearly every other day now, and Bobbie Faye thought V’rai was pretty determined to close the chasm between Bobbie Faye and her family . . . which was a little bit like being ushered into an insane asylum with open arms and LSD-laced brownies). The only one who’d answered had been her brother Roy, and that was only because he had a hot poker game he wanted to sneak into if she would only—please, pretty please, promise to change the oil in her car for the next two years—loan him some money. She didn’t bother to remind him that her car had blown up on the bridge four months ago. Roy didn’t exactly hold onto itty-bitty details like bombs and lost cars.

Cam’s voice rumbled on the phone in the other room—he’d pointedly closed the door when she had paced a loop too close to where he talked. She fidgeted around the living room, straightening up, storing crap in proper cabinets, moving in fits and starts, getting distracted by piles on the other side of the room like a squirrel with ADD, all while
Riles’s frowns grew more and more severe. It seemed like every cabinet of Cam’s that she opened, every magazine she straightened, was an indictment that there was still something going on between her and Cam, that she was intimately a part of Cam’s household, and if she could have sat down without fidgeting, she would have.

Cam cursed as he re-entered the room. Riles jumped to his feet before Cam reached her, and the expression in Cam’s dark brown eyes washed ice through her: fear. Regret. Compassion.

“Baby,” he said, low, “I’m not getting hard facts. In fact, I’m getting conflicting reports—some say he’s fine, just undercover, and others say his cover’s been compromised.”

So this is what hell feels like
. She doubled over, the pain radiating through her, sucking all the oxygen with it, and her hands went numb. Cam laced his fingers through her hair, clasping onto her shoulder as he helped her to stand upright again.

“I’ll make more calls,” Riles said, pulling out his cell. “I have a few markers I can pull in, maybe, for something like this.”

“You do whatever you want. I’m not waiting. I’m finding Alex.”

“No way in hell,” Cam said, his fingers still laced through her hair, tightening a little, and she shrugged him off as Riles glared.

“I know where he is—Roy says there’s a high-stakes poker game at Suds’s place that Alex was going to sit in tonight, but Alex wouldn’t let him go.” Alex was awaiting trial and, technically, shouldn’t be within twenty feet of a poker game—he was supposed to be behaving himself at home, but technicalities had never slowed him down before.

“You don’t even know if Roy’s information is up to date. He’s still hiding from Kim Drake’s boyfriend. Besides, even if you find Alex, it’s a waste of time. You can’t, for one minute, believe anything he tells you.” Cam crossed his arms, adopting his stubborn cop stare all over again. “He’s a bastard, he’s lied to you the entire time you’ve known him, and
you gave him back the love poems, so he’s not afraid of you anymore.”

“Love poems?” Riles asked, and the derision in his voice poured like caustic over a wound.

“I have
copies
,” Bobbie Faye pointed out, ignoring Riles. There was just really no way to explain how a gunrunner had actually gone to college and had once thought he might be a poet, until he realized where that left him on the pay scale of life. “Loophole! I never promised I wouldn’t put them up on the newspaper’s blog.”

“I don’t think the threat of local exposure as a poet is enough incentive to make Alex cooperate,” Cam said, his eyes narrowed, thinking . . . strategizing. “Remember, he’d have to cooperate with
you
and no way in hell will he do that.” When her head started to do loop-de-loops off her shoulders, he put his hand up to pause her. Cam smiled, wide, crooked, her fellow conspirator. Oh, the petty school dictators they’d toppled together when he smiled like that. He could take over the world with that smile. “I think I should call Gregory Browne over at
USA Today
. He owes me a couple of favors.”

“National embarrassment. Perfect.”

They high-fived, and Riles turned away, utterly disgusted.

“No, you’re not allowed to place bets on how far Bobbie Faye would bounce it she fell off the state capitol. Even if it is very likely.”

—Advanced math teacher Christina Cross to her tenth-grade class

It wasn’t true that V’rai was entirely blind. She could see some lights and darks (if the light was bright enough), and she had some idea if there was a doorway in a wall (especially if it was open, light streaming in). Other than that, though, her world was pretty much without form.

The visions, though, were a completely different problem. She couldn’t control them and saw them in brilliant colors, with dimension and a roaring soundtrack. She was never sure, when one ended, just how to explain to people what had just happened. She’d always had visions, and by now, at age sixty-two, her family had gotten used to her going completely still or fumbling something she had reached for, her being a little bit zoned until the imagery passed. She lived through them with a quiet resignation.

What she hated was knowing she absolutely could not take any action to prevent the vision from coming true without making it worse. Often, much much worse.

“What was it this time?” her brother, Etienne, demanded.

She came to, realizing she was still sitting at the table of Etienne’s RV parked in the yard where her brother was rebuilding the old family home and the mill. Aimee (their oldest sister) and Lizzie (second oldest) ate in silence, but she could feel them bracing for the battle.

Etienne was getting crankier and crankier, and the man had never been anything but crotchety and hell to live with
anyway. On his good days. (Come to think of it, she really couldn’t remember any good days.)

“Nothing,
chèr,
” she answered. “Just tired.”

“Don’ mess with me,” her brother warned her. “You saw it again, didn’t you?”

He’d caught her at a weak point yesterday after she’d had a vision about his daughter. Bobbie Faye had been killed in that vision. V’rai had made the mistake of telling him about it. The imagery had been so vivid, so upsetting over how real it felt, so much more jarring than any other vision she’d ever had, and she’d had plenty of difficult visions.

So much of what she saw usually came true, and the few times she’d tried to change the events, whatever disaster she’d “seen” became a full-out nightmare. But today’s vision? More confusing since it contradicted the previous one. V’rai couldn’t remember ever having contradicting visions before. In this new one, Bobbie Faye was hurt. Bad hurt. Dying hurt. But not all the way dead.

So did that mean Bobbie Faye would live if they intervened? Or die?

“
Mais, non
, Etienne, leave it alone.”