Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (5 page)

“Holy freaking geez, asshole, keep your damned hands to yourself,” she griped for Francesca’s benefit as she and the cousins caught up. Bobbie Faye stepped away from Trevor, pushing against a bicep (and she wanted an Oscar for resisting licking it, thank you very much).

“Hey, bitch. You fell on me.
Watch your step
.”

He pushed past her, climbed on his bike and started the roaring engine . . . and seemed to be stalling, checking gauges. It dawned on her that his
watch your step
had been said with a
heads-up
tone. She spun, checking out her surroundings to see if Trevor had been alluding to any specific impending danger. The train whistle sliced through the normal morning traffic noises as she walked toward her Honda Civic—a sad, rusted, and dented little box of a car that had recently wheezed past the two-hundred-and-forty-thousand-mile mark on the odometer. Bobbie Faye glanced back over her shoulder as Trevor pulled out a flask and ostensibly consulted some sort of map, though from this angle, she could have sworn he was actually looking at her instead. Other than the menacing-looking biker image he projected, everything seemed quiet on the tree-lined side street.

Well, other than that white van, bearing down on her.

Which then proceeded to stop as the side door slid open and hands grabbed her, yanking her inside, while someone shoved a sack over her head.

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Oh, shit. BF yanked off street. Another player. No audio. Visual on van. Sending license plate . . . now.

From:
JT

To:
Simone

Where’s Trevor?

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Following.

From:
JT

To:
Simone

Does he know you’re there?

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Unknown.

Holy fried butterflies,
someone had actually kidnapped her. Could chocolate give you hallucinations? Was she having flashbacks from her heavy M&M benders in the fifth grade? Because seriously, what the hell?

One of the hijackers in the van twisted her arms behind her, holding her in place as the van door slid and clicked shut, and then the van accelerated . . . slowly.

“Your
famiglia,
Bobbie Faye, they are to get you killed,
sì
?” a gruff, Italian-accented male asked.

“Look, if Roy owes you money, I don’t—”

“This ain’t about your brother,” a creepy, raspy voice said on her left, surprising her. After Roy’s kidnapping and the subsequent press about her rescuing him, quite a few people had surfaced trying to coerce her to pay his debts. (Not to mention husbands and boyfriends of women he was seeing who kindly wanted to rearrange his face.) She had grown so accustomed to surprise visits, Fear had taken to napping somewhere in the back room of her brain.

Raspy poked her with a gun barrel. Fear was now definitely awake, and kicking its idiot partners, Run and Scream, who’d been seriously falling down on the job.

The van turned right.
Huh?
She knew from memory that the street they’d just turned on was not the path to take
if they were trying to rush away from the city with her. They seemed to be . . . going around the block.

“
Non
, no about
il vostra fratello
—ah, your, brother,
non
. This is about the
diamante,”
the Italian voice supplied.

“The diamonds?” she asked, struggling with the jerk holding her arms as the van made another right-hand turn. “You have got to be kidding me.” She hadn’t been helping Francesca fifteen whole minutes and dealing with the repercussions of assisting her family was already about to get her killed.

“We know your idiot cousin,” Raspy explained, “asked you to help find those diamonds. And we’re telling you, you
don’t
wanna find them.”

“Gee, if you know me that well, you know I just love having a big strong guy boss me around.” She tried to kick out, and someone sat on her legs while the guy behind her wrenched her arm. Damn, that was gonna bruise.

“
Magnifico
,” the Italian said, clearly losing something in the translation. “Tell her you are . . . finished . . .
sì
? That you no want to help her!”

He was obviously overjoyed. Idiot. “I’ve told her that ever since seventh grade. In our family, we do Stubborn like other people do Olympics.”

“We do it better,” Raspy said. “We’re here for the buyers. The diamonds belong to us, and everything is set. You interfere? You’re dead. Come down with the flu. Convince her you’re out.”

“Gee, I’m feeling positively queasy as we speak.”

“Good girl,” Raspy said, and she wanted to deck him for the
girl
crap. What the hell was it with people? She wasn’t twelve.

“So, and not that this is
anything
like a brainstorming session, but why kidnap me to tell me to not find the diamonds when you already had a sniper trying to take me out?”

There was a distinct hesitation before the Italian said, “Ah,
sì
, the . . . sniper, he is good,
non
?”

“No,” she said, realizing what had been bothering her at
a gut level about the shots aimed into Ce Ce’s. Well, other than the whole “being shot at” thing. “He kinda sucked.”

They made another right-hand turn, which, by her calculations meant . . . clearly her brain was leaking out her ears, because
holy crap
. They’d made the block?

“The buyer,” the Italian said, “he want to no kill you, first chance.”

“A warning,” Raspy supplied. “You get one warning. They said they’re not cold-blooded.”

“Well, gee, they’re practically nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“
They
may not be cold-blooded,” Raspy laughed, “but I am. You don’t listen? We start killing your family.”

The van stopped abruptly and they shoved her out, leaving the sack on her head. She struggled for a moment to pull it off, and as she looked up, she realized she was in essentially the same spot she’d been in before being grabbed. The brilliant cousins pulled up in a gleaming yellow Hummer, which stunned her senses with its brightness. Not exactly a stealthy, anonymous choice for oh, say, finding diamonds or following hijackers.

She was probably lucky Francesca hadn’t decorated it with sparklers.

When Bobbie Faye glanced over at Trevor’s original position, he was gone, and she tried not to make it obvious that she was disappointed or that she swept her gaze around, looking for him as she turned to go to her car . . . stepping out of the way of the black SUV . . . then realizing, too late, that it had swerved at her. She saw the door opening, the maw of darkness inside the vehicle obscuring faces as she turned to run, because
damn
, twice in one day?

And then something light and soft covered her head and someone yanked her backward, hard, and she banged into the frame as someone hauled her into the backseat. Before she knew what had happened, her arms were zip-tied behind her back.

She was sensing a theme.

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Got her.

“Bobbie Faye,” a woman’s silky voice caressed, almost as soft as the folds of material covering Bobbie Faye’s face, “we know your cousin planned to ask for your help finding the diamonds.”

“Jesus. Did Francesca take out a freaking ad in the paper or something?” She felt the car drive slowly and then turn right.

“Close. She let it be known that she thought you were the answer to her problems.”

Great. Just flippin’ great. “Let me guess—you don’t want me to find the diamonds, either.”

There was a hairsbreadth of a pause, and the woman chuckled. “Ah, so that’s what the last group wanted. Interesting that they let you live.”

“Yeah, that was my favorite part.”

“Well, now you are going to find the diamonds and bring them to us. And
only
us, or your life as you know it is over.”

“Who the hell
are
you people?” Another right turn. What the hell? Were they going around the same block? Who knew the side exit of the store led to the Bermuda Triangle of Hijack-land?

“We,” Silky said rather matter-of-factly, “are the people who can take away every single thing you ever had, ever loved, or ever wanted.”

“Can I keep the lava lamp? Because I’m
really
fond of the lava lamp.” She felt a gun press into her check. “Fine. Geez. You can have the lava lamp.” They didn’t want her dead. Good. They could bite it.

Someone clocked her on the side of the head. As they
yanked her back, she swore she could feel a lump rising at the point of impact. Something sticky trickled down her chin and she was pretty sure that slam had cut her forehead. Maybe she should learn not to taunt the armed and crazy wackos.

“Here’s how we’re going to handle this,” Silky said. “You’re going to find the diamonds and give them to us. At that point, if you’ve been a very good girl and haven’t pissed me off, we’ll give you a finder’s fee. An extremely large finder’s fee, which should help you with the previous cretins who threatened your family.”

“Riiiiiiiigggggggghhhht. And I’ll bet I get a set of steak knives thrown in for free, too.” So much for shutting up. She really needed to practice that, she thought, as someone clocked her again, same spot. “Cut it out!”

“You don’t have a lot of choice,” the woman laughed. “You really don’t want to see me displeased. We’ll be watching, Bobbie Faye.”

Someone cut the zip-ties that held her hands, and the SUV stopped abruptly, just as the van had. The door opened and she was tossed out onto the street. Bobbie Faye yanked off what turned out to be a pillowcase (high thread count, very nice) and stared after the vehicle as it sped away down the same block the van had taken. She looked around and Trevor was now across the street, on his bike, apparently having followed the SUV around the block. There was something incredibly—furious—about his tension, in spite of the poker face he held.

She brushed her hands beneath her shirt and felt the small Band-Aid–sized patch Trevor had stuck on her. On the off-chance that it was a voice transmitter, she turned away from Francesca and the cousins as they gaped from the Hummer, and said, “Welcome to Bobbie Faye World where we don’t charge extra for all the crazies you can stand.”

He cracked a smile, confirming he could hear her. The relief that washed over her as she turned back toward her own crappy car was palpable. He was
here
. Helping her. She didn’t know how or why.
She’d missed him, missed their banter. The memory of his voice, talking to her until she was languid with comfort and sleep, flooded back to her. Which is why she wasn’t paying all that much attention to the big boxy moving-type truck until it slowed and she thought
no way, not again . . . not even in
my
life
, just as the back door scrolled up and open. She tried leaping out of their grasp, but it happened so fast, she tripped, dropping her purse, and fell straight into their grasp.

She had always had lovely timing.

When Bobbie Faye disappeared into the back of that truck, fury vibrated through Trevor as steadily as the hum of the Harley’s engine. This whole damned thing should never have happened. The Bureau could have alerted him sooner. If her name hadn’t popped up on the radar of his own personal contacts when it did, he wouldn’t have known to get here. He was too late to change the forward momentum when he’d first arrived, which gave him only option #2—infiltrate. Let her be used as bait, try to keep the Bureau’s mismanagement from getting her killed.

He shoved the rage aside. Anger was a luxury that had no place in an op, even though this set of players in the moving van had not been on the Bureau’s radar. The first kidnapper: yes. They were the target—stop the buyers. The second had been rumored, and now he had his own suspicions, but this third hadn’t even appeared as a blip. At least not in the intel he’d been given, and his clearance was pretty fucking high. Which meant either the Bureau had been caught off guard or someone wasn’t playing well with others when it came to information. Trevor didn’t know what was worse—that Bobbie Faye was in a terrible position, or that she didn’t even know yet just how bad it was.

He knew myriad ways of killing people, and at the rate of the threats to Bobbie Faye’s life, he might need every single one. That was fine, if it kept her safe. Or better yet,
throw all of the assholes in a room and let her have at them. That would teach them.

He amped up the volume in his earpiece and heard Bobbie Faye . . . and it sounded like a steady . . . growl. She knew he had miked her. She was letting him know she couldn’t talk.

“We’re just checkin’ ye for wires, woman,” an odd Irish lilt spilled into his earpiece.