Girls Just Wanna Have Guns Read online

  This was going to get ugly. Bobbie Faye knew it, knew she was going to be on the blaming end of things if Mr. Edgar should suddenly meet his untimely demise, just as sure as she’d known a couple of months earlier that she had to hijack a truck in order to save her brother who had called with the teeny-tiny problem of being kidnapped and held for ransom. She was sorry about destroying nearly half the state while rescuing Roy. Really.

  She had a feeling not everyone believed her, though, which made her think briefly of her ex, Detective Cameron Moreau. Sure, he was sexy and he could be charming as hell when he wanted to be (he hadn’t been an SEC Championship Quarterback for LSU without gaining a little public relations savvy), but for every ounce of gorgeous, he was also pound-for-pound the bossiest human being on the planet. (Well, okay, slight exaggeration. There were a few people she hadn’t met yet and it was statistically possible at least one of them was bossier.)

  Cam meant well, sure. He had a good heart. She knew that—knew, as they were growing up best friends, that he just wanted what was best for her, even though they butted heads about her choices. There was a moment there at the end of the last chase where she knew he’d been torn between choosing to shoot her and choosing to help her. For about two seconds, she’d thought they might have had a possibility of being friends again when he decided to help, but true to form, as soon as the crisis was over, he’d reverted back to being ticked off that she hadn’t called him for his advice, hadn’t let him control her every move.

  Yeah, she was really beginning to empathize with Maimee’s gun purchase.

  She picked up the gun Maimee had set on the counter, palming the weight of the sleek metal. An ill feeling gnawed at the pit of her stomach as she flashed back to her weird dream, seeing herself shooting that schlumpy guy. She could practically feel the vibrations of the impact as the man hit the ground.

  “Bobbie Faye,” Maimee huffed, tap-tap-tapping her credit card on the glass countertop, snapping her back to attention. It was just a dream. Only a dream. “Go on now. Ring it up. I’ve got to get to a prayer meeting.”

  The word meeting hung in the air above Maimee’s head just as the front door of the old Acadian-style building yanked open, bell jangling, and in flounced one royal pain-in-the-ass: Francesca Despré—all five-foot-five of her, an inch shorter than Bobbie Faye and slightly flatter-chested (something Francesca had never accepted and used push-up bras to mitigate). Francesca’s short auburn hair framed a perfectly tanned complexion and her couture clothing shrieked Wannabe Diva! She teetered on black four-inch stiletto heels and carried a fluffy shockingly pink feathered purse that she clutched in one hand and an alligator-clad makeup sample case in the other. It was the shredded and practically nonexistent black micro-miniskirt which was the piece de resistance—a skirt made of such gossamer threads barely strung together, Bobbie Faye suspected there was a dumbfounded spider who woke up that morning wondering where in the hell its web had gone.

  Francesca headed straight for the gun counter. No hope that the impending doom of Francesca showing up was unintentional. She sashayed through the store, weaving past the camo gear and fishing tackle, the tents and Coleman lanterns, rerouting at the last second to avoid the screened-in boxes of live crickets and overstacked shelves of “Feng Shui” crystals Ce Ce hadn’t quite managed to unload.

  “Fuck,” Bobbie Faye muttered, eyeing the nauseatingly perky Francesca crossing the store.

  “Bobbie Faye!” Maimee reproached. “Watch your language!”

  “Miz Maimee, you’re buying a gun. I’d be willing to bet you just upped Mr. Edgar’s life insurance. You don’t get to take the high road today.”

  “Hi, Bobbie Faye,” Francesca bubbled when she reached the gun counter. “We have a problem.”

  * * *

  Encryption code in: ***********

  From: Simone

  To: JTyp

  Confirmed: BF is inside, F has entered.

  * * *

  * * *

  Encryption code in: ***********

  From: JT

  To: Simone

  All plans are go.

  * * *

  Bobbie Faye scanned past Francesca and realized that every male customer over the age of two had suddenly found the aisle to the gun counter absolutely essential for their shopping needs. Francesca, for once, seemed not to notice the attention she drew. (Once Francesca went through her boy-crazy phase—oh, wait, she was still in that phase—she’d morphed from a partner-in-crime prepubescent tomboy, breaking into the neighborhood “male-only” clubhouses, into a beauty-pageant attention-seeking missile, treating makeup application with the same reverence other people would give to CPR.) Francesca propped her purse and sample case on the counter and immediately proceeded to give Bobbie Faye the earnest expression.

  “Oooooohhh no,” Bobbie Faye said, having seen that wobbly helpless wide-eyed please-oh-please-help-me-with-my-homework pout one time too many. “We,” Bobbie Faye leaned forward over the counter, gesturing between the two of them to emphasize the point, “do not have a problem.”

  “Bobbie Faye, you have to help. I told them you would.” Francesca worked the big doe eyes and pouty lips.

  “Nice try. Not happening.”

  “Wait,” Maimee asked Francesca, her shrewd gaze narrowing beneath the brim of her baseball cap, “you’re that Lady Marmalade woman, aren’t you?”

  “Why yes,” Francesca preened, turning the makeup sample case to show the Lady Marmalade logo on the front.

  Maimee dug into her oversized handbag. “You sell to hookers and pole dancers and big-breasted women who frequent gambling parlors, don’t you?”

  Before Francesca could answer, Bobbie Faye put a hand on Maimee’s arm as it heaved out a Bible the size of a mini howitzer. “I don’t think we have time for you to pray over her today. It would take hours.”

  The old woman gave the Bible a little backswing shake. “I was thinking more along the lines of smacking her with it.”

  Bobbie Faye wanted . . . oh, how she wanted . . . to move out of Maimee’s way and let her have at it, but she gently guided the Bible down to the glass counter, and said, “Miz Maimee, have you considered anger management classes?”

  “She knows what she’s talking about,” Francesca said to Maimee. “Bobbie Faye’s had to take it three times already. They even give her discounts now.”

  “Not helping yourself one bit, Frannie. You should be leaving.”

  “I can’t, Bobbie Faye. They’re coming!” Francesca nodded toward the door, as if that was self-explanatory. “And if you don’t hurry, you’re gonna be in trouble.”

  “And just exactly why would I be in trouble?”

  “Because I told them you would know where they are. Or how to find them. So now they think you do, or that you can, so you have to or they’re gonna kill people.”

  Three

  Aiden Stewart threw the rest of the soggy chips—what these bloody Americans called fries—into the paper sack and cursed the blasted fast-food drive-through. With a place as big as the U.S. he’d have thought there’d have been someone who’d mastered the art of frying a potato.

  What he wanted was a whiskey, but Sean MacGreggor, who could be a right sour bastard of a boss, frowned on drinking while at work and had been known to permanently retire a guy or two when he’d caught ’em at it. Aiden had secretly maintained that it was the Scots side of MacGreggor’s Scots-Irish DNA from his Presbyterian mother that had ruined him, because no decent Irishman would have blinked over a wee drink or ten.

  They had been parked for nearly an hour in a vacant lot located diagonally across from the strangely named store where this Bobbie Faye woman worked. Aiden glanced around the interior of the box truck they’d leased for the job. Sean, their boss, stretched out, looking about as relaxed and friendly as coiled razor wire. The barbed wire scars pocking the left side of his face should have rendered Sean repulsive, but Aiden was damned if it didn’t seem to have the opposite effect, especially
on the women. Aiden had known Sean since they were kids growing up, scrabbling for existence in Tallaght, west of Dublin. He could no longer remember the first person Sean had killed, but he remembered it had been to help them eat, and they’d followed him ever since.

  Mollie, Sean’s sprite of a cousin, hunched over the steering wheel and drummed her fingers, irritating the hell (on purpose) out of Robbie, the rat-faced terrier-sized computer geek who’d proven indispensible already. Earlier that morning, Robbie had planted a bugging device on the side of the gun counter Bobbie Faye manned, and now as the women talked, he grinned (fuck, they needed to get him to a dentist and get some teeth in that head).

  “D’you really think the woman’ll go along with it?” Aiden asked. He’d read up on several of this Bobbie Faye woman’s latest events and getting her to do what she was supposed to do sounded a bit like trying to herd kamikaze bats.

  “She’s got no fuckin’ choice,” Sean said, and he seemed calm and confident enough, though Aiden knew this was when he was most likely to snap. Aiden wondered—and not for the first time on this job—if having Sean and Bobbie Faye on the same continent wasn’t going to be a bit like banging nitroglycerin against a truckload of C-4.

  “Find what?” Bobbie Faye asked Francesca, then hung her head and sighed. She might as well have just opened the door to Hell and said, “Hi, honey, I’m home!”

  Francesca beamed as if Bobbie Faye had somehow tacitly agreed to something. Then she peered around, careful to turn away from Maimee, and whispered, “The diamonds, silly. And you don’t have much time.”

  “Bobbie Faye,” Maimee snapped, “any day now. I have prayers to attend to and I need that gun.”

  Somehow, that sentence seemed perfectly normal today.

  Bobbie Faye wanted to lie face down on the counter and press her temple into the cool glass, close her eyes, and breathe deeply to keep from beating the crap out of anyone. Later on, maybe a decade from now, when she opened her eyes, they would all be gone and it would be a good day. It wasn’t going to happen, though, and from the determined set of Francesca’s pout, Bobbie Faye might as well get to the truth; the sooner she did, the sooner she could get rid of this nightmare.

  “Frannie, what in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mom and Dad had a . . . little . . . disagreement,” Francesca continued whispering.

  From the way Francesca tensed and hunched her shoulders while her glance darted around, Bobbie Faye knew the disagreement couldn’t be little. Nothing with her mom and dad had ever been little—even their beginning had supposedly been epic: a Romeo and Juliet couple caught between warring Cajun (Marie’s) and Creole (Emile’s) families. They had immediately fallen in love and declared that if they weren’t allowed to marry, they would eschew the classic double suicide for something their parents really feared. They would leave LSU and attend the University of Alabama. (Emile’s dad staggered around with angina attacks for weeks after that.) Their wedding sealed a shaky truce between the two politically connected families. Marie’s rice-farming Cajun clan owned a grain mill and the family could finally afford to do something luxurious, like send Marie off to college to become an artist. Ostensibly in the Mardi Gras bead business, Emile’s family earned their money the old-fashioned way: organized crime. Bobbie Faye knew there was some specific bad blood between the families from a couple of generations back, but everyone old enough to know what caused it had incredibly vague patches in their memory when questioned.

  “They’re getting divorced.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not kidding,” Francesca said, her voice rising with distress. “And it’s just mean of them, because it’s giving me bad dreams and you’d think they’d care at least a little bit, but no, off they go, Daddy with his hoochie fling and Mamma with the diamonds. That’s when Daddy put a hit out on Mamma to make her bring ’em back. Mamma’s not gonna and she’s gonna get killed and then you know that Mamma’s family will be after Daddy and these stupid diamonds will wipe out my family, Bobbie Faye, and—”

  Maimee interrupted. “Could we move this along? People are going to Hell today if I don’t get to my prayer meeting soon enough. I need that gun right now.”

  “You don’t need it right now. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a new salvation plan where you rush annoying sinners along to their Maker as they beg for forgiveness.”

  “There could be.”

  “Yeah, the little known Thou Shalt Carry and Conceal commandment. Do you have some family I could call for you? Friend? Psych ward?” Francesca tapped Bobbie Faye on the arm and she turned to say, “What—” just as two men, pistols in hand, strolled in her direction.

  She didn’t have anything loaded. Nothing handy. Alarm sang oh, damn in a high-pitched squeal in her head. She squinted at a tall, heavyset man whose physique looked put together by an engineer too fond of his T-square, with everything about him blocky and wide, even down to basket hands large enough to moonlight as a forklift. There was a bulge under one arm beneath his sports coat where a holster marred the otherwise rectangular lines of his body.

  “I think I’m supposed to shoot someone today,” he announced, looking directly at Bobbie Faye. “Is it you?”

  Bobbie Faye blinked. “Did he just ask what I think he just asked?”

  “That’s Mitch Guillory,” Francesca said when Bobbie Faye looked around for an explanation.

  “That’s little Mitchell?” Bobbie Faye asked, not seeing any hint in this refrigerator-square man of the kid so scrawny his mamma called him a toothpick-with-eyes. And then she remembered seeing his mugshot flashed on the news: he’d been wounded in a sting of organized crime in New Orleans.

  “You’re not supposed to shoot her yet,” the other man cautioned Mitch, and Mitch seemed to relax a smidge, but Bobbie Faye kept her eye on his gun.

  “But don’t I shoot people?” Mitch asked.

  “He kinda has a short-term memory problem,” Francesca explained. “From being shot.”

  “I was shot?” Mitch asked, frowning, self-consciously patting himself down.

  “Yeah,” the other man sighed, having obviously explained this a few times, and Bobbie Faye recognized the sigh—a cringe-inducing recognition as she remembered he was Donny, so boyishly bland that, at thirty, he could almost be mistaken for fifteen. She hadn’t seen Donny since he’d gone to L.A. to be an actor, though his career high thus far had been in a hemorrhoid commercial. Donny and Mitch were both Francesca’s cousins and always hung around the summers when Francesca’s mom sent her to live in Lake Charles with her grandmother.

  “You got shot in the head,” Donny continued to Mitch. “You keep forgetting stuff.” Like, Bobbie Faye remembered from stories at the time, his own alibi or what his defense attorney would tell him, and so he couldn’t stand trial. And where Francesca, Mitch, and Donny were, Kit couldn’t be—

  “Read your instructions,” said a woman with a rough, sexy smoker’s voice.

  —far behind.

  Kit, petite, spiky hair, had hidden behind Mitch’s bulk. Bobbie Faye recognized her killer good looks as the bratty little cousin who tagged along. She’d always been slightly deranged, the kind of kid who would put cheese in ice cream. To Bobbie Faye she said, “I wrote it all down for him. I think he has a real future as a hit man. He’s got great consistency, if we can just clear up this whole oopsie, wrong target problem.”

  “Aren’t you . . . a career counselor? For the correctional system?” Bobbie Faye asked while she grabbed the Glock away from Maimee, just then realizing that the scowling old woman had pulled a box of bullets from the shelf and was trying to figure out how to load them.

  “I have a good record in placing people where they have a high aptitude.”

  “Yeah, why bother with the whole ‘and it should be legal’ aspect of the job.”

  “I’d have put you in demolition, for example. You show an exceptional destructive capacity.”

  “Well, gee, let me upda
te my resumé.”

  “I’ll see what I can find for you,” Kit said, missing the sarcasm. “Assuming you live.”

  “Shhh,” Francesca said to Kit, then she spun back to Bobbie Faye. “See? You’re perfect for the job.”

  “Yeah, right after I tattoo stupid on my forehead.”

  “Word on the street is that you know how to find the diamonds,” Kit explained. “We’re helping Francesca keep her parents alive. So that means you have to help.”

  “You cannot possibly believe Emile would put out a hit on Marie,” Bobbie Faye said. Everyone nodded, though Mitch looked to the others for their response before joining in. “No way. Besides, I have things to do. Paperwork for a grant to finish and turn in. I am not chasing after anything just because you show up with some insane story.”

  Bobbie Faye had to shut and lock the display case to keep Maimee’s hands off a SIG.

  “But you’re our best chance! You saved your brother! Against really bad odds! I watched the whole thing on the news. And I heard Daddy’s sending some of his . . . um, workers . . . and Mamma’s side said they were, too, and it’s going to get worse and people are going to die. They’re all convinced that since you’re the Contraband Days Queen, you’d be able to get them.”

  Bobbie Faye’s gaze whiplashed back from where Donny preened for the security camera. Francesca had never been happy about Bobbie Faye being the unofficial queen of the local pirate festival, even though it was strictly a hereditary title. “What in the world has that got to do with anything?”

  “You’re Cajun. You can find out stuff about Mamma because all her friends are Cajun, so they’ll tell you stuff they won’t tell me, even though we’re cousins.”

  And there it was, out there. The thing she hadn’t allowed herself to think about: this request was about family. Family—specifically from her dad’s side. Her dad’s sister, Marie, had her life on the line. An aunt who’d been nice to her in spite of the fact that her brother, Bobbie Faye’s dad, hadn’t ever acknowledged Bobbie Faye, nor she him. There was a time, when she was very little, she had wished it was different. Now? No way. The only person she’d confided to about her family was Nina, her best friend who owned and ran a questionable quasi-S&M modeling agency, but that was because Nina tended to approve of Bobbie Faye’s less polite tendencies, particularly if they ran to the homicidal.