Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (39 page)

“I like this purse. It was designed for me,” she pouted. “And it was featured in
InStyle
.”

Bobbie Faye grabbed the Geiger counter Trevor had carried in and turned it on as she walked into the small safe room—though everyone could still see her since it wasn’t more than a glorified walk-in closet. “Oh, Frannie, you wanna know where you slipped up?”

“I did not slip up.”

Bobbie Faye beamed at her. And Francesca looked murderous. “Um, yeah, gotcha. It’s called ‘excess,’ Frannie.
You should look it up. You’d found a couple sets of diamonds and you probably tried to fence them. Maybe you thought they were all real, just hidden in two spots, or maybe you thought one was real. But which one? So you go to Sal. He’d worked with your mom. Maybe even fenced other jewels for her in the past. Except Sal wouldn’t tell you how many fakes there were, and even though you’re listed as your mom’s assistant in her business—the FBI is a really handy friend to have—there was only one place your mom would have access to that you didn’t: here.”

“How do you know she didn’t just ship them somewhere already?” Francesca asked.

“She’s too much like you, Frannie—Marie is a strategist. She was always good at games and hell, she dated a politician and an organized crime leader at the same time—there’s no way she’d let those diamonds, worth that many millions, out of close sight. You knew that. This was the one and only place those diamonds were safe against what your mom thought was her biggest threat:
you
.

“You needed access to this location and there wasn’t a single soul you could con to get past Delano. Except me. You overplayed that, Frannie—bringing in the cousins. Although using the sniper to convince me you were in danger back at Ce Ce’s—nice touch. I might not have been convinced without the sniper and might have just left you to the authorities. But you couldn’t trust that. You definitely didn’t trust me to stick by you, even though you were family, and you knew if you changed that day planner entry to make it look like I was a part of Marie’s plan to hide the diamonds, the Feds would probably force me to help. Or you could blackmail me, I guess, if they hadn’t stepped in. You should have settled for one or the other strategy—you didn’t need both.”

Bobbie Faye turned on the palm-sized Geiger counter and slowly waved it over the pieces of art stacked in the safe.

“What is she doing?” Francesca asked.

“Figuring out which of the diamonds are real. The originals
have a slight radioactive signature that a Geiger counter will pick up.

“Your mom had a bunch of copies made. I think she knew she couldn’t trust you.”

The Geiger counter’s meter pinged to the right as she moved the unit over a stack of gorgeous chocolate-brown alligator handbags. Polymer handles embedded with stunning jewels sparkled, even in the light from the safe, and Bobbie Faye knew everyone was watching as she paused there. She clicked the meter’s button and the static of the counter crackled through the room, and she picked up the bag she needed.

“Bingo.” She smiled at Francesca.

“So,” Cam said, dead threat carving through his voice, “she killed Sal.” And, by extension, Bobbie Faye knew he’d realized she’d also shot Benoit.

“I did not! Bobbie Faye did that!” When everyone looked at her like,
duh
, she stomped her foot. “Everybody’s heard about that surveillance footage by now. I’m not the only one who thinks she did it!”

“You probably should’ve used a little more of the roofie drug, Frannie.” Bobbie Faye saw an almost imperceptible change in Francesca’s expression. Jesus, the woman was good at self-control. All of those years living with Emile had trained her well. “Yeah, I
remember
. You were good, Frannie. But really, not good enough. And pretty soon, everyone’s going to know it was you.”

“You’re making up stupid stuff, Bobbie Faye, and that’s just mean, especially when I tried to help you with your makeup and hair. Which really needs help, by the way.”

Just as Cam turned to Francesca—and Bobbie Faye wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t to kill her—one of the cop’s radios blared out a notice that Bobbie Faye had been spotted at the Old State Capitol and was considered armed and dangerous.

Bobbie Faye held up the gorgeous alligator purse and wagged it toward Francesca. “You lose.”

“The state police are gonna fry you, Bobbie Faye,”
Francesca said, waving her phone back at them all. She must have tipped off the police.

“They’re not going to find me. The cops certainly aren’t going to check the governor’s car as he drives me out of town and then Trevor will take over from there.”

“What? Me?” the governor said, and he pushed away from the table so fast, his chair fell. “I am not getting in a car with you.”

“Fine. Then you can explain to the federal government just how you came to have all of these stolen diamonds in your safe,” Bobbie Faye said, smiling sweetly, holding up the purse.

“I hate you,” the governor said.

“Yeah, the six memos you sent out to the newspapers last year pretty much covered that.”

Cam was pretty sure Bobbie Faye had lost her mind, but then, he might not be thinking all that clearly himself. Between Benoit being shot and learning the details on Francesca, knowing he’d been near the person who had shot his partner and he hadn’t been able to snap her into cuffs, had frayed the last tiny bit of logic he had left. It did not help one bit that the governor was leading them to his limo by way of a tiny, cramped secret staircase that Cam couldn’t defend and couldn’t maneuver in.

They had no evidence of Francesca’s involvement. No minor slip back there in the poker room would be admissable or damaging enough. She didn’t lose her cool the way Bobbie Faye had hoped.

“Do you think you can get her to crack under interrogation?” Bobbie Faye asked, and he wasn’t sure if she was asking him or Trevor. They’d left Francesca in the custody of the two state troopers. It had been hell to convince the men to hold Francesca instead of Bobbie Faye, and Cam grudgingly acknowledged that Trevor had helped. He wasn’t sure what the agent had said to the troopers, but it had worked. He had to console himself for now that Francesca was cuffed and on her way to jail for questioning.
For now, though, they had to get Bobbie Faye to safety before someone got trigger-happy, avenging Benoit.

“When she knows you’ve gotten away with the diamonds, I think she’ll be so livid, she’ll trip herself up,” Trevor answered.

Cam knew Trevor was going to call for backup as soon as they got out of the stairwell and he had cell reception. They exited the top of the staircase, which opened into the main Senate room. The large space had a soaring ceiling and stained-glass windows, and it was located opposite from the other large House Chamber, where the gala was in full swing.

Aiden and Sean moved to the rotunda in the old castle building, the black-and-white checkerboard floor polished to gleam. They saw Bobbie Faye when she and the other men exited the stairwell and they both did a double take—the woman, the dress, the general glowing quality stunned them for a moment.

“Got her,” Aiden whispered into his Bluetooth transmitter.

“I told you it would help to track the cousins, too,” Robbie answered. There was going to be no living with him now.

Ignoring the guns the special ops guy and cop had, Aiden and Sean moved as a unit. As quick as the special ops guy was, he couldn’t hurdle the governor, who’d accidentally blocked him in the same moment that Sean had a knife to the woman’s throat. The cop was at a disadvantage taking up the rear; he moved a step and Sean tightened his hold and a thin line of blood appeared at the knife’s edge.

Everyone stopped.

“I’ll be takin’ the diamonds, darlin’,” Sean said, and as the ops guy eased just a hair to his left to get a better shot at Sean’s forehead, Sean grinned. “I wouldn’t be doin’ that, unless you want to have my people blow the other room.” He nodded toward the big gala just on the other side of the double doors. “I don’t get the diamonds, a lot of people get killed, including herself, here.”

“He’s bluffing,” the cop said to the ops guy.

“He took out an entire restaurant in Lisbon last year,” the ops guy said.

“I’d like to vote we believe him,” Bobbie Faye volunteered, and Sean chuckled.

A lanky lad bobbed around a corner and came to a complete dead stop. “Sonofabitch, I was trying to find you to tell you we never saw the guys you were looking for.”

“Found ’em,” Bobbie Faye answered. “Sean, I’ve got to move to hand you the stuff.”

Sean relaxed the knife a fraction so that she could slowly turn to face him, and instead of looking afraid, like any sane woman would, she
smiled
. She not only smiled, she beamed such a high-wattage, come-hither attitude, even Sean was taken aback. She was radiant. That was the only word Aiden could think of, and he could tell she floored Sean’s senses—tough, thug, kill-or-be-killed Sean,
who smiled back at her
.

Bobbie Faye draped her left hand holding the purse over Sean’s shoulder, and dropped her right hand to her thigh. She wasn’t sure where her courage came from, but her instincts said to run with it. She eased up the short, swingy skirt a half an inch at a time, drawing it out, implying the diamonds were beneath the skirt, and then two things happened: Lori Ann burst through the double doors, thoroughly confounded by the sight of people with guns all aimed at one another, and Francesca stepped out of the stairwell, having somehow gotten away from the two cops.

There was a moment where everything was suspended—the entire gala paused on the other side of those open doors behind Lori Ann, and though they couldn’t see Sean’s knife at Bobbie Faye’s throat, they could see the guns. News cameras swung their direction, the band stopped, Francesca cursed, and the governor fainted, all as Bobbie Faye leaned forward a bit and said, “Welcome to my world, Sean,” and pulled the small knife she’d strapped at her thigh and threw it, nailing the fire alarm a few feet away.

The alarm blared and the gala audience ran screaming out every doorway. Francesca sprinted toward Bobbie Faye (leave it to her to be able to sprint in heels), which is when a sniper round crashed through one of the gothic arched windows of the ballroom. It angled down just right and sliced through the tiny skirt of Bobbie Faye’s dress—she’d be dead if Sean hadn’t yanked her to his chest when he had.

The gunshot elicited more screams and panic from the crowd, more running, and Trevor and Cam tried to break through the rushing sea of people to get to Bobbie Faye, but they had no shot. Mitch and Kit arrived, Mitch asking, “Now?” and Francesca nodded. Mitch fired on Trevor and Cam, laying down a hailstorm of bullets, ratcheting up the panic, and like a tidal wave in reverse, the crowd changed directions, cutting Trevor and Cam off from following. Sean and his good-looking cohort rerouted out the front door of the building and onto the spreading, sloping lawn, dragging Bobbie Faye with them.

A helicopter hovered, down the steep hill, and Sean, his accomplice, and Bobbie Faye started toward it on a dead run until sniper bullets ripped up the lawn next to them and Sean pulled her behind a tree.

“You are out of your mind,” Bobbie Faye said as she saw Sean try to calculate the best angle to get from the tree to the helicopter with the least amount of exposure to the sniper. “I’m not going out there. He’s shooting at me.”

“Love, have you noticed how every fucker’s shootin’ at you?”

“It’s a talent,” she said. A sniper bullet cut close to the tree and they squeezed together a little bit, each of them craning to see where the sniper was. They could see the rifle barrel silhouetted against a turret in one of the towers. “You know, if you give me a gun, I could make that shot.”

“I know,” Sean said, grinning, “which is why you’re not gettin’ a fuckin’ gun. It’s not like you’d be givin’ it back, would you, darlin’?”

His grin was, as Trevor had said, extremely charming.
It lit up his otherwise deadly amber eyes, and she found herself smiling back at him.

“Probably not.”

Then she heard him laugh and say something in Gaelic that made his henchman guy with the Hollywood looks gape a bit, then study Bobbie Faye like she’d just wrought a miracle. The guy looked to Sean for permission and then translated: “He said you’re his kind of woman and he thinks he’ll keep ya.” When she blanched as Sean dialed someone on his cell phone, tall-dark-and-clearly-worried suggested, “It’s better than a hole in the head.”

Bobbie Faye wasn’t so sure of that.

Trevor and Cam took a moment to assess the situation: everything was fucked six ways to Sunday. No sign of Homeland Security, and the state police had their hands full with the madhouse of screaming people trampling one another (and the cops) in an effort to leave the gala. Sean’s other two cohorts were moving along the perimeter of the lawn, trying for a shot at the sniper, who forced them to take cover. An older woman slipped out from behind an enormous fountain located on the outer edge of the lawn, stepping out right behind the little rat-faced weasel of Sean’s. Trevor was almost certain that was the old woman from the store yesterday—the one who’d tried to buy a gun from Bobbie Faye. She pulled a huge Bible out of her enormous purse and smacked the living hell out of the man. She beat him several times, then walked off. The rat-faced guy was on the ground, shaking his head, dazed.

Sean, however, looked adamant about getting to the helicopter, with his men covering him and an unarmed Bobbie Faye. They were too far away for a clear shot.

“I can stop the sniper,” Cam shouted above the wail of the sirens, “but that’ll give them freedom to get to the helicopter.”

“You can’t get a shot from here,” Trevor shouted back, studying the angle up to the tower. They were hunkered down just inside the front doorway.

“I’m not going to shoot him. Just don’t fucking let that asshole get her on the helicopter.”

They looked out at Bobbie Faye and both men froze. Sean had thrown his head back, laughing at something she said . . . and then grabbed her and kissed her. Thoroughly. She pushed away, but he didn’t let her go and she was directly between them and him.