Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (26 page)

She would die today
, the aunt had said, unless she followed her instincts, and even then, the odds weren’t high
she’d live, but it was better odds than if he forced her to stay behind.

And Bobbie Faye, clearly, wanted to follow the asshole who stole the photos.

It was the last fucking thing on earth he wanted right now. He was trained, he’d spent years hunting men, years defending, killing; there was no way she was sufficiently prepared to play cat-and-mouse with a gunman, much less with snipers in the mix. As much as he wanted to treat her like an equal—and she deserved that, she’d earned it—the fact was, he hadn’t had time to train her. She could get hurt. How in the hell was he supposed to let her walk into these silos? Then the echo of her aunt’s warning thrummed through his chest. Was he a complete fool to even allow for the possibility the aunt may have some ability to predict an outcome? If the crazy old aunt had not just told him very detailed things about his missions no one knew, he’d have ignored her. But now? Could he take that risk?

They moved forward as he scanned the area. Logistically, by himself, he couldn’t corner this guy with the photos. Obviously, they were important and the man was likely getting away, even as Trevor hesitated. His men were still pinned down in front of the house, there was no help coming fast enough, and if the diamonds were sold to the black market, the money they’d raise for any terrorist would be a goddamned nightmare.

“You’re thinking ‘clusterfuck’ and ‘epic proportions’ right now, aren’t you?” Bobbie Faye asked, and he cut her a glance. “If your muscles were any tenser, they’d be corded steel. Not that I
mind
the whole corded-steel look, because hey, kind of a fan here, but I can handle this. Unless you’re going to go all His Standard FBI Agentness on me and try to stop me.”

“I swear to God; if you get hurt, I’m going to kick your ass.”

“Hey, it’s entirely possible I have a plan.”

He couldn’t resist. “You? Have a plan?”

“I thought I’d go with ‘get the photos’ and ‘don’t get dead.’ ”

“It’s focused. I like it,” he said, “especially the last part.” He kissed her, quick. “Try not to start the Apocalypse. I hate having to fill out reports.”

Lori Ann tapped her foot in the rehab rec room. All of the other inmates hunched forward, trying to see the footage on the bad excuse for a TV as Reggie O’Connor’s live Bobbie Faye report aired.

“Why is she blue?” the woman with the unicorn tattoo on her cheek asked, because
unicorns
on one’s face was
normal
. “Is it some sort of commentary on her emotional state? I think she needs a hug.”

“I’ll bet she’s joined that group,” a tall black man with basset-hound eyes said.

“What? The Blue Man Group?” Unicorn asked.

“She can’t join that group, she’s a woman,” a prim, neat little man said. (She’d learned he was an accountant.) (Rumor had it that he was really IRS.) (He had a very nasty crying habit she wished he’d break.)

“Maybe she’s going to be part-time,” Basset Hound Eyes said, “because she’s like, only half-blue.”

Lori Ann snapped, hopping up to face the group, who, as a unit, cringed. “People are
shooting
at my
sister
and all you can think of is to wonder why she’s blue!”

“Well, people are always shooting at your sister,” Unicorn said. “She’s never been blue before.”

Lori Ann glared over at the counselor, who shrugged. “He has a point.”

Bobbie Faye watched Trevor veer off to circle around behind the silos as she stepped into the shadows of the giants, grateful for the shade in the smothering morning heat. The buildings loomed, sentries for a forbidden world.

She hated these buildings. They glinted in the sun and glared at her. She shoved her imagination and memories
down and focused, instead, on navigating beneath steel staircases that led to catwalks, passing enormous metal framework pedestals for various generators and heaters for the grain dryer itself.

She paused before every man-sized nook, listening for the sound of breathing, smelling the heavy humid air; she knew what the harvested-grain air should smell like—the distinct scent of rice mixed with a little bit of diesel fuel and oil from the eighteen-wheeler trucks that rolled through there from the various farms. Hot asphalt, soil, and the bitter scent of drying stalks of grass layered in with the other odors. In addition, men, God bless ’em,
smelled
. And since there were no other workers on the premises, and she had apparently imprinted Trevor’s specific smell on her brain, any other male scent was going to be the photo-toting jerk.

A slight crunch brushed against the silence and she recognized the sound: filmy dried rice hulls crushed underfoot. She stole behind a metal scaffold that held a generator bigger than her trailer (and thankfully, it wasn’t running, or the roar would have been deafening). She squatted there, angled to her right, and peered beneath the crisscrossed support posts through a crawl space where she’d hidden as a kid. Black rubber-soled combat boots came into view on the other side of the structure and she knew Trevor had on battle-scarred cowboy boots for his biker/mercenary façade.

Bobbie Faye palmed a pebble and tossed it away from her position to entice the photo thief to move; he inched out toward the sound. She watched his progress and then crept forward softly, careful to keep her sneakers from crunching anything and giving her away. Just as she came up behind him, keeping herself still hidden, two things happened at once: Trevor popped out, sandwiching the thief between them, and behind Trevor, a man with a sniper rifle appeared on a catwalk encircling one of the silos.
Sonofabitch
. The sniper moved into a position with a bead on
Trevor. She felt herself go icy cold. Two thoughts ran back-to-back: Trevor could die and
hell no
, he’s
not
.

She moved. The thief held a Walther P, but it didn’t matter, and she would have to think about that later, if there was a later. Trevor’s expression as she put herself in jeopardy raced from surprise to anger to confusion all in the nanosecond it took her to raise her own gun and aim—not at the thief between them, but above and to the right of where Trevor stood. The sniper saw her, and his delay, his slight, split-second blink of noticing someone else outside of the crosshairs, was all it took for her to put a shot in his left shoulder, jerking him out of position so that the shot he squeezed off went wild and pinged off the silo.

And then a second shot rang out and the sniper’s chest blossomed red; Trevor spun to Bobbie Faye, who hadn’t shot the man again, and the thief between them looked just as shocked as they were. Trevor shot the thief, center mass, but the man dove, tumbling, and then he sprang up, running between the silos, clearly wearing some sort of body armor.

Aiden nodded to Sean: the sniper who’d been shooting at Bobbie Faye was down. He’d missed the original kid who’d taken what looked like photos from the woman. They’d had to regroup fast and hadn’t had a shot at the second man who now held the photos, but one of the snipers had been eliminated. Sean couldn’t have cared less for the woman’s welfare except the bit of skirt was his best ticket to the diamonds, but not if she was dead.

“Sure,” Sean said, “and there’s more to do.”

“You thinkin’ we end this?”

“Yes.”

Aiden and Sean were better shots than Mollie and Robbie and had left the latter to man the car and wait for their signal.

John seethed. Sending the kid, Jayden, had been a mistake—one he’d realized as soon as the kid got chatty
with that freaking hurricane of a woman, and so he’d sent Alonzo in to retrieve the photos from the kid. John had been positioned where he could aim a parabolic at the house and he’d heard the majority of the conversation—enough to know the asshole Emile had hired was a Fed, working undercover. Now
that
was interesting, but it ultimately didn’t matter. John had hired the best hitter in the business, and he’d have nailed the bitch and the whole thing would have ended. Or should have ended, except Bobbie Faye had shot the sniper first.

But hadn’t killed him. Someone
else
had, and she’d looked stunned. If John had been in range, he’d have put a bullet in the middle of that stunned expression and man, that would have been the best fucking score and really, he’d have almost paid to have had that pleasure, but he’d set up too far away. He signaled his last man to go in; the last thing he needed was for Bobbie Faye or Trevor to live now. Especially now that he was close to having the clues as to where the diamonds were. Because at this point, he was realizing he could have his cake and kill her, too. All in all, an absolutely excellent day.

Bobbie Faye and Trevor shared a gaze and his was way-the-hell more furious than she’d expected.

“He could have shot
you
,” Trevor said, and she realized he was seething. “Dammit, you focus on the ‘don’t get dead’ part.”

“He was aiming at you, you idiot.” Where the hell did he get off, getting mad at her?

“Not the sniper—this guy here,” he pointed between them. “For the love of God, you can shout a warning, but don’t you dare put yourself at risk.”

And then a man was on him, having come up behind Trevor from an angle neither of them could see, and she ran toward them, to help.

“No!” Trevor shouted. “Get the photos.” But she kept going, her gut not letting her go after something else if he was . . .
oh
. Okay. Maybe he wasn’t. In trouble, that is.
Trevor spun and with a few simple moves that bespoke of way more experience at this whole killing-with-the-bare-hands thing than she’d thought about, he dispatched the would-be assailant. Holy shit. Trevor wasn’t even breathing hard from the exertion, though there was a moment she caught a primal look, something dark and lethal, and then he shuttered his expression back to neutral.

“The photos,” he said, and she turned and followed the thief.

From:
Simone

To:
JT

I’ve lost her. But we hear gunshots. Investigating.

From:
JT

To:
Simone

I wonder what our medical coverage is for therapy? Because I am seriously going to need it. A lot of it.

The freaking thief had gone up the staircase to the catwalk three stories up on the biggest silo. Three freaking craptastic stories up. She
hated
heights. She was seven all over again, when she’d climbed up a silo and slipped. She would have died if she hadn’t landed in a bed of grain in a small dumptruck—would have definitely died if it hadn’t been for the fast action of that trucker who’d seen her tumbling off the catwalk in his rearview mirror. She fell through the grain with such momentum that it had seemed alive, sucking her into its belly where it was dark. She’d
been screaming on the way down and her mouth had filled with rice hulls and the dust gagged her. The trucker had pulled her free.

Bobbie Faye didn’t think it would really help to say to the thief, “Pardon me, sir, would you mind terribly letting me chase you over flat ground? Thank you, most helpful, much obliged.”

Instead, she sprinted up the stairs, her thighs screaming, having shoved Trevor’s SIG into the back of her jeans (ouch, damn). The thief ran around the catwalk to a ladder, and up he went, which meant up she went, hand-over-hand. Surely he wasn’t going into the silo’s topmost door, surely he wasn’t that stupid, surely he knew how danger—

Apparently not, because the gunman scrambled from the ladder to the highest catwalk and circled to the hatch where the conveyors dumped grain inside. The hatch was used for emergency purposes and to vent the silo of highly ignitable grain dust. Bobbie Faye arrived at the dark opening the gunman had entered and waited just outside, adjusting her breathing, careful not to look down the . . . holy crap, she was at least seven stories up. Her heart started writing its Farewell Speech and it was in such a hurry, it wasn’t even bothering to spell correctly. Bravery was standing by with spare pens, so it wasn’t a helluva lot of help, either.

A distant
whap-whap-whap
of helicopter rotors beat the air, and she glanced around to see tiny dots on the horizon—no way to tell if they were news or police helos. Someone down below shouted something, and a slight breeze barely made the direct sun tolerable, but mostly, there was just the black maw of that hatch opening, and total silence inside the silo. Then metal creaked, and when she peeked through the opening, light filtered in from a point opposite her and she didn’t know if the asshole had run around the interior via a catwalk and found another way out. This particular ladder that she stood on ended right there; she’d have to follow inside if she wanted to keep up with the thief.

Which meant stepping into the dark, onto a narrow catwalk, into a silo full of semi-dry grain. Why hadn’t she called in sick yesterday? Better yet, why hadn’t she had that lobotomy she’d been contemplating? Anything . . .
anything
would be better than this. Bobbie Faye pulled the SIG out and ducked into the hatch opening, her lungs fighting the dust she’d disturbed as she felt the solid metal grating of the catwalk beneath her shoe. She sighed with relief. Safe. There was even a handrail. She wasn’t going to pitch forward into the abyss of grain.

A gun jammed into the back of her head. For the second time in an hour. Did they teach gun-jamming in bad-guy school?

V’rai’s words echoed in her head:
You’re standing on a precipice, Bobbie Faye. Watch your back
. Holy fucking
geez
. Would it have killed her to have been a little clearer?

“Got her,” the gunman said, and he relayed their location to someone, apparently talking into a cell phone she couldn’t see as he stood behind her. She heard the phone click off. “John’s on his way—he wants to do the kill himself.”

“Please tell me he’s traveling from Helsinki or something.”

“Man, he wasn’t kidding. You never stop. You just can’t keep from being
you
.”