Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (3 page)

Mollie, Sean’s sprite of a cousin, hunched over the steering wheel and drummed her fingers, irritating the hell (on purpose) out of Robbie, the rat-faced terrier-sized computer geek who’d proven indispensible already. Earlier that morning, Robbie had planted a bugging device on the side of the gun counter Bobbie Faye manned, and now as the women talked, he grinned (fuck, they needed to get him to a dentist and get some teeth in that head).

“D’you really think the woman’ll go along with it?” Aiden asked. He’d read up on several of this Bobbie Faye woman’s latest events and getting her to do what she was supposed to do sounded a bit like trying to herd kamikaze bats.

“She’s got no fuckin’ choice,” Sean said, and he seemed calm and confident enough, though Aiden knew this was when he was most likely to snap. Aiden wondered—and not for the first time on this job—if having Sean and Bobbie Faye on the same continent wasn’t going to be a bit like banging nitroglycerin against a truckload of C-4.

“Find
what
?” Bobbie Faye asked Francesca, then hung her head and sighed. She might as well have just opened the door to Hell and said, “Hi, honey, I’m home!”

Francesca beamed as if Bobbie Faye had somehow tacitly agreed to something. Then she peered around, careful to turn away from Maimee, and whispered, “The
diamonds,
silly. And you don’t have much time.”

“Bobbie Faye,” Maimee snapped, “any day now. I have prayers to attend to and I need that gun.”

Somehow, that sentence seemed perfectly normal today.

Bobbie Faye wanted to lie face down on the counter and press her temple into the cool glass, close her eyes, and breathe deeply to keep from beating the crap out of anyone. Later on, maybe a decade from now, when she opened her eyes, they would all be gone and it would be a good day. It wasn’t going to happen, though, and from the determined
set of Francesca’s pout, Bobbie Faye might as well get to the truth; the sooner she did, the sooner she could get rid of this nightmare.

“Frannie, what in the
hell
are you talking about?”

“Mom and Dad had a . . . little . . . disagreement,” Francesca continued whispering.

From the way Francesca tensed and hunched her shoulders while her glance darted around, Bobbie Faye knew the disagreement couldn’t be little. Nothing with her mom and dad had ever been little—even their beginning had supposedly been epic: a Romeo and Juliet couple caught between warring Cajun (Marie’s) and Creole (Emile’s) families. They had immediately fallen in love and declared that if they weren’t allowed to marry, they would eschew the classic double suicide for something their parents really feared. They would leave LSU and attend the University of Alabama. (Emile’s dad staggered around with angina attacks for weeks after that.) Their wedding sealed a shaky truce between the two politically connected families. Marie’s rice-farming Cajun clan owned a grain mill and the family could finally afford to do something luxurious, like send Marie off to college to become an artist. Ostensibly in the Mardi Gras bead business, Emile’s family earned their money the old-fashioned way: organized crime. Bobbie Faye knew there was some specific bad blood between the families from a couple of generations back, but everyone old enough to know what caused it had incredibly vague patches in their memory when questioned.

“They’re getting divorced.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m
not
kidding,” Francesca said, her voice rising with distress. “And it’s just mean of them, because it’s giving me bad dreams and you’d think they’d care at least a little bit, but no, off they go, Daddy with his hoochie fling and Mamma with the diamonds. That’s when Daddy put a hit out on Mamma to make her bring ’em back. Mamma’s not gonna and she’s gonna get killed and then
you know
that Mamma’s family will be after Daddy and these stupid diamonds will
wipe out my family
, Bobbie Faye, and—”

Maimee interrupted. “Could we move this along? People are going to Hell today if I don’t get to my prayer meeting soon enough. I need that gun
right now
.”

“You don’t
need
it right
now
. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a new salvation plan where you rush annoying sinners along to their Maker as they beg for forgiveness.”

“There could be.”

“Yeah, the little known Thou Shalt Carry and Conceal commandment. Do you have some family I could call for you? Friend? Psych ward?” Francesca tapped Bobbie Faye on the arm and she turned to say, “What—” just as two men, pistols in hand, strolled in her direction.

She didn’t have anything loaded. Nothing handy. Alarm sang
oh
,
damn
in a high-pitched squeal in her head. She squinted at a tall, heavyset man whose physique looked put together by an engineer too fond of his T-square, with everything about him blocky and wide, even down to basket hands large enough to moonlight as a forklift. There was a bulge under one arm beneath his sports coat where a holster marred the otherwise rectangular lines of his body.

“I think I’m supposed to shoot someone today,” he announced, looking directly at Bobbie Faye. “Is it
you
?”

Bobbie Faye blinked. “Did he just ask what I think he just asked?”

“That’s Mitch Guillory,” Francesca said when Bobbie Faye looked around for an explanation.

“
That
’s little Mitchell?” Bobbie Faye asked, not seeing any hint in this refrigerator-square man of the kid so scrawny his mamma called him a toothpick-with-eyes. And then she remembered seeing his mugshot flashed on the news: he’d been wounded in a sting of organized crime in New Orleans.

“You’re not supposed to shoot her yet,” the other man cautioned Mitch, and Mitch seemed to relax a smidge, but Bobbie Faye kept her eye on his gun.

“But don’t I shoot people?” Mitch asked.

“He kinda has a short-term memory problem,” Francesca explained. “From being shot.”

“I was shot?” Mitch asked, frowning, self-consciously patting himself down.

“Yeah,” the other man sighed, having obviously explained this a few times, and Bobbie Faye recognized the sigh—a cringe-inducing recognition as she remembered he was Donny, so boyishly bland that, at thirty, he could almost be mistaken for fifteen. She hadn’t seen Donny since he’d gone to L.A. to be an actor, though his career high thus far had been in a hemorrhoid commercial. Donny and Mitch were both Francesca’s cousins and always hung around the summers when Francesca’s mom sent her to live in Lake Charles with her grandmother.

“You got shot in the head,” Donny continued to Mitch. “You keep forgetting stuff.” Like, Bobbie Faye remembered from stories at the time, his own alibi or what his defense attorney would tell him, and so he couldn’t stand trial. And where Francesca, Mitch, and Donny were, Kit couldn’t be—

“Read your instructions,” said a woman with a rough, sexy smoker’s voice.

—far behind.

Kit, petite, spiky hair, had hidden behind Mitch’s bulk. Bobbie Faye recognized her killer good looks as the bratty little cousin who tagged along. She’d always been slightly deranged, the kind of kid who would put cheese in ice cream. To Bobbie Faye she said, “I wrote it all down for him. I think he has a real future as a hit man. He’s got great consistency, if we can just clear up this whole
oopsie, wrong target
problem.”

“Aren’t you . . . a career counselor? For the correctional system?” Bobbie Faye asked while she grabbed the Glock away from Maimee, just then realizing that the scowling old woman had pulled a box of bullets from the shelf and was trying to figure out how to load them.

“I have a good record in placing people where they have a high aptitude.”

“Yeah, why bother with the whole ‘and it should be legal’ aspect of the job.”

“I’d have put you in demolition, for example. You show an exceptional destructive capacity.”

“Well, gee, let me update my resumé.”

“I’ll see what I can find for you,” Kit said, missing the sarcasm. “Assuming you live.”

“Shhh,” Francesca said to Kit, then she spun back to Bobbie Faye. “See? You’re perfect for the job.”

“Yeah, right after I tattoo stupid on my forehead.”

“Word on the street is that you know how to find the diamonds,” Kit explained. “We’re helping Francesca keep her parents alive. So that means you have to help.”

“You cannot possibly believe Emile would put out a hit on Marie,” Bobbie Faye said. Everyone nodded, though Mitch looked to the others for their response before joining in. “No way. Besides, I have things to do. Paperwork for a grant to finish and turn in. I am not chasing after anything just because you show up with some insane story.”

Bobbie Faye had to shut and lock the display case to keep Maimee’s hands off a SIG.

“But you’re our best chance! You saved your brother! Against really bad odds! I watched the whole thing on the news. And I heard Daddy’s sending some of his . . . um, workers . . . and Mamma’s side said they were, too, and it’s going to get
worse
and people are going to die. They’re
all
convinced that since you’re the Contraband Days Queen, you’d be able to get them.”

Bobbie Faye’s gaze whiplashed back from where Donny preened for the security camera. Francesca had never been happy about Bobbie Faye being the unofficial queen of the local pirate festival, even though it was strictly a hereditary title. “What in the world has that got to do with anything?”

“You’re Cajun. You can find out stuff about Mamma because all her friends are Cajun, so they’ll tell you stuff they won’t tell me, even though we’re cousins.”

And there it was, out there. The thing she hadn’t allowed
herself to think about: this request was about family. Family—specifically from her dad’s side. Her dad’s sister, Marie, had her life on the line. An aunt who’d been nice to her in spite of the fact that her brother, Bobbie Faye’s dad, hadn’t ever acknowledged Bobbie Faye, nor she him. There was a time, when she was very little, she had wished it was different. Now? No way. The only person she’d confided to about her family was Nina, her best friend who owned and ran a questionable quasi-S&M modeling agency, but that was because Nina tended to approve of Bobbie Faye’s less polite tendencies, particularly if they ran to the homicidal.

Francesca’s cousins . . . well . . . technically, two of them were her cousins as well . . . looked at her, hope brimming.

“Maybe you can figure out where Mamma hid them?” Francesca asked. “Because you’re really crazy and Mamma’s really crazy, so y’all are a lot alike. You probably can think just like her.”

“It scares me that you’re in sales.”

The front window shattered and a bullet whizzed
just
over Bobbie Faye’s head and she yelled, “Down!” grabbing the Glock and the bullets on her way to the floor. Allison and Alicia, the twins who worked the front counter, herded the rest of the customers to a back room where there was no flying debris or glass. The cousins spread out, and Mitch shot back, though he clearly was confused as to where to shoot, since he was doing a fantastic job of getting rid of all of the dangerous mannequins lined up in rows in the camo section of the store.

“Mitch!” she yelled, but he couldn’t hear her as he picked off a plastic head. Another sniper bullet whizzed past, shattering the tins of gunpowder above Bobbie Faye’s head, and black powder showered her and the floor.

Great. Bad hair
and
flammability, all in one move. Yip-fucking-ee. She loaded the Glock, and told Francesca to call 911. As she peeked out from behind the counter, she realized Maimee had not, in fact, moved to the ground like
everyone else, and while Mitch kept shooting, more sniper bullets slammed into the Coleman lanterns nearby and glass went everywhere.

“Miz Maimee, get down!”

“I’m calling my prayer partners,” Maimee announced as she dialed her cell. “We’ll just meet here. I think this is God’s way of telling me we need matching Glocks.”

Bobbie Faye wondered if Mr. Edgar would live long enough to see Maimee in that nice padded cell she was clearly headed for.

“The train’s going to block the police,” Kit yelled from near the door where she stood at a safe angle, peering out. There was a long-ass train slowly approaching the tracks just a block beyond Ce Ce’s store; the cops would have a twenty-minute detour if the damned thing wasn’t moving.

“Frannie,” Bobbie Faye gripped the woman’s arm, hoping to shake her out of her ditzy-fugue state, “
get the cousins out of here
. Go to the police.”

“No way. Daddy’s got lots of ’em on the payroll. They’ll lock us up before we can help Mamma. We gotta find the diamonds first.”

“The FBI—” But Bobbie Faye stopped when Francesca rolled her eyes. Her dad’s shady activities had included bribing senators and God knew who else.

“They questioned Mamma, but she didn’t have the diamonds on her, so she must’ve hidden them. We heard she’s supposed to be selling them, and if she does that, Daddy will really be mad, so we only have a couple of days, and now we can’t find her.”

More bullets shattered display cases, embedded in walls, and knocked things off shelves, and Bobbie Faye couldn’t tell whether the shooting was from the sniper, Mitch, or Donny joining in for show. When Ce Ce got back from her errand, Bobbie Faye was going to wish one of the bullets had hit its mark. “Who the hell is out there shooting, anyway?”

“Maybe somebody who doesn’t want us to find the diamonds?” Francesca guessed.

“You’re all causing more damage than those stupid diamonds are worth.”

“There’s about thirty and they’re worth at least a million.”

Holy shit, that was a lot, even for diamonds. And Bobbie Faye realized that
why yes, someone probably
would
shoot her for that kind of money
. Actually, there were a few people who’d shoot her for free; add in that kind of money and people were going to line up out the wazoo with guns aimed her direction.

“I’m really sorry to get you involved.” Francesca worked her expression from quivering all the way up to full-blown remorse.

The glass fish tank holding the bait minnows shattered from a direct shot and water and minnows whooshed out everywhere. From the other end of the store, she heard a muffled, “Oops.”