When a Man Loves a Weapon (39 page)

“Overhead!” another SWAT said into his mic. “He’s coming in over the stadium.”

And holy hell, he was. They came up and over the walls of the stadium, giant black locusts with blades chopping the air, and dipped immediately down, riding too close above the crowds, so close that people ducked instinctively. The birds split up—two circling the stadium, staying just above the crowd, just far enough above to be dangerous but not create a tremendous amount of backwash. No shots fired. No way to take them out without killing the crowd below them. The third hovered in the center of the field, just south of the fifty yard line, facing the sideline where he and Bobbie Faye waited.

He finished climbing to the top of the platform when MacGreggor’s call was patched through to his earpiece.

“Nice to know you can follow directions, Cormier,” MacGreggor said. “The lass is wired for sound?”

“I’m here, Sean,” she said. “Where’s Nina?”

“First off, lass, I want you in the middle of the field where I can find you easy.”

“Well, isn’t that just like a man, can’t find anything by himself,” she muttered, her absolute utter fury so clear in her tone of voice, she might as well have placed a FUCK YOU sign on the overhead ESPN blimp. “Seriously, Sean, do you think you could be any more of a big hairy wuss?”

Trevor froze. Every fucking member of his team froze. SWAT froze. She’d just called the bomber a
big hairy wuss
.

The helicopters were black and big and loud, circling just above the sea of gold and white and purple t-shirts. Panic hammered her chest the moment they had appeared, and like ants following a picnic, so had Adrenaline and Shock.

She clenched her fists; she had to get a grip. She could flip out later. Right now?

Pissed fucking
off
.

One helicopter hovered over the field. One of the other helicopters that had been circling overhead came to a hover position just behind Trevor. Bobbie Faye didn’t have to even look to know just exactly how not good this was. But she looked anyway, and saw what she thought was that M110 sniper rifle protruding just enough from the opened door on the side of the helicopter to mow Trevor down where he stood. Her Aunt V’rai could make a head shot from that distance.

“Center of the field,
àlainn,
or you’ll not be havin’ a friend left to find.”

She started walking out toward the center of the field, her peripheral vision registering the JumboTron, on which some enterprising agent or cop had managed to get the words
SWAT DEMONSTRATION
for the crowd’s curiosity and nerves.

“Cormier, I don’t believe I said you could evacuate the stands. Leave the sheep be.”

“Are those. . . . M&Ms the governor’s gorging?”

“I think those are Xanax.”

“Right. Bobbie Faye Day. That explains the crying.”

—Senator CJ Lyons to Roxanne St. Claire

The hotel penthouse lights were turned low, just as she’d requested. Her private butler had arrived a few hours ahead of her, and she saw that Henry had everything prepared: the glass of wine, a perfect ’74 Château Latour, poured and waiting. She’d eaten on the jet already, her personal chef having created a magnificent tuna tartar, and she was easing onto the beautiful Louis IX settee, the silk of her suit rustling as she slipped off her Manolo Blahniks, when Henry appeared.

She hated to be disturbed during her evening wine, but he quietly held out her cell phone with a slight bow. “Madame, Mrs. Claire for you. She insists it’s important.”

Claire. Her dearest friend, but sometimes, tedious.

“Yes?” she asked. Claire knew her routine as well as Henry.

“Andrea, dear, you need to turn on this channel. This”—she heard Claire rustling—“this sports network.”

“Have you—”

“Lost my mind? No, dear. It’s very important, or I wouldn’t have called. I don’t know how to tell you this, but there seems to be an incident unfolding.”

Incident. Andrea felt a chill sweep through her, though to see her, one would never know. She leaned forward and picked up the remote, clicking on the television in the armoire across the room. She usually closed out her evenings
watching the financial reports, so Henry had the armoire open.

“I believe it’s channel twenty-eight there in New York.”

The image flicked on with a vast sea of people in a stadium, purples and golds (horrible color, what on earth were they thinking?) and there were . . . helicopters . . . flying inside the stadium. The station cut to a commercial and she muted the sound.

“What is this about?” she asked her friend.

“You know how William likes his sports,” her friend said. “He follows everything, I believe. Except, possibly, cricket, though I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyway, he’d bet heavily on this game and had the channel on—oh. There it is. That’s from a couple of minutes ago—”

But Andrea didn’t hear another word of Claire’s babbling. She turned the sound up and leaned forward.

Her son. Standing on . . . some sort of platform.

“Holy fuck
holy shit
holy fuck,” Kyle, the sportscaster, muttered and then, finally, presence of mind struck him dumb but his mouth hadn’t quite caught up, and he probably looked like an overactive guppy. He slammed it shut, cutting a gaze to the man next to him in the newly remodeled control booth at the LSU stadium.

“We threw to national a couple of seconds ago,” his producer, Colby, said in his earpiece, and he nodded, relieved. He sure as hell didn’t need the FCC breathing down his neck. “They’ve been instructed by someone pretty freaking high up that they can’t allude to anything going on here.”

“What are they saying this is?”

Colby pointed to the JumboTron’s message of
SWAT DEMONSTRATION
, which, frankly, was insane.

“Nobody’s gonna buy it,” Kyle said. “We’ve got to get on the air.” They were sitting on the freaking largest sports story in . . . decades. He could see his producer salivating at the prospect as well.

Colby tapped the screen embedded in the desk in front of them—one of the overhead cameras had a close-up of the
cheerleader running out to the center of the field. A lone cheerleader, and this was a woman, not a kid.

“You recognize her?” Colby said low, peering over his shoulder to a SWAT guy standing a few feet away as he coordinated with someone over his own earpiece. When Kyle shook his head, Colby leaned over to another console, clicked a couple of keys, and sent Kyle an image isolated from the casino boat disaster which had happened the night before and was still all over the local news. Colby zoomed in on the image and Kyle toggled between that one and the live feed of the woman jogging to the center of the field.

Holy shit. Little Miss National Disaster was about to guarantee him the highest ratings
ever
.

Ce Ce had sobered right the hell up. She didn’t know you could get whiplash from sobering up that fast, but as soon as she saw Bobbie Faye step on the field, she knew this was the bad bad bad that the chicken foot was trying to warn her about. The claws were opening and closing, like the damned thing was trying to run away from her arm—now it was giving off an eerie blue-black light.

She uncorked the last of the bad juju concoction and poured it straight onto the claw, knowing she really should have taken the time to pour a little into a container and then just dip the outer talons, not pour it dead center on the whole foot, but she wasn’t entirely sure she should touch it directly. And she hoped the chicken foot did not amplify the glassy-eyed shock of the people around her and send it back to Bobbie Faye. From the way that helicopter closed in on her girl, she couldn’t handle any more bad.

“You saying a whahoozie spell?” Monique stage-whispered, as if the chicken claw could hear her.

It wriggled. Hell, maybe it could.

Ce Ce nodded, chanting low, shaking her arms low, then high, then low again, all a part of the incantation. Several drunks behind her thought it was a new cheer and eyeballed her, trying to imitate the motions and the words. Two spilled their beers, one going down her back and running the
length of her arms, dripping onto the foot. She couldn’t stop, though, to whip their asses. She just kept going. Breaking the incantation at this point would be far far far worse, and she didn’t want to take
that
chance. The drunks were completely oblivious to the spillage, though one wondered out loud who’d drank the rest of his beer. The other kept following her motions, repeating them himself, as if it was some new line dance, and when she finally looked up, she realized a few other people near him had caught the motions and joined in.

Oh, holy hell. What kind of karma was she sending Bobbie Faye with a bunch of drunk auras funneled through the chicken foot? Drunk, horny young men’s auras?

She had no clue, but she didn’t dare stop.

The freaking chicken foot juju bracelet creeped Bobbie Faye out, and she could have sworn that with every step she took onto that field, the damned thing pulsed harder, ’til it throbbed, a bone-deep ache. It had been opening and closing now with such a regular rhythm that she’d almost gotten used to that part, but the throbbing sent sharp, electrical pulses through her until she felt as if she’d grabbed onto a 110-volt wire and couldn’t let go.

If Bobbie Faye got fried by an overactive chicken foot, she was so going to have words with Ce Ce, assuming she made it into the afterlife. Hell, she’d haunt Ce Ce. Then again, as bad as Bobbie Faye’s own personal luck had been,
death by deep-fried chicken juju
was probably the least she had to worry about.

The LSU drumline began a cadence—another of Sean’s instructions. He was going balls-out for drama, and as soon as Trevor had realized that, Bobbie Faye had heard him send instructions to block the television feed nationally—to do whatever they needed to do to loop it locally only, in case Sean had some sort of TV receiver in one of the helicopters. Trevor didn’t want Sean to know that the whole world wasn’t actually watching, afraid that losing the national stage would so aggravate Sean, that he would prematurely blow the bomb.
But neither could Trevor risk that bomb exploding live on national TV, so he’d made the move to allow the halftime show to be aired to any satellite receivers, on the off chance Sean was watching the game to see if the cameras were catching his activities.

She was almost to the middle of the field when she heard Sean again. “Lass, you’re not supposed to carry weapons.”

She held up the pom-poms Riles had thrust in her hands when she’d come out of the bathroom, and she grinned. “I don’t think I’m gonna cheer you to death, Sean. They’re pom-poms. But fine, look.” She flipped them over to where anyone in that helicopter that hovered over her could see she didn’t have a gun hidden under the poofy poms.

“Drop ’em,” he said.

She released them at her feet, and stood there, hands on her hips, watching the helicopter on the ground in front of her—though there was no guarantee Sean was in that specific helo, since its windows were tinted and she couldn’t see who was inside. She glanced back at the other helicopter behind Trevor—it still had the rifle trained on the back of his head. He stood ramrod still, aware that at any second he could die, and he gave her subtle hand signals—status reports they’d hastily worked out when she’d been changing into the uniform.
Cam’s not done yet, bomb’s still active
.

Wonderful.

“Where’s Nina?” she asked, keying her microphone.

“Right here beside me, lass,” Sean said, and the helicopter set down as the second one swooped in toward her.

“Which ‘here’ would that be, Sean? The helicopter on the ground or the one that’s chickenshit, flying around me like I’m booby-trapped? And really, seriously, Sean, I thought you had more balls than this.”

She could see Trevor go completely pale from across the field. And then insanely
furious
. Well, he had said to stall Sean, because they had a plan.

Dollars to donuts, Trevor was gonna be a little more specific about “plans” next time. Assuming she lived to see a
“next” time, which was, seriously, probably not going to happen. She’d made peace with that.

Though there were some people she really wished she’d gotten to say good-bye to, like her sister. Stacey. Roy. (Though at the rate Roy was screwing up his life, he was going to hit the hereafter about six seconds after she did.)

“You’re baitin’ me, lass, though I wouldn’t put it past you to be booby-trapped,” Sean chuckled. “Before I’m willin’ to make the trade, you’ll have to prove you’re not.”

“Well, then, Sean, watch,” she said, and she reached for the zipper of the cheerleader outfit and the
entire
fucking stadium went silent, except for one group doing some sort of woo-woo dance, and she stripped off the uniform. Cameras flashed from the sidelines, and not those little bitty cell phone–sized suckers, either, but the great big stinkin’ cameras with zoom lenses strong enough to determine that she probably should have plucked her eyebrows a couple of days ago.

Maybe she could put in for an order of Dignity in her next lifetime. All she had on was the skimpy sports bra and the too-short white bloomer things that, God help her, wouldn’t even qualify as a scrap of material at the Wal-Mart bargain bin. “You think you’re the only one with scars, Sean MacGreggor? Well, I’ve got scars, and I’m not hiding in a helicopter like some big whiny baby. Seriously, if you think I’m going to walk away from a man with balls like that,” and she waved toward Trevor, “to a man like this,” and she waved at the helicopter, “then you need to have a complete testosterone work-up, because you wouldn’t deserve me choosing you. And the world’s gonna know it, too, because by now, there are probably penguins up in the arctic circle who’re tuning in on TV or YouTube. They’re all gonna know, Sean. Hiding behind guns and bombs? Holding a gun on an unarmed man? Putting a bomb below a bunch of children?
Any fucking coward
can do that, Sean, and you never struck me as a coward. So you want me? You want your revenge? You really want to hurt him?” She gestured back to Trevor. “Get your namby-pamby ass out here and
get
me. They can’t shoot at you because they can’t risk missing and
taking out a bystander in the crowd and you know that. Nobody’s gonna rush the field, and you know it. You got us where you want us—you really want to win? Do you really think shooting an
unarmed
man
in the back
makes you tougher than him? Show some freaking
balls
. I thought the Irish had some, but then again, maybe I was wrong.”