When a Man Loves a Weapon (8 page)

“Shut up.” Like that would have an effect on Riles. Short of duct tape (which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad idea), she hadn’t been able to get the man to be quiet. “Last time I’m asking you nicely, Nick. How bad?”

She was just off balance enough to use him for target practice. Maybe it was the worry over Trevor, she wasn’t sure, but if there were a lot of bets going on right now when things were quiet, then something was deadly wrong. Couple that with Trevor’s radio silence, and it could not be a good thing.

“Um, pretty bad,” he finally answered her.

“What the hell is going on that a bunch of people think I’m going to croak?”

There was an odd hesitation in Nick, and his gaze hopscotched over everything except Bobbie Faye. He even settled a moment on Riles’s gun, as if he would almost prefer to be shot right then instead of having to answer that question, and Bobbie Faye seriously considered obliging him.

“You’ve had big bets against me in the past. Still here, still ticking.” The only thing that saved her—and which saved his ass right now—was that the bets had to be super-specific—an unusual death or dismemberment in a certain way at a certain time—and Nick was careful that it had to be an accident, not a hit, or she’d have been dead a long time ago.

As would he, because Cam—her ex, a state police detective—would have probably killed him. If Trevor didn’t do so first.

“You need a new line of business.” He wisely nodded, but the situation didn’t add up, him being here, telling her this. Now. “So why’s this time different?”

He shook his head, lips clamped closed, knowing that exposing his clientele was a line he’d be very wise not to cross, because as a bookie, one of the things he guaranteed was his clients’ anonymity.

“You know I can’t tell you that, Bobbie Faye,” Nick said, pleading. He’d probably end up with his own kneecaps broken.

“Sure you can.”

“He’ll shoot me.”

“What makes you think he won’t shoot you if you don’t talk?” she asked.

“Oh, not
him
,” Nick answered quickly, nodding toward Riles. “A different
him
.”

Bobbie Faye propped her elbow on the counter, giving Nick a good imitation of relaxed, all while her hand closed on that Ruger. “I don’t think your odds are a lot better here if you
don’t
answer. And if you’re afraid to tell me the name, then I must know him.”

Nick’s eyes widened, his jaw dropped open, and then he slammed his mouth closed. So that was a
yes
.

“Is it someone who recently tried to blow me up?”

Riles snorted. “I’m sensing that wouldn’t really narrow it down for you.” But he stepped up and put some sort of Ninja warrior whathootsie hold on Nick’s shoulder and Nick slammed to his knees. “Tell the Walking Disaster what she wants to know.”

“He knows where I live,” Nick said, genuinely scared.

Who did she know who had enough money to place big bets, big enough to worry Nick? Who knew where Nick lived?

One person came glaringly to mind. “Alex?” she asked, and Nick turtled his neck down and arms and legs in, trying to make himself as small as humanly possible, which wasn’t all that easy for a guy who was probably five-ten and two hundred thirty pounds.

“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.” Alex.

“I didn’t say a name,” Nick pointed out. “If anyone asks, I never said a name. You guessed. I can’t help what you guess.”

“This time he is so dead.” Or maybe she finally would publish those love poems to her he’d written and was now humiliated over. The local paper had a blog. They would soooooooo put up poems from a gunrunner. (She had given
back the originals as promised. She never promised not to make copies.)

“
This
time?” Riles asked. “You’ve tried to kill him other times?”

“No,” she said, but Nick nodded. “No,” she re-emphasized.

“You blew up his car,” Nick pointed out. “On purpose. When you were aiming for his house.”

“I knew he wasn’t in the house. Or the car. And frankly, he’s lucky that’s all I did.” She felt she’d been all restraint and merciful.

Riles gaped at her. Horrified. He was a former sniper for Special Ops and he had the nerve to look at her as if she was some sort of aberrant quirk of human nature.

“He’s her ex,” Nick supplied for Riles.

“Her ex? Hold on . . .
you
tried to kill
a cop
?” Riles asked, apparently having been filled in by Trevor on just who her most recent ex was. Detective Cameron Moreau, state police, and weirdly, still in her life. Once they had been best friends, then lovers, then furious enemies, and now? Now, he wanted her back, and she was so confused about him, just thinking his name made her head hurt.

“No, not
that
ex,” Nick said, helpfully. “The
other
one.”

“You have more than one angry ex you want to kill?” Riles asked. “Do you like, what? Get a free toaster oven when you reach a half a dozen?”

There was a collective gasp from the staff and customers hidden in the aisles, and then a couple of nervous giggles, then dead silence. The hum of the ancient overhead fans chopped through the air, but not a single other thing dared make a sound. It was as if the whole world needed CPR.

She glanced around and sure enough, every customer plus Ce Ce, Monique, and the twins who worked the front counter, Allison and Alicia, were all diligently examining goods on the aisles around her gun counter. In fact, the word “diligent” would have been quite proud just then, because they were collectively holding their breaths, waiting for Bobbie Faye to spontaneously combust, and while they didn’t want to be in close proximity, they definitely wanted to be witnesses.

“No, not
Cam. Alex
,” Nick explained when Riles looked over at him for an explanation. “Alex is a gunrunner. Pretty scary. They had a very bad break-up.”

“You dated a gunrunner?” He’d tossed her looks of disgust with the regularity that a machine gun spit bullets. It was getting so that she was immune. “And then a cop? And now
my friend
?”

“It wasn’t like I was asking for their résumés and references.”

“Is there some sort of Excel spreadsheet to keep track?”

She ignored Riles and asked Nick, “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “No, really, Bobbie Faye, you know how Alex is. He shows up when he shows up.”

“Yeah, kinda like cancer.”

“But that’s not the weird part,” Nick mumbled, staring down at his shoes.

“It gets weirder?” Riles asked.

Ce Ce moved out of the aisle, giving up all pretense of stacking shelves, too eaten up with curiosity to risk missing a syllable. “Oh, hon, it always gets weirder.”

Bobbie Faye leaned forward, eyes narrowed on Nick. This was going to be bad. She could tell from the way he twitched and avoided her gaze, sweat now running in rivulets down his tanned neck, into his shirt collar.

“There’s also a bunch of bets against your fiancé.”

“Isn’t this one of the signs of the Apocalypse?”

—Sally Janin, referring to headline: “No Bobbie Faye Disasters, 4 months and counting . . .”

Cam would not answer his phone. Three billion calls to him went straight to his voice mail. She didn’t know when it was declared National Ignore Your Phone Week, but really, she wanted to beat the living shit out of the person who organized it.

Sure, dispatch had said he’d been working late nights and early mornings, but usually he answered his private cell number.

They rode in Riles’s Jaguar. The pumpkin-orange Jaguar. She doubted even Jemy or Claude would have stolen this one, back when they five-finger-discounted car parts. Riles hung up his cell and was quiet. Too quiet.

“They’re not telling you anything either, are they?”

He’d worked with Trevor. He was a sniper. She knew he had federal connections.

“They don’t know where he is. Or, put it this way, they don’t know for sure why I’m calling, or why I don’t already know, so they’re not going to volunteer his location.”

They’d already gone by the FBI satellite office—nary a soul in sight—and now they pulled up to Cam’s gray-in-the-twilight house. It was in a sweet little neighborhood that backed up to a horseshoe lake, dark now except for evenly spaced gas lamps installed by the neighborhood along the walking path that surrounded the lake’s perimeter. Of course, the lake brought with it snakes and mosquitoes. Cam had
been especially proud to have killed a couple of rather large water moccasins in his backyard the first couple of months they’d dated. Until she refused to set foot outside. He suddenly, miraculously, never saw another snake again. They had all magically migrated to the house a few lots down, where that guy and his shotgun were best friends.

“So this is where your boyfriend lives?”

“
Ex
, you jerk. And wait here. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Riles climbed out of his car and met her on the sidewalk before she’d gone two steps. She stopped, glaring at him. Not that a serious poisonous glare would actually work on a sniper.

“Look, the Feds aren’t telling you a damned thing, no matter how fancy schmancy your stupid clearance was, and they’re not talking to me. Cam might get some answers, but he’s not going to put himself out on a limb if you’re hovering. Back. Off.”

She couldn’t squelch the horrible feeling that Trevor’s life hung in the balance and there was nothing she could do about it. That the Universe thought she was just going to stand around and wait, all damsel in distress, “Why sorry, sir, I’ll kindly fret over here in the corner so as to not disturb you.”

Not. Going. To. Happen. She might as well plan to sprout wings.

Agents
died
. It was a fact of life. For someone to be placing heavy bets against Trevor suggested his cover had been blown. And usually when someone’s cover was blown, they were the last to know, hence the whole “blown” manner of speaking.

“Ten minutes,” Riles snapped, and she ignored him as she approached and then knocked on Cam’s door. No answer. No conveniently un-draperied window to peer into. She walked around the side of the house, stood on tippy-toes to see into the garage and made sure his truck was indeed parked there.

Which was odd. He never slept that soundly and he wasn’t currently mad at her. He didn’t want her to marry Trevor, but he was definitely still speaking to her. She thought.

In fact, he was being downright sneaky, because he was being
nice
. And
fun
. And
charming
.

She went to the back door, knocked, and there was still no answer, which—seriously?—just freaked her out. He was as bad as Trevor for his ability to hear a spider hiccup at thirty yards, much less her banging on the back door. Hell, just a car in his driveway should have gotten him out of bed. She keyed her old code into the alarm system, banking on the fact that Cam would have changed his own personal code fairly frequently, but not hers.

He’d said she could always move out, move away from Trevor, if she changed her mind. Come “home.”

The alarm flashed to green. When she stepped inside, the kitchen was pretty much as she remembered: it smelled like coffee (Community Coffee, dark roast, no sugar). There were light-colored oak cabinets, deep green tile that registered as black in the late evening light, and randomly stacked batches of mail, tools, and camping crap on every flat surface. “Cam?”

She flipped on the light as soon as she stepped inside, hoping like hell Cam wasn’t about to spring out and surprise his “intruder,” but it was silent, except for the steady hum of the refrigerator. She eased past piles of junk (holy geez, he was always bad, but this was worse), guns, gun parts, computer guts, and catalogs for every conceivable thing that could be purchased under the sun.

“Cam?” she called again, louder this time, spooked, easing through the kitchen into the dining room where fishing gear covered the old antique table he’d gotten from his grandmother’s estate when she passed. His grandmother would have been horrified to see the sharp hooks dangling off the sides of that beautiful wood, just inches away from her polished-to-a-gleam finish. Next to the hooks: a fifth of Jack, empty, at the end of the table where he’d cleared a spot to eat. A single spot, amidst the lures. She turned away, feeling a pressure in her chest she didn’t quite want to identify.

He didn’t normally drink, and if he did, it might be a beer or two. Well, he didn’t used to drink. And maybe that had
been on her account, since he knew she was always waiting, always holding her breath that she was going to have to pour someone else into bed and mop up the disasters in their wake. Of course,
used to
were the operative words there. A lot had changed.

Hurry
, she thought, calling his name again, knocking on the wall along the hallway, flipping on lights as she went. He must be freaking dead to the world to not hear her and have come storming out. . . .

Dead . . .
hung there in the air in a little bubble over her head as her brain crunched out inarticulate syllables, trying to process what she saw as she stood in the doorway to the master bedroom: Cam, dark hair nearly jet black, longer than usual, grown long enough now to flop over his brow as he lay sprawled on his bed face-up, half covered by wine-colored sheets, his long frame catty-cornered to the headboard, his right arm dangling off the side. Motionless. There was no rise and fall to his chest, no hint of hearing her, no flinching at all when she turned on the overhead light.

Panic said
welcome to here
and maniacally mainlined adrenaline as Bobbie Faye shot across the room, her hand automatically reaching for the center of Cam’s bare chest. Warm. A slight rise as he pulled in air.
Thank God
. Relief flooded her as she reached her other hand up to stroke his cheek, and said, “Cam?” so lightly, afraid of—

—holy shit. He yanked, hard, flipping her over, the room spinning as she fell and slammed against his mattress. She struggled to get away from his whiskey-warm breath against her face. She muttered “Ugnf,” and “Cam, dammit, wake up!” and tried to push off his body, his very naked,
completely devoid of clothes
body, long and lean and
hard
against her—a hard body that reacted to every move she had with a countermove that locked her more and more firmly beneath him.