When a Man Loves a Weapon (30 page)

“The line in the sand has to come from you.” He softened his voice, and the raging pain shot through. “I need to know, Sundance, that there is a line, and that it comes from what you want. I need to know. Because this is who I am. Laid bare. You either want me, the way I am, or not. And it’s killing me to feel like we’re halfway and that you could change your mind.”

She reached for him across the console and he backed away. “No. No. As much as I want to, no. You think about this.” Jesus, he didn’t know if he could do this. He’d been shot before, he’d been knifed, multiple times, he’d had shrapnel embedded in various parts of his body, and nothing compared to this pain. It was all he could do not to double over. It took every single ounce of will he had to climb out of that car, in that much pain, while she had tears streaming down her face, and not reach for her.

But that was the hell of it. He’d reached for her so often,
he’d fuzzed up her senses with sex, he’d used wit and charm and even understanding to manipulate her into where he wanted her. He had been, in his own way, a bastard, because he’d wanted her, and he’d pulled the full-court press to get her. And now?

Now he was going to pay the fucking price, because maybe Moreau was right.

Maybe Trevor had rushed her so much, so fucking scared of her not wanting to deal with the shit that was his family, the insecurity she’d have about his background, that the way she felt about him was all mixed up in gratitude and debt for the things he’d done.

Maybe he’d been lying to himself all along when he’d said he knew exactly how she felt.

Because maybe she needed an out.

“Tranquilizers?”

“It’s Bobbie Faye season.”

“You can’t shoot someone with tranquilizers!”

“These are for me.”

—Pharmacist Deborah Mundy to FEMA coordinator Laura Gorton

Trevor had barely gotten around the car when Bobbie Faye emerged and Moreau ran up. The cop’s eyes narrowed down into cold hard hatred (aimed at Trevor) as Bobbie Faye wiped tears from her face, and Trevor braced for it—the
what did you do to her?
tactic. The asshole was going to use any advantage, and it was everything Trevor could do to not step between them and stop him. Moreau was going to touch her, to soothe her, to check to see if she was okay; he’d been using any excuse to touch Bobbie Faye, to re-create an intimate relationship with her, and now Moreau had a prime opportunity.

Trevor felt waves of determination roll off his own body, felt his fingers ball into a fist, and he fought it, fought it for her sake as she stepped past the car door and he shut it for her. A little too hard.

Braced for it as Moreau arrived.

“So, Duck Face,” Moreau said to her, gruff, bossy, downright annoyed, “we gonna do this gig or not?”

Her eyes flew wide, surprised for a heartbeat, then she snorted, a quick laugh as she play-punched him on the arm.

“Jerk,” she said, but the appreciation and relief rolled off of her.

Trevor couldn’t see the humor, and then realized: it was something private. One of the hundreds of things they’d shared. Moreau had known the right thing to do in that
moment when she was wholly upset by Nina and the bombs . . . and him. . . .

“You ready?” Moreau asked.

“Sure, Twinkle Butt, let’s go.”

Bobbie Faye started to explain the reference.

Trevor shook his head. He didn’t fucking want to hear it.

“Hang on,” Moreau said as he bent to retrieve his spare gun—a little Ruger LCP he had stashed—and as he pulled it out of his boot and fixed the jeans again, Trevor realized that he, too, should have thought to arm her.

Hell, he should have thought to make her laugh.

He shoved the heels of his hands against his eyes, forcing himself to think. He was reeling—the casino, the undercover op that was clearly a fiasco, their house blowing up, nearly losing her at the racetrack, and underlying it all, that kiss, and he couldn’t melt down. He had years of training to work under fire, alone, in the dark or in the worst stink of the world, and right now? The possibility of losing her was worse than all of those situations put together, but he couldn’t show it. Couldn’t let it get to him. Lives were at stake, and by God, he wasn’t going to fail her or them. Not again.

“You can’t go throwing spitballs in there,” Moreau said, as he handed her the gun. She checked the chamber, and the magazine, and just like that, she was back, tough as nails, ready to confront whatever came at them.

“I was not the one throwing spitballs,” she said, as they moved toward the doors of the all-glass high-rise, and Moreau gave him a glance over her head, when she couldn’t see.

This is why I’ve always been her best friend. This is why I’m going to win
, the look said.

Trevor gave him the
fuck you
glare back, but without being able to put a bullet in Moreau, he wasn’t so sure it carried the point adequately.

“You called ahead?” Trevor asked Riles as he came around the building—obviously finishing a quick scouting run. When they’d first left Lafayette and on the way here, he
had talked to his own sources, but he wanted to hear Riles’s appraisal. They’d operated together for too many years for old habits to die, and Riles liked recon. Even when intel handed him information, he triple-checked, which made him consistent and reliable.

“Yeah, LT, there are guards in the attached garage, two inside the front door, and one on the floor of the club. Those are the ones in uniforms. Since we’re dealing with an off-the-books intelligence agency, you know there are others.”

Trevor’s phone beeped a message. He scrolled through the screens, and said, “Good. We’ve got blueprints of the building.”

“Still no answer from ASAC Brennan?” Riles asked, peering over Bobbie Faye’s shoulder as they all looked at the building plans on Trevor’s phone.

“He says he’s hit a wall—they,” Trevor nodded toward the building, “don’t exist.”

“How can they not exist?” Bobbie Faye asked. “It’s an S&M club. And a magazine. People are clients. The office is right there.” She waved toward the building.

“The S&M company exists,” Riles explained as Trevor paged down to another screen of blueprints, “but it’s a very deep cover for an agency no one wants to admit responsibility for. It’s too shady, too off-the-books to claim. Especially given how wet Nina’s work has been.”

Trevor subtly elbowed Riles, but not subtly enough for Bobbie Faye to miss it. “Wet?” She scoured Trevor’s blank expression, and then the epiphany suddenly dawned. “Wet? As in, assassin?”

“Point is,” Trevor said, “ASAC Brennan’s hitting a wall, so we’re not going to know if the employees in there are aware of Nina’s status as an agent, if they’re fellow agents, or if they’re purely civilians.”

“But Nina works for the government. And she’s a fucking hostage. Are you telling me they aren’t admitting that?”

“Her cover’s been established for a very long time for some very good reasons. There are other agents’ lives at
stake, all over the world. If her employers pop up and suddenly claim her, MacGreggor will know exactly what sort of leverage he’s got.”

“Right now,” Moreau added, “he may think he’s only got your friend.”

Trevor watched as she absorbed that, livid. He wanted to reach for her.

But he stood still, his arms crossed to keep from touching her.
Being together had to be her choice—not just because they needed the comfort of each other’s touch.

“Meanwhile, if anyone is even inside, they don’t know we’re coming. There’s a tight security protection on their entrances and exits, which suggests they’re not going to be welcoming. We also don’t know who their clients are, what secrets they may be getting from those clients, and we don’t want to go in there and arouse suspicion that the club is a government front.”

“Why can’t we just call Gilda and say, ‘Hi, remember me, your boss’s best friend? I’m worried about her—I’d like to ask you some questions?’ ”

“Sure we could,” Riles said. “Aside from the fact that they’re not answering their phone, we are not absolutely sure where MacGreggor snatched Nina—so we don’t know if his people left something behind that could hurt us—and we can’t guarantee one-hundred percent they’re not inside the S&M club right this minute, holding the employees hostage. We’re not about to walk into a really fucked-up deal. We have to assume the worst. You know . . . how you generally feel every single time you look in a mirror.”

“You and duct tape, Barnacle, are going to become very good friends after this.”

Moreau’s phone rang, and while he talked, Trevor found what he’d hoped for on the building plans and he angled the phone so everyone could see. “There’s a service elevator, east side. Direct to the employee entrance of the club above.”

“Heavy security on that, I checked—video surveillance and a computerized entry, passcode and thumbprint—and that’s a guess, I couldn’t get close enough,” Riles said.

“Nick’s in custody,” Moreau told them, hanging up the phone. “Lawyered up immediately. How about the stairs?” He leaned in to examine the blueprints with Trevor.

“There are two guards on each set of stairs. We’d have to split up,” Riles said, also looking at the blueprints. “Two on the east side, one and”—he nodded to Bobbie Faye—“a half on the west side.”

“Or I can use my passcode to the employee elevator,” Bobbie Faye suggested.

“You have a passcode to the exclusive floor of an S&M club?” Riles asked. “That explains
a lot
.”

Lori Ann’s nerves multiplied, folded, multiplied again, and beat a rhythm against her stomach. Three hours ’til game time, and she and Stacey were wandering around beneath the stadium in one of the large parking bays—an area big enough to house visiting team buses and still have plenty of room for other vehicles and storage space for miscellaneous construction crap. They were waiting for Marcel to come back from the last-minute pregame Mike the Tiger check. Right before the game, the big cat would be loaded from his giant pen into the touring cage, right across the little tree-lined street, and then Marcel would pull the cage into this bay. At which point, she would try not to have a heart attack.

They were going to pull Mike the Tiger. Around the football field.

They were going to be a part of history, a part of this place she’d have liked to have attended. Maybe one day—maybe if she could stay sober, one day at a time, and Stacey was in school, maybe.

“Mamma mamma,” Stacey chanted, her pom-poms going overtime, and Lori Ann had to haul her off the piles of concrete blocks someone had stacked up against the back wall of the bay. The wall that supported the stadium seating above it and the noise above them was already a low roar as people filed in to find their seats. Then she had to pull Stacey off the mountain of rebar and the boxes of tools, off the
side of the giant generator, and then away from the orange cones tossed into a corner. It was little kid heaven and really, the idiot contractor should have picked a better spot for all of this crap. Of course, if they’d left it outside, it would have taken up precious parking spots—spots LSU charged a fee for, so what did she expect?

She pulled Stacey back off the concrete blocks, determined to interest the kid in something else besides practicing jumping like the big cheerleaders did. She scanned the room, noting a camera on top of a generator nearby. There was no barricade in sight to prevent someone from accidentally tripping on the construction supplies piled up there; a camera as a preventative safety measure wasn’t really going to cut it, except maybe to show if someone was stealing the stuff. It was amazing how safety-conscious she’d gotten after having a kid—and being on the sidelines of Bobbie Faye disasters. Now, Lori Ann examined everything with the magnifying glass of “how dangerous is it?”—especially with Stacey determinedly taking after her aunt.

She smiled at her daughter, who was coated now with the sticky purple residue of the sno cone Marcel had bought her and, on top of that, the dust from the construction supplies. She was a big ball of sugar high, and Lori Ann was going to have to convince this kid to sit still in Marcel’s truck for the trip around the field.

Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

The mechanic paced around his workshop, its pristine cleanliness a mockery of how he felt. He ran his hands over his close-cropped hair, wondering how the hell he’d not seen this coming. A quick glance at his watch told him the story: it was five minutes after the bombs should have blown. Five whole minutes. Still no GPS. He had not made his warning call to take responsibility. Without a computer uplink, he couldn’t blow the bombs, and he did not know what the hell to do.

And the Irish were not picking up his calls. They’d bought the supplies, they’d left it up to him just how to make the
bombs, how to get them into the plant, and he’d taken care of everything. The Irish had their motives, which was fine—they dovetailed with his: take down Poly-Ferosia.

He looked at Chloë’s urn, and wished, for the millionth time, he’d taken her to work that day. He was supposed to drive her, but he’d been sick with a cold, and she’d made him stay home. They were supposed to go out dancing that evening for their anniversary and she didn’t want him to be too sick to go.

A fucking
cold
.

He squeezed his eyes against the memory of arriving at the wreck after a friend called. Getting there as they’d pulled Chloë from the carnage that used to be her car, her body coated with oil and gas, burned ’til she wasn’t recognizable. He’d reached for her, then. He’d pushed aside the fireman, pushed aside the paramedics, knowing it was too late, and he still reached for her, the oil and the grease coating his hands, burning in his nostrils with the horrid smell of burnt flesh. He smelled it in his sleep. He woke to it, every day.

A “one-car” accident. There had been a definite dent in the fender with yellow paint that he’d known hadn’t been there before. Not enough evidence that she hadn’t just had a fender bender in a parking lot somewhere, the defense attorney said. Not enough evidence for conspiracy that someone had run her off the road. Not enough to put those bastards behind bars, the bastards at Poly-Ferosia who knew she had evidence to nail them for all of their hazardous safety violations. Violations that would kill people if she didn’t stop them.