Charmed and Dangerous (33 page)

No, honey, you can’t bring in Bobbie Faye as your show-and-tell exhibit for National Disaster Awareness week. I’d like to make it through this week alive.

—Ms. Pam Arnold, Geautraux Elementary’s third grade teacher

Ce Ce paced. Which wasn’t easy, given that she was pacing between the passed-out, drugged Social Services worker on one side, and Monique, whose answer to the day’s high level of anxiety was to start early on her own home remedy, a super-strong screwdriver.

She was on her fourth.

Monique was a few Froot Loops short of a bowl to start with, but four screwdrivers later, she had slid so far off the moral center, she had weebled her way to the level of unscrupulous, with a serious leaning toward debauchery.

“We could just drop her off, somewhere.”

Ce Ce was ignoring Monique’s suggestions. She needed to concentrate on the spell.

“You know, get her all dressed up, like a hooker! That’d ruin her reputation and she couldn’t do Bobbie Faye any harm.”

“We are not dressing her up like a hooker. Nobody would ever believe she’s a hooker, anyway.”

“Hunh, ’ave you seen those hookers down on Moreland?” Monique shuddered. “Honey, she’d pass for high class down there.”

Ce Ce glanced down at the currently snoring brick wall with smudged lipstick lying on her storeroom floor. Monique had a point.

She shook herself.

Do. Not. Go. There.

“Or, oh! I know! We could call in some exotic male dancers and get some really juicy photos!”

Ce Ce eyed her friend, whose bright red freckles now blended with the deepening ruddy complexion brought on by the vodka.

“I cannot believe they let you into the PTA.”

“They had to. I have four kids. They know I’m gonna be around a while so they elected me president.”

She whipped out her cell phone and started scrolling through the numbers, and Ce Ce reached over and took away the phone.

“We’re not hiring exotic dancers.”

“Oh, they do freebies. And they owe me.”

“I do not want to know why. Now hush. Let me think.”

One of the twins poked her head in the doorway.

“Ce Ce? I think we need to get hazard pay for today.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You have to do something with this matrix. It’s breakin’ down out here.”

“Honey, it can’t be that bad.”

“Ce Ce, you ain’t seen nothin’ ’til you’ve seen two eighty-year-olds trying to shag each other, almost fully dressed and using one of ’em’s walker for support. I think your matrix may have turned up their energy a little too high. We’re gonna have to do something, soon. I have had to chase three different couples out of the bathroom already, and twice the woman was Miss Rabalais.”

“Oh, Good Lord.”

They heard shouting just then, and Allison (oh, hell, Alicia), rushed back out of the room to tend to the problem.

Ce Ce had to come up with a plan. She knew the matrix had been helping. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she was certain the positive energy had kept Bobbie Faye alive so far. That girl had to be exhausted, all this running from the police to God-knows-what.

“Too bad you can’t just put a big ol’ whaahootzie spell on everyone. Make ’em all forget what egggsactly ’appened, ya know?”

Ce Ce eyed Monique who had, mysteriously, managed to fix herself another screwdriver. She had to have a flask around here somewhere. She shouldn’t listen to anything Monique suggested at this stage of the disaster.

Still, there was something to the idea. She’d done a few of the really powerful spells over the years. If she hadn’t seen the results with her own two eyes, she wouldn’t have believed the spells had worked, but she’d seen and done things that really ought not to be able to be done.

She stepped over the snoring social worker, and started perusing the titles of the dusty, ancient books on her shelves, finally pulling out one weathered, worn tome; she had to hold it close to the lamp to make out the handwritten words.

She knew this spell. It was a powerful protection spell. Scary powerful. The old woman who’d taught her warned her: precise measurements, exact timing. Not a spell to trifle with, and she had had such a difficult ordeal that last time controlling everything to the degree it needed controlling, it had stressed her own immune system completely. She’d had to go to bed for two days afterwards.

But it could work.

She started grabbing supplies.

Bobbie Faye and Trevor were in the eleventy-billionth tunnel, which only seemed to lead to more tunnels. They’d moved far enough away from the elevator that they could no longer hear the cutting torch making its way through the metal of the elevator car, but it wasn’t going to be long before Cam got through.

Cam would stop her. If he could, he’d put her in jail for years, just for the satisfaction.

If she had to, would she shoot him? Put him in the hospital in order to save Roy? And Stacey? Would she do it for Stacey?

She was a far better shot. He had SWAT with him, of course, but she knew she was a better shot than most of them. The whole idea made her queasy and flush with dread.

They entered a cavernous room, several football fields long, with the dome of the room arching so far above them their flashlight couldn’t penetrate the dark far enough to determine the height. Thousands and thousands of salt blocks stacked row after row complicated their perception of the room’s size. It was a mammoth crop of salt blocks growing upwards as if trying to reach for the nonexistent sky, all covered with mounds of salt fluff. Each block was a good three feet by three feet square, and most rows were three blocks wide. The light from their flashlight couldn’t pierce the well of shadows filling the length of the rows, so there was no telling exactly what was ahead, whether there was an exit and, if so, which direction. They could run through these rows for hours before finding the way out.

“We’ve got to go up,” Trevor said, aiming the flashlight and finding a row where the blocks weren’t as neatly stacked, giving him handholds.

“Up?” she said, wishing that tremor in her voice hadn’t just been there, hoping he wouldn’t notice it.

“Yeah, up. The dogs won’t track us up here, and we would be able to see where the exit is and go across the rows if we need to, instead of weaving around.”

“Up,” she said again, her fear squeaking out a bit. “I’m not real big on
up
. I’d kinda rather go around.”

“We don’t have time.”

He didn’t give her a chance to argue. He just started climbing.

“Great. I had to go and kidnap Spider-Man.”

She had no choice but to follow, knowing she was going to fall.

When they reached the summit, which was at least forty freaking feet off the floor, she stayed in a squat, hanging onto the top salt block while Trevor stood, calmly surveying the span of the room. Then he turned his attention to where she had a white-knuckled grip on the block, and he squatted down next to her.

“You realize you’re gonna have to let that go to get across the room.”

“Bastard.”

He laughed. “So the tough chick is afraid of something.”

“If I admit I am, can we go back down?”

“Not yet.” He pointed off to his right. “I think I see the exit over there. We’ve got to go across these rows to get out.” He turned back to her, clearly amused at her immobility.

“Quit enjoying this.”

“What? You hunkered down like a monkey? I wish I had a camera.”

“I hate you.”

“I think we have established that you don’t.”

“Hmph. I am seriously rethinking that position.”

He stood, holding out his hand. “C’mon, Bobbie Faye. We’re running out of time.”

She grabbed his hand and prayed. Fear hammered in her chest and her adrenaline pulsed so forcefully, it was as if it were turning her inside out, trying to move her against her will. She wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and discover that her arms and legs had shed their bones somewhere and she had melted into a noodle-soft pile of goo.

He glanced down and she followed the beam of his flashlight: their footprints were visible in the drifts of salt on the floor below. He scooped salt fluff piled in drifts across the top of the blocks and threw it down onto the tracks. Bobbie Faye stayed very still as he worked around her. When he was done and shone the flashlight down again, the tracks nearest where they had climbed were completely covered.

“Hey, you’re pretty good.”

“I’m damned good.”

“Obnoxious and modest, too.”

“Yep. C’mon.”

They ran down the row, then leapt onto the next row, just a few feet away, while clanging metal thumps and the muffled hum of men shouting and working echoed in the huge chamber, not nearly far enough behind them.

Sweat rolled down Cam’s arms as one of the SWAT guys used a small portable blowtorch to cut through the bottom of the lodged elevator car. He knew they weren’t far behind Bobbie Faye and Cormier. Every spark flying off the metal felt like seconds burning.

Aaron, the SWAT leader, tapped him on the shoulder. He was holding a hand up to press his earbud into his ear, and then leaned in to shout above the hiss of the torch.

“You gotta get back to the surface. Benoit’s got something urgent for you.”

Not. Fucking. Again. He knew he was
thisclose
to cuffing Bobbie Faye.
Thisclose
to keeping her from getting killed in the inevitable cross fire he sensed was coming; he felt it all the way to the cellular level of his bones.

“When you cut through, you lead the team on down. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”

He climbed the lead ropes with a jury-rigged pulley system to get to the surface and ran through the tunnels. When he got out of the tunnel where he could use the satellite phone, he found one of the SWAT members there, holding it out to him.

“What?” he barked into the phone.

“The Professor’s down.”

“What!”

“He’s not dead,” Benoit said, frustration slipping into his cadence, “but he’s not good.”

“How? I thought you put him in a cell by himself?”

“I did. I also made sure that he wasn’t even in a cell next to anyone. We found him on the floor, his lips blue, all sorts of symptoms the paramedic said looked like some kind of poison.”

“Who the hell’s been back there to see him?”

“Just Dellago, and they were in the general attorney area, not alone, and Vicari watched them, though he couldn’t hear what was said. The Professor seemed fine after Dellago left and hadn’t ingested anything, and there’s nothing yet to prove that Dellago had anything to do with it.”

“Oh, you can believe Dellago had something to do with it. I just can’t believe he’d be so bold to try to murder his client right under our noses. What have you got on surveillance?”

“Nothing helpful. We’re reviewing it. He was brought a lunch, since he hadn’t eaten all day, and water. He seemed fine, afterwards, and it was brought to him by Robineaux, and he’s damned trustworthy, so I don’t know what to think.”

“The Prof say anything?”

“He just kept saying
nap, nap, nap
and a bunch of gibberish that didn’t make sense.”

“Exactly what kind of gibberish?”

“Hell, Cam, I couldn’t understand it. Something about boats and naps and one time, I thought he said
gold,
but the paramedic said he was cold, so that’s probably what it was. When we moved him out through the lobby area, he raised up and said to me, ‘Not corn. Right?’ He said it three or four times.”

“Not corn? What the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. He had corn on the lunch plate, so maybe something was up with that, but he looked so . . . desperate. It was weird.”

“Okay, I need you to put a twenty-four-hour guard on his hospital room, and get someone we can trust at the hospital to review all meds going into that room, even if a doctor orders it. He’s got to know something pretty freaking big for them to hit him like this.”

Cam fumed. Then remembered what he’d originally sent Benoit to do, and his stomach knotted at the lack of news.

“Still no word on Stacey?” he asked.

“Dammit, no. I talked to Ce Ce a while, which was a complete dead end.”

“You sound like you think she was telling the truth.”

“Let’s just say she was highly motivated to cooperate.”

“I don’t want to know what that is about, do I?”

“Nope. I honestly don’t believe she knows anything. Bobbie Faye doesn’t confide in anyone, according to Ce Ce, especially when she’s got a problem. What about that best friend of hers, Nina?”

“I think Nina already gave us everything she knew. If she knows anything else that she doesn’t want to tell, you’ll never get it out of her, not even at gunpoint. That is one cold cookie.”

Cam heard shouts from the tunnel.

“Do we have a guard on the sister?”

“Yeah. Watts.”

“Good. And don’t let up on finding that kid.”

“Got it.”

Cam hustled back to the elevator shaft and shimmied down the ropes faster than was smart to do. As he arrived back in the elevator car the SWAT team were squeezing through the hole cut in the bottom panel of the box and then clipping onto the cables and sliding down to the bottom of the shaft. Cam used borrowed gear to follow them.

As he plummeted to the bottom, he knew Bobbie Faye was running on pure fear. She was afraid of heights, and, something she rarely told anyone, she was afraid of the dark. To have slid down that shaft—in the suffocating pitch black? It had probably scared the living hell out of her.

At the bottom of the shaft, the elevator doors were closed, and it took several minutes for SWAT to pry them open. They clipped on night goggles and swept the area for anything producing heat, and then shook their heads at Cam.

Off came the night goggles and on went their high-beam Mag-Lites. There were footprints in what looked like snow on the floor. He squatted, examining them. Dipped his finger into the fluff and smelled it.

Salt.

The dogs were gonna have a hard time with that.

He looked over the shoe prints. Definitely Bobbie Faye’s boots.

He heard a commotion as someone came through the elevator car behind him, and when he spun and shone the flashlight eye-level, he was greeted with a glare from the other man’s light.