When a Man Loves a Weapon (42 page)

Suds nodded and Cam ushered Stacey and Lori Ann out to the perimeter as Suds rushed to dismantle the bomb on the generator. He could see the lights flickering on the miniature computer board he had attached. It was searching for a new signal.

“Yeah? Bite me.”

—the Universe

In the dark, Trevor heard the spit of a round from the sniper’s rifle perforate the platform where he’d been standing a half a second ago: he’d flipped off it as soon as he knew Izzy had blocked MacGreggor’s signal to the bomb. Then he heard two echoing shots and two cries of anguish from the helicopter.

Riles said, “Sniper and spotter down, LT,” and Trevor didn’t bother to glance up to the helicopter in front of him. He knew Riles was already zeroing in on the next problem—the men surrounding MacGreggor and Bobbie Faye. He had thought he might have to put an infrared homing signal on her somehow, for when the lights were out, to make sure he could find her.

But she fucking
glowed
. Sparks were flying off her as if she were a multi-thousand-dollar fireworks display.

He had no clue how she was creating the sparks, or when she’d planned them. He knew she had on nothing underneath that borrowed underwear and he also knew for a fact that she had not been fitted with some multi-thousand-dollar fireworks display.

Trevor sprinted toward her, snagging a SIG from one of his men. As he landed on the field, even in the mostly dark, with the nearly full moon melting out of the clouds, he could see her, see her and MacGreggor each with a grasp on the other’s forearm, and she stood there, staring at her enemy.
MacGreggor had a hand on her
. Was a breath away from
pulling her into that helicopter, and she stood there. Gazing at him.

Not moving.

Scaring the living hell out of Trevor.

“Someone’s trying to reroute the signal,” Izzy said in his ear. “They’ve got to have a laptop there somewhere. I’m countering, but I’m warning you—”

Nina, with her hands cuffed in front of her, took down one man; Trevor didn’t blink when she broke the man’s neck and laid him out on the ground, turning into the next one coming at her, who suddenly stopped, then arced backward, dead.

“That’s two she owes me,” Riles said as Nina ducked and dodged a third man.

Lightning flashed again, and on some level, Trevor knew it was starting to rain, but he didn’t see anything except Bobbie Faye, standing between him and MacGreggor, and he didn’t have a shot. She was standing there with that sonofabitch’s hand on her and Trevor didn’t have a shot.

“No shot here,” Riles said.

“Sean,
no!
” Lonan shouted.

Ian hit the send button on the laptop. He was rerouting the signal, because Lonan would be damned if they were stopping the bombs—when Lonan saw Sean move toward the woman. Moving like he was fucking
mesmerized
by whatever the fuck she was out there doing, and Lonan knew, then, that he had to save Sean.

Save him from himself. Save him from whatever spell the woman had cast on him, whatever had made him come back for her. And it couldn’t just be revenge, he was too wrapped up, too . . . insane.

Lonan stood in the helo, his gun raised and aimed at the girl, and she was as good as dead. He had one heartbeat where he wondered if he’d get more satisfaction shooting her in the arms or legs first, to watch her hurt before he watched her die, and that one heartbeat said
die
, because the Fed was coming up behind her. The Fed, who was focused on Sean and not him, who couldn’t have seen him standing in the
dark helicopter with the field lights off, who couldn’t have seen his gun.

A bullet struck Lonan square in the chest, knocking him back against the wall and the world went blank.

It took Trevor a million years to close the gap between them, coming up behind her as the lightning flashed again and his heart fell through the ground because
she kissed MacGreggor.

Kissed him. Hard.

The third helicopter landed nearby and men flowed from it and Riles’s sniper rifle cracked and men crumpled on the rain-soaked field, but she could only focus on Sean.

She’d seen the small remote in his left hand. She’d seen it and knew what it was. Power surged from the crowd, and she felt the fire . . . flames licking around her, a column of fire, burning, and knew,
knew
, what she had to do.

And she kissed him.

Lightning sizzled and thunder clobbered the sky, rolling in with the drums. Rain ran down her body as the burning current flowed from her and into him. All of it. It seared him, an electrical jolt he couldn’t break free of; she felt his breath tighten, his body jerk, as the current burned. His eyes were open, shocked, and she knew the moment he dropped the remote, the blazing current making him forget entirely where he was, forget that Trevor was coming up behind her like the hand of God, forget that he’d lost, just now, he’d completely lost. She stepped back from him; his hands were raised, about to embrace her, and there was a moment, just one second, when he looked at her, where the flames shimmying around her reflected in his amber eyes and his brows went up in surprise.

“
Àlainn
this,
you asshole
,” she said, and she plowed the heel of her right hand into his chest. Power flowed through her, through her arm, down her wrist, and he rocked back, feet flying up off the ground as if a sledgehammer had swung and caught him. As he fell away from her, his hand
flailed out and he grabbed at her, grabbed for purchase. His fingers snagged the chicken foot and yanked.

And as it ripped free, the crowd surged, the drums rolled, Trevor clasped her shoulder, and the world fell away,
bam
, a rolling iridescent, multicolored . . .
pulse
. . . emanating outward from Sean as he fell backward. The pulse rippled out, knocking everyone down on the field, knocking back everyone in their seats, like some sort of nuclear bomb and they were ground zero.

Silence thudding against her skin.

Silence as loud as the drums had been. Aching, deafening, slippery.

She could only focus on Sean, who was lying there, twitching. She didn’t see it until it moved in her periphery: the rain glinting silver, slicing through the moonlight, and there in a flash of lightning was a gun rising up out of the helicopter. The man standing behind it was one of the “ambulance” drivers and he was saying something about this being for Aiden. The gun moved up and up and Trevor fired. Fired and fired again, and faster than she could count, he’d loaded two bullets into the guy and one in the guy with the laptop next to him. Trevor spun, tucking her under his arm, spinning her to his chest, his arm a band of steel, holding her up while the whole world tilted. Trevor spun again, firing like the wrath of God as he shot two more men who were rising up from the other helicopter to aim at them, and then rain crashed and lightning stabbed the dark and there was Sean, trying to sit up. His body smoked as he reached for the fallen remote, his fingers curling around it there in the wet grass, and without missing a beat, Trevor pressed her face to his chest, his hand shielding her eyes as
bam
he ended the demon who’d have killed them all.

Cam rode one of the police Harleys, lights and sirens, moving people out of the way on Skip Bertman Drive, which T’d into River Road. Suds followed in Marcel’s truck, both bombs lying on the backseat.

They’d worked fast and gotten them out of the stadium.
Cam had radioed Trevor, but it wasn’t clear to him what the hell was going on back there.

All Cam knew was that right now he had to get these bombs away from the stadium. If that signal came back up, they’d blow.

He flashed back to Suds telling him about his wife. His loss. Losing his mind.

Cam could understand that loss.

He focused on the task at hand. They were lucky in that most of the road had been kept clear for the mass exodus that would happen after the game was over. They were freaking unlucky in that there was nowhere to take the truck except down River Road. To the right—houses and then downtown. To the left, lots of cars and then fields. Crossing some of those fields and buried beneath the road were oil and gas pipelines headed out to the Mississippi River. And directly in front of him, the levee. An explosion there would destroy the levee and flood . . . and oh fucking hell, he couldn’t think about it. It was too damned many people.

Instead, the image of Bobbie Faye lying in the hammock, out behind his house, came to mind unbidden. She was napping, curled up against him as he studied for an exam, the sunlight filtering through her hair as he gently rocked them back and forth with one foot, his forgotten textbook on the ground as he held her, just watching the way the light played across her cheek. Smiling to himself because even the Tasmanian Devil looks peaceful in sleep, and so, then, did she.

He hoped like hell his luck would hold. Because if that truck went, he was going to go with it.

“Wow,” the drunk behind Ce Ce said. “That was, like, the best halftime show, ever!”

Ce Ce collapsed in her seat, exhausted, her body wracked with the pain she’d been channeling. Monique put her chubby arm around Ce Ce and hugged her.

“I saw what potion you used,” Monique said, low. “That was the demon one.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Uh-huh. You didn’t tell Bobbie Faye she was spitting into the anti-demon one, but I know.” She waggled her red brows at Ce Ce. “How many did you get?”

“I’m not sure,” Ce Ce said.

“Think you got any zombies?”

“I didn’t want to risk it. Do you realize how many politicians come to the game?”

“Oh. Right. That’d have been a lot of bodies to explain.”

“Exactly.”

“Sanitize,” Nina said, standing at Bobbie Faye’s shoulder, having somehow gotten her hands out of the cuffs. “Trevor.
Now
.”

He opened his eyes—his face had been buried in Bobbie Faye’s hair, and he was holding her so tightly, he wasn’t sure who it was for—her, or him.

“It’s raining,” Nina reminded him, and he just then realized he was drenched. “Let’s use it.”

He didn’t want dead bodies on the field, little kids seeing the blood and people he’d killed. Nina wasn’t on a radio and so dispatch had not heard her—and he nodded. “Riles.”

“Got it,” Riles said, coming up on them.

They had maybe thirty seconds before the crowd realized something was infinitely wrong, and maybe sixty seconds before the press pushed their way onto the field. Trevor knew they were about to break six billion different laws, but the bottom line was, he was going to be responsible. He knew neither SWAT nor the state police nor LSU wanted to explain that there had been a massive gunfight in the middle of the field, that the children in those stands had stood right above a bomb, and
that they had not evacuated anyone
. Luckily, the klieg lights were still off and it was still softly raining.

He started to tell Bobbie Faye to go to the sideline, that she didn’t need to see this, but one glance at her hardened expression, daring him to not trust her, to exclude her, and he nodded again.

“We’re gonna have to amend our vows,” she said, as she
grabbed MacGreggor’s feet. “I’m beginning to sense that ‘moving dead bodies’ needs to be right up there with the whole ‘love and honor’ part.”

He should have protected her from this.

“He was going to kill a lot of people,” she said, understanding him as if he’d said it out loud. “If he’d lived, he’d have found a way to keep killing, out of revenge.” She helped him lift MacGreggor into the helicopter. “We could not let him do that.”

Then again, maybe he wasn’t giving her enough credit.

Maybe he never had.

And it hit him, what a freaking fool he’d been not to trust her.

“Sixty seconds,” he said, as Riles and Nina lifted one of the bodies and moved it into the door of the nearest helicopter. Trevor’s other men had already begun lifting bodies behind him.

Forty-five seconds, and every body was accounted for and laid in a helicopter. Someone had instructed the band to start the LSU fight song and the crowd roared back to life as the stadium lights came back on. Nina piloted one helicopter, Riles another. He and Bobbie Faye climbed into the third, and they no sooner had lifted out of the stadium when an explosion blasted from about two miles away, a fireball rolling into the sky, the concussion rocking against them.

She couldn’t breathe. Bobbie Faye watched out of the helicopter’s front window and flames rolled up and out, a truck in the center of it, debris all around, and all she could think of was
Cam
. He’d radioed that he and Suds were getting the bombs out of the stadium.

The copter pivoted and raced toward the wreckage and as they got closer, all she could see was how very very bad it was, and she thought,
no, not Cam
. Her heart thudded and all sound ceased and her hand splayed against her window, and she wasn’t sure if she was trying to reach out, or trying to push it away. All she could think was
Cam
.

“And in other news, the entire Twitterverse went down today as thousands of people tweeted ‘bad juju’ and ‘chicken dance.’ We are afraid to ask why.”

—MSNBC reporter Karin Tabke

“Madame?” Henry asked Andrea, and she waved him away.

“Isabella,” she said into her cell phone, “you cut off my signal.”

“You were finished, Mother,” her daughter said. “Anything else, and you’d have done harm.”

Andrea thought through the implications. Then asked, “So what would you have done if Claire hadn’t conveniently seen that broadcast at that moment?”

“What makes you think I didn’t call her husband and suggest he change channels, Mother?”

“You two are clever,” Andrea chuckled, “I’ll give you that. I suppose you couldn’t help that, given the genetics. But your sisters stand with me, Isabella, and your brother wants nothing to do with the company. You’ll regret favoring him. But then, you always had a soft spot for him.”

Isabella laughed, and Andrea frowned. Isabella rarely laughed. Like her brother.