When a Man Loves a Weapon (13 page)

“You got in here
how
?” Trevor asked as they moved through the rooms.

“Tap-dancing serum.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the room. “Well, of course.” The Sahara couldn’t pretend to that level of dry, antagonized wit.

White-hot fury streamed from him.

Geezus, she deserved it.

She wanted to reach over and touch him, reassure herself, but she held back. Even wet, his suit ruined, he was beautiful. Sure, technically, this was the same man she was engaged to. She hadn’t had nearly the consternation the last time she’d met up with him in the middle of an op (back when they’d first started dating). He’d disappeared then, too, only to show up again with fake tattoos and long hair and biker clothes. That was fine. But this . . . sophisticated look? Freaking her out.

She shivered.

And her shirt was soaked. She looked down. And nearly see-through. Oh, crap. That was
it
, she was banning every light-colored shirt she ever owned. Wearing anything white was a guaranteed all-expense-paid vacation into Humiliationland. Between the arctic cold of the casino (the better to lure the tourists in from the sweltering heat and humidity) and the overhead sprinklers (which finally shunted off), her goose bumps were in full contact-sport mode.

Trevor pulled off his jacket as they turned through the kitchen doors, running past empty stainless-steel workstations. He slipped the suit coat over her arms, pushing her forward at the same time. They all halted in front of a large security monitor at the checkpoint inside the service entrance as a ten-by-ten set of security images rotated, displaying the many external camera angles: Tyrone and the other security guards were now out on the two main gangplanks, trying to help the screaming mob exit safely. Which left the service entrance free.

On one of the images, they could see the lights of the high-rise hotels that faced the lake—and the casino.

“We’ll be sitting ducks,” Riles griped.

She stole a glance at Trevor’s profile.

He and Cam discussed—okay, quietly seethed at each other with about six billion veiled threats between them—just how there were too many people trampling each other at the main gangplanks and there was too much risk of not seeing someone come at them from out of the crowd if they tried to exit through either of those choices. They’d have to take the risk of the wide-open service pier.

As they headed to the exit, Riles and Cam took the classic two-man sweep, checking each doorway, then each room, as they crossed. Where in the hell had those two men in the casino gone? She hugged into the jacket. Trevor’s scent clung to it.

“I’m sorry,” she said as he leaned close, pulling her around a rolling cart blocking their path. “Your crazy girlfriend strikes again.”

He frowned at her as he folded her into him while Riles and Cam checked the exit. “Fiancée. Soon to be
wife
.”

She leaned back and gazed up into his eyes. “I see you’re not correcting me on the ‘crazy’ part.”

“The crazy works for me.” He looked past her to where Riles and Cam had gone.

“Can I have that in writing?” she asked as Riles motioned that the passageway was clear.

“Yes,” he murmured in her ear so she could hear over the still-blaring siren. “Pick a damned date.”

“How do you know I didn’t pick a date?” He slanted her a
yeah, right
glance and she grimaced. “You say that now, but when the cake blows and takes out half of your family, do not say I didn’t warn you.”

“When you meet my family, you’ll realize that statement is actually an incentive.”

He turned away, leading her through the doorway Riles had cleared.

They’d taken a few steps past locked doors and down the dark hallway when someone wrenched her backward.

The noise level had disguised the intruder’s sounds as he slipped up behind them, or maybe he had dropped down from somewhere, all Spider-Man–like. She had no way to warn Trevor other than the fact that she was jerked clear out of his grasp.

The blare of the sirens stopped, and the following silence was louder, hurting her ears with the sudden whoosh of absence.

“Fuckin’ back off,” the man said as Trevor whirled to see what she was doing. “I’d not be likin’ to shoot her, but by jazus, I will.”

Cold sweat ran down her back. The man shoved something hard into her right side. From the shape of it, she’d say it was a Walther, but that was just a guess.

“I should just mark that spot with Day-Glo paint,” she said, letting Trevor know where the gun was shoved.

“Like hell,” Trevor said, so low she wasn’t sure anyone caught it but her.

The passageway was narrow and they were lined up like ducks. The emergency lighting blinked, casting a surreal disco effect across the faces in front of her: Trevor, and behind him, Cam, and then Riles re-entering from the direction of the exit, having gone a few feet ahead, recon, making sure there was no trouble there.

Because
nooooooo
, it was back here, thank you, since Trouble had apparently stapled a GPS to her ass.

And before the next blink of the emergency light, Trevor yanked her forward, practically throwing her beneath him toward Cam as he sailed up and over and into the guy with the gun. The fight was fast and brutal and hard to tell exactly what she was seeing with the lights throbbing on and off.
Blink
and Trevor’s arm sliced the space between him and the man and
blink,
darkness, then
blink
, the gun slid up into the space and
blink,
darkness, and
blink,
Trevor’s strong fingers slammed forward into a choke-hold as the gun kept moving and
blink,
darkness and
bam.

The crack of the gunshot split her ragged hope, echoing in the narrow space.

She jumped out of her skin, trying to move forward, stopped by something immoveable, holding onto her.

“Sonofabitch,” Trevor swore as the man sprawled beneath him, dead.

“Shit, are you hit, LT.?” Riles asked, falling back into combat mode. He’d pronounced it “Ell Tee,” and he’d said it with respect and admiration.

“I’m fine. He’s dead. He unintentionally fired his weapon.”

“Operator errors
suck
,” Riles opined.

Trevor checked the dead man for ID and found none. “I don’t know him. I knew two at the table, so there are still at least two—” He heard a gasp and looked up. Bobbie Faye had gone ghost white and frozen to the spot, one of Cam’s hands clamped on her to keep her from moving forward. She didn’t seem to be trying—instead, she stared, and when he glanced down, he realized the man’s blood had spattered across his white shirt. “Not mine, Sundance,” Trevor said, standing, reaching for her ice-cold hands, pulling her out of Cam’s grasp. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here before we get cornered.”

Cam closed his cell phone. “I called this in and they’re sending help. Foot patrol is trying to address the panic out there. We’ve got several people injured when the crowd started trampling each other on that lower walkway.”

Riles opened the exterior exit door and two rounds drilled into it just to the right of his head. He slammed the door shut, locking it, and jumped back into the small passageway, keeping low, moving back toward Bobbie Faye.

Sean was not going to be happy. Lonan watched the people pouring down the walkway, running, all mayhem and madness. No Bobbie Faye.

This was supposed to be a simple snatch-and-grab, right in front of the Fed. It was all perfectly calculated. Sean had wanted it done this way. Grab her, toss her in the ambulance, none the wiser if she screamed—she’d look like an anxious accident victim and they’d have been gone. All while rubbing the Fed’s nose in his failure. Perfect.

Well, not exactly. They didn’t have the woman.

He sat in the cab of the ambulance they’d purchased and re-decaled to match the local district. Zimmer was in the driver’s seat. The kid was twenty years old, all angles and frizzy hair that stood up as if he was in permanent fright. Lonan’s phone rang and as soon as he saw which one of his men was calling, he knew it was bad news.

“Liam’s dead,” Brian, one of his better soldiers, said. “His gun’s gone, too. Whaddya want us to do?”

“I want that fuckin’ woman.”

He punched off the phone, eyes still on the brightly lit walkways and gangplanks. Sirens blared from fire trucks a few blocks away as smoke poured from the forward section of the boat, and police and firemen couldn’t be long.

How difficult could one woman be?

Blood spatter on Trevor’s shirt.

Someone had shot at the door.

There was a dead guy in the hallway.

Bobbie Faye’s brain hopscotched around those facts like a bunny on acid and not a single one of them was a safe place to land, especially not the one where she’d thought, for a second, that Trevor had a bullet in his chest, that she’d been the cause of him getting shot. Her vision went soft and fuzzy and she could feel the recoil of the SIG she’d used when she’d shot her cousin Mitch. Feel the yank against her hand, the weight of the metal, hear the crack as the bullet sliced through the distance between them, him standing in the yellow glow of the lights of the Old State Capitol, red blooming across his chest as he sank to the ground. She expected Trevor to sink any moment now, just any second, and she couldn’t do a damned thing about it, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe—

He shook her. He’d been talking and she finally met his gaze, quit staring at the blood on his shirt and caught the determined expression in his eyes—his very much alive and worried eyes.

“I’m okay,” he said again, but she wasn’t so sure she was.

They had taken an intersecting hallway, and she didn’t know where the hell they were, she was so turned around and confused and maybe in shock. Lot of shock. Smoke seeped and rolled from beneath a second exit door as Trevor felt of it, yanking his hand back. They were soaking wet, there was a shooter behind them somewhere, and their secondary exit was on fire.

She nodded back toward the dead man. “Did he sound . . . Irish to you?”

“Bobbie Faye drinking game! One shot for every fire, two for every explosion.”

—Michele Bardsley

“Girl, there is just not enough alcohol in the state of Louisiana for that game.”

—Renee George

“MacGreggor’s in Winnipeg.” Trevor moved down toward another exit.

“Yeah, but he could—”

“I’m already on it.” He glanced back at her, where her obvious doubt flashed in giant neon letters over her head. “I’m on it. I’ve called in to the Bureau every day. If you jump to conclusions, you’re more vulnerable.”

“Right, because it feels so much better to think that there might be
two
homicidal maniacs out there who want me dead.”

“As opposed to all the regular people who want you dead?” Riles asked.

“Shut up.” She appreciated what Trevor was trying to do—alleviate the stark-raving freak-out boiling inside her, which would burst right on through like that awful shot in
Alien
when that thing slammed out of that space guy’s chest. She wasn’t entirely buying it, but it was nice of him to try.

She saw a sign in the dark hallway and tapped Trevor’s arm. “Ballroom.” She pointed.

Riles kept up the rear as they checked the entrance. The blinking yellow emergency lighting flicked, slow and dim, like a TKO’d fighter who was knocked out on his feet, down for the count without quite knowing it yet. This, she noted, is where the serial killer would jump out at the girl who’d tiptoed into the dark with a pair of tweezers and a butter
knife and then she thought
oh, dear God, did I just think
serial killer
to the Universe?

She should just go dance on someone’s grave while she was at it.

They crept single file, Trevor leading in the near-dark, the cooler air a relief as they studied the expanse of the multi-decked room, which was eerily devoid of people. The casino had an atrium center—multiple decks stacked like glittering bracelets around an open showcase of luxury: crystal chandeliers the size of small houses dotted the ceiling and though they weren’t lit, they still caught the lights streaming in from the awakened city outside the massive picture windows that ran along both sides of each floor. A ten-thousand-gallon aquarium hogged the center of the ground floor below them. Surrounding this were tables festooned with white (now wet) linen tablecloths, fine silverware, crystal, and quite a few half-eaten meals, all abandoned when the fire alarm had sounded.

Smoke curled near the ceiling, fire-truck sirens screeched outside, but there was an exit sign, diagonally across from them, faintly glowing green. They had to skirt around the balcony, but in no time flat, they would be out of the open “Hi, let’s paint a target on you” airy room and into a nice, safe hallway that would take them to the exit marked “You Can Go Home Now, Dorothy.”

“Too open,” Cam said.

“No choice,” Trevor countered, eyeing the way they’d come.

“Multiple places for a sniper,” Riles cautioned.

They ran, hugging the outer wall of the wide large-capacity balcony. They were far enough away from the railing that the balcony above them protected them from most shots from a floor above, but the angles wouldn’t have been impossible—and they didn’t know where the shooter . . . or hell, shooters . . . were.

One quarter way, good. Halfway, great. Three quarters of the way and the glass banister exploded, bullets ripping into it, coming from in front of them. More shots, now from
behind them. Cross fire—and then there was a distinctive
crack
and everything hushed for a second while the Universe said
gotcha
and then fuck of all fucks, sound pounded back into Bobbie Faye’s ears as a cymbal-crashing clatter of glass shattering—a crescendo of bad news as the cross-fired shots sliced several rounds into the aquarium.

Water thundered out, thousands of gallons roaring a deep bass sound as it roared and slammed into them and their side of the boat. A wall of water, heavy with fish and turtles and momentum and volume poured down, and the boat lurched with the sudden shift of all that weight sloshing toward them.