Charmed and Dangerous (31 page)

Shit. Maybe this thing with Trevor paralleled Alex? Maybe she was attracted to him, in spite of his past? Assuming she knew?

Sonofabitch.

Cam stopped thinking and focused on not pulling his gun when Alex sauntered out of the hole with a demeanor as casual as if he was heading down to the Circle K to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Clearly, he was not the kind of man who would ever give up information, even in the most arduous interrogation. Cam didn’t have time for arduous. He would have liked to have made time for an intensive one-on-one, no holds barred, private interview, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had made it this far without being one of those cops, though right about now, he was starting to seriously reconsider his code.

It was purely from a professional frustration that he was reacting this way. He was certain of that.

The bastard looked in Cam’s direction, and grinned.

She went to that sonofabitch for help, before she came to him?

He’d known she was furious with him. He knew she hated him with a white hot passion. Hell, you could fry eggs on the level of heated hatred she held for him arresting her sister. He knew that. He’d felt the same way, for the things she’d said. He hadn’t fully understood that she couldn’t trust him. That she’d trust a pathological bastard before she’d trust him. Or, if not trust, at least accept his help.

Cam didn’t crack an expression, or let Alex know that he had, in any way, registered on Cam as anything other than another suspect.

“Sir,” Aaron said from the trapdoor. “There’s tunnels.”

“Get the dogs.”

The dogs went baying down into the entrance, straining at the leashes Kelvin kept them on. Since they didn’t know where the tunnels led, Kelvin would keep them reined in until he knew the tunnels were safe.

Cam watched Alex as the dogs and then Kelvin entered the tunnel. Alex furrowed his brow and seemed to tense. The man actually looked a little concerned.

Good.

That meant Bobbie Faye was still in there, somewhere.

“We’re going in,” Zeke said in Cam’s ear, and he mentally
cursed his distraction. He’d forgotten all about the asshole to his left while he was watching the bastard on his right.

“And if we find Cormier,” Zeke warned, “you and your men better fucking get out of the way.”

Zeke spun away from him, though Cam wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of answering.

He glanced in Alex’s direction as he entered the trapdoor and the smug bastard smiled at him. Smiled as if he knew something about Bobbie Faye.

No. He remembered that smile. That was Alex’s “I have something of her that you don’t have” smile.

Good goddamned thing he had a code and there were witnesses, or Alex would be in the bottom of the bayou.

Cam climbed into the trapdoor entrance after the dogs.

The National Hurricane Center came out with its list of hurricane names for the next few months. When it was announced in Louisiana that one of their name choices was “Bobbie Faye,” it was the first time in history an entire state flinched.

—weather anchor Patricia Burroughs on Dallas Morning News

Trevor tied the tiara to Bobbie Faye’s belt loop.

“You’re going to need your hands to hold on.”

The hounds bayed, the racket echoed through the tunnel and, in spite of the steel door which had closed down between them and the tunnel, filled the room. Trevor hooked his makeshift harness to the elevator cables, turned, and then sat in the harness, hooking the shoulder straps across his chest to hold him in.

“I’m going to have to support your weight. We don’t have enough stuff for two harnesses, and since we can’t rappel in the traditional sense, you’re going to have to hang on tight. It’s a quick ride.”

He held out his hand to her, ready for her to board the straight-to-hell, do-not-pass-go, do-not-use-any-common-sense express, and all she could do was stare at his long, slim fingers. She was telling her muscles to move. She commanded
her legs to walk on over there and step into the little foothold he’d fashioned for her and take his hand. Her legs pretty much said “fuck off bitch, and die.”

“Did I ever mention that in high school, I was voted ‘Most Likely to Cause Armageddon’?”

He kept his hand outstretched, waiting for her.

Did she trust him with her life?

The sound of the dogs’ barking increased and she could hear their grunts and heavy panting, their nails clattering on the concrete floor of the tunnel, the echoing voices of the men who must not be far behind. She turned to Trevor, grasped his hand, and stepped into the foot-harness. She leaned into his body, he wrapped one arm around her, and they adjusted positions a little until he had a strong grip. He handed her the flashlight, its dim beam barely illuminating the murky dark of the shaft, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a second as he reached above her and released the makeshift brake.

They fell.

Plummeted.

Bobbie Faye’s nerves screamed at her to clutch onto something solid, anything, to keep from falling, because falling meant dying. They were not exactly helpful nerves. Very possibly, they were a little hysterical. No, no, as a matter of fact, the Nerves had moved just to the other side of Hysterical and were beating the ever-loving shit out of it for being such a blatant underachiever.

She and Trevor plunged down, air rushing past them, and her soul shivered as she inhaled the smell of oil and grease from the old elevator shaft. Dust stung her eyes and nostrils and she buried her face against Trevor’s chest.

Still, they fell.

Bobbie Faye half-wondered if she was already dead, if she’d died years ago and was just doomed to live this moment over and over for all of eternity, this falling falling falling forever falling when Trevor applied the makeshift brake to slow them down before they hit the bottom of the shaft, or the top of the elevator car, whichever came first.

The metal brake scraped the elevator cable, slowing them both, and sparks rained down on Bobbie Faye.

Catching her shirt on fire.

She instinctively let go of Trevor to beat out the fire.

“Noooo,” he shouted, and that’s when she remembered she was supposed to keep holding onto him, not the other way around.

She slipped from his grip, floundering away from him, spinning dizzily, dropping away from him faster as his speed decreased due to his makeshift brake. He released his hold on the brake, accelerating again . . . leaning . . . stretching . . . his fingertips brushing against the tiara, the bottom of the shaft racing up toward them.

The flashlight fell away from her, and for a brief moment, it illuminated his face, furious with concentration, every muscle taut as he reached for her. She stretched toward him, and she felt his hand, all corded sinews and roped muscles, yanking her toward him, applying the brake with his other hand, showering sparks across the top of the elevator car as they smashed into it. The thudding impact thundered up the elevator shaft as the blow killed the flashlight and the sparks in one swift second.

Roy was worried. Frankly, he was about to piss himself and probably should have asked for another bathroom break, but the thought of going back to the bathroom with The Mountain as an escort made certain body parts retract clean up to his neck. He was particularly worried since Eddie had lost all interest in the copious decorating magazines lying around the room and was sharpening his machete-sized knife. Again.

The Mountain kept looking through the discarded magazines, pointing out fancy doorknobs he’d like to collect.

Worst of all was Vincent.

When the phone rang, Roy jerked, reflex, and the ropes bit into his arms. Vincent answered and listened a moment, then seemed to somehow grow more pointy, all violent angles and sharp features.

“You had better,” he seethed into the phone, “make sure
our little Professor can’t tell that version of the story.” There was a heavy pause. “No, I don’t care what you have to do, or what it costs. Take care of it.”

He set the phone down and Roy felt very sorry for whoever the Professor was. Vincent still seemed to be seething, which couldn’t be a good sign.

“Twelve minutes left on the clock,” Eddie murmured to Vincent, who had returned his focus to the TV images of the burning shack and police activity covered by the news.

“Hey, Vincent,” The Mountain squeaked, “ain’t that the FBI going in that hole in the ground now?”

“Indeed, my boy, it is.” Vincent peered over to Roy. “Which is, sadly, very bad for you. The FBI have a very nasty habit of getting in the way, and your sister certainly won’t find the tiara for me if she’s locked up in some federal prison somewhere.”

“Do we have to wait the full time?” Eddie asked, testing the sharpness of his blade by holding up a magazine page and slicing it diagonally as easily as Roy usually convinced women to go out with him. “There’s still no sign of the GPS signal.”

Roy would have focused on that latter tidbit except for the fact that Eddie had stopped directly in front of him and had taken a rope and cleanly sliced it lengthways with one swift stroke. Roy tried hard not to picture that blade going through his neck.

“I’ll wait until the deadline,” Vincent said, and he turned to Roy, a particularly disturbing gleam glittering his dark eyes. Vincent’s focus shifted back to the TV, and his momentary bout of smiling, as frightening as it had been, was immediately replaced with a scarier grimace as the news replayed the footage of the police going into the trapdoor. The video zoomed in, capturing close-ups of the SWAT, then FBI, and Roy could feel Vincent’s displeasure ripple through the air.

The SWAT team pried the first steel door open and ran across a large room with blank monitors to a second door. A
deep, thudding sound of collision reverberated up from the bowels of the earth, and Cam was almost certain he’d heard Bobbie Faye’s shriek just a split second before.

SWAT redoubled their efforts to get through that last door.

“How much longer?” he asked the leader, Aaron.

“Not sure, sir. This one’s jammed, and it’s not a thin sheet of steel, that’s for sure. Our pry bars aren’t strong enough, and the battering ram won’t work. We may have to blow it.” Aaron looked around the room. “But I don’t know how strong this structure is, or how old. If we blow it wrong, we could collapse the whole room.” Then he tapped his foot. “And if we’re right, and there’s a dome beneath us, we could all drop straight through to the dome. Kill us and anybody underneath us.”

Every. Single. Thing. Hurt.

Which was probably the best result, she realized. At least she could feel all of the parts of her which were in agonizing pain and that had to mean she wasn’t dead, right? And hopefully, not paralyzed?

She shifted her weight, groping in the inky darkness to get her bearings and figure out where Trevor was. She pressed her elbow into the lumpy terrain beneath her and it grunted.

“Watch it,” Trevor growled.

“Uh, sorry.” She climbed off him, and onto something equally as lumpy. That flashlight couldn’t have gone far, and she groped around in the dark.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the flashlight.”

“Well, unless you put it down my pants while we were falling, I don’t think you’re going to find it there.”

“Smartass. You find it.”

He moved near her, brushing against her several times until there was a lot of clicking as he attempted (she guessed) to get the light on. When it finally illuminated, it flickered grudgingly as if it were not entirely sure it would continue doing them this favor after what they put it through. Trevor
aimed the flashlight down and they discovered they’d landed on lumpy sandbags.

“Are we on the floor of the shaft?” she asked, starting to feel a bit panicky. There was no obvious door. Any. Freaking. Where.

“This isn’t the floor,” Trevor said. “It’s sandbags. Or bags of . . . oh, yeah, it’s salt.”

“So, the elevator car?”

He dug through the sacks and hit something metal. He pounded it with the heel of his boot and they heard a hollow echo.

“Beneath us.”

Together they moved the sacks until they found the access door built into the top of the elevator car. He could not pry it open on his own, and Bobbie Faye grabbed a leftover gun part from the satchel, using it as a makeshift pry bar.

Trevor shone the flashlight inside, and the car was empty. They climbed through, landing with a hollow, metallic clank onto the floor of the elevator car. Trevor pried the doors open, and discovered the car hadn’t actually been resting on the ground level; there was only a half-a-car’s space open as they hovered about five feet above the floor.

Above them, small, concussive explosions rocked the shaft. Dust shook loose of the car and the opening and splattered down onto their heads.

“They’re blowing that door,” Trevor said.

“How the hell do you know that? Do you have X-ray vision or something?”

“It’s what I would do. C’mon, we’ve got to get out of this car before they get down that shaft.”

Trevor squatted and then hopped out of the car, dropping the five feet as smooth as a big cat. He glanced at his watch.

“Hey, four-and-a-half minutes. C’mon.”

She turned and scooted backwards on her belly, her feet protruding from the door. Her plan was to shimmy backwards until she could bend at the waist and then she’d just drop down.

Only. There was a great rumbling above her in the shaft. She froze as the elevator car shook.

And started to move.

Upwards.

With her still hanging halfway out.

Trevor shouted something, though she had no clue what, because she was losing her balance and she didn’t know how to push off from the position she was in, and then, all of a sudden, something yanked the hell out of the tiara still tied to her belt loop and she slid backwards. Out of the elevator car. Landing on Trevor. Again. In time to see the car whoosh upwards.

She looked beneath her, and it took a heartbeat to register what she was seeing: Trevor, holding the tiara in one hand, which had ripped off with her belt loop when he’d tugged on it.