When a Man Loves a Weapon (22 page)

He wasn’t going to lose Bobbie Faye.

Not to MacGreggor.

And sure as hell not to the man running beside him.

God
dammit
. Moreau just made everything a thousand times worse, being there. Moreau should have never let Bobbie Faye talk him into helping. He should have known better. He should have known that an agent in trouble meant
do not fucking enter
, don’t make things worse. Now, when Trevor should be focusing on MacGreggor, on thinking the way the man thought, gaining ground, setting a trap, the images of Moreau waltzing into that casino, his body language smug and possessive, invaded and screwed with him.

They moved silently through a thin perimeter of trees, keeping low while they each kept lookout, guns ready for cover.

“She’d be a helluva lot better off without you in her life,” Moreau goaded as they crouched in the high grass, watching for movement in the field and the woods beyond it. They
were positioned back-to-back, giving them a 360-degree view, as best as could be had in the dim light emanating from the water tower in the center of the field.

There was no sign of anyone present around the base of the water tower, no movement anywhere around the tree line, no signs of tree cancer, that telltale blip of darkness that indicated someone flat against a trunk or a limb. But any sniper making those grenade shots, with that precision, wouldn’t be making amateur mistakes, anyway. Trevor kept scanning, knowing this was not the fucking place or time to have this argument with Moreau.

But he couldn’t let it go. Not with his imagination supplying the image of that kiss Bobbie Faye had told him about.

“You’re hurting her,” Trevor seethed, low. “And you’re deluding yourself. She’s chosen. Respect that and back off.”

“And let you take advantage of her? When she’s torn up over killing Mitch and can’t sleep and isn’t eating—yeah, I see the signs. I know her better than you do, you asshole.” Moreau kept his voice pitched soft, deadly, directed at Trevor in a tone so low, Trevor knew the sound wouldn’t carry. “What she feels toward you? Guilt. You’re railroading her, and there’s no fucking way I’m standing by when you’re too goddamned selfish to see it or care.”

They had a dozen yards to go before they would have to cross flat, open field, no trees or shrubs or high grass to use for cover. “She’s going to be my wife.” Trevor pivoted, and faced the man, because the rage pounding in his ears demanded it. “And if you kiss her again, I will fucking break you in half.”

“The judge decided that you have to personally tell Bobbie Faye her anger management certificate has been revoked.”

“See, I knew he hated me.”

—court clerks Jessica Kessler and Dakota Cassidy

Bobbie Faye and Riles approached the street side of the empty stables, the barn doors standing open; several horses and their trainers, grooms, and owners, all clustered in an adjacent field a couple of acres away. She could hear the horses stamping and whinnying and could see the light-colored blankets thrown over their backs, and she could see the movement, but not a lot of detail.

The ambulance slowed to a crawl, navigating around the debris from the clubhouse grenade remodeling. The remainder of a flat-screen TV burned near a smoldering booth and mangled chairs thrown out in the explosions. Large sections of scorched tin from the side of the building dotted the area like ice floes in a sea of debris. While her arm hurt like hell and she’d be grateful to be in the competent care of a couple of paramedics—especially if they came bearing painkillers and Band-Aids—the slow speed of the ambulance was a good thing, because getting mowed down by an ambulance
while
wearing a
BAMA
t-shirt was just exactly the sort of thing to make the Lake Charles obituary writer’s day. (Bobbie Faye already had enough issues with Erin Lugo over at the newspaper for the last three premature obituaries she had published about her, especially the one where Bobbie Faye supposedly ate so many boiled crawfish, she had to be carried to the hospital where it sounded (from Erin’s extensive description) like she’d died a rather prolonged, painful death.)

The ambulance crawled toward them, threading through broken bar stools and floor tile and Bobbie Faye forlornly eyed the distance between the vehicle and where she and Riles stood.

“I’m
not
carrying you,” Riles snapped at Bobbie Faye after Trevor and Cam left them and ran toward the water tower.

“Don’t worry, Barnacle, I haven’t had a frontal lobotomy yet. I think you’re safe from my cooties.”

“Apparently, I’m the only one. What do you do? Put something in the water? With a girlfriend like you, I’m surprised Trevor didn’t throw himself on a grenade just to get the suspense over with.”

She stopped shuffling toward the approaching ambulance and turned to Riles, who was filled slap up to his eyeballs with wholly undisguised disgust. “Seven days.” When he narrowed his eyes at her, she said, “I just figured out what my personal limit for asshole friends is: seven days. You’ve been nasty to me since the second you walked in the door. I haven’t blown up or broken anything of yours or even come close to getting you arrested—yet—so you’re gonna have to clue me in here, Riles, as to just what the fuck is bothering you. I’m used to people like Sean who are a teensy bit more direct.”

“You cannot be that dumb.”

“Let’s just pretend for a moment that I flunked out of Stupid Guy Interpretation class, and I have no freakin’ clue what your problem is.”

“If you want to play it that way, fine, but I’m not buying. Trevor’s a damned fine man.”

“You think I don’t know this?”

“He saved my life,” he continued, ignoring her, “he saved several of his team’s lives—he’s done a helluva lot for other people because he has a good heart. If you expect me to just look the other way, lady, while you take advantage of that, you’d better think again.”

She blinked at his raging animosity, and started to answer, just as Riles stepped a bit closer, getting in her face and seething. “Yeah, I know you’re used to every guy slobbering all over you.”

“Every . . .” she trailed off, not quite able to speak from sheer incredulity. She waved at the burning racetrack behind them. “How on earth would I possibly think that? What part of ‘hey, Bobbie Faye, would you kindly go boom’ back there did you not understand?”

“What I understand is that you’ll just end up leaving him for the next shock jockey or adrenaline junkie that comes along, if you don’t get him killed first.”

“So I guess I should send back that BFF ring I bought you?”

“It’s crystal fucking clear you don’t know how to have a long-term relationship—hell, you don’t even know how to let go of the guy two guys ago—and obviously you’re one of
those
women.”

“One of
those
? What? Breathing?”

“One of those women,” he continued over her, having built up such a fury, his words jabbed at the air around her, “who uses men and then moves on. I might not be able to influence him in how he feels about you, but I can damned well try to protect him—you may rip his heart out, but at
least
you should have the decency not to roll him. Because I guarantee that within a few months, someone else will come along and you’ll be gone, and Trevor will lose half of his net worth because he’ll feel compelled to split everything fairly. I can’t stop him from getting destroyed on a personal level, but if you cared about him half as much as you pretend to, you’d sign a damned prenup.”

“A
huh
?” She felt whiplashed, disoriented. Could confusion
be
any more exponential?

“Don’t play stupid. Where in the hell did you
think
all the money for the security detail came from?”

“Security detail?” Words floated in her head, snatches of conversation, zigzagging through her memory, until the kaleidoscope of words settled in a new order. Remembering Sean’s taunt to Trevor. “What security detail?”

“You know exactly what security detail,” Riles said, but for a split second there, his stare had turned wary. Unsure. “The detail guarding your friends, and your family.”

She glanced back at the ambulance, which had slowed and seemed to be taking for-fucking-ever. Everything was . . . odd, and wrong and the glass in her arm hurt like hell and her head hurt and Sean was after them and Trevor and Cam were gone and she was standing there arguing with a veritable ad for birth control and not a damned thing
made sense
. “I didn’t know about any security detail.”

He crossed his arms, guns in both hands, and eyed her as if she were two bullets short of a full load.

“You jerk,” she said, glancing back behind him at that ambulance, feeling edgy, out of sorts, disconnected from the sights and sounds around her. “Aside from the fact that today was brought to you by ‘Grenades, One of the Top Ten Serious Turn-Offs for Your Future Partner,’ you clearly got in the short line for Stupid when I wasn’t looking. I’m sure Trevor’s tried to get the Feds to occasionally check up on my insane family, but hello? If there’d been anything remotely like a ‘security detail’ on us, there would have been a mass exodus as Feds stampeded out of the state and Ce Ce would have been griping about the short supply of weasel entrails to use for the protection spells she’d be convinced we needed. I—”

She suddenly realized what was wrong behind Riles: the logo of the ambulance company. She’d been in too many of them. The logo was the wrong color. The paramedics climbed out of the cab and walked toward them and their expressions were wrong—somehow they were like double images of aggression, their right hands tucked behind their backs.

She glanced back at Riles, who was facing away from the truck; he’d tensed when she’d stopped talking midsentence and midexplanation. “Two, one on each side of the truck, guns, right hands,” she said fast, and then before he could spin around, she purposefully threw her expression wide open and surprised and shouted, “Oh, shit, look out, behind you!”

The paramedics ducked.

She had to resist the urge to throw her hands up and yell,
“Score!” but there was no time for victory dancing. She and Riles both dove to the ground, a bullet cutting across his right arm just as he landed and rolled. They lay flat behind what might have once been a bathroom stall and
dammit
, she’d further ground glass slivers into her left arm when she tumbled. Riles tossed her his second gun as he shot—and the men circled, aiming strictly at . . .

Riles.

She and Riles rolled back up, shooting, keeping the “paramedics” pinned down as they made it around the far corner of the barn. A barn that was in the middle of a freaking
field
with no trees, no structures, nothing for cover. There was nowhere else to go, nowhere to run, except back toward the clubhouse or parking lot, both of which had plenty of innocent people and first responders.

Her life had seriously spiraled out of control when she knew that the best choice that she could hope for this evening was to make it inside a barn with horse manure and Riles.

Trevor and Cam noted four unique sets of prints leaving the base of the water tower—with no apparent effort to obliterate them. The tracks were made by four males in all likelihood, based off the size of the combat-boot-style impressions in the mud, and at least two of the men weighed more than Trevor did, judging from the depth of the displacement of the mud. They clearly weren’t concerned with what Trevor and Cam would find, and MacGreggor had to know Trevor would investigate this area. He had to know Trevor and Bobbie Faye had made it out of the clubhouse, especially since that last grenade had landed near them outside—near enough to indicate MacGreggor’s team had aimed it.

And there was a cell phone, lying in the mud in the center of the water tower.

With a smiley face drawn in the mud beneath it.

Trevor recoiled about the same time Moreau saw it and they both bolted back toward the stables where they’d left Bobbie Faye. MacGreggor had either seen Trevor and Cam
headed this direction, or instinctively knew Trevor would investigate, and had left this evidence . . . to . . .

Sonofabitch
. To distract him. Which meant MacGreggor must know Trevor had left Bobbie Faye with only one person to guard her.

The sirens stopped abruptly—every one of them—as if someone had given an order, and the eerie void that followed made Bobbie Faye jumpy as they dove through the dark barn opening. Dim lights rimmed the interior of the giant building, bathing everything in an eerie night-light glow, and despite the doors being open, smells permeated the place: leather, horse manure, horse sweat, and the fainter layers of saddle soap and barley. The long building was split in two, with stables lining the left side and tack rooms and offices lining the right. Bobbie Faye and Riles ran, her flip-flops slapping the concrete floor with each step, and they might as well have advertised, “follow me, follow me” for all the noise they made.

Riles sighed the sigh of the ultra-beleaguered, and Bobbie Faye figured if they got shot, it was his own damned fault. He was the idiot who bought flip-flops. Of course, they didn’t exactly stock Nikes down at the Guzzle & Ride.

They raced across the building to the rear exit; as Riles toed open the back door, standing back from its opening, bullets ripped into the wood and he jumped back, shoving her down to the floor.

“No way those paramedics ran around the building that fast.”

“No, that’s an M110. Sniper rifle—just came out couple of years ago. Shoots 7.62mm. It’s suppressed—that’s why we didn’t hear it.”

“Duh. Because X chromosomes mean I’d never understand what ‘suppressed’ means. Thank you.”

“Which means,” he said, giving her a pointedly annoyed glare, “that they have help—that shot came from the woods across that field.” He assessed the stables while she kept an eye on the door they’d entered. “We’ll hole up, over there,”
Riles said, nodding to a corner which, to her, looked like a really convenient place to die: there were lots of saddle blankets to lean against when they were shot. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I think they only want to kill
me
.”