When a Man Loves a Weapon (43 page)

“Mother, I think you sometimes forget I am your daughter. And I’ll warn you now, which you will ignore, I know. Don’t go after his fiancée. Not after what you did last time.”

“Or what? He won’t forgive me? I did him a favor last time and he has admitted that. The two of you, darling, will one day learn that I know what I’m doing.”

There was a long silence, and then softly, so very softly,
Isabella said, “Mother, if you go after her, whether or not he forgives you will be the very least of your concerns.”

Trevor set the helicopter down south of the burning debris, out of the path of the ambulances he’d called. She beat him out of the cabin, but only because he had to shut it down. And she ran, her heart in her throat, screams trapped in her chest, because she could see Cam lying in a field, twisted and unmoving, the carcass of the Harley a mangled heap not far away.

The closer she got, the more blood she saw.

Cam came to, blinking wetness out of his face, feeling submerged in more wetness. He was drowning. Or bleeding to death.

Trevor leaned over him from one side, Bobbie Faye on the other, and she said, “Cam? Cam? Fucking answer me or I’m going to beat the living hell out of you!”

“What the—” And then he remembered: Suds pulling off the road suddenly, plunging the truck through a fence and into a wide open field. Cam had stopped and turned his bike to go back when the whole thing went up in a rolling explosion. Suds had plunged into a field that didn’t have a pipeline running through it, which had probably saved Cam’s life. “Oh,
fuck
,” he said, trying to sit up.

“Hold on, Moreau,” Trevor said through gritted teeth, and that’s when Cam realized the man had no shirt on and was, instead, ripping it.

“I’m okay,” Cam said as Bobbie Faye grabbed his hand, and he reached for her and, God, she never looked so . . . terrible. “Why in the hell are you in your underwear?”

“She did a striptease in the middle of the field,” Trevor said, turning a piece of his shirt and tying it in place on Cam’s thigh, stanching a bleeder, and that’s when the pain shot through him and he sat up, realizing he was lying on the ground, rain pelting down. He smelled like mud and cut grass and rotting leaves and coppery blood, and the light
from the burning truck cast a glow on both Trevor and Bobbie Faye’s faces.

“It was
not
a striptease,” she griped.

“Then she danced the chicken dance,” Trevor continued, overlapping her.

“Okay, that’s just mean.”

Cam looked down at his leg—still there, thank God, but both legs were bleeding from shrapnel cuts. Trevor had clearly been working on him for a couple of minutes. He glanced past them and saw a helicopter—and then closer, the wrecked bike. Cam could hear the ambulance sirens above the blaze of the truck. They all knew Suds was dead. Cam would have to tell them more. Later.

“A chicken dance,” Cam said, glancing over her. “Is that as bad as I think that was?”

“Worse,” Trevor said.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Chickens everywhere are gonna sue.”

The ambulance approached, and they could see it weaving past the cop cars blocking River Road. As Bobbie Faye watched, more than a little stunned, Trevor offered a hand to help Cam up and, to her surprise, Cam took it and stood, dizzy for a second. When he swayed, she caught his other side and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, leaning on her.

Trevor backed away, dropping his hands to his hips, giving her one of those unreadable gazes she hated.

The paramedics ran up, and as they helped Cam, Trevor said, “You need to go to the hospital with Cam.”

“But I’m not hurt,” she started, and then she and Trevor locked gazes, then he nodded toward the helicopter.

“I’m going to be a while.”

She looked back at the helicopter. “Oh.”

She could tell Cam was doing some quick calculations. He looked toward the stadium, where he heard cheers of the ballgame back in play . . . which meant no dead bad guys on the field . . . then glancing from her to Trevor standing there,
which meant no bad guys running around. His gaze settled a moment on the helicopter, then on Trevor. “Is that as bad as I think that is?”

Trevor shrugged. “It’s not as bad as the chicken dance.”

And Trevor jogged away, without a touch, a hug, or a kiss good-bye.

“He stopped the signal
how
?” Cam asked as they rode in the ambulance, its shocks absorbing the bumps along the potholed asphalt road.

Bobbie Faye closed her eyes, trying to ignore Cam’s wounds, which the paramedic was now checking, ignoring the bleeding, ignoring the smell of antiseptic and sweat and swallowing down the fear.

“His sister, Izzy,” she said, trying to focus, “is the head of R&D at their telecom company. She’d developed a tracking program, something that they are using to try to pinpoint unregistered cell phones based on their signal.”

“Like triangulation,” Cam said, “where a signal can be isolated inside of an area bordered by three cell towers.”

“Yeah, only faster, like caller ID, even if the signal is being bounced through a filtering device from towers all over the world. Apparently, in Nerd World, Izzy can trace a call from the end destination back to the origin, if she knows what the destination is going to be and when it’s about to happen. Izzy helped Trevor set up his mother—who apparently doesn’t mind dropping fifty million to get what she wants.” She ignored Cam’s scowl. “When their mother got the bank account number and repeated it, Izzy’s software piggybacked onto her mother’s signal, riding the transfer in to Sean’s bank account and from there back to Sean’s signal as he logged in to that account long enough to confirm the money was there and transfer it. She—”

“Traced it back to his computer.”

“And was able to lock out that specific ISP footprint.”

The medic finished checking Cam’s cuts. “You’re gonna need stitches.”

But Cam wasn’t focused on his cuts, or the pain. He was
completely focused on her, though he was muddy, bloody, and had dark circles under his eyes. “Let me get this straight—Trevor made sure his own mother made that call to Sean?”

“Yeah. Well, I think so. I didn’t hear all of it, but he set it up while you were talking to my dad. I heard him tell Izzy to make the call, and Izzy apparently said she wasn’t nearly a good enough actor, and that she couldn’t be acting with Sean and trying to trace the call at the same time.”

“So if Trevor’s mom had not called?”

“I think he had someone else standing by, but I don’t know if they could have moved the money as fast. He knew she’d drop the cash, even while he was telling her not to. Probably
especially
since he was telling her not to.”

“So Cormier just double-crossed his own mother.” She looked away from his
you are so screwed if you trust this guy
expression. “Did you know all this as it was happening?”

“Um. Not all of it, no. I knew why he’d called Izzy. And what he needed the signal for. I just wasn’t quite sure what they’d planned.”

“So the money is really in Sean’s account?”

Yeah, that part made her sick. Not just that his mother had lost it, but because of those final words to Sean, that of course he could keep “the girl.” It wasn’t everybody’s future mother-in-law who made no bones about preferring their future daughter-in-law dead.

Well, at least Bobbie Faye felt special.

Bobbie Faye wore scrubs that a nurse was kind enough to find for her, and was clean from grabbing a quick shower in the nurses’ ward room, but she was too numb to think straight now; her brain was reeling with the events of the last twenty-four hours. She sat curled in the world’s most uncomfortable chair. Why, exactly, did hospitals think they had to make sure you were in pain in a waiting room? Was it to drum up the extra business? Keep people from loitering and from all of the frolicking good parties going on in there?

She was waiting on the doctors to finish with Cam’s stitches. They’d kicked her out of the room when they realized she wasn’t family. Or his fiancée.

When she glanced up, she realized Old Man Landry stood at the arched entrance to the little room. They stared at each other for several long, mean minutes.

She couldn’t stand it any longer. “Thank you for helping find the bombs.”

He nodded. She didn’t mention the tiara. He was never going to help her find it, even if all she wanted it for was because it was her mom’s. He was convinced she would just do more harm searching for it—or getting it—and once he’d made up his steel-trap mind, she might as well chew off a limb as try to open it.

“I saw the dance,” he said, looking away from her to the far wall, studying it for a century. Then, finally, “It must be from your mom’s side.”

“What? The Crazy? I think your side had enough of that to share.”

A smile twitched for the briefest of a second, and then was gone again. “I meant the goodness, Bobbie Faye. Necia had that. People loved her. I’m glad you take after her,
chère
.”

She gaped. In all her life, he’d never said something nice. And just like that, he spun and left, and there was a hole in her heart as big as the space where he’d stood.

Later, Lori Ann sat next to her in the little waiting room alcove while Stacey played hopscotch across the shiny linoleum tiles of the hospital floor. Bobbie Faye watched Lori Ann through her own half-closed lids, and her sister kept wiping tears from her face, her arms crossed stubbornly, but she didn’t want to talk about it. That she even wanted to sit by Bobbie Faye spoke of her anxiety, wanting her sister for comfort. Bobbie Faye remembered the many times Lori Ann had vehemently insisted that she did not need a big sister to boss her around. Until she did.

But Bobbie Faye didn’t know how to fix this one. She didn’t know how to reassure Lori Ann that Stacey was
okay—that ultimately, she wasn’t going to be psychologically scarred from the event. The fact that the kid had just bamboozled another handful of candy out of one of the nurses ought to be a big enough indicator, but Lori Ann still shook.

It was learning about Suds that had her crying.

“Are you sure?” she’d asked Bobbie Faye three times.

“Yes. Cam told me on the way here.”

“I can’t believe it. I really can’t.”

And Bobbie Faye knew the feeling—she couldn’t either. Apparently Suds had left behind evidence—he’d never intended to live through the bombings. He just hadn’t realized he would be double-crossed and the bombs would end up where they could hurt so many people. At least, that’s what he said to Cam.

“I don’t really remember meeting Chloë,” Lori Ann said.

“I think you were twelve when she died. And we were dealing with mom’s cancer, so I don’t think we saw her much—just Suds. But he loved her deeply. He was not the same for a long time after. Very angry, just . . . a very different person.”

“He always seemed okay. Of course, I was drinking all the time, so what do I know?”

Bobbie Faye cut her eyes to her sister—she wasn’t saying that bitterly. Just matter-of-fact. “I think you saw what he wanted everyone to see, once he got past the initial shock. I think he wanted to be okay. He found a way of going through the motions.”

But even as she said it, Bobbie Faye couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it.

Marcel rounded the corner and froze, seeing Bobbie Faye.

“Aw,
chère
,” he said to Bobbie Faye, “I don’ know how to tell you how sorry I am.”

He looked positively . . . scared . . . that she was going to come up off that chair and beat the crap out of him for somehow driving the truck for LSU. But Sean had planted that truck, not Marcel.

“I’ve been making calls,” he said, “trying to backtrack
just how exactly I got the gig to paint the truck and drive Mike around the stadium. It was a big win for my new business. I shoulda known it was too good to be true.”

“It’s not your fault, Marcel. I know you wouldn’t hurt either of them,” she said, nodding to her sister and her niece. Partly, she knew, because he valued his life and would not want her aimed at him.

And partly, if she had to be honest, because she could see how much he cared about them. She’d wanted that for Lori Ann. It wasn’t who she’d have chosen, but if Lori Ann was happy, that’s really all that mattered, wasn’t it?

Lori Ann slipped her hand into Bobbie Faye’s, lacing their fingers together. Bobbie Faye stared at their intertwined hands and it was like seeing double—it was the one physical trait of their mom’s that they shared, and her eyes blurred a bit as she squeezed back the tears.

“Marcel,” Lori Ann said, “could you take Stacey to . . . uh . . . go get something to eat? Or drink?”

Marcel looked between the two of them and nodded and called Stacey, who hopscotched happily over to him and took his hand with the clear-eyed joy of a child who didn’t know that she was supposed to be all screwed up.

They sat for a moment in silence and Bobbie Faye held her breath. Lori Ann sitting beside her because she wanted to hear about Suds was one thing, but Lori Ann willingly talking to her was entirely another. Was Lori Ann pregnant again? Had she been drinking? Both? Whatever this was, it was going to be bad, given how her sister’s hand trembled.

“So,” Lori Ann said, wiping her eyes, “you know that night?”

Bobbie Faye frowned at her sister, her brows knit together. Puzzled. “Tonight?”

“No,” Lori Ann said, her voice cracking. “
That
night.”

Oh. The night Cam had arrested her. The night she’d point-blank told Cam a few hours earlier that she’d handle it, she’d make sure Lori Ann got into treatment. The night he’d explicitly ignored her and arrested Lori Ann anyway. The night their lives had changed, the beginning of the end.

“I’m familiar,” she said. Dust bowls should be as dry.

“When Cam arrested me—”

“Lori Ann, no,” Cam’s voice said from the open-arch entrance to the sitting area.

Bobbie Faye snapped her focus to his face, the anguish there as he leaned on crutches, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t just the physical pain she read. She turned back to her sister, her scalp tingling as she noted Lori Ann’s matching anguish.