When a Man Loves a Weapon (17 page)

Trevor was going to go after Cam, she could see it as clearly as the fire as he said, “You have no fucking idea
what
she needs.”

She pushed between them, and something inside her snapped.

“Stop it, you two.” To Trevor she said, “Am I okay? Fuck no. Me and Okay? We are not friends anymore. I don’t think I am even speaking to Okay right now because you know what? This is a Victoria’s Secret bra and it’s the first time I ever went there when there wasn’t a sale instead of going to Wal-Mart and I saved up and
myGod
do you have any idea how insane those prices are?” She shoved her arms in the sleeves of the shirt Cam had slammed over her head and as she spiraled away from the details to try to grasp onto the big picture, she latched onto a slim threat of sanity. “And by the way, who the
fuck
blew up our house?”

Riles had moved immediately to set up with his back to the fire, guarding their one vulnerable position—the lake—guns in both hands, the barn giving them refuge from any other angle. She caught a brief glance of his expression. With Cam hovering just behind her, Riles didn’t bother to hide his disgust as he went back to scanning the tree line, searching for danger.

The house fire roared behind them, pipes hissed, joists seared in half and fell, glass popped and shattered. She couldn’t quite wrap her mind around that. There was their home. In pieces. Around her. Oh, look, over there. Some of the tile from the ugly backsplash. Good thing they hadn’t been able to afford the new appliances Trevor wanted.

The bedroom roof fell in, sccccrrrrrinnnnching and cracking and thunking on their king-sized bed. That beautiful bed and that beautiful mattress.

“It’ll be okay, Sundance. We need to get out of here, though.” Trevor scooped her up so she didn’t have to walk barefoot across the stickers and burning debris.

“Right. Do they cover bombings under homeowner’s insurance? Because I have never had homeowner’s insurance before and I have a feeling there wasn’t a ‘Sure! We’ll be happy to pay for it when bad guys blow it up!’ codicil and I still don’t think it was funny that most of them wanted a psychiatrist to sign off on me before they would even
consider
insuring me and the one we signed with was the
only
company who didn’t get a restraining order—”

“You know you’re babbling, right?” he asked, as he detoured around what used to be their microwave.

“—and really, seriously, I still do not believe that our insurance agent was on vacation in the Congo every single time I called for two months. We just moved in the damned house and Jesus, Trevor, I’m sorry.”

Riles snorted.

“What?” she asked him. “I
am
sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” Trevor said, both to her and to Riles, and he caught Riles’s eye just as Riles was about to say something else. Trevor glared; Riles clammed up. She had a feeling. Riles’s life was just chock full of warning glances. “Check the truck,” Trevor told his friend as they approached the front yard and she frowned, confused. Trevor nodded toward the Porsche (slightly on fire) and Riles’s Jag (tires slashed from debris). The only vehicle not obviously damaged was Cam’s truck. “Riles will be checking for explosives, trackers,” he explained.

She quashed down the need to babble, to fling herself away from the moment, as she looked in his eyes, and his pain, riveted in the here and now.

“If you’d have done a half-assed decent job,” Cam griped, stepping around the burning card table lying in the yard, “she wouldn’t have been worried and we wouldn’t be—”

“Shut the hell up, Moreau,” Trevor snapped.

“—here.” Cam clenched his fists. “Fuck you. With your house in flames—”

“
Our
house,” Trevor said, setting her down beneath a tree on the front lawn halfway between the house and Cam’s truck, the reds, oranges, and yellows of the firelight flickering over them. “Ours. And I’ll take care of it.”

Cam nodded pointedly at the burning remains. “Good job so far.”

She stepped between them, splaying a hand on each man’s chest, and damn, they both didn’t have shirts on, and Cam reacted with a sharp intake of breath, and she snatched her hand away and wasn’t
that
awkward. “Look, I know this is pure Crazy Talk, but I think we may have some bigger problems than the testosterone poisoning.”

Cam leaned forward and said, “You’re going into protec—”

“No.”

“—tive custo—”

“No.”

“—dy. Oh, hell yes, you
are.
”

“No, she’s not.” Trevor’s voice slid low, menacing, as he dialed his phone. Where the hell? Pants pocket? Mystical seventh dimension?

“This is
my
crime scene. What if that”—he pointed to the burning house—“was a warm-up?”

“Our best clue is Nick, and I know how to flush the little weasely sonofabitch out,” Bobbie Faye said.

“No. We don’t need you to be the one,” Cam said. “We have hundreds of cops—sheriffs, state police, city—we can find him. And you’re in no shape—you’re exhausted, you’ve lost weight, you’ve got circles under your eyes. You look terrible.”

“Well, gee, Cam, thank you. I feel
much
better now.” She felt waves of heat and anger roll off Trevor as he talked on the phone to someone—clipped, short bursts—and the tension from him was like a battering ram . . . and yet, he knew this was her argument, and except for his hand at her waist, he made no other move. “And meanwhile,” she continued, “how long will it take everyone to get a photo of him, knock on doors, turn over rocks?” What she didn’t say, what she couldn’t say, was, “And how great of a job did everyone do when Sean escaped,
huh
?” Because she could see it was fear for her that was driving Cam. “Nick lied. He was doing someone’s bidding to get me in the casino and we need to know why.” To Trevor, she said, “He’s not evil, just mercenary. I can give him a reason to come talk to me.”

“We’ll handle it—you’re going into hiding. I’ll make some calls and—”

“She’s not going anywhere, Moreau, without me.” Trevor had closed his phone.

“Because you’ve kept her oh-so-fucking safe.”

Cam had leaned in too far this time. She felt Trevor shift, felt his leg muscles bunch against the back of her legs, and knew that he was going for Cam—and she shouted, “No, Trevor!” jumping, putting her back against Trevor, keeping him from strangling her ex. Because right then, Trevor was losing it. Whatever was said on the phone had made it worse, somehow, and he had lost his home, too. He’d been the one to find this place, he’d been the one to put up the security. He’d entertained her by walking the backyard, planning where he was going to put a deck and a grill one day, and a hammock. He’d already repaired the old sinks and two rooms’ worth of old hardwood flooring. He’d done that in the two weeks they’d lived there.

And it was gone.

“You really
really
can’t kill him,” she said over her shoulder to her fiancé. He gazed down at her angled face, his eyes glittering red, reflecting the inferno behind her, and she felt him go just a little bit crazy inside, even though he didn’t move a muscle.

*  *  *

The mechanic stood there watching the boat sink, his own clothes ruined from the oily film that had spanned the top of the lake water as the boat had sunk. He wanted to wash his hands, had to resist asking one of the ER techs handling hurt gamblers for a sanitizer, which would have been ludicrous. In light of how nasty he felt, one little sanitizer wouldn’t do enough. And so he forced himself to stand there, arms crossed, looking for all the world like another victim, gaping at the wreckage of years of work.

Because it was a wreckage. It was not supposed to go this way. He’d watched it unfold, powerless to stop it. None of it should have happened—not Bobbie Faye showing up, not the men going after her, not her fiancé involved in that poker game. Tactically, he’d missed something.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, needing to keep them busy so he wouldn’t focus on the oily feel of his fingertips, and he felt a few poker chips there. Chips he hadn’t remembered shoving in his pocket in the melee.

Had he forgotten something else? Some small detail? Had he missed something obvious?

This mess would have killed Chloë, seeing these people hurt. Her whole life, her mantra, her motto, was about safety, protecting the general public. Public service. That’s what she was about, that’s what she gave her life for.

Only she hadn’t known she was giving her life.

The bile of that fact rose again, burning his throat, eating him from the inside out, the same way grief had eaten his soul. He wasn’t the man he used to be, he knew that. Knew the crisp, clear autumn morning when it changed, when they told him of her car wreck. A one-person fatal wreck.

The ache and pain of losing her slammed him all over again as he stood there and watched the engineers and marina owners and police brainstorm just what to do, and how to do it, to try to rescue the white behemoth of a casino lying in the water. It was never going to be the same, though. He could have told them that, that it was never going to be the same, no
matter how much money they poured into it, no matter how much effort and railing at the gods they did, no matter what sort of verdict came down from a jury somewhere, it was never ever going to be the same.

People would forget. Their lives would go on and people would forget. Eleven years from now, it might be a dim memory, that time when the casino boat sank, and someone would mention it and someone else’s eyes would get a faraway look as if they were searching in the vast amount of daily minutiae, through the latest TV shows and what their boss said two weeks ago and the scandal of a pantyless celebrity that had hit the airwaves, and they would finally call up some vague, fleeting glimpse of this moment and nod, yeah, and then move on.

That’s what they did with Chloë’s memory now—they moved on.

They wouldn’t just move on once this was complete. They would have to pay attention, they would have to remember. There would be outrage and numbing pain and laws made and his name would probably define a new standard of the harm that could be done, but they would, by God, pay attention.

So he forced himself to stand there, ignoring his concern that other agendas may be at work. As long as his succeeded as well, he didn’t really care anymore what others’ did. He was beyond saving, anyway.

“Damn fool girl,” Etienne barked, slamming out of the RV for the second time in two days, and V’rai, Lizzie, and Aimee froze. V’rai didn’t know if this was just another effort of her brother to blow off steam—the sunken casino ship imagery was now split-screened with the house explosion.

“He really ought to talk to her,” Aimee said again.

“Not yet,
chère
,” V’rai cautioned. “If he goes over there now, she’ll die. I know it.”

“It’s not like you’re right all the time,” Lizzie pointed out. “Sometimes you’re wrong.”

“
Mais, non
, not lately,” V’rai noted. “The visions . . . they
have been stronger. Somethin’ ’bout our girl, she . . .” V’rai stopped at a loss for the right word.

“Amplifies it?” Aimee asked, and V’rai nodded.

That was it, exactly. Amplifies. Ever since Bobbie Faye had come back into their lives, the visions were stronger. Accurate. Deadly.

They heard Etienne’s truck engine rev and he peeled out of their long gravel drive.

“Oh, holy shit,” Lizzie said, peering out the RV’s window. “I think . . .”

V’rai got very very sick to her stomach just then, and knew . . .
knew
this was the wrong thing for him to do. Wrong time, wrong thing, and especially when he was so angry at his daughter.

“We have to stop him,” she told her sisters.

Lizzie grabbed her cell phone, started dialing.

“That’s a waste of time,” Aimee said, grabbing the car keys.

“Which way is he going?” Aimee asked V’rai.

She thought a moment, wondering if she should tell them everything. Then, finally, she settled. “Lafayette.”

“Then we’re going to Lafayette,” Aimee said, jangling the keys as she walked awkwardly to the door, her right prosthetic leg giving her trouble.

“How?” Lizzie asked. “You can’t push the gas or brake, V’rai can’t see, and I sure as hell can’t cross bridges.” Lizzie had never been able to drive across a bridge again after she’d wrecked on one and ended up in a submerged car in a river.

“Old times,” Aimee said, maybe a little maniacally. “I’ll navigate, V’rai will do the pedals.”

“It’s dark!” Lizzie protested.

“I can’t see anyway,” V’rai said, standing to join Aimee. “If we hurry, we can catch him.”

“I’m not leaving y’all to go do this,” Lizzie said, grabbing her gun. “You don’t need me to have my eyes open on the bridges, but I can still shoot.”

“And pray,” V’rai said. Lizzie was really good at praying.
And shooting, but luckily, she had more practice at the praying.

Dox watched the Bobbie Faye woman, the two Feds, and the cop from his scope. At forty, he was the old man of Sean’s group, and he’d shimmied up the tree a hair slower than he’d planned. He’d gotten out of the house a hair slower, too, after setting up the bomb and the message; two seconds slower and the Fed would have caught him.

He could tell the sniper guy “felt” him—good snipers usually had a sixth sense of when they were being watched. Dox could have taken them out multiple times since the explosion if he’d wanted to. Change that—if Sean had wanted him to. Sean, instead, wanted them alive and on the run.

If it had been up to Dox, they’d already be dead for what they did to Aiden and Mollie. He probably should have included Robbie in that number, since Robbie had died, too, but Dox hadn’t cared about the little weasel rat-faced bastard. But Aiden and Mollie? Good people. Solid. Kept the crew together in the bad times, they did.

He’d wished, for them, that Aiden and Mollie had found each other, the way they were. They flirted around the edges of it, but they hadn’t had any bit of happiness, like they could have.

Dox knew it was a romantic notion. He was fond of Romance. Loved a good flick. His wife had dragged him to that Bridget Jones movie a few years back, and he hadn’t wanted to tell her but he’d kinda liked it when the Darcy bloke showed up there at the end. He’d seen the way Mollie stole glances at Aiden when the man didn’t realize. Kinda the way the tall bloke, the state cop, hungered for the woman.