Girls Just Wanna Have Guns Read online

  Praise for Toni McGee Causey’s novels

  GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE GUNS

  “If you’re a fan of Stephanie Plum, this is a treat for you. Bobbie Faye is another wise-cracking gal with a knack for getting in trouble. The novel is fast-paced, while the mystery keeps you guessing. If you’re up for a fast-paced book . . . this is one you won’t want to miss.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Causey roared into the book world with Bobbie Faye . . . and now takes readers on another thrilling roller-coaster ride in this fast, feisty, and ferociously funny novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Toni McGee Causey doesn’t just write. She takes prisoners. She grabs you by the heart and the funny bone and carries you off into a world of captivating characters that are a whole bunch of crazy and twice as much fun. Don’t try to sleep—you’ll be laughing too loud.”

  —Marshall Karp, author of The Rabbit Factory

  “Janet Evanovich, move over. Toni McGee Causey just gave us Bobbie Faye, and we’re loving her.”

  —Armchairinterviews.com

  “If you’re in the mood for something fresh, edgy—and often downright hilarious as Bobbie Faye shares her take on life, love and the world in general—then you won’t go wrong with [this] sassily written, high-spirited caper brimming with marvelously eccentric characters, crackerjack plotting, non-stop action, and plenty of regional Cajun flavor, a spicy blend that will leave readers begging for the next installment.”

  —BookLoons

  “A fast-paced, can’t-put-it-down novel full of great chases, lots of gun play, and steamy scenes . . . The dialogue is quick, witty, sarcastic, and laugh-out-loud funny . . . A cross between Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, Toni McGee Causey has a unique style that is a blast to read. I can’t wait to get my hands on the next adventure starring Bobbie Faye.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Bobbie Faye Sumrall is BACK! Toni McGee Causey has brought back the ever-crazy Bobbie Faye and taken her to new heights (literally)! Once again chaos meets laugh-your-pants-off humor, in the very best of ways. I can only say that I hate (CAN’T WAIT) to see what Toni (and Bobbie Faye) are up to next!”

  —Romantic Inks

  CHARMED AND DANGEROUS

  “This hyperpaced, screwball action/adventure with one unforgettable heroine and two sexy heroes is side-splittingly hilarious. Causey, a Cajun and a Louisiana native, reveals a flair for comedy in this uproarious debut novel.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “There are many things to love about this book—the plot, the pacing, the dialogue . . . think Die Hard in the swamp. And Bobbie Faye? She’s a titanium magnolia.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “It’s about time women had an Amazon to look up to . . . Bobbie Faye is a hurricane-force heroine who makes this novel the perfect adventure yarn.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “Bobbie Faye is Southern, eloquent, kick-ass, highly accomplished, and just plain nuts.”

  —Harley Jane Kozak,

  author of Dating is Murder

  “Hold on for the ride, Bobbie Faye is 100% pure adrenaline. Causey has penned a laugh-out-loud nonstop thriller.”

  —Allison Brennan, USA Today and New York Times

  bestselling author of The Prey, The Hunt, and The Kill

  “The tears are still running down my cheeks from laughing. Oh, my. What talent. What verve. What NERVE!”

  —Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author

  of The Last Spymaster

  “DO NOT miss reading [Charmed and Dangerous]. Oh, and remember to breathe. The action is so fast, the characters are hilarious and the laughter so rampant that you really do need to remind yourself to breathe . . . The South could rise again with this woman at the helm (unless she blows it up first).”

  —Armchairinterviews.com

  “Toni McGee Causey will have you laughing out loud as her insane characters take you on a ride of pure chaos. This book could only be described as a roller-coaster ride with dynamite!”

  —Romanticinks.com

  “Move over, Stephanie and Bubbles, you’ve got major competition tracking north from the Deep South . . . Bobbie Faye Sumrall is out to capture both the hearts of spunky women everywhere and the minds of men ready for a challenge.”

  —Deadly Pleasures

  “This is an action-comedy novel that will delight fans of the Ya Ya/Sweet Potato Queens genre. The pacing of the book will take your breath away.”

  —The Advocate

  “If you like Stephanie Plum, you’ll love Bobbie Faye Sumrall! She’s a one-woman catastrophe and absolutely hilarious.”

  —Alesia Holliday, USA Today bestselling author

  of American Idle

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by

  Toni McGee Causey

  Charmed and Dangerous

  Girls Just Wanna Have Guns

  When a Man Loves a Weapon

  (coming in August)

  Girls Just

  Wanna Have Guns

  Toni McGee Causey

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Girls Just Wanna Have Guns was previously published in trade paperback under the title Bobbie Faye’s (kinda, sorta, not exactly) Family Jewels.

  GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE GUNS

  Copyright © 2008 by Toni McGee Causey.

  Excerpt from When a Man Loves a Weapon copyright © 2009 by Toni McGee Causey.

  Cover photo © Herman Estevez.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008009286

  ISBN: 0-312-35850-4

  EAN: 978-0-312-35850-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Griffin edition / June 2008

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / July 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mom and Dad

  Genius has its limitations.

  Insanity . . .
not so much.

  —bumper sticker,

  Lake Charles, LA

  One

  Bobbie Faye Sumrall was full up on crazy, thank you very much, and had a side order of cranky to spare. The bank—citing the picky little reason that it didn’t want to lend money to people who were routinely shot at—said no to a loan for a new (used) car. It wasn’t like she’d ever been hit by an actual bullet, for crying out freaking loud. Immediately after that, she couldn’t get an insurance company to give her a quote for a start-up business grant application she needed to turn in. (Three insurance giants had gotten restraining orders as soon as they heard who was calling.) (Wusses.) And then the FBI guy she’d been blistering hot and bothered about had dropped off the planet two weeks earlier, and geez, there was only so much rejection a girl could take. She needed to have one night, one measly little night, to sleep well. That wasn’t too much to ask, right?

  Apparently, the Universe thought it was.

  Bobbie Faye and the Universe were like warring spouses locked in an eternal battle, trying to blow each other up rather than admit the other was savvier. (The Universe, by the way? A big fat cheater.)

  Still, she tried. She went through her nightly routine: she squeezed into the tiny bathroom of her small, almost-not-ratty trailer, fantasizing about actual hot water while she grabbed a tepid shower. To wind down, she poured herself some juice and nibbled on crackers. (Yeah, her luck was solid. The juice tasted like it had gone bad. And not the good “fermented” kind of gone bad.) Thankfully, her five-year-old niece, Stacey, had been invited to spend the night at a friend’s house. No matter how much she loved the little rugrat, she was grateful that tonight there wouldn’t be fourteen billion attempts to hogtie the kid into bed for a whole five minutes of sleep before Stacey bounced up again, determined to drive Bobbie Faye out of what little was left of her mind.

  When Bobbie Faye did finally stretch out on her lumpy twin mattress, she sank into disturbing, hallucinogenic dreams—all disjointed, a half-step two-step out of rhythm, bits and pieces swirling in a kaleidoscope of confusing colors. At one point, she saw herself as if from afar and damn, she looked odd. She could have sworn her boobs were off-kilter, like one was higher than the other, but maybe it was just that striped, butt-ugly shirt she was wearing, the one she’d won back in high school in that dumb “spirit week” contest. She was twenty-freaking-eight years old; why couldn’t her subconscious mind be a team player and clothe her in something über cool and sexy? And why did her long and normally loose-flowing brunette hair look so . . . strange? It seemed all wrong. It was stiff, like she’d emptied a can of hair spray and shellacked it into a helmet.

  Great. Bad dream and bad hair. Just perfect. But at least she wasn’t bald, like that little schlumpy guy she was talking to.

  Oh. Wait. Make that the schlumpy pot-bellied guy she was shooting.

  Why in the hell was she shooting this guy? Five times. Damn, but it was a beautiful pattern. At least her dream got that part right. She leaned over the man as he stared at her off-kilter boobs, saying something about them not being real. The jerk.

  He didn’t remind her of anyone she knew. Stupid subconscious. Why couldn’t it at least let her pretend to take out one of the jerks driving her insane? Mr. No-Extension-For-You IRS Guy would have topped her list. Or maybe Nick Lejeune, the local bookie who kept placing odds on her every move. (Would she wreck today before or after noon? Would she inadvertently blow something up or would it be on purpose? Would she be in jail on her birthday?) He was making a fortune and not even giving her a cut.

  But no . . . the dead guy in this dream wasn’t the least bit familiar. Bobbie Faye watched herself as she picked up all of the dropped casings, felt for a pulse on the dead guy, and wiped her fingers on her hideous shirt. Then the images churned, and wind rushed at her, tangling her hair, buffeting her arms spread wide open as if she were flying under the streetlights in the small commercial district of her tough, no-nonsense industrial hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

  When she woke up, she had a raging headache and her mouth was painfully dry. She peeled her eyes open, and holy fucking shit.

  There was something definitely . . . bloodlike in her hair. She’d sleepwalked a couple of times as a kid, mostly wandering aimlessly through the house. She had a vague sense of having done it again last night. An almost-memory of having heard something in her sleep—had she gotten up to check? Then banged into something? Her closet door was open, so it was a possibility. She glanced down, dreading what she’d find, but no, she still had on the same t-shirt she’d worn to bed, but there were a couple of bruises on her left arm and a cut on her right that she didn’t remember having the night before.

  So it had been a dream. A way too realistic bad dream. Probably best to ease up on the chocolate suicide cake after dinner.

  She sprang up to a sitting position as she felt the weight of cold metal in her right hand, a weight she recognized and instantly wished she didn’t. It was her Glock. She froze, her body running cold and clammy. It was supposed to be locked up. It was always locked up, especially with Stacey living there now. Bobbie Faye gingerly checked the magazine: five bullets were missing.

  Clearly, the Universe thought it was payback time.

  Two

  Four days later, the memory of the freaky-assed dream hadn’t faded, but at least she’d managed to push it out of her mind. Her temporary amnesia would have come in handy while she dealt with the Crazy, Inc., portion of society which believed it absolutely had to be armed and dangerous at 10 A.M.

  Bobbie Faye wasn’t entirely sure if it was the ninety-five-degree heat searing the June morning, or the fact that Ce Ce’s air conditioner had gotten in a snit and shut down for the day, but it felt like the oppressive warmth had the nutjobs out in force; she hadn’t been at work fifteen minutes and she was already itching to plunge her head through the nearest wall. Or strip naked and go skinny-dipping in Bundick’s Lake. With her luck, she’d end up on the five o’clock news like last year when little high-school senior Aubrey Ardoin caught her completely naked, sinking into the lake, using his spanky new digital recorder, the underaged rat bastard. (He’d financed his techno-geek habit through selling “Bobbie Faye debris” on eBay.) Of course, it was the fact that he’d hacked into the LSU Purple and Gold preseason game and aired her naked self on the JumboTron that had gotten her on the national news. Again.

  She wouldn’t ditch Ce Ce in spite of how much she wanted to escape the oppressive heat and insistent customers. She loved her boss, so she stuck it out, breaking a sweat while doing her dead level best not to sell a compact Glock to older-than-dirt Maimee Parsons, a Baptist pillar-of-the-community. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Or not do, rather. As the person in charge of the gun and knife counter at Ce Ce’s Cajun Outfitter and Feng Shui Emporium, Bobbie Faye was supposed to sell to anyone who’d passed the state-required security check. Maimee, eighty-five, had just aced that sucker. Not exactly a red-letter day for gun safety.

  Bobbie Faye should have known something was wrong when Maimee had shown up in baggy slacks, a mismatched striped shirt, and a baseball cap shoved atop her pert white curls instead of being well coifed and wearing her usual church dress. The old woman frowned down her nose over silver-rimmed bifocals, the glinty look in her eyes incongruent with the sweet round doughy “O” of her face.

  The gleam in Miss Maimee’s eye was usually because Maimee had long been in charge of the Lord’s Supper at the main Baptist church in town and therefore felt she had a lock on exactly who was going to Hell, and she reveled in the knowledge. But today, the gleam seemed slightly maniacal, and Bobbie Faye wondered if Maimee wasn’t tilting toward the husband of fifty years gambled away their retirement and needs a-killin’ manner of thinking. Just her very Baptist presence in Ce Ce’s shop—where it was well known that Ce Ce practiced a little voodoo as a sideline business—suggested Maimee had clocked in on the psychotic break side of the equation. Maimee wasn’t big on second cha
nces unless the Lord Himself granted them and it looked like Edgar Parsons, recent big loser at the gaming tables, was about to come up on the short end of the prayer stick.

  Maimee’s ability to suss out any remotely minor sin intimidated even the most unrepentant person (her nephew, the governor, included). In spite of that, Bobbie Faye liked her. Maimee had been one of those rare people who had actually helped Bobbie Faye’s mom get food on the table, back when most people thought her mom was halfway to certifiable, before they knew she was taking painkillers for the cancer.

  As Maimee peered down the barrel of an empty Glock, her spindly legs spread in a stance that would have made Dirty Harry proud, Bobbie Faye scanned the old rambling store, dusty and cram-packed with every imaginable doo-dad and whatchamacallit on the planet. Maybe Maimee could pray over someone instead of buying a gun, but when Bobbie Faye looked around for victims, the store seemed eerily devoid of customers. It was as if the crowd of sinners, knowing Maimee’s reputation for her . . . enthusiasm . . . in laying-on-of-the-hands prayer mode, had migrated way the hell away from the gun section of the store.

  “Miz Maimee, you don’t really want a Glock. You want to go home and talk to Mr. Edgar and work out some things.”

  “Nonsense, girl. This isn’t about Edgar. I feel the need for protection.” She plunked the Glock down on the glass countertop. “I have the right to buy a gun and you have to sell it to me.”

  Bobbie Faye rankled at being called girl, but she let it slide. It was probably best not to annoy soon-to-be-armed customers. “You don’t know how to shoot.”

  “Well, I heard that you’re a crack shot and you give lessons here, so sign me up.”

  “They’re kinda expensive.”

  “Not a problem. How many lessons will it take for me to be able to pick off an intruder at night?”

  “Doesn’t Mr. Edgar come in late sometimes?”

  “Here’s my credit card. Run it on through. And add some ammunition. I’m not sure how much a person needs to defend themselves. A lot, I imagine. Ring that up, too.”