Charmed and Dangerous (3 page)

“Well, kiddo, it’s kinda the same thing as scooping up water and throwing it out the door. It’s getting somebody outta trouble and Aunt Bobbie Faye ends up broke before it’s done.”

After settling Stacey to scoop out water at the front door, Bobbie Faye had the distinct impression that everything around the perimeter of the room sloped toward the center. She walked to the middle of the room, and sure enough, the water was deeper there—nearly four inches versus just two near the door. This little funhouse event definitely fell into the
oh fuck
category.

Bobbie Faye decided she wasn’t going to panic. Not at all. There would be no panicking in the Sumrall household. Which was just when she noticed the trailer starting to make creaking and groaning noises. So not helping with the whole not-panicking decision.

As the daylight ripened into actual morning, Bobbie Faye ventured outside to see if there was any other way to cut off
the water. It struck her that the trailer looked swollen, and with the floor sagging on sad little piers supporting the structure, it looked like a bloated PMS-ing woman forced to wear stilettos.

No word from Roy. No clue how to shut off the stupid valve. No choice.

She was going to have to call the emergency line at the water company. Which meant talking to Susannah. Who still blamed Bobbie Faye for the entire Louisiana State University hearing Susannah lose her virginity to the Assistant Dean of Accounting when Bobbie Faye inadvertently left the intercom system turned on in the Dean’s office during an extremely brief stint as a student-worker. (And really . . . who knew accountant types could be so loud?)

It didn’t help that Susannah’s parents were faculty and heard everything firsthand.

But this was a certified emergency, and Susannah was just going to have to dispatch someone.

The larger of the two sets of Muscles, which Roy had silently nicknamed The Mountain, zip-tied Roy’s hands behind his back and then shoved him into the rear seat of an all-black Town Car. By the time they had hit the interstate heading east, Roy’s arms ached, his nose itched, and he was starting to think these guys might be worse news than pissing off Bobbie Faye.

He leaned forward a little, scanning from Eddie, who was driving, to The Mountain, whose stomach was growling in the passenger seat.

“Is this about Dora?”

Neither of the men answered.

It was unlikely; Jimmy was a roughneck, but he was also pretty straightforward, and if he had suspected Roy of boinking Dora, Jimmy wouldn’t have wasted good money on goons. He’d have just beat the hell out of him.

“Ellen?” No answer. “Or . . . Vickie? Thelma?”

Still nothing.

Maybe it was the thousand bucks Roy owed Alex after dodging out of the last poker game. But . . . as much as Alex might want to kill him, Roy knew Alex didn’t want to have to deal with Bobbie Faye again. Ever. And hurting Roy would mean lots of Bobbie Faye in Alex’s face. The other guys at the poker table had made Roy promise not to mention Bobbie Faye any more because every time he did, Alex twitched, and nobody wanted a gunrunner twitchy.

As Eddie and The Mountain drove Roy toward Baton Rouge, Roy pondered his ever-growing list of ex-girlfriends and their husbands who might want him hurt (or a little bit dead) if they’d been able to find him, but he couldn’t see any of them going to this much trouble and expense when a good rifle and a bateau were enough to drop him to the bottom of some little-known bayou.

Bobbie Faye grabbed her cordless phone and dialed the water company’s emergency number.

When Susannah heard Bobbie Faye’s voice, she hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, Bobbie Faye managed to force her to stay on the line and listen to the problem.

Susannah laughed.

And called the local radio station.

When she finally got back on the line, the DJ could be heard on the three-way conversation as he broadcast her latest disaster, and Bobbie Faye knew Susannah was enjoying her revenge. To make it even more fun, Susannah’s big helpful advice to Bobbie Faye was to shut off the water at the valve.

“Well, duh. I did everything but sacrifice chickens to get it to budge. If God Himself tried to turn it, He’d get an inferiority complex.”

“Fine,” Susannah said, a bit too happily. “I’ll send someone out. They’ll be there sometime between noon and three.”

“I can’t
wait
until three for someone to show up. You ever see
Titanic
? Nothing.
Nothing
compared to this, Susannah.
And I can’t turn off the main valve—there’s a lock on it and the lot manager is gone for the wee—”

Click.

She looked at the dead phone and then at the base unit perched on the arm of her more-shabby-than-chic sofa when it struck her that the lamp was off. And the hall light. She growled her way past Stacey, who had not only ceased to scoop out water, but had somehow found not one, but two, frogs, and was letting them swim around the living room.

Something clinked and rattled outside on the side of her trailer.

She sloshed her way through the sagging living room to her front door, pulling the wet and now clingy PJs away from her body, knowing she ranked skankier than a nutria straight out of a mud pit, but if it was who she suspected, she didn’t have time to waste changing into clothes. Sure enough, there on the gravel drive, facing out, its engine running for a fast getaway, was a Gulf South Electric Utilities truck.

She hurtled down the stairs and around to the electric meter. The utilities worker saw her just as he clipped the red tag-wire onto the metal box, preventing her from rigging her meter back on when he left. He cringed as she marched toward him, using his clipboard to shield his face, then his groin (then his face, then his groin; he finally chose his groin).

“Good choice. Which is not going to help you one little bit to keep that”—she gestured—“area. Safe. If you don’t turn my electricity back on.”

Before she could launch an actual attack, he looked at her and then blushed, thoroughly, from his oversized collarbone to the tips of his rather large and now crimson ears. Then, pointedly gazing away from her, he thrust a letter into her hands.

“I’m sorry, Miss Bobbie Faye. But your check bounced.”

She snatched it, read, and fumed.

“How in the hell am I supposed to come up with a deposit of two hundred and fifty bucks when I obviously couldn’t
come up with one-freakin’-eighty-seven for the bill in the first place?”

He had inched a step back with every word she spoke, still not meeting her eyes. “I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t do this to you for anything in the world, you being the Contraband Days Queen an’ all, but, you know, it’s my job. They would fire me.”

“You work for dickheads, you know that? I can’t get this money until later, but I’ve got to have the electricity on so I can borrow Nina’s wet-vac to suck up the whole freaking lake in there.” She gestured at the trailer and he gaped a moment at the small trickle of water leaking from one of the bottom seams. “See that? You gotta cut me some slack here. I’m supposed to be at the festival’s starting ceremony in just a couple of hours!”

“I . . . I just can’t. I’m really sorry!” He turned and fled, climbing into his truck before Bobbie Faye could catch up.

“Coward!” she yelled as he peeled out. “Come back here and fight like a
man
!”

She examined the bill he’d handed her and made a mental list of items she might be able to pawn to cover it, then remembered she’d already pawned them to help pay for her sister’s stay for her “sobriety mummification” (Lori Ann was ever the positive thinker) in a decent detox addiction center.

Bobbie Faye stood in front of her trailer, water dribbling from the front door. The good news was, as bad as things were, at least they couldn’t get any worse.

Roy’s stomach dropped a little when the Town Car veered into the industrial heart of Baton Rouge, where the black-water Intercoastal Canal intersected the roiling Mississippi River. They parked behind a plain brown stucco building which squatted with all the glamour of a working-class hooker, bland and scarred and ignored by most of the city passing by. Cast-off broken-down desks and chairs, many from the sixties, were piled in haphazard stacks, filling the lobby, and
it looked more like a government-surplus auction center than an office space. The acrid scent of stale body odor mixed with tobacco clung to the stained veneered walls of the ancient elevator.

They stepped out into the tenth floor, where a utilitarian sitting area was lined with rickety metal chairs listing in rows. Eddie didn’t bother to press the call button beside a door whose green paint was chipped and mottled and looked as though it had leprosy; instead, he reached below the last broken chair to a lever. A hidden panel beside a dusty plastic ficus swung open. Roy thought that might be a big bloodstain under the ficus, but he wasn’t about to ask. His balls retracted a little (
only
a little) when they stepped into the room beyond the leprosy door. His adrenaline jumped and his sense of balance wobbled as though he’d stepped through some sort of portal. A line of sweat beaded just above his collar and the air frozen in his chest acted like it hadn’t a clue how to escape back out again.

This might be something I can’t talk my way out of.

The foyer sported an impressive imported rug, rich in honeys, golds, and russets. Sculptures perched on granite pedestals and were specially lit from above. There were fancy paintings on the wall, and Roy started wondering just who in the world he had screwed whose dad might have been in the Mafia. This place reeked of money, and not the kind the IRS knew anything about.

They walked through the foyer and into an even more sumptuous office. A thick blue tarp covered yet another expensive rug. Roy looked from the tarp to Eddie.

“Please tell me that’s ’cuz y’all have a roof leak.”

The Mountain clocked him on the side of his head and Roy crashed down on the tarp, jamming his shoulders when they caught the brunt of his weight, sending waves of pain through to his toes and back again. Nausea spun through his stomach and swam upwards, and then The Mountain yanked him up, planted a fist into his face, and this time when Roy hit the tarp—well, once the black dots cleared from his
eyes—he saw the toe of an expensive wingtip inches from his face.

“Tie him in the chair, boys,” a baritone voice purred from somewhere above the wingtips. “We have a phone call to make.” He leaned over Roy, his face looming in Roy’s clouding vision. “You’d better hope your sister’s home, dear boy.”

Roy didn’t remember blacking out, but coming to was far more painful than anything he’d experienced after a drinking binge, and pretty much everything on his right side was fuzzy and dim.

He was tied to a chair and positioned in the middle of that blue tarp. The ropes cut into his arms.

Something . . . someone asked him something. Slowly, noise seeped in. They wanted something Bobbie Faye had.

“I . . . uh. Why’n’t you ask Bobbie Faye for it?” he slurred, squinting through hazy vision in one eye (the other swollen shut) until the angular face of a well-dressed man came into focus. Roy guessed him to be mid-forties, maybe, and oddly happy. He wore a flawless silk suit, perfectly tailored, which almost managed to give him an appearance of sanity and stability.

He introduced himself as Vincent.

“You see, dear boy,” Vincent said, “we don’t want to kidnap a Contraband Days Queen. There would be far far too many questions, especially with her associations with the police. And your niece? Cute little blond-haired five-year-olds get the Amber Alert, and the country would pay attention. As a last resort?
Yes
. However,
you
?” Vincent leaned down, filling Roy’s blurry vision. “You are expendable. You’re always disappearing, hiding out from one girlfriend or another. No one will even believe you’re missing until days later, when it no longer matters to us.”

Roy noted the playful tone, the warm smile, and pondered how he was going to charm Vincent. Everything about the man struck Roy as pointy: a chin sharpened to a razor edge, angular eyes, pinched nose, a slash of a mouth, and
thin, clothes-hanger elbows. Realizing it was unlikely Vincent would know his way around a John Deere backhoe didn’t cheer Roy up like it usually did. Vincent might be a challenge.

Bobbie Faye approached the steps leading to her front door at the same moment Stacey was dragging something not quite above water level toward the trailer door.

“Your purse was ringing.”

“Stacey! For crying out loud.”

Bobbie Faye jogged up the steps, dug into the damp purse for a cell phone, and scanned the last caller’s ID through the condensation forming on the cell’s small screen. Roy’s name and number flashed, and Bobbie Faye resisted the urge to project her frustration with him onto the phone by squeezing the phone to death. She glanced back at her soaking wet niece splashing and laughing just inside the door.

“Stacey, honey, go find something dry you can wear to school and bring it here.” As Stacey scampered back to her room, Bobbie Faye hit the dial-back feature and got Roy’s voice mail.

“Damnit, Roy, it looks like the Mississippi River just decided to detour through my trailer. You better call me back or I’m going to rip your head clean from your shoulders. You got that?”

She snapped the phone off and steamed. It wasn’t humanly possible to be any more frustrated until she glanced down and made a startling discovery: the silly glow-in-the-dark PJs she’d bought just to make herself laugh were transparent when wet. She thought back to the electricity guy’s blush and realized she’d flashed him. Completely. She wasn’t entirely sure which was worse—to have exposed herself, or to have done it with yellow and pink see-through hippos over her boobs. She would have prayed for a lightning bolt to put her out of her misery, but with the way her luck was running, it wouldn’t kill her, just maim her and give her bad hair for the rest of her life.

Her cell phone rang again and she snatched it open. “Roy.
You
asshat
. I don’t care what bottle blonde or redhead you’re with, if you’re not over here in five minutes—”