Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (13 page)

They stumbled and clawed their way across the floor, which sloped more as another support beam bit the dust below them. The waxed hardwood gave no grip, except where boards popped up, unable to bend with the twisting frame of the house. Part of the exterior wall right where they’d been kneeling wrenched, Sheetrock and studs snapped, glass in the windows cracked, then fell in great chunks. Subflooring ripped away, exposing the two floors below through holes that gaped larger and larger with each passing second. The giant machine on the ground kept going, slowed down only by the weight and volume of its victim. Pipes clanged as they broke and sheared through walls, water spurting through the now-missing sections of the floor as the room kept tilting. Something hissed, and Bobbie Faye and Trevor smelled the additive the nice helpful utility company puts in the natural gas so you’ll know when there’s a gas leak and, oh, yeah, you’re about to go
boom
.

They looked down through the holes in the floor, all the way into the kitchen. A white light flashed as the gas caught fire, blue-white and then orange flames shot out of the feed to the formerly gorgeous stainless-steel range, torching the massive cherry-and-granite island in front of it. Somewhere above the din, Bobbie Faye thought she heard the shrill beep of a smoke alarm. Good thing that sucker was in working order.

And then she was falling. The dozer had inched through the dining area, taking another supporting wall with it as well as the joists Bobbie Faye had been standing on as they scrambled for a stairway that simply wasn’t there anymore. Down she went, registering Trevor’s furious movements to
grab for her, and she landed on top of an armoire . . . which rocked and tilted and started to fall through the second floor. She leapt, grabbing onto a pipe protruding from the ceiling. Trevor swung down through the same floor opening, yelling something she couldn’t hear above the roar of the machine and the house crashing around them, but he pointed, and she saw what he wanted: head for the front window, because the last thing they’d want to do is head for the back and have the house fall on them.

Which it was proceeding to do. The house creaked and snapped and vibrated, groaning as it shuddered against the onslaught. The dozer’s massive treads dug into the ground, losing purchase as the earth became sloppy mud from the spurting pipes, until some piece of debris or other fell underneath the tread, giving it traction. The machine lurched forward a couple of inches and the walls jerked apart from the roof and fell a bit more.

She and Trevor clamored over floors that were now sagging all across the back wall of the house, the supports falling apart beneath them, and she remembered now why she’d hated the stupid obstacle course in P.E. She’d declared rather obstinately to her fifth-hour teacher that she was never going to use this physical education stuff. There was no freaking
rock climbing
in freaking
Louisiana
, she’d insisted, and she was never, ever in her freaking life going to need to know how to do a hand-over-hand climb up a stupid freaking rope. (Said hand-over-hand technique coming in rather handy as she scaled the electrical cord to the lamp wedged near the front window to keep from falling into the burning kitchen below.)

Behind her, Trevor fell and snagged a grip on molding from the ceiling, cutting his hand on the protruding nails as he climbed toward the window. As more of the house gave away, she swung out on the dangling cord,
Hi Tarzan, Me Jane
–style, planting both feet in the gigantic front window as the entire glass popped out, squeezed as it was by the torque of the twisting outer walls. Bobbie Faye latched onto the sill as the house caved in behind her,
Trevor following, and they both tumbled through the window, sliding two stories down the now-sloping exterior as the house collapsed away from them.

Safe. They were safe.

She glimpsed Emile and his two bodyguards running away frantic. The guards shoved their boss into his car, doing their job, protecting him, though she thought he may have seen her.

Bobbie Faye leaned forward to check out a cut across Trevor’s shoulder, and at that moment, a bullet whizzed past. One from a different angle than Emile.

Great. Just great
.

From:
JT

To:
Simone

Jesus Christ, I am so fired. The whole fucking house collapsed?

It had taken John five minutes to find where Otto had moved the van in the wooded lot across from Marie’s—he’d apparently moved it so that he could watch the front of the house to make sure the bitch didn’t come crawling out. John expected to find a very pleased Otto and a confirmation that his fee would be wired to his account. The dozer had been the perfect tool for the perfect accident: no Bobbie Faye, no house, no clues, no worries. The buyer would be thrilled. What he found, instead, was Otto on the roof of the van, dead. Sniper rifle in hand. Cell phone ringing. John guessed the dumb fuck had climbed up there to have a better line-of-sight above the cars parked in the front drive of Marie’s house. A motorcycle raced by and he looked up in time to see that bastard mercenary Emile had hired riding off with Bobbie Faye.

The caller ID on the phone showed unknown. John
answered, because the only person Otto had been talking to on that phone had been the buyer. By the time John explained the situation, the buyer had wired extra money into John’s account so he could hire the help he’d wanted in the first place.

Sean and Aiden climbed back into their box truck.

“Happy huntin’?” Mollie asked, and Aiden nodded. They’d seen the man climbing onto the top of the van, aiming a sniper rifle at Marie’s.

“Who do you think he was?” she asked. “Feds?”

“Not fuckin’ likely. The cunt’s too fuckin’ amateur by half,” Sean answered.

“You still got her?” Aiden asked Robbie, who nodded, focused completely on his computer system and the GPS signal he was tracking.

Cam stood in the front yard of Marie’s collapsed house. The fire department had turned off the main gas supply and had trucks in front and in back, putting out the flames.

“We can’t get to the upper floors,” Jordan, the local precinct captain, told him. The man was a friend, who also happened to have married Cam’s middle sister. “The building’s barely standing,” Jordan continued. “We gotta get the fire out on the ground floor and then get an assessment of structural stability before we can try to get in there to sift through the debris,” he shouted above the roar of water rushing through hoses onto the house. “I heard you got a couple’a witnesses say they saw her climb outta there.”

Cam nodded. It wasn’t anything he could keep secret, particularly with the media interviewing everyone and their dog who lived in the neighborhood—an upscale place where the homeowner’s association preached the neighborhood watch program. Jordan grinned, relieved. He’d always liked Bobbie Faye—hell, all of the firemen in the city had been especially appreciative of her since she’d lobbied hard and very publicly to get them a raise
and
new
equipment after the last disaster. Cam envied feeling that pure, simple, happy relief. Bobbie Faye was alive, and she hadn’t even called him. She’d been shot at, had a bomb explode her car—not to mention a
bridge
—and she hadn’t even called him to let him know she was breathing. He pressed the heel of his hand to his right eye, in the vicinity of the bitch of a headache he was nursing.

“Your sister wants to know if you and Winna are still coming over Saturday for the bar-b-que,” Jordan said, and Cam threw an
are-you-freaking-kidding-me?
expression in Jordan’s direction. They were standing in the middle of another Bobbie Faye disaster—how in the hell could he be thinking about something like a date?

“Hey, don’t kill the messenger. You know Gracie—she’s inherited the Moreau control-freak gene,” his brother-in-law said, but he smiled. He and Gracie had been married three years and seemed pretty happy about it. Gracie, in turn, was determined to see the last of her brothers shackled, as if it was something of a personal affront that her oldest brother had somehow evaded her matchmaking skills. She taught school with Winna, who, Cam had to admit, was very pretty, sweet, stable, and refreshingly interesting. They’d been dating for about two months—often enough, as far as his sister was concerned, to be an official couple.

Cam’s phone rang and he recognized the crime scene tech’s number. He had already called out another crime scene team to Marie’s and it was entirely too soon for Maggie to have any sort of findings on the bomb or even the evidence they’d bagged from the car. Jordan went back to his job as Cam took the call.

“Your girl is keeping me too damned busy,” Maggie said, getting straight to the point. “I feel like I can give you a prelim that there were no remains in the car—it’s looking pretty good that whoever was in there got out before detonation.”

This was good, but he already had the wit’s descriptions of Bobbie Faye leaving Marie’s, and he’d told Maggie that earlier. “What’s up, Maggie?”

“I have something here I need to run to confirm, so this is guesswork, but given the case’s profile, I thought you needed a heads-up. You know I got hair and blood from the bridge.” Cam tensed, but he’d seen the spots she’d scraped—there wasn’t enough blood to indicate a serious injury. “It’s the hair,” she said when he hadn’t responded. “Before we got called out today, I’d been running a hair sample from our diamond jeweler case.”

“I thought the Feds took all of the forensic evidence?”

“Not all,” she said, and he could practically hear her smile. “A couple of pieces of evidence had been misplaced and we’ve been working
real
hard on finding them. Anyway, while I was waiting on them to ask me for this stuff again, I had a DNA run—the lab owed me a favor—there were no known matches. It seemed like a dead end.”

“Why do I get the feeling there is a ‘but’ here.”

“Yes. I don’t have a DNA on file for Bobbie Faye.”

“Why would you need one?”

“I was supervising the cataloguing of the samples from the bridge, and something about the hair sample we found next to her handprint struck me as familiar.” Cam knew that they
did
have Bobbie Faye’s fingerprints on file. Hell, the PD practically made them must-reads for all new cadets. “And if the handprint was definitely Bobbie Faye’s, then odds are that the hair sample next to it was probably hers, too—but that wasn’t what bothered me. Then I realized why it was so familiar—I’d just seen it, from the jeweler case. I’ve run preliminary tests and I’ll get a DNA to see if the two match, but I won’t know if they are positively Bobbie Faye’s hair unless we get a DNA on her.”

No fucking way
. Bobbie Faye would never be involved in an actual murder.

A large section of Marie’s roof gave way and crashed in under the blast of water from the fire hoses.

Damn, he did not have time for this. He did not want to have to go through the freaking ordeal of chasing her down again and arresting her.

He had to get a DNA sample.

Bobbie Faye and Trevor walked through her trailer, checking closets and beneath beds and in the bathroom—making certain no one, especially not a persistent assassin, was hiding. Then relief hit her—the endorphin rush after the adrenaline subsided, which was probably the only thing that was keeping her upright, because even her bruises had bruises. She plopped down at her tiny kitchen table, tearing open the paper bag of food they’d bought on their way to her trailer. Within seconds, she’d shoved a bite of the chili cheese dog her into her mouth and nearly collapsed with joy.

When she noted Trevor’s amusement at her expression, she said, “Apparently, blowing up things gives me the munchies.”

“Dear God, we’d better stock up.”

She’d have made a face at him, but that would have slowed down the eating. Besides, there were magical powers of healing in a great chili cheese dog. Especially the dogs made by the Ardoin brothers, because they were a Cajun version of the American classic, using smoked sausage and Cajun spices and three kinds of cheeses and she wasn’t sure what was in the chili, but if she could mainline it, she would. She tried to remember when she’d told him of her unholy obsession with the Ardoin’s hot dog stand, how she’d actually save her change so she and Stacey could have chili dog Saturdays. She heard him chuckling and when she looked up, she saw a crooked white smile against tan skin, and holy geez, that was even better than the chili. He bent down and kissed the corner of her mouth, stealing a little chili she was sure was smeared there and her brain sort of exploded as two of her favorite things in the world collided. Suddenly chili cheese dogs were associated with lust and all things sex and her unholy obsession just got a lot unholier.

Her phone rang: Nina, returning her call. Bobbie Faye would have assumed Nina was sleepy from the lazy sound in her voice and the time difference, but knowing Nina the
way she did, the woman probably had just finished with some Italian count. Or two.

“What can I get you?” Nina asked.

“Your condo, if that’s okay? I need a place to hole up and think.”