Charmed and Dangerous (32 page)

He had grabbed for the tiara?

He had fucking
grabbed
the
tiara
.

“You bastard! You were waiting to grab this the first chance you got.”

“You’re insane. I was trying to grab
you
.”

“Oh, sure you were. Is that why you’ve been helping? To get to this thing because you know it’s valuable to someone?”

“Another second, the elevator would have sliced you in half. I was trying to keep you alive, you crazy nut job. How many heart attacks do you think a man can take in just one day, anyway?”

He rolled so as to remove her from his chest, and she jumped up, snatching the tiara away from him, waving it at him.

“You try double-crossing me, and I will personally hunt you down for the rest of your very short life.”

He checked his fancy diver’s watch, pressing a button on the side, which lit up the face a little better for her to see the time. She saw a timer counting backwards, and gulped.

“We’ve got maybe three minutes, Bobbie Faye. Let’s find that land line. You can yell at me later.”

Right.

Shit.

Trevor pulled out his gun, faced the electronics box beside the elevator, and without hesitation, shot it out.

“Should slow them down,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I hope Alex wasn’t lying about a back door.”

They hurried away from the elevator, looking for a likely place for a land line.

“It should be near here,” Trevor reasoned. “If there was trouble, or if they needed to evacuate for some reason, it would make sense to put a land line by the elevator.”

It took two of her very precious three minutes for them to find the phone. The salt fluff from the mine had covered it, blending it in with the wall around it. Bobbie Faye knocked the salt off, and held it to her ear.

Dead.

No dial tone.

We made the tragic mistake of asking Bobbie Faye to be the guest of honor at the blessing of the boats. It’s the only time in our history someone managed to sink a brand-new shrimp boat with just a bottle of champagne and a good strong arm swing.

—Father Albert O’Patrick

Eddie paced in front of Roy, flipping the machete-sized knife with a little too much glee. Roy was trying to remember the Our Father he was supposed to have learned in catechism, except that was probably when he’d been French-kissing Aimee Lynn in the confessional, which probably wasn’t the best of priorities, given his present circumstances.

“Two minutes, boss,” Eddie reminded Vincent, who seemed to be ignoring them, his rapt attention still glued to the TV screens.

Roy was pretty sure he ought to take it like a man, he ought to watch his killers right up to the fatal blow, except that he was also pretty sure no one was ever going to know that he took it like a man, and so he closed his eyes and replayed some of the high points in his life, which nicely coincided with the women he’d kissed. He’d expected his untimely death to be over a woman, just never over his sister.

He kept his eyes closed and sensed Eddie treading closer and closer with each pass around the room, and he could smell the man’s expensive aftershave and hear the rustle of his silk suit. Roy opened one eye and peeked at Eddie as the man rocked on his toes, excitement emanating from him as his lopsided face distorted further with an awful grin.

Roy heard a steady beeping, and knew that the timer was up, and braced himself, closing his eyes.

“Aw, damnit, no,” Eddie murmured. “Not fair.”

When the machete didn’t, in fact, slice him in half, Roy ventured another peek and saw Eddie, The Mountain, and Vincent perusing another TV monitor, which had gone unnoticed by Roy since it had appeared to be off.

“I’m afraid so,” Vincent said, though he looked quite happy.

“Uh, what’s that?” Roy asked.

“Your lifeline,” Eddie grumbled, flopping back into the leather chair, sheathing his machete, and looking particularly disgruntled.

“My huh?”

“It’s okay, Eddie,” Vincent smoothed. “I’ll let you redecorate the downstairs apartment.”

Eddie seemed to brighten a bit. “Fine. But you cannot veto the toile later like you did last time.”

“No, of course not.”

“Uh, lifeline?” Roy asked again, and the three men looked over at him.

“GPS signal,” The Mountain offered, and then flinched under Vincent’s glare. “What? Boss, it ain’t like he’s gonna live to tell about it, anyway.”

Vincent chuckled at that.

“GPS? Whose?”

“You may have been in too much shock earlier when I mentioned I had eyes on Bobbie Faye, dear boy,” Vincent said, his fingers steepled as he observed Roy.

“Yeah,” The Mountain chimed, a little too enthusiastically. “The guy what was s’posed to grab the tiara and off
your sister? He’s with her, man. Chasing it down. And this is his way of lettin’ us know he’s still after it.”

“Why wouldn’t he just keep it?”

“Easy, m’boy. He doesn’t know the value of the tiara, or why I want it. He doesn’t get paid until I have it in my hands, and believe me, he charges a very hefty fee. But then, he’s the best in the business.”

“He’d have to be, to survive your sister,” Eddie added, with just enough adoration in his voice to make Roy’s eyebrows go up.

Vincent laughed. “Oh, Eddie’s got a bit of a crush on our mercenary. Killers often appreciate the finesse of someone who’s at the top of the same game.”

“I do not have a crush,” Eddie griped, though it was clear to Roy that he did. “He’s just impressive.”

Roy digested this information. So this must be the guy in the truck from the bank surveillance tape. The guy Bobbie Faye must think is helping her, since she hadn’t shot him and run to the cops.

She didn’t know.

“Uh, how do you know he’s the one who triggered the GPS?” he asked, hoping to find some angle to use.

“Bionics,” The Mountain said.

“Biometrics,” Eddie corrected, and The Mountain pouted at him and slouched in his own leather chair. “The boss here spared no expense for the gizmos, kid. He doesn’t trust a mercenary any more than he’d trust his own mother.”

“He really hated his mother,” The Mountain offered, and Vincent’s glare was so ice cold, The Mountain seemed to shrivel a bit.

Eddie continued. “That particular GPS is programmed to only respond if it’s still attached to the mercenary’s skin. If he tries to pull a fast one and remove it, it would turn on an alarm here.”

Bobbie Faye didn’t know she was running with the very guy she ought to be running from. He was going to have to figure out a way to warn her. Something he could shout, fast,
when she called in, because he sure as hell knew he wouldn’t have time for a full explanation.
If
she called in.

Bobbie Faye stared at the dead phone in the salt dome. This could not be happening. It simply wasn’t going to happen this way. She then shone the flashlight all around the phone, as she and Trevor searched for anything to plug in, any wires to reconnect. It was an ancient model, its hard black enamel housing crusted with years of salt fluff, and was attached directly to a wall.

To a wall made of
salt
.

There was no way wires were going through that, and she aimed the light where the phone met the wall and found a small metal conduit pipe running from the phone upwards into the vast darkness that arched above them. The light reflected against the millions of facets of salt crystals making up the walls, and there was no way to see where the pipe eventually led. It looked perfectly fine.

Trevor took the flashlight and tried to find where the wiring went, while Bobbie Faye jiggled the cradle. Then banged it. Harder. Then harder, still holding the receiver in her other hand.

No no no no no, her head chanted, panic in three-quarter time, and before she realized what she was doing, she was using the receiver to beat the living hell out of the telephone, and she may have been shouting. Trevor turned back to her and took the phone from her death-grip, and once the echoes died down from her curses . . .

Lo, there was a dial tone.

“I think you scared it back to life.”

“It’s a talent.”

She dialed Roy’s number, white-knuckling the receiver, praying that they’d made it to the phone in time. She looked at Trevor’s timer while the phone rang. The countdown was holding steady at zeroes, and no telling exactly how long they’d been lodged there.

The kidnapper’s smooth baritone answered.

“I’ve got the tiara.”

“You’re late, Bobbie Faye.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“I don’t reward
late,
my dear girl.”

She heard Roy scream in the background, and it was all she could do to keep her knees from going out from under her.

“Now, bring me the tiara. You’re to go—”

“I want to talk to Roy. Or you don’t get the tiara.”

“You have too many other family members and friends for me to go after, Bobbie Faye, and you know it. Quit playing games out of your league.”

“Oh, sure. You want the tiara? If I don’t talk to Roy, and right now, then I’ll just wait here. The SWAT team’s likely to be here and arrest me in five or so minutes, and I’m sure they’ll take the tiara into evidence, and God only knows where it would end up from there. You have no idea how things go missing in Louisiana. Kidnapping anyone in my family wouldn’t do you one fucking bit of good then, asshole. Now,
let me talk to Roy
.”

There was a soft chuckle from the monster on the other end of the line, and Bobbie Faye shuddered.

“Bobbie Faye, dear girl, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy meeting you.”

Before she could respond, Roy came on the line with, “Watch out for—” and just as quickly, was gone again.

“That’s it,” the kidnapper said. “You’ve heard him. Now, I want you to meet me at 1601 Scenic Highway in Plaquemine. You have an hour.”

“An
hour
? Are you nuts? That’s at least two hours from here, if I even knew where the hell here
was
. I’m so far underground, I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get to the surface, much less Plaquemine.”

“Sounds like a personal problem to me.”

The line went immediately dead, and Bobbie Faye stared at the phone, unable to form a sentence.

One hour. There was no way, not even if she had the fastest
car on the planet and was already in said car, racing across the interstate. One hour.

“Where did he say to meet him?”

She’d almost forgotten Trevor was standing there, waiting.

“Plaquemine. We’ll never make it.”

“We’ll figure something out.”

Her brain was humming, her mind reeling, trying to clutch onto some sort of understanding and, instead, it fractured over and over, a kaleidoscope of morbid colors and shock and awe. She couldn’t understand this sort of monster; she’d dealt with all sorts of cruel jerks and idiots and people who were just mean or bitter or selfish or greedy (or all of the above), but never, in her entire stellar life of getting slammed by the world, had she ever come up against someone so purely capricious.

“When I get Roy back,” she said, “I am so going to stomp this guy’s ass.”

“If you want to get him, then we need a plan.”

“Sure. A plan. Because everything I’ve planned today has worked out so well.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, you’re alive and we have the tiara. Which is the key.”

“I still don’t know why he wants it.”

“Then maybe we should find out.”

He removed the phone she was still clutching, hung it up, and started to pull her into a hug, but she held back. Then she sighed, exhausted, and rested her head on his chest. He
had
grabbed for her and the tiara to save her. She certainly would have been cut in half if he hadn’t acted, right? He was here, he was helping. He was holding her, and not lecturing. That, alone, earned him a little grace in the doubt column. And it didn’t exactly hurt his case that her body was still reeling from that kiss. Not even the fear or adrenaline seemed to diminish it.

He rested his chin on her head. “I’ve never seen anyone go through this for anyone.” His low voice hummed through her body.

She shrugged. “It’s all I have to give.”

And it was. She had no money, she couldn’t buy her way out of the problem, and she sure as hell couldn’t count on the cops to help her.

“It’s a lot more than most people would give.”

She looked him in the eye. “They’re my family. They’re all I have. I’m not going to lose another one of them.”

She tried to brace against the fear, for him not to see it, but she knew he had. He folded her in close again, kneading her sore muscles almost as if they’d always fit together like this.

His voice hummed again. “We need to use whatever the tiara is for collateral. If he gets it, and we don’t know why he wants it, then he’s got all of the cards and there’s no reason to let any of us go alive.”

“But if we know what it’s worth, or what it’s for, then we can maybe control that,” she continued. “If it’s just valuable in and of itself, then that’s a little harder to handle. But if it’s really not worth anything . . . if it’s a link to something else . . .”

“We get the something else first. Then we hold the cards.”

“I don’t know how we’re going to do that, though, and still get to Plaquemine in time.”

“I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

She nodded, and he kneaded the knots in her shoulders.

“But if it’s just valuable for itself?” she asked, muffled in his shirt.

He set her back a little. “Then we give it to him. We use it to save your brother’s life. No doubt about that.”

“Okay.”

Behind them, they could hear small explosives echoing down the elevator shaft, and debris raining down the shaft afterwards, spilling out into the open doorway.

“That ex of yours has blown that door to the monitor room.” He stood there, looking around as if he was assessing odds at a racetrack. “It’s not going to take him long to get down that shaft with the SWAT rappelling gear.”

He grabbed her hand and they ran into the cavernous, pitch black dome, their flashlight illuminating only a few feet at a time.