When a Man Loves a Weapon (23 page)

She glanced at the chicken foot, which was not only black, but was vibrating and seemed to almost . . . pulse.

“Okay, ew?” she said, holding her arm away from herself.

“What exactly does that chicken foot do, again?”

“Apparently, not enough, since you’re still around.”

“It’d take more than a chicken foot to get rid of me.”

“I’ll alert Colonel Sanders.”

Which is the moment the youngest of the two paramedics eased around a large supporting column and took direct aim at Riles.

Trevor and Cam reached the stables in time to see the bullets lace up the door as Riles had toed it open. They lay flat on the ground behind the corral fencing, eyeing the woods where the shots originated; odds were, they’d just “found” MacGreggor’s men. Trevor trusted Riles to stay low inside that barn, to keep himself and Bobbie Faye safe. Coming up on his left, though, were two cops who had heard the shots and were headed their way.

“Tell them to back off—last thing we need is someone thinking we’re the shooters,” Trevor told him, and took off, running for the woods.

Manure, horse sweat, hay and oats, old leather, and smoke from the burning debris just outside the barn battled her brain for attention. Smells always slammed Bobbie Faye in these moments. Sounds faded away to nothing, completely cotton-eared muffled, as if God had hit the giant Mute button, the better so that she could focus on just how bad having to shoot this kid actually was. Maximum heartache squeezed into the shortest possible time. Bobbie Faye saw the kid’s gun rise up, aimed at Riles, his gaze steady, the decision already made. Probably made
for
him, an order from Sean.
The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty, barely had time to live.

She eyed down the barrel of the gun, flying on instinct, a split second to aim, and it was her cousin, Mitch, all over again. The image of shooting Mitch overlaid this one of the kid, no time to think about how much she hated her cousin for having put her in that spot, no time to think about the deep razors of regret buried in her heart, no time to think about Mitch falling into a bloody heap, remembering Trevor’s warning, “You’re still hesitating.”

No time to think about how this kid was going to be another bloody heap, because her gun was going up, up, up, and she shot,
bam
, without stopping, because the kid had already made the decision for her.

Trevor moved through the woods, silently, easing through the brush. The earlier rain made the deadfall on the forest floor soft and spongy, the limbs and leaves springy and quiet, but he still took no chances. His training took over: flowing through the dark woods like a creature of the forest, blending in with the trees and undergrowth, checking the sightlines, scenting the air, listening for even the faintest sound not generated by fleeing, scurrying animals. The dark felt like velvet out there beyond the lights of the racetrack, and the noises from the chaos decreased to a muffled hum once he moved a few feet inside the heavily overgrown brush. He kept a sharp lookout above him, on the low limbs—the shooter who’d hit the barn door had probably been elevated in order to make that shot.

There was a slight
schnick
farther in, to his left. A
schnick
like the scrape of a shoe against bark and then a soft
thud
as someone dropped to the ground, and Trevor risked being seen for the speed he needed to catch the man. He ignored the burn of brambles slicing into him as he raced, soft soft soft, flying through limbs that bit into his arms as he kept as much cover as possible. Trevor heard the heavy breathing of a man running hard, smelled sweat and the strong odor
of spilled coffee, and caught sight of the thin white strip of skin—the back of the man’s neck between his black cap and his black shirt.

The man heard him and when he spun, Trevor was up, airborne, a flying side kick to the man’s chest, nailing it, solid, and sending him backward to the ground as Trevor landed and rolled through the wet loamy, rotting leaves, springing up and onto the man before he knew what had hit him.

He could kill the man.

He needed to keep him alive for interrogation.

Trevor
wanted
to kill him. Blood lust pulsed through him, wanting vengeance for all of the hell they’d gone through, wanting justice for their home, now just charred remains, and his professional training barely held the rage in check, like a fingernail grip on a cliff face.

The man fought back, sliding a knife out of a bandolier across his chest, and the overwhelming silence of the woods was broken by low grunts and thuds and fast quick quick moves. Two heartbeats later, Trevor had the man in a death grip, spinning him around into a takedown position, when
crack
—a gunshot sliced through the night and the man in front of him arched, hit, instantly dead, falling out of Trevor’s hands.

Trevor dove for the forest floor, grabbing the dead man’s gun just inches in front of his face; he lay belly down in the wet earth and scanned the trees for the second shooter, for whoever meant to take him out and got his own man instead.

There
. Someone moved through the brush, running low, fast, silently and expertly and if Trevor hadn’t rolled into low-growing palmettos for cover, the man would have had a tactical advantage. Then the sound stopped, the man frozen in the deep shadow of a tree; Trevor lifted his gun, aimed, had a silhouette—a headshot—in his sights when the man moved a fraction.

Moonlight, slim, watered down, filtered through the overhead branches and illuminated half of the man’s face.

Moreau. Searching for him, one hairsbreadth of a trigger-pull from being dead. From being out of their lives. Forever.

And in that moment, he realized he could pull the trigger anyway.

Jesus Christ
.

He eased off the trigger, dropping his head down to his forearm, wondering just when the fuck he’d lost his control. But he knew already. The moment those bullets had sliced through Bobbie Faye four months ago, he’d started losing it. He’d done everything he knew to do to keep her safe, to keep from losing her, and the disaster wasn’t fucking over. It was only getting worse, and the man in front of him was hell-bent on destroying the very thing Trevor was fighting to keep.

“Moreau,” he said, low, and Moreau turned toward him, surprise registering there in the pale light as Moreau saw the gun in Trevor’s hand. They exchanged a look, and the man knew—Trevor
knew
that Moreau knew—he could have been worm fodder—the perp’s gun, the murder weapon.

Moreau narrowed his gaze at Trevor, as if to say, “Wise move.” Or maybe, “You fucking sonofabitch.” Those two sentiments were easily confused.

Moreau met him and they crouched next to the dead man. “You should have kept him alive.”

Trevor snapped his gaze back to Moreau. “I thought
you
were the shooter.”

Moreau peered down at the man’s head. The dead-center head wound was too perfect to be accidental.

The two men looked at each other, realizing just how very insane Sean must have become, to be willing to sacrifice his own man instead of letting him be caught and questioned.

Then they heard a gunshot echoing inside the barn, and a muffled, anguished scream.

They ran.

If Lori Ann had to hear one more thing about a carbur-something or an intake whatchacallit, she was going to bean Marcel
over the head with the shiny ratchet he was admiring. They’d been there for hours in the fancy RV, and Stacey was now sound asleep in her little purple and gold cheerleading outfit, the plastic pom-poms sticking to her face as she used them for a pillow. The rowdy tailgaters surrounding them had ramped it up with every passing hour, drinking and having a ball the drunker they got and it was getting on her very last sober nerve.

To make matters worse, the RV’s little built-in armoire held a new flat-screen TV (even Lori Ann was willing to concede Marcel was lying through his teeth when he said he had never made a dime off the whole gunrunning gig) . . . and the stories played back-to-back: Bobbie Faye sunk a casino! Bobbie Faye’s house blew up! Bobbie Faye destroyed the racetrack!

It was hell having a hurricane for a big sister.

Lori Ann needed a drink. It had been 183 days, six hours, and (she checked the clock on the paneled RV wall) twenty-three minutes since her last drink. And thirty-four seconds.

She squeezed the pillow to her upset stomach and gritted her teeth.

“Hon,” Marcel said, finally cluing in to the fact that she wasn’t listening (she’d actually stopped listening about three hours ago, sometime around “fuel injection”), “it’s been a whole four months since she blew something up. She was overdue.”

V’rai somehow managed to pull off the road onto the shoulder and come to a stop. The pungent odor of asphalt mixed with a fishy smell from the swamp, which was just a few feet off the road, according to Aimee.

“We’re all going to die,” Lizzie screeched in the backseat.

“Shut up or we’re all going to die in jail,” Aimee snapped.

“Where is he?” she asked Aimee.

“Coming up behind us.”

“
Chère
, this’ll never work,” V’rai said.

“Just tell him you lost your license.”

“They run your name now,” Lizzie said. “Don’t you people watch
Law & Order
?”

“Blind here,” V’rai reminded her.

“Ma’am?” a nice police officer said next to her door. “I’m going to need to see—ma’am?” V’rai attempted to pin his exact location with a smile, and she was rewarded with, “Over here, ma’am. Ma’am, have you been drinking?”

“Oh, no,
chèr
, I don’t drink,” she said.

“I’ll need your license, registration, and insurance, ma’am.”

V’rai turned to Aimee, who said, “So sorry, Mr. Officer, but we were in a hurry! We left without it.”

“Then would you mind stepping out of the car?”

All that noise and traffic echoed around her and V’rai shook a little. She eased her way out of the car, keeping one hand on the dented fender as she made her way to the rear of the car. He’d stepped away from her and she couldn’t tell exactly where he’d gone ’til she heard his own car door open again. She heard him on his radio, calling in the license plate on the car. Then there was a very very long pause, and the radio crackled again, but she couldn’t quite make it out.

She heard the officer, however, crystal clear.

“Blind? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Nina parked the bike in the shadowed sprawl of trees; she could see the klieg lights of the racetrack haloed above the dark canopy. Going in without sufficient back-up or intelligence was a bad idea. But she had to tell them about the bombs. Trevor would need to know, they’d need to plan.

They were running out of time.

She eased into the woods, hating navigating a forest where every tree could be cover for someone with a gun aimed at her head. She was used to circling through Italian ballrooms and navigating elegant boardrooms, not sliding quietly through field ops, though she could. And she did.

Gunshot
. A distance away, inside a building.

She picked up speed, keeping to the trees, and avoiding the moonlight. She didn’t know who was surprised more—her,
or the three men on their way out of the woods who stumbled across her.

The oldest, carrying an M110 sniper rifle, looked straight into her eyes, his own eyebrows arching in recognition.

“It’s the friend,” he hissed to his colleagues and they all seemed wicked happy about that. Then he motioned to Nina with his gun. “And you’re coming with us.”

They were too close, too damned close, for her to pull her Kimber from her shoulder holster. One of the men struck at her and she twisted, planting a boot in his solar plexus, which threw him against the tree as the third sliced toward her with a knife and quickstep, she moved and twirled and defended—and she’d have been fine, she’d have taken the morons down if the older one hadn’t backed up and pulled his pistol.

“Sean didn’t say any-fuckin’-t’ing ’bout hostages,” the one picking himself off the ground said.

“Yeah, an’ he thought we’d already have the girl,” the older guy said and she thought,
Thank God, Sean’s men don’t have Bobbie Faye, yet.
“We’re improvisin’.”

Nina had gone dead still as she watched how well the man in charge handled the gun. There were people who weren’t comfortable with firearms, people who had never shot one, or specifically, never killed anyone, at least not on purpose, people who didn’t want to even think about taking a life. Those kinds of people usually held the gun like a coiled snake that would curl back on them and bite them.

This man? Was not of those people.

“Get her weapons,” he instructed the others and she weighed fighting against a bullet between the eyes as the other two pulled her gun and her knife from her belt.

He motioned, and Nina followed where they told her to go.

“I’m sorry, Governor, but the military will not call up an entire SEAL team just to deal with one woman. No, sir, no matter how much you cry.”

—Gubernatorial assistant Gina Tallent

She’d
missed
. Bobbie Faye gaped at the kid, who was writhing on the ground, his shoulder bloody. He was very much alive. Because she’d missed her intended target.

She’d been off by a slight nudge to the right. And the bullet had sliced through the column—apparently made of Sheetrock and wood—which deflected it down and into the kid’s shoulders instead of being the head shot she’d intended.

The last time she’d missed by that much . . . well, she couldn’t remember the last time. She shot nearly every damned day for the last twelve years at the firing range. Give or take a day or two in the hospital.

Maybe Riles didn’t maintain his guns like he should. Maybe the sight was off.

Yeah, right. He was a sniper. He lived and breathed gun maintenance. Hell, knowing Riles, he probably farted gun maintenance.

Maybe she was losing her control, her edge.

Then again, maybe the Universe was finally relenting just a tad, just a smidgeon, and taking her off its shit list.