Guns and Roses
Page 43
As Bobbie Faye unloaded her magazine, he intoned, “It’s been a particularly stressful day.” His monotone delivery barely disguised his own tightly banked fury. He was FBI—well, now, he was former FBI after their last disaster where a bad-to-the-bone terrorist had gone after Trevor by trying to destroy Bobbie Faye… and half of Baton Rouge with her, when he planted bombs at the LSU/Alabama game. In Trevor’s world, people died when they threatened Bobbie Faye, hence the former in front of that “FBI.”
Nina started to speak to her friend and Trevor held her back, shaking his head. It wasn’t that unusual to see Bobbie Faye with a gun; hell, she not only ran the gun counter at Ce Ce’s Cajun Outfitter and Feng Shui Emporium, but she was a better shot than anyone Nina had ever come across—and being neck deep in spec ops, Nina had come across plenty. It was, however, a bit strange to watch Bobbie Faye blast the stuffing out of the poor defenseless scarecrow tied to the fence, not to mention how unnerving it was to see several carcasses of previous scarecrows littering the ground. As crazy as Bobbie Faye was—and she tapped out at the top of the if-she’s-breathing-then-there’s-a-disaster-a-brewing meter—Nina had never seen her quite so… focused in her Crazy. For someone who was purely a civilian, who simply had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bobbie Faye was generally able to deal with the stress.
Now? She looked like she was going to go batshit at any moment.
“She’s been on the phone all day,” Trevor explained. “It didn’t go well.”
“If this is ‘not well,’ then remind me to move to Russia when she gets to ‘bad.’”
“It was either encourage her to kill the scarecrows or let her go talk to the Bishop at the Diocese.”
Bobbie Faye dropped the magazine out of her FN, slammed a new one in and planted, rapid-fire, nine more rounds into the scarecrow’s left eye.
Nina suppressed a shudder. “Good call.”
Nina had heard a few of the early horror stories from Bobbie Faye as she tried to find a venue for their wedding. She personally knew local bookies who were taking bets as to how many people slammed the door in her friend’s face before Bobbie Faye had a full-on melt down. There was a betting board set up in Vegas and Homeland Security was discretely making calls. She knew of one three-star general who’d taken early retirement rather than be transferred to “Bobbie Faye” territory.
Bobbie Faye was Catholic, somewhat lapsed, but it mattered to her, so it hadn’t completely shocked Nina that Bobbie Faye would want a Catholic wedding. It had surprised her, when she had returned home from her latest assignment, to find out there was no venue booked and no wedding details planned—not because Bobbie Faye was anything short of a nightmare in the planning department, but because Trevor, at least, was an organizational wizard. If he hadn’t gotten her to settle on a place, things were bad.
Bobbie Faye dropped that empty magazine, slammed home another one with a vengeance, and shot off a kneecap.
“Boss?” a construction worker said, approaching them from the house—the one being renovated after the aforementioned badass terrorist had blown it up, “we gotta take off for the day.”
“It’s only noon,” Trevor said, still watching Bobbie Faye.
“I know… but,” he stammered as Bobbie Faye unloaded multiple rounds into the scarecrow. “Sir, she’s scaring the men. T-boy done dropped the big nail gun on his foot twice, an’ Mikey keeps flinching, an’ if you want your wiring to work, that ain’t so good, an’ Raoul keeps stopping to pray. An’ cry. We’re just wastin’ your money.” He’d said it all in a rush and Nina realized he’d had the sense enough to put her between Bobbie Faye and himself. “We can come back tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Trevor said, surprising Nina. It must really be bad if he wasn’t telling the man to pull up his big boy panties and get back to work. The foreman crossed himself and then sprinted back to the jobsite as Bobbie Faye loaded another magazine.
“How many churches turned her down?”
“All of them.” Trevor’s flat passionless tone didn’t fool Nina. He was just as ticked off as Bobbie Faye.
“Well, you don’t have to get married in this parish. Y’all could try—” She caught the banked disgust behind Trevor’s sunglasses. “Oh, you mean all of them. In the whole state?”
“Country.”
Nina blinked, waiting for the punch line. Trevor kept his gaze on Bobbie Faye. “Seriously?”
Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam — and there went the right eye. Behind them, construction workers fled, their trucks fishtailing in the driveway.
“Apparently,” Trevor added, deadpan, “she was ex-communicated last month.”
“Seriously? They still do that? The Pope?”
“It came down from a Cardinal here in the US.”
“Well that explains the weird protection detail request that came through a while back from a Cardinal who was crying and begging for help—” Trevor arched an eyebrow and she nodded. “Kept babbling about having made a grave mistake, but wouldn’t admit what it was.” Bobbie Faye reloaded. “But why? It’s not like she’s actually blown up a Catholic Church. Yet. And I’m pretty sure she hasn’t maimed and tortured any priests that I’m unaware of.”
Trevor cut his steely blue gaze her direction. “Are there some you are aware of?”
“You think I’m gonna break girlfriend code with her handling a loaded gun right there?”
Trevor barely twitched a grin at that, and he shook his head. “The ex-communication happened not long after I had mentioned to my family that we wanted a Catholic wedding. I had Izzy”—his computer-hacking whiz of a baby sister—“do a deep check of Cormi-co’s financials.”
Cold fury radiated off Trevor just at the mention of his family’s business and suddenly Nina knew. “Tell me she didn’t.” Trevor’s mom. A name banished in Trevor’s home and anywhere near Bobbie Faye. Banned by Trevor when his mom gleefully tried to trade her to the terrorist to buy back Trevor’s life.
“Moved thirty million into a charitable contribution fund, just after placing a phone call to the Pope. Said fund dispersing to the Vatican ten minutes later.”
“Wow.” Nina’s mind reeled. “Your mom really really does not want you two to get married. Does Bobbie Faye know?” Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam — and the scarecrow’s head fell off, the neck cut clean through with Bobbie Faye’s neat line of shooting. “Never mind. I’ll take that as a yes. You could always elope. She said from the beginning she didn’t want a big wedding.”
“She wants a wedding,” Trevor said after Bobbie Faye shot off the right arm of the scarecrow. “She’s not going to say it, or ask for it, but when she doesn’t think I’m looking, she pores over bridal magazines.”
“Bobbie Faye? Our Bobbie Faye?” The cowboy boot-wearing, tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners, foul-mouthed whirlwind… looking at big fluffy wedding dresses?
“She’s getting a wedding,” Trevor said, low, quiet. Scary quiet. “She’s getting a wedding, with all the frills, in a Catholic church, in a beautiful dress, if I have to kill every goddamned person in this state to do it.”
Nina watched as the other arm of the scarecrow fell off. “How many of those you been through?”
“Seven.”
“If she makes me wear pink, I’m kicking your ass.”
~*~
Two months later in New Orleans…
Nina watched as Bobbie Faye paced up and down the sidewalk of the bridal boutique store just on the outer edge of the French Quarter. Stop. Start to enter. Change her mind. Pace again.
Ce Ce, Bobbie Faye’s boss and sort of surrogate mom, stood inside the shop next to Nina and asked, “How long do you think she can keep that up?”
“Forever, if we let her.” Nina glanced over at the proprietress and the poor woman was chewing on her own lips out of nervousness. Lips she didn’t have and couldn’t afford to lose on her garden-hose thin figure.
Even Ce Ce still vibrated nerves. This, despite being on her third
mimosa in two hours, supplied, perhaps unwisely, by the shop owner.
“You don’t think she’s getting cold feet, do you?” Ce Ce asked, draining the glass and handing it over to one of the assistants to be refilled.
“No, not about Trevor. The wedding? Absolutely. She’ll ditch it in a heartbeat, if we let her. Then regret it forever.”
“It’s going to be be-yooo-tiful.”
Nina turned to Ce Ce, whose big brown eyes practically glowed with joy and… a certain knowing, like she’d been up to something. She was, after all, a self-proclaimed voodoo priestess. Of sorts. Strangely skewed results didn’t seem to slow her down.
“What did you do?”
“Not a thing,” Ce Ce said a little too quickly, shaking her head, her long, dark braids swinging as she did, as if to put paid to that silly thought.
Ce Ce never did nothing. She’d have been better off admitting to something small, but Nina also knew the woman was wily as hell. She wasn’t going to divulge it, especially not to Nina, who could stop her. If Nina could take down Sultan Iksmanistan and his gunrunning operation, she should be able to handle one voodoo priestess.
“Just don’t paint her with anything, okay? She doesn’t need to be the ‘something blue’ next month.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Ce Ce tapped the window with one long, manicured nail. “Do you think we need to drag her in here?”
“I’m not feeling suicidal just yet. Let’s give her a few more minutes.”
~*~
“Pardon?” the Kleenex-thin bridal shop proprietress asked Bobbie Faye. She glanced over at the woman as the stick pressed her spider fingers to her heart as if it might plop straight out of her chest. “It has to cover your… gun?” the woman squeaked. Then she turned to Ce Ce and then Nina, as if gun was a euphemism for something that she didn’t quite understand and they could clarify. Both of them stared diligently at the ceiling.
“Cowards,” Bobbie Faye muttered, and saw Nina try to hide a smile. Bobbie Faye turned back to the owner. “Gun. As in bang bang. The dress can’t be too A-line because it has to cover the gun; I’ll be wearing a garter-holster instead of a regular garter.”
“But… you can’t wear a gun in a church!”
“Actually, I can.” The woman gaped at her. “See? It’s little.” Bobbie Faye bent over and pulled the gun out of her ankle holster and as she stood up, the little Ruger in the palm of her hand, she heard a loud thump and there was empty space where the proprietress had stood. It took Bobbie Faye a second to process that Nina and CeCe were staring at the floor, and then she looked down to see the woman lying prone, her assistants hurrying over to fan her.
“Huh. They usually don’t faint unless I actually shoot the gun.”
“How many times have you done this?” Nina asked, frowning at the assistant who was starting to hyperventilate over her boss.
“Oh,” Ce Ce hastened to answer for her, “a couple dozen. That’s why we had to meet you all the way across the state. She’s been banned from every store in Lake Charles and in Baton Rouge and most of the ones here, too. We’re down to two stores left, or we’ll have to go out of state.”
Nina cocked a knowing look Bobbie Faye’s direction. “I told you I’d go with you, if you’d wait ‘til I got back this week.”
“I reminded her of that,” Ce Ce said. “She wanted to just ‘get it out of the way.’ Who wants to just get their wedding dress shopping out of the way? It’s the best part! It’s supposed to be fun!”
“Of course you’d think that—you own eleventy billion bridal magazines from way back when I started dating Cam!”
“Like you noticed,” Ce Ce slurred.
“It was hard to miss. You wallpapered the store’s bathroom in wedding dress photos.”
“It was kitschy! It wasn’t like I was focused on you getting married or anything.”
“You gave me fertility quilts!”
“Only three.”
“Six.”
“Noooooo…” Ce Ce looked thoughtful. “I shouldda put more spells on ’em.”
“Dear God, no. And don’t think I didn’t notice the fact that you made origami Christmas ornaments out of all of the wedding invitation samples you’ve collected.”
“That’s not a big deal.”
“For the last ten years.”
“That’s just being frugal.”
“You know,” Nina drawled and Bobbie Faye braced herself, because Nina using that tone meant the jig was up. “You’re not going to get out of the fancy poufy wedding and convince Trevor to elope by not finding a wedding dress, B. He’ll just buy you one because he’ll think he’s solving a problem and helping. In fact, he’s probably itching to do just that, right about now.”
Bobbie Faye glared at Nina. “I hate you.”
“That’s what best friends are for.” Nina grinned, a smile that had probably dropped a thousand men to their knees; in her line of work—running an S&M club as a front for one of the alphabet agency’s covert ops programs—there wasn’t much that was going to daunt Nina.
“Fine. I’ll try on the stupid dresses.” It was going to suck.
~*~
Several hours, a lot of frayed nerves, one terrified shop-owner later…
“No. No no no no no. Absolutely not.”
“But it’s beee yoooouuuu tiful,” Ce Ce pled, her big chocolate eyes swimming in tears as she looked at the confection that was wearing Bobbie Faye.
“I liked the one with the corset,” Nina offered.
“The one that pushed my boobs up to my ears?” Bobbie Faye asked. “The see-through corset?”
“What? It had pearls in all the important places. It fit you like a glove.”
“I am not walking down the aisle looking like Hookers R Us dressed me.”
“Damn,” a man’s voice said from the doorway to the dressing area, “can we re-vote on that?”
Bobbie Faye whipped around at Cam’s voice and had to step a little farther into the display room—the insane “viewing” area with a bazillion mirrors and a freaking platform that they kept making her stand up on after trying on every dress like some idiot Barbie doll—in order to gape at him, because what in the hell was he doing here?
He stood there, leaning against the door, all six-foot-four of him, lanky lean, dark hair, clean-shaven, all cop, all gorgeous. Her best-friend-former-lover-onetime-enemy-now-maybe-friend-and-wanted-to-be-more-again ex. He took one look at her in the giant frou frou antebellum froth she was wearing—the one with a skirt so big, they’d have to cut a hole in the church to lower her into it, because she’d never fit through the doors—and then he burst out laughing.
“Gee, Cam, thank you. And just what in the hell are you doing here?”
Nina suddenly looked innocent, which likely meant the world was ending. Bobbie Faye turned to her. “What did you do?” Then, understanding… “You called him?”
She stepped past the platform, grabbed Nina and hauled her into the dressing room while an assistant scampered out. It wasn’t easy to fit into the dressing room with a hooped skirt and a metric buttload of petticoats and Nina, but by God, she was going to get some answers.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked her best friend.
“Really? Me? Hello, pot.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t invite your ex to… what? Humiliate me?”
“I can hear you,” Cam said from the outer room.
“Shut up,” she and Nina said in tandem. Bobbie Faye continued, “Why in the hell did you call him? I haven’t made anyone cry in the last hour! No hostages taken! I can’t help it if the microwave in her break room exploded—”
“You shot it, B.”
“Only after it exploded and I really needed that hot fudge brownie and it was the last one, so that was totally not my fault and it’s not a case for the idiot police—”
“Can still hear you,” Cam reiterated, a tad closer to the dressing room.
“—and just because t
he owner didn’t like me threatening her to make her stay a few minutes late, it’s not like she’s not going to make a sale, and—”
“It’s two a.m., B.”
She stopped abruptly, scrutinizing Nina’s yes, you’ve run rampant over the crazy line expression. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just past dark.”
“Two-seventeen, to be exact,” Nina said, referencing her phone.
“You’re nuts. No one would stay that late for a customer. This is some sort of trick.”
“You waved a gun at her!”
“Just once. I didn’t shoot that annoying assistant, which, frankly, showed a lot of self-control. I want brownie points for that.” She paused in her rant and caught Nina’s raised brow and… oh, holy shit, sympathetic expression. Wow, she was in a world of trouble if Nina had foregone the sarcasm for sympathy. “Is it really that late?” Nina nodded and Bobbie Faye had an odd, out-of-body feeling. Trevor had to be freaking out. And geezus, if he was freaking out, he probably had the entire building surrounded by SWAT. “Ohmygod, Trevor—”
“Knows you lost your mind somewhere back about the fortieth dress. He’s been informed. You’re stalling.”
“I am not. I’m trying. I can’t help it if—”
“B, if this is trying, then I’m Tinkerbelle.”
Cam opened the dressing room door, his arms braced on the top cross bar. “I’ve gotta agree with Nina. It’s pretty obvious.”
“What? Get out of here!”
Instead, Nina made her getaway with a feeble, “I need a drink,” and escaped beneath Cam’s arms, leaving Bobbie Faye trapped in a freaking hooped skirt. She tried to press the front down so it covered the ridiculous ruffled petticoat that went with the stupid thing and as soon as the front was shoved down, the side popped up and smacked her on the ear.