Charmed and Dangerous (9 page)

Trevor whipped the wheel, slamming her against him again, knocking the breath from her for a moment. Maybe he was doing it on purpose. Sadistic bastard was enjoying it. Though he had an arm across her to hold her steady. And damn, that arm was like a band of steel. Impressive. As he steadied her, she forgot about Cam behind her. Or, more like, chose denial, because no way could her luck really be that bad.

When Bobbie Faye crashed against the passenger side of the truck, Cam fought the urge to identify with the driver.

The scanner crackled with static as Jason radioed him.

“I’ve got the pilot patched in to you.”

Cam grabbed his mic and asked, “Who’s up there?”

“Allen,” the pilot answered.

“You’ve got a good sight on the truck?”

“Yep,” he said. One word answer. Obviously not a Southerner.

“Could you elaborate a little for me here?” Cam said, spinning his steering wheel to avoid a little grandma in a Volvo who was determined to cross the intersection in the middle of the chase. “I don’t exactly have a periscope in this thing.”

“Gotcha,” Allen answered. “Looks like the red truck’s winding its way toward . . . wait a minute. There’s a white . . . maybe a Saab? I’m not sure, but it’s maneuvering like mad. I think it’s trying to get out of the jam.”

“Describe the Saab’s driver.”

“Early twenties. Glasses. He keeps looking toward the red truck, from what I can see.”

Just then, the red truck swerved hard again and Cam saw Bobbie Faye slam against the dash. It would be just like Bobbie Faye to not put on her seat belt. How many times had he reminded her? Damn freaking woman.

The driver seemed to be shouting at Bobbie Faye, and he was pointing emphatically to the passenger side. Cam watched in awe as Bobbie Faye slid over to the passenger side and actually put her seat belt on.

Damn. He was starting to really like this guy.

Or maybe hate him.

He’d decide later.

“Hey,” the helicopter pilot cut in, “the Saab’s broken loose of the crowd. And the truck’s jumping through the opening—looks like the truck’s chasing the Saab.”

Cam focused on the chaos of the crowd as he followed the truck through its opening, zigzagging to avoid angry people piling out of cars. Wrecked floats spilled flowers and tissue paper in a riot of colors all over the road. A couple of
the cops behind him would handle the rowdy crowd. Still, he would almost trade places with them to have someone else handling the impending disaster that was Bobbie Faye.

On days like this, he wished he’d taken the job in Austin. A very nice city, very nice people, and no Bobbie Faye. Instead, he’d come home from a successful college football career, a local hero, happy to be back in his hometown, loving the spicy food, his good-natured people with their own unique customs.

Except that he woke up some mornings with a heavy sense of dread on his chest, and he couldn’t quite pinpoint why. It didn’t help that most of those mornings coincided with a Bobbie Faye disaster, which had already cost him two promotions.

He didn’t
want
the sixth sense of knowing when to predict a Bobbie Faye crisis. He didn’t want a single fucking thing to do with the woman, specifically since their dating had ended so spectacularly badly. Not that he thought about it. He didn’t (much). Plain and simple, she was a catastrophe that he had to prepare for, just like any other. He would remain professional. Detached.

“They’re turning,” the helicopter pilot said, breaking into his reverie. “McCaffery Road. I’m going to lose them under those trees.”

Cam understood: McCaffrey was a curvy road that wound beneath dozens of hundred-year-old live oak trees whose branches intermingled above the road to form a complete canopy. The trees followed the undulating bank of Lake Prien, and the road sometimes double-backed on itself in sharp turns. He’d worked more accidents on this one road than he cared to remember. And the helicopter would never be able to track them there.

The good news, though, was that the trees ended just before the road crossed the bridge and entered the marina. There was nowhere for Bobbie Faye to go.

“I’m flying ahead to the bridge,” the pilot said and Cam heard the helicopter veer away. “We’ll watch for them to come out on the other end.”

Cam kept behind the truck, worrying about the way the driver kept accelerating into the curves—impressed when the truck didn’t flip over in the sharp turns. Just what in the hell had Bobbie Faye gotten herself into
this
time?

The Saab sped up in one longish curve, at least a half-mile ahead, racing into the turns far less expertly, cutting across the lane in order to handle the turn at such a high speed. Cam winced, panic burning his gut. The kid driving wasn’t considering the fact that there just might be oncoming traffic in that lane in the curve. Cam had backed as far off as he could so he wouldn’t intimidate them into rushing and losing control. Even the driver of the truck had slowed a bit, though from the little Cam could see of Bobbie Faye, she was leaning forward, pushing against the dash as if that would make the truck speed up.

Bobbie Faye heard the noise from up ahead well before they were out of the curve, and she knew all the way to her bones that this was not going to be good. The air stuttered with the staccato drumming of an eighteen-wheeler employing its Jake Brake, a most definite non-reassuring sound.

As they ramped out of the curve, the awfulness of what was happening seared into Bobbie Faye, and the animal part of her brain saturated her body with a shot of
get the hell out of here
adrenaline. The eighteen-wheeler, hauling one enormous metal oil-rig pipe, had careened off the road to their left in order to miss colliding with the Saab, which was in his lane . . . and now to avoid hitting the oak trees, the trucker had yanked the truck back toward the road . . . over-compensating, crossing the double-yellow line, only to see them in his path in that singular moment.

She could see the trucker’s face, the absolute terror and anger of it all as he dodged away from them and Trevor cut to their right. But there was only so far each of them could go without ramming the oak trees, and that’s when Bobbie Faye’s world crawled into agonizingly slow motion:

The Saab passing the back end of the eighteen-wheeler’s flatbed trailer . . .

The eighteen-wheeler starting to jackknife, with the trailer end closing in on them . . .

Just as the metal pipe as large as Trevor’s truck broke free of the bindings on the back of the eighteen-wheeler’s trailer and rolled off.

It seemed like it hung forever in that second just before it hit the road. Her gut knew that if Trevor kept going forward, they would be crushed under the pipe, if he didn’t keep going forward, they would be crushed by the eighteen-wheeler’s cab, and if he tried to go to the right, the pipe would sandwich them against the oak trees.

Bobbie Faye knew they were dead.

She wouldn’t be able to get to the tiara. Or Roy.

And then she grasped that she had hijacked a psychotic, because he was aiming the truck
at
the rolling pipe. At the opening.

There may have been screaming.

Bobbie Faye thought it might be coming from her, but she was powerless to stop it as they shot into the pipe, speeding forward for a few feet until there was metal screeching against metal, whiplash as their sudden forward momentum snapped to a complete stop and then
whoosh,
the whole world spun crazily out of control as the truck continued rolling with the pipe. They dangled upside down, hanging by seat belts, then upright, then over, then upright, then over, and
wham
. They slammed into something.

And kept rolling.

Oh, it must be the trees, we’ve mowed down the beautiful oak trees,
Bobbie Faye thought, realizing she was having a quiet, analytical thought right before dying, how very very strange.

The pipe kept spinning, picking up speed, and then for a brief second, the truck and pipe felt weightless. Airborne.

And then
kaplunsh
. There was a deafening sucking sound as water from the lake rushed into both ends of the pipe. She grabbed her gun from the floorboard as water gurgled into the truck from the bullet hole she’d put there and now water was covering her boots and
whose stupid idea was it to
shoot the truck anyway
? She jerked back up to see the level of water rising fast on the outside of the truck, over the hood and then against the windshield, water pouring in through the firewall in the dash. The doors couldn’t open, wedged as the truck was against the interior of the metal pipe.

Trevor shook her and he was saying something . . . she could see his lips moving, but there was all that damned
shrieking
and if that didn’t stop, she was going to have to
kill someone soon,
and he shook her harder and kept mouthing something and why didn’t he just
speak up
for crying out loud and then he slapped her and she focused every atom in her body into rage aimed at him.

Then she realized the shrieking had stopped.

He grinned, way too smug for a split second there, and she decided she might as well have the satisfaction of shooting him since she was probably going to drown anyway.

We separate our male clients into four categories: single, divorced, widowed, and those who survived Bobbie Faye. That last group is usually so shell-shocked, we don’t let them date through our service until they’ve had counseling and can form complete sentences again.

—Christina Donatelli, owner of Bayou Dating Service, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Bobbie Faye had barely turned toward him when Trevor took her gun—so quickly, she hadn’t even known he’d done it until he waved it at her.

“You can decide to shoot me later.”

“Oh, sure, make promises you won’t have to keep after I’ve drowned already,” she said, hugging herself, trying to sustain the snark in order to fake the calm while the water rushed into the truck and crept up her calves. She
was
calm, damnit. Of course she was calm. She was so one-with-the-freaking-calm that after she had drowned, they were going to call her St. Bobbie Faye, Patron Saint of the Calm People. There was a big drawback to that, because calm people don’t really need any help and only the crazies would be haranguing her in the afterlife. Fuck.

Trevor snapped his fingers in front of her face and she lasered a glare at him.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked, leaning past her, grabbing the flashlight from his glove box.

“I’m a little busy working out my afterlife schedule, thank you very much.”

“Sorry to interrupt.” He motioned toward the back window. “Now, I’m going to shoot it on ‘three.’ ”

“But the front window’s bigger. Why not go that way?”

“I just
told
you. It’s shatterproof glass. Can you hold your breath long enough to swim to the surface?”

His doubtful expression annoyed the crap out of her. She threw her shoulders back, defiant. “Of course I can. I took P.E. I can be athletic.”

“Yeah, somehow I think the Olympics are safe from you.” He ignored her glare. “On two, take a deep breath. The water will rush in fast.”

He counted, one finger up, then two (they took deep breaths), then three and
bam bam bam bam
. Four shots across the back window. The explosion of sound in the confined space startled Bobbie Faye, and she nearly forgot to hold her breath as water poured in.

While she looped her purse over her head, Trevor used the flashlight to break out the rest of the window and rake shards of broken glass out of the empty window casement. He swam through first. Panic jolted her and the metallic taste of adrenaline saturated her mouth as she watched his feet disappear out of the window into the inky blackness cast by the pipe and muddy lake. She hated to admit she felt relief when she saw him crouch in the truck bed and reach back to help her through the truck window. They kicked away from the pipe and swam toward what Bobbie Faye hoped was the lake bank opposite from where the police were no doubt gathered.

It was a long freaking way to the surface, she thought as she swam through the cold, dark, primordial soup that was Lake Prien, and wondered if Trevor was taking the long way just for spite. She brushed past scary giant catfish near the bottom of the lake, and then a little higher the bream and sacalait and bass darted away from her. The water above her
head seemed marginally lighter with daylight trying (and nearly failing) to shimmer into this murky world. Bobbie Faye gritted her teeth, fighting to hold her breath.

How the hell did she
get
into these things, anyway? When she woke up that morning, she was expecting a normal day. Well, a fun day of cutting the ribbon for the opening ceremony to the Contraband Days Festival and waving and taking pictures with a billion babies and sticky-fingered pirate-costumed kids who were always so excited to be at the coolest festival on the planet.

Her lungs hurt. There was this odd constriction across her chest and she had to keep reminding herself to fight that sensation by not breathing. Water, bad. She couldn’t really see Trevor in the murkiness and what if they were going the wrong direction?

She needed oxygen. She needed to breathe. The water pressed in around her, a heavy blanket of cold and dark. Bobbie Faye followed behind Trevor, losing momentum. Dizzy. And fuzzy. How did the world get fuzzy? And what was it she was supposed to be doing with her arms again?

Water rippled against her as Trevor slowed down, grabbed her hand, tugging hard to hurry her through the last few feet of watery prison. They surfaced behind one of the many fallen rotting trees which sufficiently hid them from the opposite bank.

Bobbie Faye wheezed for air, sucking it in and sputtering. Trevor helped hold her afloat until she could breathe normally again, which surprised her and annoyed her all at once, because he really
shouldn’t
be being nice right now, given the fact that his truck was at the bottom of this very lake. It worried her, when someone was unexpectedly kind. She eyed him, wondering if he was being helpful just to have the pleasure of turning her in to the police.