When a Man Loves a Weapon (19 page)

Then she remembered whose life she was thinking about.

Great. She was going into the Apocalypse armed with a Chicken Foot Mood Bracelet for Trouble.

It started raining.

V’rai drove. Well, technically, V’rai worked the pedals. Aimee had scooted as close to V’rai as she could to help steer the old Oldsmobile, and was shouting out instructions and landmarks while Lizzie screamed in the backseat.

“Lamppost!” Lizzie shouted and V’rai wanted to cut the wheel, but she didn’t know which direction.

“Got it!” Aimee shouted back. “Push down a little more on the gas pedal, hon.”

V’rai felt like the world was rushing past her and through the car, wind blasting her from the open window, the smell of asphalt in the dying heat of the late night whipping acrid against her face, cornfields just beyond that, pastures. She felt like a NASCAR commercial, with cars zooming the other direction, loud and startling. And V’rai was a little worried about being pulled over. “How fast are we going now?”

“Um,” Aimee leaned over to see the dials V’rai knew were on the dashboard. “Twenty-two.”

“Oh, dear,” V’rai said.

She stomped on the gas, the car lurched forward, hard, throwing her backward, and Lizzie yelled “Bird!”

It was going to be the longest trip to Lafayette V’rai had ever taken.

If Bobbie Faye had had any doubts whatsoever about the exact location of the horse track, the three billion signs plastered on every square inch of the buildings and roadside
for the last two miles would have cleared them right the hell up.

“Built in the middle of a sugarcane business that went belly-up after Rita,” Cam explained to Riles—mostly, she thought, to fill the silence.

And then they turned into the well-lit entrance; the central corrugated metal building, with its jazz-finger angles and strobing lights plunked slap in the middle of a field surrounded by stately magnolias and live oaks, looked like the slutty girl at the debutante ball.

Her brother’s dad used to gamble here, back when there was a dirt track, a railing, a few bleachers, and the small, clapboard Baptist church two miles down the road that had every gambler’s name and included each one on their weekly prayer list. (Her mother had a real winning streak at picking ultimate assholes who would abandon their children. It was the one thing she and Roy and Lori Ann had bonded on fast and early.)

She would have been soaked, running in from the parking lot, if Trevor hadn’t had a rain slicker in his go bag.

Inside, the cold hush of the air conditioner chilled her newly damp skin, and the crowd noise fueled the adrenaline. Thirty-foot ceilings, however, did not contain enough air to disperse the smell of rain-soaked skin and sweat. Leather booths abutted a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that ran the length of the room and overlooked the track to her right, and a long ebony bar lined the solid wall to her left. The entire club was cantilevered over the regular stands; a window seat gave the impression of floating on air.

Or in this case, water, since rain trickled down the glass.

There were big flat-screen monitors on every wall; just because the horses weren’t racing here didn’t mean they weren’t racing somewhere in the world, and this group was drinking to it. Raucous laughter and chatter echoed in the room; there were easily a thousand people crammed inside. One quick glance told Bobbie Faye that this clubhouse catered to the wealthier clientele of the racetrack—the crowd reeked of money. From the designer clothes to the sparkling
jewelry to the expensive, hand-tooled leather purses, it was all about people who had enough money to play with it.

The whole damned thing boggled Bobbie Faye’s mind. She had exactly $2.38 in her checking account. She worked a lot of hours and made more than minimum wage, with Ce Ce insisting now on bonuses because her notoriety brought in a lot of customers. Those bonuses had enabled her to help have enough for the down payment on the house, but not a damned thing extra. How in the world did people have the money to play the horses? Or gamble on teams? Was there some sort of alien language or secret handshake that rich people had that made their money multiply?

She caught her reflection in the bar mirror.

Oh, hell, her hair had enough static electricity to power a buzz saw. Way to blend, she thought, tugging on it and trying to smooth it, ’til Trevor took her hand, his fingers laced with her own, and turned her so that she could see his expression: he dragged his gaze from her toes exposed in the flip-flops up her legs, pausing for a moment where her belly button showed just beneath the hem of the obviously-too-small t-shirt and then slowly up, and when he met her eyes, she recognized that heat burning there, that
if there weren’t a thousand people in here, you’d be naked
heat.

Every. Single. Inch. Of her skin said, “hot damn” and “back ’atcha” as he squeezed her to him in the crowded room, one hand at the nape of her neck. He kissed her, possession and fire in spite of how she looked, and while she suspected that one of the reasons he’d kissed her right then was because her face was plastered all over every freaking TV in the entire room, with live footage of the casino boat and then live footage of their house (still burning, damn), there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that he’d wanted to do that for the last hour.

“Don’t look,” he said, when he broke off the kiss. Then he glanced over past Cam, who could have been carved in granite, he was so unmoving, so livid, so determined to gaze anywhere but at them, and Trevor asked the clubhouse guard, “Where are the fire exits?”

Before Bobbie Faye could turn around, Riles had blended into the gamblers and disappeared, heading for the exit on the other side of the room. Cam nodded briefly at Trevor, indicating that he’d have the entrance covered. As she and Trevor wove through the crowd, Bobbie Faye scanned the room, searching for Nick. She’d called over a dozen people when they’d first left the burning house, narrowing down Nick’s location for the night.

But something was wrong. She knew it, could sense it. There . . . she saw it.

Nick. Sitting alone at one of the leather booths abutting the window overlooking the track. His attention . . . on her.

Then down at his hands flattened palm-down on the tabletop. Nick did a really fine impression of hangdog guilt.

Bobbie Faye pulled against Trevor’s hand, and he stopped short, following her gaze.

“That’s Nick,” she said. “And I’ll be damned if he wasn’t expecting me.”

Trevor’s sharp gaze snapped back to the man in the booth and then scanned the room. He pulled his cell phone out, hit speed dial, and said, simply, “They were expecting us. Tell Moreau. Spread the word.”

The word, she presumed, was to be spread to the various backup and reinforcements he’d alerted on their way in. Cam had the Lafayette-based state police gathering at the perimeter of the racetrack, and Trevor had at least a couple of agents on their way in. Neither man was about to let Nick get away.

Except . . . he wasn’t running.

Fidgeting? Yes. Sweating? Profusely. Even in the chill of the air-conditioning set to cryogenic levels.

“Oh, this is bad,” she said to Trevor, who nodded, still scanning the crowd as she moved toward Nick.

“Candlelight vigil at 5:30 for all who suffer from Bobbie Faye fear.”

—sign on local Our Sisters of Mercy Catholic Church

“Please pray for Our Sisters of Mercy Catholic Church which burned to the ground earlier today.”

—sign on the First Methodist Church

Trevor pulled her back. “We’re not sitting in front of that window.” He motioned to Nick to meet them at the bar, and Nick eased out of the booth, careful to keep his hands at his sides, easy to see.

“I’m very, very sorry,” Nick said as soon as he neared them. There wasn’t a lot of room at the crowded bar, but Trevor maneuvered them next to the nervous bookie, all while checking out each person nearby, watching how they moved, their level of interest, or studied noninterest. “Really. Very. Honest-to-God, I’m—”

“Yeah. ‘Sorry,’ ” Bobbie Faye said. “I get it. Groveling. Good move, but so really not going to save your ass.”

“Very very,” Nick continued, staring down at his feet. “Very.”

Trevor tamped down the urge to slam the man’s face into the bar, and he felt his ripple of tension go straight through Bobbie Faye. He tamped down harder. Trevor leaned forward just a hair, and Nick wisely stepped away. The pitch of Trevor’s voice clicked into
you are completely dead
territory. “That was our home, you sonofabitch,” he said, nodding to the footage still playing, “so you’d better start talking.” He did not add the “if you want to live” on the end of that sentence. The likelihood that this asshole was wired for recording? Within the realm of possibility. But Trevor
had no problem
communicating
that threat, and the bookie blanched and swallowed hard.

There was nowhere this bastard would be able to hide when this was over. Not a single fucking place. Trevor knew he’d been set up the second Bobbie Faye had walked into that casino. The sting he’d been called in on was well-planned, well-manned, and everything about it still seemed . . . off. They had enough information to know that they shouldn’t have had that much information. The multiple changes in venues alone was suspect.

“I don’t know anything,” Nick said. “I mean, I—I know that this guy threatened my family. He had surveillance photos of my mom, my dad. Look, all I know is he said I had to take these big bets. And I had to warn her.” He turned to Bobbie Faye. “You. I had to warn you. I don’t know why, but he said I had to say Alex was the one making the bets.”

“You met him?” Trevor asked.

Nick shook his head. “No, the pictures were delivered. He called—made it real fucking”—he blanched again, turned to Bobbie Faye—“ ’scuse me.” Apparently, he was a very polite bookie. “The guy made it clear he could get to anyone, and I believed him. I never got into this for the big stuff. I swear, Bobbie Faye, really. It just started as a joke a few years ago, that time you ended up on the JumboTron.”

“Geez, thank you. My humiliation for the night wasn’t quite complete, but I think that wrapped it up nicely.” When she faced Trevor’s quizzical expression, she turned a deep red. “Um, naked footage of me, skinny-dipping. A hacker managed to broadcast it up on the big screen at an LSU game.”

Trevor bit back the urge to ask “alone?” because no one goes skinny-dipping alone, and the way she most definitely avoided glancing in Cam’s direction told him just who that other someone had been.

“And,” Nick had continued, “one thing just sort of led to another and we were doing a Bobbie Faye board like you do a football board and it kinda exploded.” He took a small step back from her because she had bristled up like a porcupine.
“Sorry! Bad word choice. It grew. But I never really set out to make this some big money-making scheme. It was just kinda easy to keep taking the bets.

“Now, he’s threatening my family. That’s all I know. I don’t know where he is or who he is, but I’m supposed to give you a phone number to call.”

“How in the hell would someone know we were going to meet up?” Trevor asked him. Riles had moved into position a couple of feet behind Nick and, like Trevor, scanned the room for anything, anyone, suspicious. “We didn’t even know until tonight.” Not to mention that Cam had made sure that the police band was still broadcasting that she was on the scene at their burning house.

“Dammit,” she muttered. Then turned to him as Nick shrugged, wide-eyed, innocent. “My phone calls to find Nick. Or else they’re following us.”

He and Cam and Riles had all watched for a tail, but it wasn’t impossible, if someone had enough money, to hire four or five cars instead of the usual two—each one picking them up as the previous tagger dropped back.

“Or,” Trevor said, eyeing Nick, “someone knew we’d come looking for you, to find out more. That I would naturally want to question you, and that’s why you’ve been camped out here, waiting. If we hadn’t started making those calls to find you, what would have happened? Would you have called,” Trevor supplied without giving the man a chance to lie, “to drop some hints about something else that you knew? Or would we have gotten a convenient phone call of an eyewitness that placed you here, bragging about some information you knew?”

Nick studied his feet.

“Give me the damned number,” Trevor said, and he dialed it as Nick called it out to him. “Meanwhile, you’re under arrest. There’s another agent on his way in here and if you move one single hair, I’m going to call that resisting arrest and I’m going to have a fucking field day on your ass, you get me?”

Nick nodded so hard, Trevor was mildly surprised the
man didn’t give himself a concussion. And then he heard the damned Irish lilt of the man’s voice when he answered the phone.

Nina rode the black Ducati, the 160 hp of pure Italian racing engine roaring between her legs, right where it belonged, tearing down the interstate, the roar of the engine humming through her as she wove in and out of heavy traffic. The miles stretched out in front of her, nothing but the bleak darkness of swamps on either side of the interstate; there was barely a small town or occasional farm between Baton Rouge, headed west toward Lafayette, to break up the monotony. Beneath her black helmet, her headphones were connected to a voice-activated cell, and her call to Trevor’s phone kept going straight to voice mail.

Fuck.

He’d called in a location change—from the casino to the racetrack—and that’s when she knew her information was correct. But she had to get it to him, and she didn’t trust anyone else. She wasn’t about to call it in, letting it wind its way through channels, battling out between his agency and hers (hers being nonexistent on the government’s books, which just did not bode well for interagency communication).

She checked her watch. Twenty minutes. At top speed, she could get there in twenty, and then she’d find them. Tell them.

“Did you enjoy my gift for you, then?” Sean asked, and all Trevor had to do was pitch Riles one look, and Riles moved in close, his hands on his guns, ready to draw, scanning the crowd. Bobbie Faye went cold, dead rigid—hearing Sean, despite not holding the phone herself.