Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

by Toni McGee Causey

  “Nina—she landed in New York and she’s been ‘talking’ to me ever since.” Bobbie Faye smiled, thinking about how frustrated that had made Nina, who wanted to get back to Baton Rouge instead of waiting there, misdirecting the cops. “You remember Old Trapper Crowe?” Cam grinned—and she knew he remembered the old Chickasaw Indian who was older than God, who still tooled around the swamps, trading furs and whatever he could. No one knew where he lived, but he had a deep affection for Bobbie Faye and brought her candy every spring equinox. “He did me a favor, took the phone with his dog and a bateau. He could be halfway to Galveston by now.”

  “You should stay away from that old coo-yôn,” her dad snapped. “He ain’t nothin’ but crazy.”

  “Not half as crazy as her own family,” Cam said, his arms crossed, his cop glare hard—and every muscle she had lockstepped into attention.

  “You . . . knew?” She’d always assumed he believed her dad had died. How had there been so much they had never talked about?

  He shrugged. “I suspected, and you look just like V’rai. You didn’t want to talk about it,” he said to her obvious surprise, “so we didn’t talk about it. One of several mistakes I’m not going to repeat.” He gave Trevor a look. One of those male, you have been warned stares.

  Trevor returned the favor. Tension swamped the room, as aggressive as gang members breathing on their necks, thugs brushing by and hovering too close. She so wanted to get the hell out of there. Jesus, where was spontaneous combustion when you needed it?

  “Bobbie Faye—” Francesca tried again, growing even more upset, but the double doors burst open and everyone spun, with Trevor and Cam and her dad and her uncle and every single member of the band coming up with guns, aimed at the door. Monique squeaked and threw her hands up in the air as she and Ce Ce stumbled into the room.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Monique babbled, “but we were in a hurry.” She turned to Ce Ce, who looked scared half out of her wits. “See? I told you we’d make it in time if we broke one-twenty.”

  “You let her drive?” Bobbie Faye asked, incredulous. Ce Ce nodded, her massive chest heaving from overwhelming adrenaline, not having yet caught her breath. “And she did one-twenty?” Ce Ce held up three fingers. “One-thirty? Good grief, Ce Ce, how much has she been drinking?”

  “Honey, I quit asking after she hit a hundred. I didn’t want to distract her.”

  “Bobbie Faye!” Francesca snapped, stomping her foot on the tile, and it echoed. “What’s going on? I thought you were going to find the diamonds!”

  “I am,” she said, smiling. “And Ce Ce’s going to do a special locator spell to help.”

  John had followed the idiot brother and the drunk of a sister all the way from Lake Charles out to the camp, and just before he could get completely set up with his rifle and scope, they had all come out of the camp and were leaving. He couldn’t fucking believe it. They were gone before he climbed back in his car, and he had to follow them again—keeping a safe distance. He’d hoped to kill everyone else and wound her, and then force the bitch to tell him where the diamonds were. Now he didn’t know what their plan was, and he had a hard time staying in sight of the brother’s car, especially since the Fed on the bike drove like he was God and owned all of the speeding laws.

  It pissed him the hell off that they’d driven all the way to Baton Rouge, but he kept reminding himself: diamonds. He’d kill Bobbie Faye after she gave them to him, just for the sheer pleasure of getting to rub her nose in it—that he’d tried to ask her out, tried to be a boyfriend, and what does she go and do? Get a fucking restraining order on him.

  He’d tried to make her see reason. They put him in jail for that. Fucking jail. She had no idea what they did to him in jail, but she was going to learn. He’d been waiting for this chance for years. When the word went out from a fence that a buyer needed her stopped? He jumped at the job. Hell, he’d have taken it for free.

  When they got to the Old State Capitol, though, he worried that his quarry might slip from his grasp—there were so many people, he couldn’t see where she’d gone. There was obviously some gala being set up, and lots of press there, so it wasn’t like he could just pop her asshole Fed escort in the street and then force her to hand him the diamonds.

  He had to think. There had to be a good contingency . . . ah. He saw it. He knew where he’d set up and there was no fucking way she’d ever get out of his sight.

  “This is insane,” Lori Ann griped as she pulled on the waitress uniform. Roy was dressed in a waiter’s uniform already and had his back turned to her; he peered out the door, acting as a lookout.

  “Yep,” he said. “Hurry up.”

  “Why in the hell did we agree to do this?”

  “You’re the idiot that wanted to help.”

  “I’m the family drunk! Since when do you listen to me?”

  “Since you threatened to e-mail every woman I’ve ever dated with my new home address.”

  “Oh. Right. Wimp.”

  “C’mon, we have to go plant that thing.” He nodded toward the little GPS unit Bobbie Faye had given them. “Are you ready to go do something stupid?”

  “I think that’s the family motto.”

  * * *

  From: Simone

  To: JT

  Followed the coordinates of the phone. Unless she grew a beard and turned into a 90-year-old Native American, I think we’ve lost her.

  * * *

  Twenty-seven

  Ce Ce had barely caught her breath as she dabbed at a fine sheen of sweat. “Oh, good, everyone’s here.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Bobbie Faye said, hauling Ce Ce a couple of feet away from everyone. “What in the hell were you thinking, inviting my dad and V’rai and Cam? This wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “It’s okay, hon, we need ’em.”

  “You are following the plan, right?”

  “Oh, sure, completely. Except not.” She turned to the crowd. “We need to get started.”

  Francesca paced. “You have got to be kidding me! You can’t be dumb enough to believe in all of that silly junk! All that blue stuff did was give you a bad complexion.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Trevor said. “The whole silo blew and Bobbie Faye’s still here. I think Ce Ce’s got a lot of power.”

  As Francesca started to argue. Ce Ce said to her, “Keep it up, sugar, and I’ll make sure all of your hair falls out.”

  Francesca clamped her lips closed, but she was clearly unhappy.

  “Now, Bobbie Faye, come on over here.” Ce Ce led Bobbie Faye to a set of three concentric rings Monique was setting up: a dozen candles formed an outer ring and a dozen little jars of some sort of liquid Bobbie Faye wasn’t about to question too closely formed an inner ring, with sand between the two. “Careful when you step over,” Ce Ce instructed. “Don’t break the circle.”

  “What’s this?” Bobbie Faye asked. She’d seen Ce Ce do locator spells for people who’d misplaced their cell phones or keys or laptops and even one time when a woman lost a baby grand piano. The woman never did explain how she managed to lose something the size of a cow, but Ce Ce helped her find it. The locator spells were usually made up of a little bit of spice tossed over the client’s shoulders, and then the person had to turn around a few times while saying something stupid in another language which could very possibly mean “I now humiliate myself.” Bobbie Faye had expected Ce Ce to come up with something a little flashier because the goal was to completely agitate Francesca, but she still expected the spell to be an actual locator spell. This? Not so much.

  “You need to know that this,” Ce Ce said, holding her hand as Bobbie Faye stepped over the candles, “is the most powerful spell I’ve ever done. But it’s one-time only—we won’t get another chance.”

  “I am not here to watch The Bobbie Faye Show,” Francesca huffed, pacing off to the side.

  “You’re not going to turn me into a chicken or anything, are you?”

  “That wou
ld be fun,” Francesca said, cheering a bit.

  “No,” Ce Ce answered, but she didn’t look Bobbie Faye in the eye.

  “We don’t think so, anyway,” Monique added. Ce Ce frowned at her. “What? You were worried, is all I’m sayin’.”

  “If you want to keep being my apprentice, you gotta learn when not to tell that part.” Ce Ce turned to Bobbie Faye and said, “You’ll be fine. There are just a lot of ingredients and everything has to be just right to pull it off.”

  Bobbie Faye leaned close and whispered, “What happened to the simple locator spell we talked about?”

  “You gotta have touched the thing at least once. You didn’t touch the diamonds, so I have to do something stronger.”

  “How strong?” This was starting to worry her. The last time Ce Ce did something strong, Bobbie Faye had looked like a giant blue jellyfish.

  “It’s a love protection spell,” Monique volunteered and then slapped her hands over her mouth when Ce Ce threw her a withering glare.

  “A love protection spell? Like to protect me from love?

  Where in the hell was that a couple of years ago?”

  “Hey, still standing here,” Cam said, and Bobbie Faye blushed.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I deserved that.”

  She frowned at him—he was just being so freaking confusing. Accommodating. Cam was never accommodating. Benoit’s being shot and in surgery had clearly unsettled him, because he wasn’t being himself.

  “How is this supposed to work for what I need?”

  “It’s a combination spell—it gives you the protection of the strength of the people who love you and that gives you the purity of sight—you’ll know the real thing when you see it.”

  “The diamonds?”

  “Um,” Ce Ce said, looking away, “them, too. Now, I just need you to stand really still while I do this.”

  “Wait—people who love me?” This was so fucking not what Bobbie Faye had in mind. She wanted to annoy and upset Francesca by looking super-empowered, and that wasn’t going to work by having the most humiliating moment of her entire life played out in front of Trevor, or for that matter, Cam. And her family. And those band guys who were gaping at this whole thing. (If that one guy made the sign of the cross any harder, he was going to dent his forehead.)

  “Yes,” Ce Ce answered, “five people who love you. Enough to die for you. And the spell will know if they’re lying.” She sprinkled something purple around Bobbie Faye’s feet. “Which is why, a lot of times, it doesn’t work. . . .”

  Bobbie Faye didn’t like the way Ce Ce’s voice sort of trailed off there at the end. “What happens if it doesn’t work?” she whispered, as if the spell would somehow hear her and start paying closer attention. Monique kept one hand plastered over her mouth, but started waving the other in the classic, “I know, I know, call on me,” maneuver.

  “We don’t want to think about that,” Ce Ce said, and then when Bobbie Faye stopped her from moving to the next ingredient, she caved. “Well, the person in the circle usually dies.”

  Bobbie Faye leapt out of the circle.

  “No fucking way. Where’s the back-up spell?” Ce Ce gave her a blank look. “Please tell me you didn’t put everything into this one spell?” She didn’t even know how to process that. Everything she’d hoped to accomplish with this little insanity had just boomeranged on her. Maybe if she went and found Lori Ann, that might give her one person for the spell, and on his most desperate day, Roy would count for two. “I am sooooo not getting in that circle, Ceece. You’re five people short, so we’re just gonna—” and the next thing she knew, Trevor had picked her up and lifted her over the candles, setting her down into the center of the circle again, the heat of his hands pressing through her thin dress at her waist.

  “She’s only four people short.”

  She gaped at him, and felt a sudden presence behind her as Cam stepped up to the circle.

  “She’s only three people short,” Cam said. The shock that slammed to her brain nearly switched off the part that told her legs how to work.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him.

  “What I should have done a long time ago.”

  “See, I told you,” Francesca piped up, “that Cam wasn’t going to like it that you got engaged to someone else.”

  Glaciers cracked and melted at the North Pole, millennia passed, spaceships landed, the world ended and began again before there was a single sound in the room. Bobbie Faye was absolutely certain her head had exploded and no one had bothered to tell her. Cam looked at her left hand, then looked past her to Trevor and said, a little too casually, “She’s not wearing a ring.”

  “She will be,” Trevor said for the second time that day, and Bobbie Faye wondered if he’d lost his mind, because it was one thing to make Francesca annoyed that Bobbie Faye was getting all of this good attention, but there was no way in hell Cam was going to swallow that as easily.

  Francesca leaned in to where Cam stood in the circle, a wicked little smile playing in her eyes and she said to him, “I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t thrown Bobbie Faye’s engagement ring into the lake now, don’t you.”

  “Ring?” Bobbie Faye asked, the word rough as razor blades in her throat. He had a ring?

  Cam glared at Francesca, and for Bobbie Faye, the satisfied expression on her cousin’s face was the final piece of the puzzle clicking into place. All of Francesca’s double-crossing hadn’t just been because of the usefulness of having someone like Bobbie Faye as a scapegoat for the diamonds. Bobbie Faye had what Francesca always wanted: attention. And, from the expression on Fluffy Head’s face, it galled her that Bobbie Faye had Cam’s attention. No, framing Bobbie Faye wasn’t enough. Francesca hadn’t been able to resist the symmetry: take everything away from Bobbie Faye, and make it look like the woman Cam had chosen instead of her had shot and (maybe killed) his best friend. Hell, Francesca probably hoped Cam would have to be the arresting officer.

  “I didn’t mean for you to find out this way,” Cam said, referring to the ring, and Bobbie Faye came back to the present. Trevor was searching her expression, frowning, since she hadn’t responded, not even with a smart-ass answer.

  “Only two short,” Ce Ce said, stepping into the circle and bringing them back to the task.

  “Only one short,” her uncle said, joining them, and Bobbie Faye glanced over at him: tears in his eyes. She knew he’d cared about her—her mom always took her to visit him when she was a kid—but this much? This wasn’t poss—

  “None short,” her dad said.

  Of all of the people Bobbie Faye thought would have stepped up to fill that spot, her dad wouldn’t have even made the list. Rage rushed her body, a heat-seeking missile wanting to detonate on someone, and she couldn’t tell if she was livid that he had never said anything about caring for her before, or angry because he was probably lying right now.

  “You realize if I die, I am coming back to haunt your ass.”

  Her dad chuckled. “Girl, there’s a lot you don’t know about. Now hush and let Ce Ce do her thing.”

  Bobbie Faye wished she understood, she really did. How could he love her at all? How could he stand there as if he did, when he’d never been in her life? When they’d been so hungry after her mom had died, and she’d volunteered to clean up two restaurants after-hours just so she could bring home leftovers to Roy and Lori Ann. Where was he then?

  “Let it go,” Ce Ce instructed, “and look for peace. Face true north—that would be Trevor.”

  Bobbie Faye faced him, brushing away the traitorous tears running down her cheeks.

  “If I croak, you’d better kill somebody,” she told him.

  “Deal.”

  “Hush,” Ce Ce said. “Now put your hand on Trevor’s heart and Trevor, you put yours on Bobbie Faye’s. Everyone else, place their right hand on Bobbie Faye. No cell phones, no talking through the spell. No moving away, either, no matter what happens. If you do, I can’t promis
e you’ll be safe.”

  Bobbie Faye placed her palm on Trevor’s chest and she would have sworn electricity jumped from his to hers as her own heartbeat accelerated. Ce Ce’s words sifted back to her from a few minutes ago: People who love you. Enough to die for you. Trevor had stepped up, immediately, no hesitating. She gasped and looked up into Trevor’s eyes and knew he saw her finally understand.

  At the same time, she felt Cam’s hand at the base of her neck as he stood directly behind her, his fingers threaded through her hair. He’d wanted her out of his life. He’d been glad she was gone, and he’d made it crystal clear that she should stay gone. She’d have never guessed he’d been contemplating getting married.

  Or that there had been an engagement ring.

  In a lake, no less . . . and yet . . . he was standing in this circle. Along with her uncle and dad, and the whole world made absolutely no sense.

  Ce Ce had begun the spell. There was smoke (Bobbie Faye didn’t know how or where it started, but it filled the room) and a whirlwind of pressure and movement around the circle, but the wind didn’t knock the art from the interior displays. The candles flickered, and a roar echoed off the tall glass walls, and then the musicians’ instruments started playing . . . Bobbie Faye wasn’t sure who was more shocked—her, Francesca, or the musicians who weren’t actually playing their instruments. Suddenly there was the brightest white light she’d ever seen, and it was emanating from . . .

  Her.

  Oh, wow.

  She couldn’t look away from Trevor’s eyes, and his hand over her heart was warm and powerful and molten and she felt like they’d interconnected somehow. Then energy flowed from everyone’s hands, and it felt like . . . love streaming through her . . . from her uncle and her dad. And such a flood of feeling from Cam. She didn’t understand, and her gaze never left Trevor’s, but Ce Ce’s words tugged her somewhere else . . . words about listening to her heart, listening to her instincts, sharpening her senses for her own protection. The noises roaring around them increased and the lights snapped out and there were bizarre crashes going on somewhere beyond the circle, but inside there, she felt safe. If this was dying, then that was okay.