“Just who the hell does he think he is?” she grumbled while she poked around in the electrical box. “I’m the one who slowed down the other boats by sabotaging them, I’m the one who got this boat started, I’m the one who shot the tie rope”—she jiggled a couple of wires, revving up into her rant—“I’m the one who’s going to fix the damned motor so we don’t get shot by the stupid gunrunners he stupidly decided to stupidly steal from, the stupid man.”
She thought fondly of the moment earlier that morning when she shot his truck and he had gaped at her, furious, and she wished she could go backwards and shoot it a couple more times, just because. Damned man, always thinking he knew what the right thing to do was.
There was a red wire loose from a connection, which was obviously the problem. As she fiddled with it, the boat bounced across the tops of the lake’s waves, jostling her. She stumbled a bit and the wire connected to something and wham, the boat surged forward, the motor maxed out.
“I fixed it!”
She looked at Trevor, who was trying to steer the boat, and nothing was responding—not the steering, not the throttle—nada. He gaped at her.
“I didn’t fix it?” she asked, her voice a whole lot smaller.
“What the hell did you touch?”
“The ‘fuck up everything’ wire, apparently.”
Bullets stitched the water just behind them.
Lovely. Just freaking lovely. How could this day get any worse?
Bobbie Faye looked ahead to the shoreline and boggled at what she saw there.
No. No no no no no no no.
There, straight ahead of them in one of the man-made canals dug at the perimeter of the lake was an oil rig on a floating barge. A big oil rig, with a huge crane on board to off-load barrels of product onto waiting barges.
She tapped Trevor, who was still focused on trying to fix the throttle.
“Are those . . . pilings I see?” She pointed to the necklace of huge concrete posts sticking up from the surface of the lake in front of the barge.
They were headed directly at these posts, their boat skimming the surface of the lake at more than sixty miles an hour. Just fast enough to smash into smithereens and not leave anything identifiable behind.
Roy flashed in her mind, then Stacey, and stupidly, the fact that she was going to die in a SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW T-shirt for all of the state to see.
So this is what it’s like to know you’re gonna die, she thought, watching as Trevor jumped forward, grabbing a long rope out of the satchel of goods they’d taken from the gunrunner’s shack. He seemed to be frantically tying knots.
“It’s not gonna do you much good to tie me up now.”
“Don’t give me ideas.”
Bobbie Faye looked over her shoulder and saw the gunrunners slowing down, gaping at them like they were crazy. Beyond the gunrunners, the WFKD and state police helicopters flew toward them.
“Great. I’ll blow up on the news. At least they won’t see the shirt.”
“Oh, with your luck, I’m sure they’ll see the shirt.”
“Thank you so freaking much. I’m going to be dead in a moment. Let me have my fantasy, okay?”
Trevor hung one of the satchels over her, then shoved what he could from the second one into her purse.
“Stand here. We’ve got one shot. Hold onto me, because I won’t be able to hold onto you. Got it?”
Well, no, she didn’t have it. Not really. Then she saw him start to swing the rope in circles and realized he’d made a lasso and was going to try to nab the crane on the oil rig. But their boat wasn’t going to fit through the pilings anyway, and they weren’t going to get close enough to the crane to reach it, though she admired him for trying.
She held on tight. Partially because she just couldn’t process anything else, and partly because if she had to die, she might as well get to feel his back beneath her arms. She tried to close in tightly to him, to make herself as small as possible and stay out the way of his swinging the lasso, and there were the pilings, right there, a few feet ahead.
Trevor stepped on the side of the boat with a sudden force, tilting it hard, and the motion dipped one side down into the water.
Shoving the other side up.
At that angle, their width scraped past the first row of pilings just as—
Trevor released the lasso.
It arced . . . slicing across the impossibly blue sky, hanging there for a thousand years . . . moving toward the crane . . .
“Hold on!”
The rope snagged the crane and Trevor held the rope as it snapped taut, lifting them out of the boat, the momentum swinging them forward as the boat raced out from under them.
Bobbie Faye strained to hold onto him, her arms burning with the effort. As they glided through the air, she heard his heart jackhammer in his chest, heard him cursing under his breath, smelled the aftershave he must’ve used that morning.
The boat kept going, racing forward.
Their momentum swung them toward the rig.
The boat rocked back down into the water.
Just as her feet touched the deck of the rig, the boat smashed into the next set of pilings, exploding. The rig’s deck jerked and undulated.
Bobbie Faye only had a second to see the horrified shock of the crane operator and the worker on the barge.
“Life rafts!” the barge worker yelled, and pointed. He and the crane operator leapt into one as she and Trevor dove into another. Behind them, flames from the exploding boat licked at the oil rig as Trevor fired up the motor on the life raft and raced up the canal, away from the lake and the rig.
Twenty
There are five grown men in the waiting room all experiencing shortness of breath, anxiety attacks, dizziness, hives, and one of them has curled into a fetal position, is sucking his thumb, and wants me to call his mommy.
—Dr. Pam Dumond to RN Jennara B. on the influx of patients during the last Bobbie Faye disaster.
The state police helicopter rocked hard from the rig explosion; metal shrapnel whizzed outward from the former rig-turned-scrap heap, and a rolling fireball boiled upwards a hundred feet. Cam’s pilot regained control, spun around, and faced the lake. There, in front of him, was a forty-foot roiling blaze feeding on the oil from the rig, mirroring the knot in his stomach.
His mind, at first, was a blessed blank.
He stared at the flames, stared at the destruction, and everything was quiet as the color leached out of the world and there was nothing. No feeling, no warmth, no sound, no color. Then, one by one, images of Bobbie Faye ticked into his memory. If he was the kind of man who let his subconscious lead him around, he’d have noticed how he hadn’t been able to conjure up one single image of her angry or wild-eyed with fury or giving him a difficult time. Instead, he would have noticed that every image that clicked past was of a moment he had enjoyed, of her smile, or the way she smelled or snuggled into the crook of his arm. But he wasn’t that kind of man, and he closed his eyes, pushed the images away. He wouldn’t even let himself think about Bobbie Faye. There just wasn’t anything to think about; that had been a part of his life that was long over, final, finished.
He had a hard time feeling the radio switch, and he fumbled the mic, his fingers numb, why are they numb? Why is there no sound? And he struggled to remember how to contact Jason, the words robotic as he told Jason what had happened, and to dispatch the emergency crews trained to handle this kind of disaster.
There was nothing to think about. Nothing.
His helicopter hovered a safe distance from the oil rig until the radio crackled with a call from the news helicopter; they’d switched to the same frequency Cam was on in order to coordinate efforts.
“We’ve got something!” the cameraman shouted over the airwaves. “Seriously, we got something. Y’all have to see this.”
Cam radioed back a landing zone suggestion and realized the FBI had been monitoring his frequency when they cut in and announced they�
�d be joining the party.
Bobbie Faye had felt the force from the blast before she actually heard it. Or, at least, that’s what she thought happened, because she never really heard anything. Of course, it was a little difficult to hear with her brain screaming holy shit holy shit as if it were trying to gold medal in the freak-out Olympics. The concussion threw Trevor forward, which knocked her down into the bottom of the life raft, and he sprawled on top of her for a long moment before he seemed to shake it off and pull himself up.
He motored them a decent distance away in the canal, a U-shaped affair which worked its way back toward the lake. She sat up and watched him try to tend to a wound in the back of his left thigh where a small, jagged piece of metal protruded. Shrapnel from the oil rig, she supposed. He grimaced and made such a face and, for crying out loud, she’d had worse wounds in her own backyard. She yanked the metal out before he could say anything just to show him how unimportant the wound was.
“Sonofabitch!” he said, gritting his teeth and clamping his hands down, putting pressure on the gash.
“Oh, good grief. It’s not even bleeding.” She looked closer. “Much.” She looked closer still. There was an awful lot of red oozing out. “Ewwww. You really should do something about that,” she suggested, and then stepped back in case the “something” which occurred to him would be to toss her out of the life raft.
Trevor throttled the life raft down to barely a crawl as he tried to observe the wound, but he couldn’t quite see it, from its position on the back of his upper thigh.
“Oh, fine, give me your knife,” she said.
“Like hell.”
“To cut your shirt for bandages, idiot.”
Trevor pulled up the small trolling motor attached to the life raft, and pulled out his knife and cut his own shirt. They drifted for a few minutes. She crossed her arms, frustrated that he couldn’t get to the wound and wouldn’t ask for help.
He finally gave in and reluctantly handed her the shirt material as a bandage. She barely resisted the neener neener neener comment perched at the tip of her tongue as she expertly folded the material and tied off the bandage.
Trevor examined it thoroughly.
“It worries the hell out of me that the one thing you’re good at is tying bandages.”
The sound of shotgun shells ratcheting into chambers echoed off the trees around them.
“That ain’t all you got to worry ’bout,” said a voice behind Bobbie Faye.
“Y’all show your hands,” another man’s voice instructed, and she and Trevor raised them as the life raft bobbed gently in the water.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered just to Trevor, as she had yet to turn and see the men behind her.
“I’ll handle this,” he whispered. “If it gets bad, swim for the rig. Cops should be there by now.”
It wasn’t going to help. She’d never make it to the rig; she’d heard enough to know this was a helluva lot worse situation than Trevor thought.
It was everything Cam could do to keep his hands off the controls of the state police helicopter and land faster. He leapt out before the runners hit the ground and sprinted to the news helicopter, meeting Zeke and one of his FBI colleagues halfway there.
“Detective Moreau, this is special agent Wellesly,” Zeke explained as they reached the news helicopter together to find the cameraman setting up a playback monitor.
“I’m telling y’all, I think I got them on tape.”
The cameraman pushed the tape into the player, fast forwarding until he found where his footage of the boat chase started. He tapped the screen, showing the boat with Trevor and Bobbie Faye.
“I’m pretty sure this is them. I zoomed in here, but as you can see, we’re still a little too far away to get a crystal-clear image. This was when we started flying toward them.”
Cam watched the speedboat lurch forward. It was Bobbie Faye as he had suspected. He’d recognize her body language anywhere, especially since she was clearly arguing with the man in the boat, presumably Cormier. He held himself spectacularly still as the boat tilted through the first row of pilings and, for a split second, he thought he saw Trevor holding Bobbie Faye just before the boat went down the side of the rig opposite from the helicopter. They disappeared from view and then the boat exploded and a minute later, the rig followed.
“Now see this,” the cameraman said, rewinding the tape back to that moment when Cam thought he’d seen Cormier holding Bobbie Faye. The tape froze there. Cormier appeared to be holding something aloft. Maybe a rope? Cam couldn’t be sure, but he could see Bobbie Faye squeezing tightly against the man. As the scene crawled forward, they disappeared from sight, and then the explosion.
The acid in his veins threatened to sear him from the inside out, and he stood, quiet, still.
“We won’t be able to get in there for a while,” Cam found himself saying. He sounded calm, steady. Strange, how that worked. “The emergency response team is on their way. They’ll have to get the fire out and then get the well capped before it’ll be safe enough to get any of our CSI in there.”
“How long? Hours? What?” Zeke asked.
Cam almost snorted with derision. “We’ll be lucky if it isn’t days. You don’t exactly turn off one of these at a spigot.”
They replayed the tape twice more, slowing it down for a frame by frame study, and still couldn’t discern any movement of Bobbie Faye and Trevor from the boat.
“Well that’s it, then,” Wellesly said. “They’re dead.”
Zeke shook his head. “I’ll believe Cormier’s dead when I have his body parts in a bag.”
Cam ran back to his helicopter. For once, he hoped the FBI agent was right.
“I’ve seen some tick-fevered dogs do some crazy-ass shit, but each-a-you, y’all done take the cake. What the hell were you thinking, stealing my boat?”
“Honestly, there was a mix-up,” Trevor said, and Bobbie Faye rolled her eyes at him. That wasn’t going to work.
“What?” the man behind her scoffed. “Like you took your brains out and forgot to put ’em back in? That’s one hellified mix-up.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Alex,” Bobbie Faye said, turning around to face the man leading the gunrunners. “It was just one measly little boat.”
“Goddamnit, sonofabitch, I thought that mighta been you,” Alex said, and Bobbie Faye and he glared at each other. The gunrunners grinned like a bunch of kids who discovered they were about to have front-row seats to a primo fireworks display as they all studied Bobbie Faye, then Alex, and then back again.
He wasn’t much changed from her memory: dark, wiry, muscular, with a hook nose and fierce angles and planes to his face, but the shoulder-length black hair worked for him. He was part Cajun, part Choctaw, and no one would have ever described him as handsome, but he definitely had the kind of charisma that made him a leader and made his men loyal.
The years had been good to him, which pissed her off.
“I saw on the news that you were running loose,” Alex continued, and Bobbie Faye noted with a shameful amount of satisfaction that he was seething. “So of course you have to lead the whole damned state to my door. Have you lost your mind? Wait a minute, look who I’m talking about.”
“I didn’t know it was your crappy old boat, for one thing. If I had, I’d have blown up the whole freaking lot of them.”
Trevor turned to her, his expression shot through with incredulity. “Perhaps you haven’t noticed who is holding the guns on whom.”
“Oh, she knows, all right,” said the second man standing near Alex. He was a stump, short and squat, with tobacco stains on his chin from the permanent chew he held between rotting teeth. “They used to date.”
“Don’t fucking remind me, Marcel,” Alex said.
Bobbie Faye watched realization dawn in Trevor’s eyes.
“So that’s why you knew they were gunrunners. And that’s why you’re such a good shot.”
She couldn’t tell what he was annoyed ab
out. “I didn’t know it was Alex’s camp, though. That one is a lot fancier than the last one. He moves around a lot, since he’s a pus-filled, slimy, good-for-nothing waste of human skin.”
“Promise me you’ll never work as a negotiator.”
Alex’s face reddened, flushed with fury. “I should have killed you back when I had the chance.”
“He got a restraining order on her,” Marcel said, “on account of when she blew up his favorite car.”
“I was aiming for the camp,” she explained to Trevor. “Alex and I never did see eye-to-eye.”
“I wanted her dead and she wouldn’t oblige.”
“I’m beginning to know the feeling,” Trevor muttered, and Bobbie Faye cast him an icy frown. “So,” he asked Alex, “why didn’t you shoot her this time?”
Alex stared at Bobbie Faye. She could see his mixed emotions, but she also knew it was more than that. She had leverage.
The question didn’t elicit an answer, though it did make Marcel suddenly regard the men around him. “Y’all show some respect. Y’all can’t point your guns at the Contraband Days Queen!”
As a unit, they all swung their guns so that they aimed solely at Trevor.
“Somehow, today,” Trevor said, “this makes perfect sense.”
“Y’all are all right,” Bobbie Faye said to the men. Most of them blushed, though a couple of them looked appreciatively at her belly-baring SHUCK ME, SUCK ME T-shirt and tight jeans. Then they checked to see if Alex had seen them do so, and when they met his glare, they suddenly found their boots fascinating.
“Just what in the hell are you doing out here, Bobbie Faye? And why the hell are you dressed like that?” Alex focused on Trevor. “You let her go outside like this?”
Trevor’s expression registered surprise, and then he shrugged.
“You actually expect someone to have some control over her?”
Bobbie Faye wanted to kick them both.
“Hey! What year is it in that universe you live in, Alex? This is none of your business, what I wear.”
Alex focused his searing glare back on her. She heard the helicopters whirring somewhere beyond the billowing smoke from the oil rig’s fire.
Charmed and Dangerous Page 16
