Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

by Toni McGee Causey

  She sat down at the bar. “Nice try at the reverse psychology. You’re seriously deluded if you think I’m that easy.” She stared at the omelet; damn, there were two kinds of cheeses. Maybe even three.

  “Sundance, in all of the history of women, you would be the last one that someone would label ‘easy.’ ”

  “Good,” she said, then, “Wait.” He smiled. “I’m not going to be manipulated.”

  “Okay.” He reached for the plate and Instinct took over and she grabbed it, protecting it, and he waited, his hand still on the rim.

  “I never said I didn’t want it.”

  “Do you want it?”

  She eyed him, wary, unsure if they were still talking about the omelet. He snagged her fork with his other hand, cut the omelet, and fed her a bite. She should have been annoyed at his blatant manipulation, and she should have kept her lips closed, but Hunger vetoed and took over her mouth and she had to close her eyes once the food passed her lips because oh. dear. Lord. She had no idea anyone could do something so sublime to an omelet. She wasn’t even sure what he’d done, but it had melted in her mouth and she’d nearly had an orgasm. When she opened her eyes, he was clearly enjoying her response.

  “You jerk,” she said, but it was hard to sound really angry when she’d taken the fork and was stuffing her mouth with the next bite. When he arched an eyebrow, quizzically, she angled the utensil toward the omelet. “You’re not playing fair.”

  “I have no intention of playing fair.”

  She wanted to take that growling statement and the wave of sexual energy emanating from him as purely flirting, but Trevor was the kind of guy who’d managed to out-strategize people while undercover—even people prone to tremendous paranoia, like the mob types he’d indicated he’d had to associate with in the past. Why in the hell would she be any less of an obstacle if he thought she had something he needed, and any less deserving of exploitation?

  His goal was to find the diamonds and to trap this MacGreggor guy, not have a real relationship with her, and it was time for her to learn a little self-preservation for a change. She’d seriously screwed up her life trusting two different guys in the past—she just flat didn’t need the third strike. She wasn’t entirely sure she could handle it, and she pushed that thought away, because she’d have to investigate the why of that notion, and there was no way she was going to do that. Not with him standing there looking like Sex Incarnate and feeding her, for crying out loud. Good freaking grief, he was smart.

  “Well, good thing you don’t have to play anymore,” she said, and he frowned, his blue eyes in his deeply tanned face snapping to confused. “I know where to start looking for the diamonds.” She pushed off the bar stool before he could respond, went to the dining room, and picked up what she needed from the dining table. When she spun to return, she slammed straight into him.

  “Jesus, we need to hang a bell on you.” His eyes narrowed as she held up her fist and opened it, palm up, to show him what she’d retrieved. Let’s just see how well he’d researched her.

  There in her palm were the empty rice husks she’d found at Marie’s. He stared at them a moment, then some recognition dawned, and she felt the sting of humiliation all over again: her privacy really and truly had been completely invaded, since he clearly knew she had family—butt-crack crazy family—because that’s where the hulls had come from. And how could he be attracted to her? Any man who knew the level of insanity she belonged to wouldn’t come near her with a ten-foot pole.

  She’d never discussed who she was related to, except with Nina, and even then, it was just in a cursory exchange: Nina’s parents had died when she was young and she’d moved to Lake Charles to live with her grandmother. Bobbie Faye’s dad hadn’t acknowledged her and her mom had turned into a loon, which everyone gossiped about until her mom got cancer, and then for the longest time, she thought her mom’s name had changed to “Poor Necia, bless her heart” because that’s how every sentence started when people talked about the latest crazy thing her mom had done. Bobbie Faye had never told Cam; they’d met when she was twelve after her family moved into his school district—and he’d just accepted the fact that she didn’t have a dad.

  “We’re going to your dad’s house?”

  “Yeah, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go figure out what to wear to Demented Central.”

  Sixteen

  Benoit met the owner of the antique store. She turned out to be near seventy-five, her leathery skin creased with so many lines, she looked like someone had used her face for multiple games of tic-tac-toe. Her smoker’s cough echoed in the big main room as she dragged her oxygen bottle around with her, though the fact that she was wobbling around with a flammable liquid didn’t prevent her from lighting up another cigarette while she told him about her bunions.

  When she finally meandered back to his question she said, “Aw, sweetheart,” in the way old Southern women always “sweethearted” everyone, “the only young women I seen for sure are my customers, so of course they’d be coming in kinda often. Got all sizes and shapes of girls coming in here, and some of them come once a year, some once a week.”

  She was lying. The old woman inhaled another drag on her cigarette, shifted her feet, and kept scanning off to the back of the store as if she had a customer, somewhere, she could go attend. The place was empty.

  “It would be beaucoup help for her, Mrs. Oubillard, if you could tell me whether or not you saw anyone that looked like Bobbie Faye here that night.”

  “Help her, huh?” she asked, and then another drag. “Well. If you’re sure?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, she was here. A little weird, though, and I couldn’t figure out half of what she was talking about, but then my hearing aid acts up sometimes.”

  “She was here? Talking to you?” Couldn’t be possible.

  “Oh, not directly to me. She was over there,” she pointed to the alley where Sal had been shot. “I couldn’t see who she was talking to, though.”

  “You’re sure it was her? And not someone who looked like her? That is a long way away, chère.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m sure. You see that shelf in the back?” She pointed to a display case in the far back of the big store. “I can read all of those magazine covers from here.”

  Benoit squinted. He could barely make out the colors, much less the headlines. He eyed her suspiciously.

  “Got me some cataract surgery last year,” she explained. “Multifocal lenses. I needed to be able to see the customers across the store, keep up with merchandise that tries to walk out. I know who I saw in the alley. I was up in my room,” she pointed above the store. “An’ she waved at me. I had the window open, on account of the smoke.” She adjusted the oxygen tube going to her nose and then took another drag. “’Course, I went to bed then. Didn’t know old Sal was gonna bite it. I’d’ve stayed up for that.”

  Benoit followed her up to her room, decorated in leftover antiques that she’d probably never be able to sell. He took out a small digital camera he always carried now and snapped photos from her window overlooking the alley and noted that she could only see a portion of it. Still, her certainty was absolute, and she’d convince any jury.

  They would completely believe Bobbie Faye was in that alley.

  “Do you remember the time you saw her?”

  “I think maybe a little bit after the Tonight Show goes off. I’m not sure, I mighta dozed a little with the light on. I saw her after that, though. Clear as a bell.”

  Benoit asked her a few more random questions, but she hadn’t seen anyone else—hadn’t even seen Sal or Sal’s lights on. Didn’t think anything was suspicious because Bobbie Faye is always doing crazy things, so of course she was in an alley at midnight.

  He left as she went to attend to a new batch of customers who’d come clanging in the doorway. The dry-cleaners had opened up for the day across the courtyard, and he headed that direction. Then something orange beneath the shrubbery in t
he center courtyard area caught his eye. Curiosity compelled him forward, and when he bent to see what it was, he felt a sense of alarm. It was a shirt. More importantly, it had the same stripes as the shirt seen on the murderer in the surveillance footage.

  Benoit stood and scanned the area to see if anyone was watching his actions. He knew that if the shirt had been in this location after the murder, the police or FBI or crime scene techs would have found it. This grouping of shrubs was less than thirty feet from the alley entrance. So how did it get here? Now?

  He didn’t see anyone watching him. There weren’t many people shopping yet that morning. After a few minutes, he pulled out his camera again and photographed the location of the shirt from every angle. Once documented, he used a pen to lift a corner of the shirt and found blood spatters consistent with what he’d seen on the murder video. Equally worrisome, though, was the fact that the tag had the initials “BF” scrawled with a permanent type of marker.

  Benoit hadn’t needed to see the initials to guess where the shirt had come from: it was a shirt given out to the winners in a high-school spirit-week competition. He remembered how all of the kids had joked about how ugly the shirts were that year—they were more of a punishment than a reward—though it hadn’t deterred them all from entering the contest. The challenge had been to come up with a big, visual event to generate excitement for the football team, and Bobbie Faye had staged a bonfire near the local water tower. She’d convinced a couple of idiot boys (he and Cam) to climb the tower and string Christmas lights, spelling out their school name. No one had anticipated someone tossing an ember from the bonfire into nearby shrubs. Fire had spread to the trees at the base of the tower, which melted the welds of the old structure and, before anyone knew what was happening, the tower swayed and then toppled. There was a minor flood (but at least it put the fire out). She was the only sophomore whose stunt made the national news, so she’d won the most-spirited contest, although the nuns promptly banned her from all future spirit-planning activities. She probably would have been expelled, but when one reporter shoved his microphone in her face and asked her what she was thinking, she said, “Go, Tigers!” and all was forgiven. (Football. Second only to oxygen in Louisiana.)

  He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, pulled out an evidence bag, and gently placed the shirt inside.

  “So because those rice husks are fresh,” Trevor asked when she rejoined him in Nina’s dining area, “you think Marie’s been to your dad’s recently.” He waved a gadget over her as she nodded, and a damned alarm went off, scaring the bejesus out of her.

  “Holy crap, this shirt isn’t that ugly.” He’d already made her change out of the red shirt she’d started off with as her first choice with the picky little detail of her being a better target in red. Now she had on a tiny green t-shirt she’d brought, and she looked down to see what he was frowning at.

  “This isn’t for the shirt,” he said, indicating the contraption, “though it’s still heart-attack worthy. There’s a GPS on you somewhere.”

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked as he waved the wand slowly down to her tennis shoes, then over her purse—where it went all bells and whistles, pinging its little gadget heart out.

  “When I had one of my men bring in the food, I asked for this.”

  “So you suspected I had a GPS on me . . . all night?”

  “I knew they’d found us somehow. They were outside Nina’s within a few minutes of us arriving.”

  “And we didn’t leave because?”

  “You were tired and needed to rest.”

  He dumped her purse out on the table and she immediately started grabbing the more embarrassing items (tampons, a nightlight—she really fucking hated the dark—and Binky, a little stuffed lion she’d had since she was a kid and she was going to pretend that belonged to Stacey, though why in the hell she bothered, she wasn’t sure, because the man had seen her with a vibrator, for crying out loud. He’d known when she was going to the bathroom . . . could she please just fall through the floor now? Oh, wait. Already did that). She looked up at God and thought, this is for all those times I put the jar of bugs in Sister Elizabeth’s desk in fifth grade, isn’t it?

  Trevor had continued talking, ignoring her blush, saying, “They weren’t getting inside or close to the building without me knowing. Besides . . . this will come in handy.” He lifted out a tiny little square and held it up for her inspection.

  * * *

  From: Simone

  To: JT

  They’re on the move. And we have company.

  * * *

  Cam listened as Benoit described the shirt he’d found and the antique store owner’s eyewitness account. They used secure lines to talk, but it would have been better for Cam if Benoit had told him to leave the office while he delivered this news. He hung up the phone, slamming it so hard the cradle cracked. Great. Now he had to requisition a new phone. Explaining that one was going to be fun. He tried shoving the plastic casing back together and when it looked like it might work, he dug in his desk for some tape, jerking the middle drawer open, which jarred the precarious folders piled high in front of him, and the entire jeweler murder file scattered onto the floor.

  He stood, planting a fist through the drywall. His knuckles hurt like a sonofabitch, but still didn’t match the screaming headache which hadn’t subsided in spite of the pills he’d taken at Bobbie Faye’s that morning. So much for being the guy known for his control under pressure. He’d quarterbacked games where the entire season rode on one last throw, one final Hail Mary into the end zone to win the coveted SEC championship, and he’d done it, in spite of a fractured wrist and ninety-thousand fans going absolutely apeshit in Death Valley, LSU’s Tiger stadium. He’d scrambled out of an oncoming blitz with his own offensive linemen fighting for inches and he was always, always cool. In control.

  “At least you had the common sense not to pick a cinder-block wall,” his captain said from the hallway. “Little problem this morning?”

  “No, sir. Nothing. Just. Frustration, sir.”

  “Frustration, huh?” the captain asked, his stomach hanging over his belt more than it used to, and his ruddy complexion going redder with his annoyance at Cam’s destruction. “Well, son, I don’t think that belongs here, do you?”

  “No, sir, it doesn’t.”

  “Then make sure it doesn’t show up again. And call maintenance and have them fix this. Charges are to be deducted from your paycheck.”

  The captain left and Cam raked his hands through his short-cropped hair and rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t know what in the hell was happening to him. He couldn’t even fathom what he’d done already. He’d never withheld evidence. He’d never even considered the possibility of withholding evidence, not for any reason. He’d never cheated on an exam, even when people wanted to give him the answers. He was a winning quarterback and there were a lot of people in Louisiana who thought that was akin to being a king and deserving of special dispensation. A lot of people wanted to give him things, allow him to take the easy way out instead of adhering to the rules and he’d never even been tempted. And yet, in his pocket still, was a Ziploc bag of casings that he thought may very well be from a murder case. Casings which were removed from their location without benefit of a warrant.

  How in the hell had he lost his common sense? How in the world had he gotten to this point? This wasn’t like him.

  He squatted and began picking up the scattered pages of the jeweler murder file, collecting the photos of the murder scene into one stack. The top photo was an overview of the scene with the body still in position. Several numbered plastic markers stood next to items found at the scene and within close enough proximity to the body that the items had to be reviewed as potential evidence. One was an old string of pearls. It might have once been a necklace, but if so, at least half of it was missing, as was the clasp. There had been no way to know if it had been an item dropped at the time of the murder or weeks prior. Every tim
e he’d seen the photo, he’d thought “necklace” because that’s how the item had been logged.

  Except now, with his thoughts so focused on Bobbie Faye, he suddenly recognized it; it wasn’t a necklace. It was a bracelet. His heart went cold at the thought.

  He remembered when Bobbie Faye was a freshman at LSU and he’d been a junior. He’d wanted their relationship to be something more than just friends, and hadn’t found the way to deepen it without jeopardizing the friendship. He’d given her a pearl bracelet for her birthday; pearls were the June birthstone. They’d never really exchanged fancy birthday presents before, and he’d hoped she would understand what it meant.

  He picked up the photo and took a closer look, and another day slammed back at him, that day they’d argued. It was a few months after her birthday and he’d reached for her arm, trying to keep her from storming away from him, and his hand slid down to her wrist and accidentally snagged the bracelet, ripping it off. She’d gasped, and then picked it up. They had been fighting over the asshole she’d been dating and was giving yet another “second chance” to. Alex. A guy he now knew was a gunrunner and back then, the guy he knew was the bastard who’d turned her inside out with lies and betrayals. He’d wanted her to break up with Alex. What he’d really wanted was to date her, but he’d stopped short of saying that, and she’d stood there, holding the broken bracelet, her face grim.

  “Why in the hell can’t you resist doing something as brainless as dating this guy?” he’d asked. Stupid, he knew now. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “You just can’t resist bossing me around,” she’d answered.

  If he could go back and shake himself, he’d have said, “I can’t resist you.” Corny? Hell, yeah. Truth? Absolutely. Instead, he’d said, “If you didn’t act like an idiot, I wouldn’t need to.”