Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

by Toni McGee Causey

  He hadn’t thought, ’til that moment, what he would do if they were a match. Could he be handing the DA the very information he’d need to make a good case against Bobbie Faye? Circumstantial as all hell, but then many cases came down to circumstantial evidence.

  Cam faced the mirror, arms braced on either side of the sink. The hairs he had weren’t admissible—he had no warrant, no permission, and they definitely weren’t something discarded in public he could have simply picked up. Nor could he argue she’d left hair behind on a brush in his house—he’d given everything of hers back. Maggie wasn’t supposed to still have the hair from the murder site, and her conjecture that the hair on the bridge was a match to Bobbie Faye’s was just that—a conjecture. Still . . . what if doing this gave the DA evidence against her?

  He was breaking ten kinds of laws, not to mention ethics, just being there. She wasn’t his girlfriend, hadn’t wanted his help, and they hadn’t been able to have much more than a barely civil conversation in a year. Even if she had been his girlfriend, he’d have been duty-bound to comply with any search warrants, and if she’d been staying at his place, he’d have handed over anything he’d owned, like his hairbrush, if it had been on the warrant’s list. So what was he doing here breaking laws to try to help her?

  His cell phone rang, and he saw it was Benoit. He hesitated; Benoit would ask him the kinds of questions he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer just yet (like had he lost his mind).

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “Can you meet me at your house?”

  “I’ve got some leads to follow up.”

  “Yeah, cher. You’re gonna want to meet me. Twenty minutes.”

  Benoit hung up, and Cam’s worry ratcheted into overdrive. It wasn’t like his best friend to be anything but laid-back.

  Cam pinched the bridge of his nose, clenching his eyes shut, and tried to shove away the awareness of the headache throbbing. When he opened his eyes, he blinked, adjusting back to the light, and that’s when something shiny glinted from the small space where the bathroom vanity didn’t quite meet the wall in the cheap-ass trailer. He leaned closer, assuming it was a piece of jewelry, and he had his pocketknife out on reflex, planning to fish it out for her (ignoring his constant inner argument over not being the guy who was supposed to be doing that sort of stuff for her anymore), and that’s when he realized it was larger than jewelry, and it was brass.

  Brass casings. In the bathroom? Weird was his first thought, and then, as he bent over to inspect it more closely without having to touch the brass, he knew something about this was beyond weird. And wrong. There were at least four casings back there. Bobbie Faye didn’t typically pick up her brass after shooting at Ce Ce’s firing range—she knew the twins were dead broke and needed to recycle the brass to make extra money. If it had been just a single casing, he’d have assumed it was something Stacey had somehow found and wedged behind the sink with the typical wily behavior of a five-year-old, but he found it odd that she’d have a single casing to play with, much less four. Bobbie Faye would have never let Stacey play with anything that might make the five-year-old think bullets were toys. His ex might be crazy, but she was exceptionally careful about that kid.

  Cam used his pocketknife to pry the top casing out and laid it on the vanity countertop. He then retrieved a second, and then a third, and the dread that swamped him forced him to admit what he was thinking about: there were five missing casings from the jeweler murder scene. Five. And as he pulled the fourth casing out from the spot behind the vanity, he saw a fifth which had fallen in a little ways further. It took using a pair of scissors with the pocketknife to maneuver the brass out without touching it, but there it was, lying next to the other four.

  Cam didn’t really believe in coincidences. Five missing casings. A jeweler murder. Rumor that Francesca had been saying something about diamonds when she was at Ce Ce’s. (Well, if Maimee was to be believed, and frankly, he’d never seen a woman go so clean off her rocker so fast as Maimee had gone after Edgar had lost their retirement and life savings.) Then there was Maggie’s phone call about the hair on the bridge matching the hair at the murder scene. And on the other side of all of those coincidences was the woman he’d intended on marrying.

  It was surreal that she and Trevor were pushing a motorcycle through the rows of the sugarcane field behind her trailer park—Bobbie Faye was pretty sure she’d hopscotched over reality two explosions ago—but what she really couldn’t reconcile was the fact that Cam had broken into her home. From their hiding place in her shed, they’d watched him come through that gate and go up to her door and then pick the damned lock. Even if he was just checking to see if she was okay, and if he thought that maybe she wasn’t, that maybe she’d needed help, he would normally have knocked and shouted for her to come to the damned door. In fact, he’d have started by banging on the front door and then he’d have barreled around to the back, on the off chance that she’d dragged her bleeding body to the back door by mistake, and then he still would have knocked.

  Except, he hadn’t. He’d broken into her trailer, big as you please. He was the man who’d been so hell-bent on adhering to doing what was “right” that he’d arrested her sister for a DUI instead of calling Bobbie Faye and letting her get Lori Ann into rehab, quietly. When she’d gotten upset over that, he’d made it clear he was a good cop who didn’t bend the rules. He made it crystal clear she was the one kind of girlfriend a good cop would never want. So why was it o-freaking-kay for him to bend the rules when he wanted something? What in the hell he’d wanted, she had no clue.

  She glanced over at Trevor. He’d been watching her stew.

  “Do you want to go back and kick his ass?” Trevor asked with a mischievous glint.

  “No,” she said. The last thing she needed was a shouting match with Cam right now, and she particularly didn’t want to have to answer questions about Francesca or diamonds or explosions or anything until she’d had time to think. She looked down the row she and Trevor navigated, the tall sugarcane leaves shooting up and then drooping open, umbrella-like, forming a canopy of green overhead as far as the eye could see. It looked like she was going to have a while to think before they were safely far enough away to start the bike.

  “If you ever come back to Louisiana again, I promise I’ll show you something prettier than exploding houses and stifling hot farms.” Maybe she’d even have gotten the grant to start up her South Louisiana tour business and could afford to treat him to something nice, like a fancy dinner out.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Oh? You think they’ll let you hang around, assuming I don’t get you killed first?” She tried her dead level best not to sound too hopeful (about the staying, not about the killing). Probably sounded hopeful. Shit.

  “They’d better, since I transferred here.” He pushed the bike onto a trail that she hadn’t known existed—it bisected the field.

  “You . . . huh?” Had her brain melted out her ears? “When did you do this?”

  “Transfer?”

  She nodded.

  “Last month.”

  Last month. That would have been a couple of weeks after the disaster with Roy . . . oh hell. She paused as he moved forward. “You got demoted. Oh, Jesus, Trevor, I’m sorry.”

  He stopped pushing the bike and frowned at her. “Your brain is a very scary place sometimes.”

  “Like that’s news.”

  “I did not get demoted,” he said, in that amused, smug male sort of way. “C’mon,” he said, holding out a hand to her. “We need to get out of here.”

  “You requested the move? You’re not like, terminally ill and figured suicide by Bobbie Faye disaster would be a quick way to go, right?”

  He responded with a very slow, sultry, wicked, holy-geez-where-was-a-bed-when-you-needed-one sweep of a gaze that started at her toes and when he met her eyes, he held the gaze and she was pretty sure she was going to need CPR.

  “Let’s just say I intend
on having that second date.”

  Cam grabbed a plastic zippered baggie from Bobbie Faye’s kitchen and returned to the bathroom; he scooped the casings carefully into the bag, then sealed it. He avoided his reflection in the bathroom mirror. If he tagged ’em and bagged ’em and turned them into evidence, he’d still get the shit kicked out of him by his captain for not getting a proper search warrant. Moving the casings like this was tantamount to throwing the case into the toilet, if it turned out that these were, indeed, the casings missing from the jeweler’s murder. He didn’t have a warrant. Any good defense attorney could have the casings declared inadmissible.

  The most likely motive for them being in her trailer was that whoever had put them there wanted Bobbie Faye implicated. For all he knew, these casings had Bobbie Faye’s prints on them. She’d taught shooting lessons to plenty of people at the range. Bobbie Faye was a pain in the ass, but she was a smart pain in the ass—she wasn’t dumb enough to kill someone and hide the shells in her own home . . . not with three bayous between her trailer and the murder site she could have tossed them into. For the casings to be there, in the trailer, hidden, but not quite hidden well enough, reeked of someone framing her. Could he count on a good attorney getting her off?

  With her luck?

  He could save his ass right here, put the casings back, let the investigative process run its course. Because moving these casings? Illegal. He’d be canned. Charged with tampering with evidence, impeding an investigation. His career would be over. Maybe Bobbie Faye would never be a suspect in the jeweler murder, maybe that wasn’t her hair at the murder site, and maybe she was going to turn into Mary Poppins and start singing and flying—they all had about the same chances of coming true.

  Back in the kitchen, he took the headache meds she kept in stock for him, then left the water glass and medicine bottle out on the counter. He wasn’t sure why he left them out. It would tick her off that he’d been there without permission. It was easier to focus on her being angry, on how they’d probably fight about it; almost anything was easier than thinking about that plastic bag in his pocket.

  He slipped out the back door and that’s when he noticed it: her storage shed door. It had definitely been closed when he arrived. Now it was standing open. He pulled his gun out. No one was inside, but a man’s and a woman’s prints overlapped on the dusty floor, like they’d been in there at the same time. Witnesses had placed her on the back of a Harley leaving Marie’s with a rider who fit Trevor’s general description. The Feds were all over this case—could Trevor be involved? Or was it a possibility that the people who’d pulled her into their vehicles earlier—according to the twins who were at Ce Ce’s when it all went down this morning—had decided to take her again?

  Sonofabitch.

  He tracked the prints to the sugarcane field. He hadn’t gone far before he crossed a furrow where the dirt had a single tire track—from a motorcycle—and a man’s footprints on one side and a woman’s on the other. From the way the balls of her feet had dug into the soil, it looked like she’d been pushing something—probably the bike. As had the man. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to draw attention by revving the engine. The fact that she was on the opposite side of a heavy bike, helping to push, suggested she was not being forced.

  Cam squatted, gauging how long it had been since the tracks had been made, and he’d guess not longer than a few minutes. She was on the run, and whether she liked it or not, she was going to have to tell him why.

  Reggie couldn’t help but notice the bright yellow Hummer when it pulled into the trailer park; most of the residents appeared to have gotten their cars through Ed’s Swifty Thrifty Lot, where no clunker would prove too dilapidated to sell. The Hummer was not only sorely out of place, but it pulled directly up to the front of Bobbie Faye’s trailer and a woman popped out and went to bang on Bobbie Faye’s door.

  Reggie looked through DJ’s zoom lens, and there was Donny, the stupid sap. If she had to hear one more time about him bragging about all of the acting roles he almost had before he left L.A., and all of the things he was going to be able to do once he landed a new agent, she was going to slam a microphone against his head.

  She mentally shook herself and repeated her mantra: Whatever it takes.

  Donny pulled his smile for the camera as he casually ambled over, like they’d never met before, hadn’t been talking, and to anyone watching, it would seem believable. Maybe he could make a decent actor after all.

  Thirteen

  Cam was late getting home—he’d followed the motorcycle tire print until it reached a trail, and without his truck, he couldn’t catch up. His truck wouldn’t fit the narrow trail, even if he could have found the trail’s opening and backtracked. Benoit had been waiting for him with a six-pack of ice cold beer and had handed one to Cam when he met Cam at the door.

  “Thanks,” Cam said, taking the beer and swigging it before he reached his living room. “It’s been a shitty day.”

  “It’s about to get worse, cher.”

  Cam hadn’t thought it was possible, but as the footage from the surveillance DVD rolled on his high-def flat-screen TV, he felt as if he’d been plowed by the biggest, meanest sonofabitch SEC lineman to walk the gridiron. He’d been standing, and then he was sitting in a chair Benoit must’ve pulled up for him.

  While his friend and partner moved to the sofa, Cam sat directly in front of the screen, rewinding the images, rewatching it at slower and slower speeds. He paused it several times when the picture was a little blurry, or there seemed to be shadows of other people, and the rational detective part of his brain tried to think it through, to make sense of how in the hell he was seeing the woman he’d known since they were kids . . . shooting a man in cold blood. Because there was no doubt, it wasn’t anywhere near self-defense.

  He and Benoit watched as she picked up the five casings and, without moving, he could feel the weight of the brass in his pocket. Cam didn’t say a word about them to his partner. Benoit was his best friend and would take a bullet for Cam, but Cam wasn’t going to let Benoit derail his own career just because Cam had gotten sucked into another Bobbie Faye disaster. And sonofabitch, this was a disaster she might not get out of. He squinted at the image again when he paused it—she was standing underneath the streetlight, and she looked distorted in the harsh light and strange angle. The whole perspective was off.

  Cam thought about that.

  “This can’t be her,” he told Benoit, who said nothing for a long time. And there she was, her hand holding a Glock, planting five slugs into the jeweler in a pattern he’d known all along was familiar—and now he knew why. “Can’t be,” he said again.

  Holy Christ, he had the casings in his pocket. What had he done? Fuck, what had she done? Could someone have forced her?

  “It could be someone else,” Benoit said, though Cam felt his friend’s uncertainty in the too-calm delivery of the thought. “Maybe someone dressed up like her. For that to be intentional to frame her, they had to have known about the other video cameras—maybe the assumption was that we’d get those tapes, too.”

  “True,” Cam said, remembering the footage from one store was erased and the other videotape broken. “Bad angle. Bad lighting. It could be someone else.”

  Could be? He’d said could be. Not is. Not it is someone else.

  “I’m not going by the PD this evening,” Benoit said. Which Cam knew meant he wouldn’t be logging this evidence in tonight. As soon as it was logged in, they’d have to arrest Bobbie Faye.

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” Cam said. “She’s not my . . . she’s not anything to me.” Except someone who pissed him off on a regular basis.

  “She’s still my friend, Cam,” Benoit said. “An’ she’s yours. Even if you’re never going to marry her.”

  “Marry her? God, no. My life would be like this every damned week. No thank you.”

  “Well, cher, I want a day to see what else I can find out, first. I’ll have to log it in tomorro
w. But maybe I can shake the trees and drop something that’ll help.”

  Cam nodded, and used his computer to burn a copy of the DVD. He would find Bobbie Faye. Ask her some questions before Benoit logged this in.

  Trevor padded barefoot through Nina’s expansive, ultra-chic loft; freshly showered, hair still damp, clad only in jeans (something Bobbie Faye’s Hormones were busy writing thank-you notes about). He appeared to be quadruple-checking the security system. Bobbie Faye stood at the big antique mahogany dining room table, glad to have showered away the debris from the day, though she didn’t really want to think about what had actually happened. She wondered if there was some sort of job she could get as a Specialist in Denial and Compartmentalization because she was a freaking pro. Come to think of it, there were entire governmental departments she could probably apply to. Of course, then she’d have to answer for entire departments running screaming in the streets, so maybe it was best just to quietly freak out by herself.

  She caught Trevor’s reflection in the huge loft windows—the dark outside had turned them into mirrors, and when she didn’t think he noticed her watching, she caught how his gaze swept the length of her and stayed on her ass. She was soooo second-guessing the short silk pjs she’d grabbed for comfort. They were a little slutty. Maybe too slutty. (Was there such a thing as half-slutty? Kinda up there with sort-of innocent and a little pregnant.)

  She refocused and scrutinized the junk she’d shoved in her purse from Marie’s place. Trevor made another lap past the walls filled with gorgeous paintings and African masks (original, not Pier 1 copies, Bobbie Faye had learned when she’d inadvertently dropped one once). There were chic polished metal lamps and deep, plush rugs that were more comfortable to lie on than the bed Bobbie Faye had at home. There were two bedrooms, and the spare was fully stocked with clothing of all sorts—for Nina’s models, Nina had told her once. Bobbie Faye didn’t ask about any of the S&M props Nina had stored there for use in the magazine, or why Nina had gotten started in this business in the first place. Well, she hadn’t asked any direct questions; Nina was a very private person, ironically, and Bobbie Faye knew that Nina told her more than she told anyone else in the world, but as they’d grown older, there were more and more gaps. Bobbie Faye wondered about that, and if Nina had seemed unhappy, Bobbie Faye would have pressed her friend for more information. Nina, though, seemed perfectly well-adjusted. Probably was the only well-adjusted sane person Bobbie Faye knew.