Charmed and Dangerous

by Toni McGee Causey

  “Fine. So why in the hell are you out here in my backyard, stealing my boat? Bored? Thought you’d light a firecracker up my ass just for kicks and giggles?”

  His neck muscles were knotted, tense, and there was a bit of a facial tick, which Bobbie Faye knew was a very bad sign of Alex losing what little grasp he had on his temper. His men looked nervous and sent her pleading looks. And as much as she’d love to mess with him, she didn’t have time.

  “Actually, I’m in trouble.”

  “Trouble is your hobby, Bobbie Faye. So what’s new?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Please tell me it’s bad.”

  “It’s about Roy. In fact, I need your help.”

  She’d never actually seen synchronized gaping before. Bobbie Faye wasn’t sure who was more shocked at her request: Alex, his men, or Trevor.

  “How about I just kill you instead?” Alex finally asked, until he looked around at his men, all of whom were shaking their heads “no.”

  “Shit,” he addressed his men. “Y’all are nuts. I’m not helping her, I don’t care if her mamma was the Contraband Days Queen for fifteen years.”

  “But she’s the Queen, now that her mamma’s gone,” Marcel pointed out. “I’m real sorry to have heard about that, Bobbie Faye.” Marcel’s weaselly features softened. “She was a real good Queen.”

  “Thank you, Marcel.”

  “Besides, Alex,” Marcel said. “Roy’s in trouble.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Bobbie Faye never lies. She’s crazier than a raccoon hopped up on Tabasco, but she always tells the truth. And it’s Roy. We gotta help.”

  Bobbie Faye noted the eager expressions on the rest of the men’s faces and the rush of the epiphany nearly made her head spin.

  “You sonofabitch,” she addressed Alex. “You promised me Roy wouldn’t work for you ever again.”

  Trevor stepped in front of Bobbie Faye while Marcel took a step to move in front of Alex.

  “Oh, he don’t work for Alex no more, Bobbie Faye. Not since the whole car blowing up deal. But he’s great at poker.”

  “Roy always loses!”

  “That’s what makes him great,” Marcel said, and the rest of the men nodded.

  Trevor grabbed her around her waist to keep her from lunging at Alex.

  If she and Roy lived through this, Bobbie Faye vowed to get even with Alex. Then smack some sense into Roy; he’d been lying to her all these years, still losing all of his money to Alex. She’d like to stomp Alex right now, too, but that was going to have to wait.

  “I know you know pretty much everything going on around this lake and these bayous, Alex. You’ve always had lookouts everywhere.”

  “What the hell do you want from me?”

  “A couple of geeky boys took something of Mamma’s,” she said, pointedly to the men, “from me, and I have to get it back. The people holding Roy will kill him if I don’t.”

  “So?”

  Bobbie Faye watched him. He was normally difficult to read, but she knew him well (too damned well), and she could tell he had more going on here than met the eye. For starters, he didn’t seem surprised when she described the boys, and he didn’t make jokes about how a nerdy kid was just good gator bait in the swamps. In fact, it was more about what he didn’t say than anything else.

  “So,” she said, giving him a piercing look, “you know where they’re going.”

  “I might have some idea.”

  “Are you helping them?”

  “Nah,” Marcel volunteered as Alex glowered at him. “Couple days ago, we heard someone like that was looking for a place to hole up. We didn’t know they was gonna be pullin’ a job on you, Bobbie Faye. Honest.”

  “Tell me where they are,” Bobbie Faye said to Alex, “and I’ll give you your stuff back.”

  Alex’s pupils dilated as his eyes widened, though nothing else denoted just how much she knew he wanted his hands on that stuff again. He glanced around, then back at her, now looking slightly worried that she might say what the stuff actually was. She followed his lead, looking at his men, realizing they still didn’t know. She grinned her biggest, most annoying “I have your ass nailed, don’t I?” smile at him.

  “All of my stuff?” he asked. “Given only to me?”

  “Quit worrying about loopholes, Alex. I’ll give it back.” Eventually, she muttered, though low enough that he didn’t hear her. He nodded, very reluctantly, agreeing.

  “Hey boss,” one of the other gunrunners said. “What do we do with this guy?” he asked, pointing at Trevor.

  Bobbie Faye stepped in front of Trevor, surprising everyone. “He’s with me.”

  “Reason enough to put the poor bastard out of his misery,” Alex said, and Marcel and the men laughed, but lowered their guns. “Get her out of here, Marcel. Help her find the kids.” He pointed at Bobbie Faye, a warning. “But I get all my stuff back. Or else.”

  Twenty-One

  She got an A+ in demolition. Unfortunately, we weren’t teaching demolition that week.

  —André Chapoy, high school shop teacher

  Cam’s helicopter swooped low over the canals around the rig, staying well clear of the fire, but still close enough to see if any life rafts were nearby. The entire scene at the oil rig was on a loop in his mind, and he wanted it excised.

  He pondered what could be driving Bobbie Faye to these lengths. Even if she’d intended to rob that bank, she wouldn’t have put this many people’s lives in jeopardy on purpose. She was crazy, but she was never intentionally cruel. He could give her that. Reluctantly. Something must be pushing her way beyond the normal level of insanity and the only thing—

  He grabbed his phone, and as soon as Benoit answered, said, “Do we know where Bobbie Faye’s family is?”

  He heard Benoit flipping through a few pages of reports.

  “Nope, not yet.”

  “Find ’em. Just verify their location and put someone on each of them.”

  “Including the niece?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Got it. I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve found ’em.”

  He hung up, pissed that he hadn’t thought to find them earlier. One of them was bound to know what the hell was eating Bobbie Faye and, unlike Ce Ce, have no problems blabbing anything anyone wanted to know. He maybe could have stopped this insane chase an hour ago. How in the hell had he forgotten her siblings?

  His phone vibrated on his hip and he snatched it open and shouted a little too forcefully, “Moreau here.”

  “Uh, Cam?” Jason asked, breathless. “You okay?”

  “Of course I am,” he spat, and he could visualize Jason flinching. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve picked up a couple of survivors from the rig. A crane operator and a dock worker.”

  “And?”

  “They said they saw Bobbie Faye, but they don’t know if she made it off the rig before it exploded. The workers grabbed the first life raft and raced off toward the lake. The other life raft didn’t follow. We haven’t found it yet.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Will do. Oh. On that other thing we were talking about?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. Call me from a land line as soon as you can.”

  They hung up, and Cam debated which was more pressing: hearing what Jason had learned or finding that other life raft before the FBI grabbed it. Bobbie Faye could be injured, bleeding.

  Or dying. The imagery of the explosion was on constant repeat. Geez, he needed a new brain.

  Cam directed the helicopter to land near the marina and he ran for one of the pay phones out on the pier. When he dialed Jason, he was greeted with, “Hello, Mrs. Lee. I’ve got that information for you around here somewhere. Is there a number where I can call you back?” Cam read off the pay phone number and within a couple of minutes, it rang.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked Jason.

  “I wanted
to switch to a secure line and I didn’t want anyone picking up your cell line and recording this. Besides, the Captain was strolling around.

  “I got a snippet. The Fibbies are rotating frequencies, though, not staying on the same channel for very long—probably some sort of automated hack prevention program they have set up to keep anyone from hearing a full conversation. I’m patching it in through the computer to you. Don’t worry, it’ll be scrambled if anyone else picks up on this line.”

  Cam made a mental note to sweep his house and office for bugs if he ever pissed Jason off. He could hear computer keys clicking and Jason humming the way he did when he was hyped up on technogeekism, and then Zeke’s voice broke into the silence.

  “If I know Cormier, he’s after it.”

  “You think he knows?”

  “It’s Cormier. Of course he knows.”

  “You think she’ll give it to him?”

  “I think she won’t know what the hell just happened. I know Cormier. He’ll charm it straight out of her hands and make her think it was all her idea.”

  “If she gets it.”

  “Oh, he’ll make sure she gets it.”

  “So . . . what happens if he gets it first?”

  “Game over.”

  Jason cut back into the line. “The channel switches there and I lost ’em, but just as they’re switching, the first guy asked something. It’s too scratchy to understand, and I washed it through the computer a few times. The best I could come up with was something about a ‘piece.’ I don’t know what they’re referring to. Maybe the same thing Bobbie Faye’s supposed to give to this Cormier guy?”

  “Thanks. Do you think you can track down their frequency and listen in again?”

  “I can try. I’ll call you if I get anything else.”

  Jason hung up, and Cam tried to imagine Bobbie Faye having something of such great value she’d not only risk going to jail, or dying, trying to get it, but clearly other people were willing to risk as much as well. Aside from one decent car she’d had (used, high mileage), the most expensive thing she’d ever owned was a used laptop computer refurbished by the guys down at the Computer Barn, and even then, it was so far out of date, it barely ran Windows. She had no fancy jewelry (he was not going to think about the ring at the bottom of the lake . . . not going to think about it, not not not not, dammit, and how it would have looked on her), and she had no knickknacks that came from anything except garage sales and flea markets. Anything else of value she’d once owned, she’d hocked, he heard, to pay for Lori Ann’s rehab.

  He’d offered to pay for that, in spite of Bobbie Faye loathing him, but she’d made it crystal clear she wanted absolutely nothing from him. Ever.

  Cam climbed back into the cockpit, directing the pilot to fly south of the rig fire, away from any logical roads out of the area. Anyone wanting to escape would have gone east or west to get to the closest roads out. But clearly, Bobbie Faye didn’t just want to escape. She was after something.

  Even with the air-conditioning cranked on high, the crowded, humid conditions in the Outfitter store where many people stood or sat, chanting, made the customers look a little too much like dozens of Easter eggs drowned in a pot, coming to a boil. Sweat clustered across their brows as Ce Ce fussed around each one, handing some a crystal, tucking talismans in others’ pockets, sprinkling odd spices and ingredients around them all.

  “What’s that?” Maven asked, his attention dragged from the knife case to the odd blue strings she tucked in his pocket. “Yarn?”

  “Sure, honey. Yarn.”

  Maven squinted at her, suspicious, but she patted him on the arm and continued down the matrix line. No way in hell she was telling him exactly what kind of yarn that was.

  The energy seemed to be flowing through the matrix exceptionally well. Quite a few of the customers were looking scads more robust than they had prior to joining in the matrix. They seemed to be feeling, as Miss Rabalais had put so delicately, tingly, if Ce Ce could judge by the smiles, the body language, the flirting. She noticed the scores of crystals she had hung around the room seemed to waft toward the door, the same direction she’d focused the positive energy. Sure, some people would say that was probably just the air conditioner jostling the crystals, but Ce Ce knew better.

  This was good.

  No, this was very good.

  The phone rang for the billionth time and Allison scrunched her forehead in concern and handed it to Ce Ce.

  “Ms. Ce Ce?” It was a youngish woman’s voice, tremulous, soft. “This is Mrs. Gareaux, Stacey’s kindergarten teacher. We met last open house?”

  “I remember, honey. Is Stacey okay?”

  “I think so. Well, I mean, yes, she’s fine, but I thought I probably should have called you before I let them take her, but it was all official and everything, so I really didn’t have a choice.”

  “Let who take her?”

  “The FBI. There was a special agent who came here a few minutes ago. He said he had to take Stacey and put her in protective custody until her aunt Bobbie Faye was found. I know you’re the emergency contact to pick Stacey up if something happens to Bobbie Faye—I mean, now, while her mamma’s drying out, bless her heart. We just, well, we never talked about what to do if something like this should happen.”

  “That’s okay, honey, I don’t expect you’d have that sort of conversation handy.”

  “True, Ms. Ce Ce, but this is Miss Bobbie Faye we’re talking about and I just feel terrible that I didn’t think to ask this sort of question before.”

  “Not to worry, honey, I’m sure they were just trying to protect her.”

  “Yes ma’am. I suppose you’re right. It just seemed . . . I don’t know. Odd. I just thought you ought to know.”

  “Thank you, honey. Did you get the agent’s name?”

  There was a brief pause, a slight intake of air. “Oh, dear, should I have? He had a badge and everything.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Ce Ce said, and then rang off. Surely, it would be fine, right? She just had to find that child, make sure they were keeping her safe. Get a name. Not a big deal, really. She ignored the gnawing in her stomach. It really couldn’t be a big deal. She wasn’t sure if she had a spell for that.

  Twenty-Two

  I’m sorry, Governor, but “her mere existence” isn’t grounds enough to register Bobbie Faye as a controlled and dangerous substance to be locked up.

  —Louisiana State Supreme Court Justice Tara Sedalek, to a former Louisiana governor after his run-in with Bobbie Faye put him in a full-body cast for two months

  Bobbie Faye groaned at the incessant busy signal on her cell phone; Stacey’s school still wasn’t answering. She waited in Marcel’s boat while he and Trevor sank the life raft, hiding it from the police.

  “What the hell do you mean, you’re not coming with us?” Bobbie Faye demanded of Marcel as he and Trevor stepped from the lake shore back into Marcel’s boat.

  Marcel waved his own cell phone at her while she hit redial.

  “I done tracked ’em to a shack, Bobbie Faye. I gotta get outta here. This place is gonna be crawlin’ with Feds, and I ain’t exactly on their Christmas list. ’Sides, if those kids move from there, we’ll know it and I’ll call you. I’ll take you far as another boat, chère. That’s it.”

  Bobbie Faye smacked the cell phone closed after yet another busy signal, staring at it as she asked, “What could they be doing over there?”

  “They’re probably getting a lot of calls from parents, which is tying up the lines.” Trevor suggested.

  That didn’t exactly make her feel better.

  Marcel guided his boat through small bayous where the trees overhung the stagnant water to the point of obscuring the view from above and the five (at last count) helicopters circling the oil rig fire. She had to give him credit; he was going to great pains to help. He and Trevor seemed to have hit it off well. A little too well? This was, after all, a guy who knew exactly where a gunrunner’
s hideout was. And knew where the guns were stored. And how to use them. And seemed way too familiar with getting into and out of trouble. And . . . wow, her head hurt just thinking about what he could be up to. His procurement business? Was it guns? Or stealing valuable things? Was she leading him straight to the tiara?

  Geez. She had enough to worry about.

  The bayou they were on curved sharply to the left, but Marcel seemed to be ignoring the curve and was heading straight for a clump of trees and brush.

  “Marcel, what the hell are you doing? Intentionally grounding us?”

  “Aw, chère, you worry too much. Just ’cuz you dumped me for Alex, don’t mean I hold a grudge.”

  Trevor glanced at her, the mockery clear in his eyes.

  “Marcel. We did not date.”

  “We did too. It was a very good date.” He turned to Trevor. “We went to a tractor-pull.”

  “Ha,” she snapped. “Y’all tricked me into going, and I ended up covered in beer, cotton candy, and mud!”

  “Yeah,” Marcel said, smiling, fond of the memory. “It took four men to hold you down so I could hose all the mud off you so you could get in the truck.”

  “I bet that went over well,” Trevor noted.

  Bobbie Faye ignored them both, worrying instead over the looming trees, until they suddenly divided in half, swinging open on an electric gate. Marcel held a remote control and grinned, smug.

  “Holy crap, no wonder the Feds never find you guys.”

  “Well, they find the gates sometimes. We’ve got ’em rigged with alarms and we’ve got surveillance cameras all over the lake, so we know if one’s being staked out or tampered with. Most of ’em, though, are still hidden.”

  Trevor looked quite appreciative of this creativity. Marcel clicked the remote after they’d passed through, and the gate closed behind them, cutting them off from the bayou and lake. They were floating on an even tinier bayou, one too small for the speedboat and its big Mercury engine to navigate safely.

  “This is where y’all switch to the bateau,” Marcel announced, and he pointed out a bateau which was tied to a tree a couple of feet away. “There’s a trolling motor in good condition, some gas in there, and a couple of paddles. That should get you all the way to the shack.”