Guns and Roses (65 page)

“Um, yeah,” Nina said, her eyes on Bobbie Faye, “when that’s what everyone wants.”

Bobbie Faye ignored Nina and followed Father Joshua into the little room, a sort of classy souvenir sales area; they stepped forward to the counter he’d indicated, looking at the paperwork he had laid out there. He handed her a pen and she bent to read what turned out to be a note. It said:

Trevor: I’ve been kidnapped. Do what they say or I die.

And before she could spin around and say a single word, Father Josh or whatever his name was had a gun shoved against her back.

“I’d just as soon kill you,” he said, “but the others think you’ll be useful for a little while. Make no mistake—you being dead works just fine for me, so if I were you, I’d shut up and not cause a scene. Now, sign that paper.”

She hesitated, assessing the room, thinking through the strategy of trying to take on an armed gunman in her freaking wedding dress in a small, cramped room. The odds weren’t great.

“My partner has a gun trained on your Maid of Honor, by the way. He’s not a great shot, but from ten feet, he can’t miss. She doesn’t even realize he’s there. She’ll never know what hit her, if you make the first sound.”

She tried to think of any furniture or doors into the vestibule that were large enough to hide a man, and frankly, couldn’t remember. She’d been thinking of the monstrosity of the details of this wedding, the stupid pipers, everything else that made her nervous and sad and she hadn’t paid attention when they’d first walked into the church. He shoved the gun harder and she signed the note.

“Move,” the fake priest said to her. “Through that door,” he pointed, and that’s when she realized that the ornate paneling along the wall had a slight crack in it—a hidden paneled door.

“What do you want?” she asked him and he laughed.

“Money, princess. Lots and lots of money.”

He shoved her through the door, into the hands of another gunman, who promptly yanked her in front of him, stepped on the hem of her beautiful dress and tore it.

She was going to kill someone. Soon.

Then he pushed her toward a set of stairs that went
down
. In New Orleans. Below the level of the river just across the square outside.

This could not be a good sign.

~*~

Nina peeked into the church and suppressed a laugh; no need to freak Bobbie Faye out just yet, but Ce Ce and Monique had brought some sort of smoking… lantern… into the church and had proceeded to horrify everyone already sitting in a pew by dancing up and down the aisles, doing squats and lunges and twirls on one foot, while singing. There was no priest inside as yet, which, perhaps, was the only thing that had gone well thus far. It would be a bad thing to have to do CPR on the priests, or, worse, kill one of sheer fright.

“Ah, Miss Nina?” Father Joshua asked from the doorway where he and Bobbie Faye had entered a couple of minutes before, and she turned, surprised she didn’t see Bobbie Faye exiting. “There seems to be some confusion on Miss Sumrall’s part about some of these questions she has to answer and Mr. Cormier isn’t answering his phone. He probably isn’t getting service here—it’s so iffy, with this construction,” he said, pointing at the forty-foot tall ceilings. Then he paused, turned to Bobbie Faye, though Nina couldn’t see her. He turned back to Nina. “She wanted me to ask if you’d mind finding him and asking him to call her?”

“Sure,” Nina said, and the priest nodded his thanks and smiled so beautifully, it was a shame the man was a priest. As he went back into the room, she watched and turned to radio Trevor, who’d been worried traditional phone lines might not work in this old building and had equipped everyone with scarily effective miniscule microphones and earbuds. Paranoid marrying Crazy, Nina thought and laughed. At least their lives would never be dull.

~*~

Andrea waited patiently in the living room of the hotel room; she’d bought the entire hotel to have all of her people nearby. Henry, her butler, was off seeing to the import of high quality linens and other necessities she had found wanting in the hotel’s amenities. The place would be renovated, of course, and turned into a small five-star boutique hotel—Cormi-Co might as well make a profit from her acquisition.

“Drea,” Deronda said as she entered a room with a file in her hand, skimming over a report, “it’s not good.”

“What you found on that woman wasn’t good?”

“No. What we found was nothing. Our plan of finding something incriminating or humiliating enough to stop this wedding isn’t going to happen. The wedding is set to start in just a few minutes, and I’m looking through this final report from the PIs we put on the case…” She kept skimming through more pages. “And they’ve got nothing. Well, there’s a lot of stuff, but she hasn’t made a secret of
anything
she’s done.” Deronda looked up from the paperwork, her eyebrow raised, waiting for Andrea’s decision.

She had hoped Plan A would’ve done the job, but she hadn’t counted on it. She’d put a Plan B and even a fall back Plan C into play, just in case. Plan C—worst case scenario, and it was going to generate some negative press, should she have to use it, but she had already figured out a PR campaign that would paint her as the loving-but-devastated mother at having to make the choice she might now have to make. But she’d made sacrifices before. Many. She’d taken this company from a small-town operation into the major leagues, and that sort of warfare taught a person when to take risks and when to hold the fort. Right now, she had to take this risk, because there was no one else she knew who could handle the company like Trevor.

“Make sure the attorneys are on stand by and have the medical team prepped for my signal should we need Plan C.”

Deronda nodded and left. Andrea watched the clock as she went through her mental checklist of all the things she needed to do: other acquisitions, dealing with the takeover attempt, trying to uncover who was at the bottom of it, handling the lawsuit from some nitwit entrepreneur claiming Cormi-Co stole his patented software, handling the multi-million-in-cost-thus-far of the newest R&D into the next wave of smart devices—ones keyed to your own thumbprint, couldn’t be stolen or hijacked, and integrated everything from your computer to your car to your home. Biotech, the next generation—

—her cell rang and she snatched it up.

“Ms. Cormier?”

“Yes.”

“We have made the arrangements we discussed earlier,” a smooth male voice said, practically purring. “We have Ms. Sumrall.”

Ah. Plan B. She might not need Plan C after all.

“Good. I reward efficiency. You will notify me when she’s out of the country with that ex of hers, correct?” Finally. She felt a sense of relief. That woman would go missing and it would look as if she’d gotten cold feet and ran off. “I want her gone. You’re certain this Alex person will do the job?”

“Of course. No worries there—he loathes her. That’s why we sought him out. Plus, as a smuggler, he’s an asset to what we’re doing. Win-win.”

“Excellent. If there’s nothing else, then I expect to hear, by midnight, that you’re finished.”

“There is one other thing.”

“Oh?”

“It turns out that Alex has no love lost for your son, as well. He offered a sizeable discount if we could deliver both people to him, when he heard our plan. It occurred to us, being good businessmen, that there should be a bonus: we will leave your son alone, in exchange for a larger payment, or we can take him and you’ll pay even more, later.”

Andrea paused, cold with rage. “You think you’re going to double-cross me, kidnap my
son,
and have me pay you?”

“Certainly. It seems to be smart business, don’t you think, to maximize one’s investment. And we’ve invested a considerable amount of effort this week to put this into place. I expect to benefit from that. You won’t miss the money, you’ll benefit directly, and the entire exit strategy is set up to completely confirm your version of events. Set up
meticulously
, so that your son never doubts the veracity of his fiancée leaving with a previous lover, in spite of whatever she may have told him privately. That kind of detail—and proof—is worth the extra you’ll pay.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she said, furious. “If you expect to double-cross me and get away with it, you’d better think again.”

“Really? Well, here’s the thing: we have you on tape from our previous discussion, as well as this one. Any good DA would be able to prosecute you and, since they won’t be able to find us, you’ll go to jail and we’ll be fine. We’ll still have the original item we came after. So all around, we’re good here. You, on the other hand, won’t be. So you can either pay double—at the prearranged time and place—or tomorrow’s very sad headlines are going to be about a tragic murder-suicide of a beautiful young bride and her former FBI groom who just could not handle her cheating on him with her gun-runner ex. It’ll be messy, and we’ll send the tapes to the FBI, so they’ll get you for conspiracy, if nothing else. Be where you’re supposed to be, bring the bonds—untraceable—and don’t be late. I abhor tardiness.”

He hung up and Andrea stared at the phone.

It was that woman’s fault for bringing her to this. If she hadn’t already devised a plan to get rid of her, she’d have her killed. That woman was
entirely
too much trouble for one person.

~*~

It was insulting, is what it was, Bobbie Faye fumed. She’d tromped down a long stairway, having to hold up her gown to keep from tripping, knowing it was getting grimier by the second rubbing against the old, moldered brick walls beneath the grand Cathedral. Clearly, this passage led to some sort of storage room for the priests and God only knew what else—some of it looked to have been there from back in the Underground Railroad days. Trevor had said this church had been here since the 1700s, but it never occurred to her that there was something
underneath
a church that was, essentially, on a parcel of land that sat below sea level. The levees barely kept the river out of the Quarter. How any of this wasn’t flooded with groundwater was a flat-out miracle.

But that wasn’t the insulting part. And it wasn’t just that they’d kidnapped her and ruined her wedding.
No
. They had tied her up. With a soft handkerchief. With her hands in front of her. If she sneezed, the stupid handkerchief would come untied. And that? That was just fucking
disgustingly
insulting. She was having to sit completely still so she’d stay tied up.

The idiots had looked at her in her beautiful wedding dress and had immediately dismissed her as a threat. They’d led her through that stupid storage room, through a maze of tunnels, and into this dank, little room that sat, she grasped from their conversation, just beneath Pirate’s Alley.

Named for Jean Lafitte. Her great-great-great-great-she-lost-track-great grandfather.

So,
of course,
she’d be kidnapped and held hostage in some sort of dingy dungeon room he’d built waaaaay back when he was the king of pirates and basically ruled New Orleans. She wanted to go back in time and kick him. Hard. In the teeth.

The woman holding the gun on her was gorgeous, but obviously completely bored with this whole “guard duty” thing, as she’d laid the gun in her lap while she flipped through a fashion magazine. There was a little squealy guy who kept glancing Bobbie Faye’s direction and flinching when she glared at him as he worked on some sort of laptop with several other handheld types of machines nearby. Standing next to him was the guy they called RG, who was clearly the leader; a silver-haired guy maybe in his sixties or mid-fifties, who just watched the squealy guy work and barely acknowledged Bobbie Faye was there. She could hear other men talking and moving around just beyond a doorway—a door that entered a room beneath the Cabildo. The Museum.

Meanwhile, Trevor and she had had a plan. They had expected his mother to create a ruckus, try to swoop in and stop the wedding, and Trevor had asked her to play it low key.
Helpless
. She was supposed to pretend to be weak, should anything as outrageous as an—oh, let’s reach for it…
kidnapping
—were to occur. It was, Trevor assured her, the very least likely thing that would happen, because he and Riles had covered all of the bases before choosing this church. He had men outside. He had men watching his mother. He had men watching the apartment where they’d dressed.
Nothing
, he said,
is going to happen. You’re going to be in a fancy dress that will stop you from being able to fight or get away quickly. You won’t be armed with much more than your little pistol. That makes you extremely vulnerable. Just play helpless until I get there.
He’d made her promise.

Helpless. She could do helpless. It was going to fucking
kill
her, but she could do helpless. And then she was going to stomp some ass. Very possibly Trevor’s. But these guys? Oh, yeah, they were first.