Bobbie Faye's (kinda, sorta, not exactly) Family Jewels Chapter One Bobbie Faye Sumrall was full up on crazy, thank you very much, and had a side order of cranky to spare. The bank—citing the picky little reason that it didn't want to lend money to people who were routinely shot at—said no to a loan for a new (used) car. It wasn't like she'd ever been hit by an actual bullet, for crying out freaking loud. Immediately after that, she couldn't get an insurance company to give her a quote for a start-up business grant application she needed to turn in. (Three insurance giants had gotten restraining orders as soon as they heard who was calling.) (Wusses.) And then the FBI guy she'd been blistering hot and bothered about had dropped off the planet two weeks earlier, and geez, there was only so much rejection a girl could take. She needed to have one night, one measly little night, to sleep well. That wasn't too much to ask, right? Apparently, the Universe thought it was. Bobbie Faye and the Universe were like warring spouses locked in an eternal battle, trying to blow one another up rather than admit the other was savvier. (The Universe, by the way? A big fat cheater.) Still, she tried. She went through her nightly routine: she squeezed into the tiny bathroom of her small, almost-not-ratty trailer, fantasizing about actual hot water while she grabbed a tepid shower. To wind down, she poured herself some juice and nibbled on crackers. (Yeah, her luck was solid. The juice tasted like it had gone bad. And not in the good "fermented" kind of gone bad.) Thankfully, her five-year-old niece, Stacey, had been invited to spend the night at a friend's house. No matter how much she loved the little rugrat, she was grateful that tonight there wouldn't be fourteen billion attempts to hogtie the kid into bed for a whole five minutes of sleep before Stacey bounced up again, determined to drive Bobbie Faye out of what little was left of her mind. When Bobbie Faye did finally stretch out on her lumpy twin mattress, she sank into disturbing, hallucinogenic dreams—all disjointed, a half-step two-step out of rhythm, bits and pieces swirling in a kaleidoscope of confusing colors. At one point, she saw herself as if from afar and damn, she looked odd. She could have sworn her boobs were off kilter, like one was higher than the other, but maybe it was just that striped butt-ugly shirt she was wearing, the one she'd won back in high school in that dumb "spirit week" contest. She was twenty freaking eight years old; why couldn't her subconscious mind be a team player and clothe her in something ueber cool and sexy? And why did her long and normally loose-flowing brunette hair look so... strange? It seemed all wrong. It was stiff, like she'd emptied a can of hair spray and shellacked it into a helmet. Great. Bad dream and bad hair. Just perfect. But at least she wasn't bald, like that little schlumpy guy she was talking to. She leaned over the man and he kept babbling. He was dying and rambling as he stared at her off-kilter boobs, saying something about them not being real. The jerk. Oh. Wait. Make that the schlumpy pot-bellied guy she was shooting. Why in the hell was she shooting this guy? Five times. Damn, but it was a beautiful pattern. At least her dream got that part right. He didn't remind her of anyone she knew. Stupid subconscious. Why couldn't it at least let her pretend to take out one of the jerks driving her insane? Mr. No-Extension-For-You IRS Guy would have topped her list. Or maybe Nick Lejeune, the local bookie who kept placing odds on her every move. (Would she wreck today before or after noon? Would she inadvertently blow something up or would it be on purpose? Would she be in jail on her birthday?) He was making a fortune and not even giving her a cut. But no... the dead guy in this dream wasn't the least bit familiar. She watched herself as she picked up all of the dropped casings, felt for a pulse on the dead guy, and wiped her fingers on her hideous shirt. Then the images churned, and wind rushed at her, tangling her hair, buffeting her arms spread wide open as if she were flying under the streetlights in the small commercial district of her tough, no-nonsense industrial hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana. When she woke up, she had a raging headache and her mouth was painfully dry. She peeled her eyes open, and holy fucking shit. There was something definitely... blood like in her hair. She'd sleepwalked a couple of times as a kid, mostly wandering aimlessly through the house. She had a vague sense of having done it again. An almost-memory of having heard something in her sleep—had she gotten up to check? Then banged into something? Her closet door was open, so it was a possibility. She glanced down, dreading what she'd find, but no, she still had on the same t-shirt she'd worn to bed, but there were a couple of bruises on her left arm and a cut on her right that she didn't remember having the night before. So it had been a dream. A way too realistic bad dream. Probably best to ease up on the chocolate suicide cake after dinner. She sprang up as she felt the weight of cold metal in her right hand, a weight she recognized and instantly wished she didn't. It was her Glock. She froze, her body running cold and clammy. It was supposed to be locked up. It was always locked up, especially with Stacey living there now. Bobbie Faye gingerly sat up and checked the magazine: five bullets were missing. Clearly, the Universe thought it was payback time. Chapter Two Four days later, the memory of the freaky-assed dream hadn't faded, but at least she'd managed to push it out of her mind. Temporary amnesia would have come in handy while she dealt with the Crazy, Inc., portion of society which believed it absolutely had to be armed and dangerous at 10 a.m. She wasn't entirely sure if it was the ninety-five-degree heat searing the June morning, or the fact that Ce Ce's air conditioner had gotten in a snit and shut down for the day, but it felt like the oppressive warmth had the nutjobs out in force; she hadn't been at work fifteen minutes and she was already itching to plunge her head through the nearest wall. Or strip naked and go skinny dipping in Bundick's Lake. With her luck, she'd end up on the five o'clock news like last year when little high-school senior Aubrey Ardoin caught her completely naked, sinking into the lake, using his spanky new digital recorder, the underaged rat bastard. (He'd financed his techno-geek habit through selling "Bobbie Faye debris" on eBay.) Of course, it was the fact that he'd hacked into the LSU Purple and Gold preseason game and aired her naked self on the JumboTron that had gotten her on the national news. Again. The point was, she couldn't ditch Ce Ce in spite of how much she wanted to escape the oppressive heat and insistent customers. She loved her boss, so she stuck it out, breaking a sweat while doing her dead level best not to sell a compact Glock to older-than-dirt Maimee Parsons, a Baptist pillar-of-the-community. It wasn't an easy thing to do. Or not do, rather. As the person in charge of the gun and knife counter at Ce Ce's Cajun Outfitter and Feng Shui Emporium, Bobbie Faye was supposed to sell to anyone who'd passed the state-required security check. Maimee, eighty-five, had just aced that sucker. Not exactly a red-letter day for gun safety. Bobbie Faye should have known something was wrong when Maimee had shown up in baggy slacks, a mismatched striped shirt, and a baseball cap shoved atop her pert white curls instead of being well coifed and wearing her usual church dress. The old woman frowned down her nose over silver-rimmed bifocals, the glinty look in her eyes incongruent with the sweet round doughy "O" of her face. Bobbie Faye had assumed the gleam in Miss Maimee's eye was because Maimee had long been in charge of the Lord's Supper at the main Baptist church in town and therefore felt she had a lock on exactly who was going to Hell, reveling in the knowledge. But today, the gleam seemed slightly maniacal, and Bobbie Faye wondered if Maimee wasn't tilting toward the husband of fifty years gambled away their retirement and needs a'killin' manner of thinking. Just her very Baptist presence in Ce Ce's shop—where it was well known that Ce Ce practiced a little voodoo as a sideline business—suggested Maimee had clocked in on the psychotic break side of the equation. Maimee wasn't big on second chances unless the Lord Himself granted them and it looked like Edgar Parsons, recent big loser at the gaming tables, was about to come up on the short end of the prayer stick. Maimee's ability to suss out any remotely minor sin intimidated even the most unrepentant person (her nephew, the governor, included). In spite of that, Bobbie Faye liked her. Maimee had been one of those rare people who had actually helped Bobbie Faye's mom get food on the table, back when most people thought her mom was halfway to certifiable, before they knew she was taking pain killers for the cancer. As Maimee peered down the barrel of an empty Glock, her spindly legs spread in a stance that would have made Dirty Harry proud, Bobbie Faye scanned the old rambling store, dusty and cram-packed with every imaginable doo-dad and whatchamacallit on the planet. Maybe Maimee could pray over someone instead of buying a gun, but when Bobbie Faye looked around for victims, the store seemed eerily devoid of customers. It was as if the crowd of sinners, knowing Maimee's reputation for her... enthusiasm... in laying-on-of-the-hands prayer mode, had migrated way the hell away from the gun section of the store. "Miz Maimee, you don't really want a Glock. You want to go home and talk to Mr. Edgar and work out some things." "Nonsense, girl. This isn't about Edgar. I feel the need for protection." She plunked the Glock down on the glass countertop. "I have the right to buy a gun and you have to sell it to me." Bobbie Faye rankled at being called girl, but she let it slide. It was probably best not to annoy soon-to-be-armed customers. "You don't know how to shoot." "Well, I heard that you're a crack shot and you give lessons here, so sign me up." "They're kinda expensive." "Not a problem. How many lessons will it take for me to be able to pick off an intruder at night?" "Doesn't Mr. Edgar come in late sometimes?" "Here's my credit card. Run it on through. And add some ammunition. I'm not sure how much a person needs to defend themselves. A lot, I imagine. Ring that up, too." This was going to get ugly. Bobbie Faye knew it, knew she was going to be on the blaming end of things if Mr. Edgar should suddenly meet his untimely demise, just as sure as she'd known a couple of months earlier that she had to hijack a truck in order to save her brother who had called with the teeny tiny problem of being kidnapped and held for ransom. She was sorry about destroying nearly half the state while rescuing Roy. Really. She had a feeling not everyone believed her, though, which made her think briefly of her ex, Detective Cameron Moreau. Sure, he was sexy and he could be charming as hell when he wanted to be (he hadn't been an SEC Championship Quarterback for LSU without gaining a little public relations savvy), but for every ounce of gorgeous, he was also pound-for-pound the bossiest human being on the planet. (Well, okay, slight exaggeration. There were a few people she hadn't met yet and it was statistically possible at least one of them was bossier.) He meant well, sure. He had a good heart. She knew that—knew, as they were growing up best friends, that he just wanted what was best for her, even though they butted heads about her choices. There was a moment there at the end of the last chase where she knew he'd been torn between choosing to shoot her and choosing to help her. For about two seconds, she thought they might have had a possibility of being friends again when he decided to help, but true to form, as soon as the crisis was over, he'd reverted back to being ticked off that she hadn't called him for his advice, hadn't let him control her every move. Yeah, she was really beginning to empathize with Maimee's gun purchase. She picked up the gun Maimee had set on the counter, palming the weight of the sleek metal. An ill feeling gnawed at the pit of her stomach as she flashed back to her weird dream, seeing herself shooting that schlumpy guy. She could practically taste the acrid gunpowder residue in the air, feel the vibrations of the impact as the man hit the ground. "Bobbie Faye," Maimee huffed, tap-tap-tapping her credit card on the glass countertop, snapping her back to attention. It was just a dream. Only a dream. "Go on now. Ring it up. I've got to get to a prayer meeting." The word meeting hung in the air above Maimee's head just as the front door of the old Acadian-style building yanked open, bell jangling, and in flounced one royal pain-in-the-ass: Francesca Despré—all five-foot-five of her, an inch shorter than Bobbie Faye and slightly flatter chested (something Francesca had never accepted and used push-up bras to mitigate). Francesca's short auburn hair framed a perfectly tanned complexion and her couture clothing shrieked Wannabe Diva! but the actual effect was Newbie Hooker. She teetered on black four-inch stiletto heels and carried a fluffy shockingly pink feathered purse that she clutched in one hand and an alligator-clad make up sample case in the other. It was the shredded and practically nonexistent black micro-miniskirt which was the piece de resistance—a skirt made of such gossamer threads barely strung together, Bobbie Faye suspected there was a dumbfounded spider who woke up that morning wondering where in the hell its web had gone. Francesca headed straight for the gun counter. No hope that the impending doom of Francesca showing up was unintentional. She sashayed through the store, weaving past the cammo gear and fishing tackle, the tents and Coleman lanterns, rerouting at the last second to avoid the screened-in boxes of live crickets and overstacked shelves of "Feng Shui" crystals Ce Ce hadn't quite managed to unload. "Fuck," Bobbie Faye muttered, eyeing the nauseatingly perky Francesca crossing the store. "Bobbie Faye!" Maimee reproached. "Watch your language!" "Miz Maimee, you're buying a gun. I'd be willing to bet you just upped Mr. Edgar's life insurance. You don't get to take the high road today." "Hi, Bobbie Faye," Francesca bubbled when she reached the gun counter. "We have a problem." # # Bobbie Faye scanned past Francesca and realized that every male customer over the age of two had suddenly found the aisle to the gun counter absolutely essential for their shopping needs. Francesca, for once, seemed not to notice the attention she drew. (Once Francesca went through her boy-crazy phase—oh, wait, she was still in that phase—she'd morphed from a partner-in-crime prepubescent tomboy, breaking into the neighborhood "male-only" clubhouses, into a beauty-pageant attention-seeking missile, treating makeup application with the same reverence other people would give to CPR.) Francesca propped her purse and sample case on the counter and immediately proceeded to give Bobbie Faye the earnest expression. "Oooooohhh no," Bobbie Faye said, having seen that wobbly helpless wide-eyed please-oh-please-help-me-with-my-homework pout one time too many. "We," Bobbie Faye leaned forward over the counter, gesturing between the two of them to emphasize the point, "do not have a problem." "Bobbie Faye, you have to help. I told them you would." Francesca worked the big doe eyes and pouty lips. "Nice try. Not happening." "Wait," Maimee asked Francesca, her shrewd gaze narrowing beneath the brim of her baseball cap, "you're that Lady Marmalade woman, aren't you?" "Why yes," Francesca preened, turning the makeup sample case to show the Lady Marmalade logo on the front. Maimee dug something out of her oversized handbag. "You sell to hookers and pole dancers and big breasted women who frequent gambling parlors, don't you?" Before Francesca could answer, Bobbie Faye put a hand on Maimee's arm as it heaved out a Bible the size of a mini Howitzer. "I don't think we have time for you to pray over her today. It would take hours." The old woman gave the Bible a little backswing shake. "I was thinking more along the lines of smacking her with it." Bobbie Faye wanted... oh, how she wanted... to move out of Maimee's way and let her have at it, but she gently guided the Bible down to the glass counter, and said, "Miz Maimee, have you considered anger management classes?" "She knows what she's talking about," Francesca said to Maimee. "Bobbie Faye's had to take it three times already. They even give her discounts now." "Not helping yourself one bit, Frannie. You should be leaving." "I can't, Bobbie Faye. They're coming!" Francesca nodded toward the door, as if that was self-explanatory. "And if you don't hurry, you're gonna be in trouble." "And just exactly why would I be in trouble?" "Because I told them you would know where they are. Or how to find them. So now they think you do, or that you can, so you have to or they're gonna kill people." Chapter Three Aiden Stewart threw the rest of the soggy chips—what these bloody Americans called fries—into the paper sack and cursed the blasted fast food drive-through. With a place as big as the US, he'd have thought there'd have been someone who'd mastered the art of frying a potato. What he wanted was a whiskey, but Sean MacGreggor, who could be a right sour bastard of a boss, frowned on drinking on the job and had been known to permanently retire a bloke or two when he'd caught 'em at it. Aiden had secretly maintained that it was the Scots side of MacGreggor's Scots-Irish DNA that had ruined him, because no decent Irishman would have blinked over a wee drink on the job. They had been parked for nearly an hour in a vacant lot located diagonally across from the strangely named store where this Bobbie Faye woman worked. Aiden glanced around the interior of the box truck they'd leased for the job. Sean, their boss, stretched out, looking about as relaxed and friendly as coiled razor wire. The buckshot scars pocking the left side of his face should have rendered Sean repulsive, but Aiden was damned if it didn't seem to have the opposite effect, especially on the women. Aiden had known Sean since they were kids growing up, scrabbling for existence in Tallaght, west of Dublin, and he couldn't remember the first person Sean had killed, but it had been to help them eat, and they'd followed him ever since. Mollie, Sean's sprite of a cousin, hunched over the steering wheel and drummed her fingers, irritating the hell (on purpose) out of Robbie, the rat-faced terrier-sized computer geek who'd proven indispensible already. Earlier that morning, Robbie had planted a bugging device on the side of the gun counter Bobbie Faye manned, and now as the women talked, he grinned (fuck, they needed to get him to a dentist and get some teeth in that head). "Sure, an' d'ye really think the woman'll go along with it?" Aiden asked. He'd read up on several of this Bobbie Faye woman's latest events and getting her to do what she was supposed to do sounded a bit like trying to kamikaze bats. "Aye, she'll no' have a choice," Sean said, and he seemed calm and confident enough, though Aiden knew this was when he was most likely to snap. Aiden wondered—and not for the first time on this job—if having Sean and Bobbie Faye on the same continent wasn't going to be a bit like banging nitro-glycerin against a truckload of C-4. # "Find what?" Bobbie Faye asked, then hung her head and sighed. She might as well have just opened the door to Hell and said, "Hi, Honey, I'm home!" Francesca beamed as if Bobbie Faye had somehow tacitly agreed to something. Then she peered around, careful to turn away from Maimee, and whispered, "The diamonds, silly. And you don't have much time." "Bobbie Faye," Maimee snapped, "Any day now. I have prayers to attend to and I need that gun." Somehow, that sentence seemed perfectly normal today. Bobbie Faye wanted to lie face down on the counter and press her temple into the cool glass, close her eyes, and breathe deeply to keep from beating the crap out of anyone. Later on, maybe a decade from now, when she opened her eyes, they would all be gone and it would be a good day. It wasn't going to happen, though, and from the determined set of Francesca's pout, Bobbie Faye might as well get to the truth; the sooner she did, the sooner she could get rid of this nightmare. "Frannie, what in the hell are you talking about?" "Mom and dad had a... little... disagreement," Francesca continued whispering. From the way Francesca tensed and hunched her shoulders while her glance darted around, Bobbie Faye knew the disagreement couldn't be little. Nothing with her mom and dad had ever been little—even their beginning had been supposedly been epic: a Romeo and Juliet couple caught between warring Cajun (Marie's) and Creole (Emile's) families. They had immediately fallen in love and declared that if they weren't allowed to marry, they would eschew the classic double suicide for something their parents really feared. They would leave LSU and attend the University of Alabama. (Emile's dad staggered around with angina attacks for weeks after that.) Their wedding sealed a shaky truce between the two politically connected families. Marie's clan were rice farmers and owned a grain mill and the family could finally afford to do something luxurious, like send Marie off to college to become an artist. Ostensibly in the Mardi Gras bead business, Emile's family earned their money the old fashioned way: organized crime. Bobbie Faye knew there was some specific bad blood between the families from a couple of generations back, but everyone old enough to know what caused it had incredibly vague patches in their memory when questioned. "They're getting divorced." "You're kidding." "No, I'm not kidding," Francesca said, her voice rising with distress "And it's just mean of them, because it's giving me bad dreams and you'd think they'd care at least a little bit, but no, off they go, daddy with his hoochie fling and mamma with the diamonds. That's when daddy put a hit out on mamma to make her bring 'em back. Mamma's not gonna and she's gonna get killed and then you know that mamma's family will be after daddy and these stupid diamonds will wipe out my family, Bobbie Faye, and—" Maimee interrupted, "Could we move this along? People are going to hell today if I don't get to my prayer meeting soon enough. I need that gun right now." "You don't need it right now. I'm pretty sure there isn't a new salvation plan where you rush annoying sinners along to their Maker as they beg for forgiveness." "There could be." "Yeah, the little known Thou Shalt Carry and Conceal commandment. Do you have some family I could call for you? Friend? Psych ward?" Francesca tapped Bobbie Faye on the arm and she turned to say, "What—" just as two men, pistols in hand, strolled her direction. She didn't have anything loaded. Nothing handy. Alarm sang oh, shit in a high-pitched squeal in her head. She squinted at a tall, heavyset man whose physique looked put together by an engineer too fond of his t-square, with everything about him blocky and wide, even down to basket hands large enough to moonlight as a forklift. There was a bulge under one arm beneath his sports coat where a holster marred the otherwise rectangular lines of his body. "I think I'm supposed to shoot someone today," one of the men announced, looking directly at Bobbie Faye. "Is it you?" Bobbie Faye blinked. "Did he just ask what I think he just asked?" "That's Mitch Guillory," Francesca said when Bobbie Faye looked around for an explanation. "That's little Mitchell?" Bobbie Faye asked, not seeing any hint in this refrigerator-square man of the kid so scrawny his mamma called him a toothpick-with-eyes. And then she remembered seeing his mugshot flashed on the news: he'd been wounded in a sting of organized crime in New Orleans. "Not yet," the other man cautioned Mitch, and Mitch seemed to relax a smidge, but Bobbie Faye kept her eye on his gun. "But don't I shoot people?" Mitch asked. "He kinda has a short-term memory problem," Francesca explained. "From being shot." "I was shot?" Mitch asked, frowning, self-consciously patting himself down. "Yeah," the other man sighed, having obviously explained this a few times, and Bobbie Faye recognized the sigh—a cringe-inducing recognition as she remembered he was Donny, so boyishly bland that at thirty, he could almost be mistaken for fifteen. She hadn't seen Donny since he'd gone to L.A. to be an actor though his career high thus far had been in a hemorrhoid commercial. Donny and Mitch were both Francesca's cousins and always hung around the summers when Francesca's mom sent her to live in Lake Charles with her grandmother. "You got shot in the head," Donny continued to Mitch. "You keep forgetting stuff." Like, Bobbie Faye remembered from stories at the time, his own alibi or what his defense attorney would tell him, and so he couldn't stand trial. And where Francesca, Mitch, and Donny were, Kit couldn't be— "Read your instructions," said a woman with a rough, sexy smoker's voice. —far behind. Kit, petite, spiky hair, had hidden behind Mitch's bulk. Bobbie Faye recognized her killer good looks as the bratty little cousin who tagged along. She'd always been slightly deranged, the kind of kid who would put cheese in ice cream. To Bobbie Faye she said, "I wrote it all down for him. I think he has a real future as a hit man. He's got great consistency, if we can just clear up this whole oopsie, wrong target problem." "Aren't you... a career counselor? For the correctional system?" Bobbie Faye asked while she grabbed the Glock away from Maimee, just then realizing that the scowling old woman had pulled a box of bullets from the shelf and was trying to figure out how to load them. "I have a good record in placing people where they have a high aptitude." "Yeah, why bother with the whole 'and it should be legal' aspect of the job." "I'd have put you in demolition, for example. You show an exceptional destructive capacity." "Well, gee, let me update my resumé." "I'll see what I can find for you," Kit said, missing the sarcasm. "Assuming you live." "Shhh," Francesca said to Kit, then she spun back to Bobbie Faye. "See? You're perfect for the job." "Yeah, right after I tattoo stupid on my forehead." "Word on the street is that you know how to find the diamonds," Kit explained. "We're helping Francesca keep her parents alive. So that means you have to help." "You cannot possibly believe Emile would put out a hit on Marie," Bobbie Faye said. Everyone nodded, though Mitch looked to the others for their response before joining in. "No way. Besides, I have things to do. Paperwork for a grant to finish and turn in. I am not chasing after anything just because you show up with some insane story." She had to shut and lock the display case where, Maimee had focused with laser intensity on a SIG. "But you're our best chance! You saved your brother! Against really bad odds! I watched the whole thing on the news. And I heard daddy's sending some of his... um, workers... and mamma's side said they were, too, and it's going to get worse and people are going to die. They're all convinced that since you're the Contraband Days Queen, you'd be able to get them." Bobbie Faye's gaze whiplashed back from where Donny preened for the security camera. Francesca had never been happy about Bobbie Faye being the unofficial queen of the local pirate festival, even though it was strictly a hereditary title. "What in the world has that got to do with anything?" "You're Cajun. You can find out stuff about mamma because all her friends are Cajun, so they'll tell you stuff they won't tell me, even though we're cousins." And there it was, out there. The thing she hadn't allowed herself to think about: this request was about family. Family—specifically from her dad's side. Her dad's sister, Marie, had her life on the line. An aunt who'd been nice to her in spite of the fact that her brother, Bobbie Faye's dad, hadn't ever acknowledged Bobbie Faye, nor she, him. There was a time, when she was very little, she had wished it was different. Now? No way. The only person she'd confided to about her family was Nina, her best friend who owned and ran a questionable quasi S&M modeling agency, but that was because Nina tended to approve of Bobbie Faye's less polite tendencies, particularly if they ran to the homicidal. Francesca's cousins... well... technically, two of them were her cousins as well... looked at her, hope brimming. "Maybe you can figure out where mamma hid them?" Francesca asked. "Because you're really crazy and mamma's really crazy, so y'all are a lot alike. You probably can think just like her." "It scares me that you're in sales." The front window shattered and a bullet whizzed just over Bobbie Faye's head and she yelled, "Down!" grabbing the Glock and the bullets on her way to the floor. Allison and Alicia, the twins who worked the front counter, herded the rest of the customers to a back room where there was no flying debris or glass. The cousins spread out, and Mitch shot back, though he clearly was confused as to where to shoot, since he was doing a fantastic job of getting rid of all of the dangerous mannequins lined up in rows in the camo section of the store. "Mitch!" she yelled, but he couldn't hear her as he picked off a plastic head. Another sniper bullet whizzed past, shattering the tins of gunpowder above Bobbie Faye's head and black powder showered her and the floor. Great. Bad hair and flammability, all in one move. Yipfuckingwhee. She loaded the Glock, and told Francesca to call 911. As she peeked out from behind the counter, she realized Maimee had not, in fact, moved to the ground like everyone else, and while Mitch kept shooting, more sniper bullets slammed into the Coleman lanterns nearby and glass went everywhere. "Miz Maimee, get down!" "I'm calling my prayer partners," Maimee announced as she dialed her cell. "We'll just meet here. I think this is God's way of telling me we need matching Glocks." Bobbie Faye wondered if Mr. Edgar would live long enough to see Maimee in that nice padded cell she was clearly headed for. "The train's going to block the police," Kit yelled from near the door where she stood at a safe angle, peering out, referring to the one-hundred-plus cars on the train slowly approaching the tracks just a block beyond Ce Ce's store; the cops would have a very long way around if the damned thing wasn't moving. "Frannie," Bobbie Faye gripped the woman's arm, hoping to shake her out of her ditzy-fugue state, "get the cousins out of here. Go to the police." "No way. Daddy's got lots of 'em on the payroll. They'll lock us up before we can help mamma. We gotta find the diamonds first." "The FBI—" But Bobbie Faye stopped when Francesca rolled her eyes. Her dad's shady activities had included bribing senators and God knew who else. "They questioned mamma, but she didn't have the diamonds on her, so she must've hidden them. We heard she's supposed to be selling them, and if she does that, daddy will really be mad, so we only have a couple of days, and now we can't find her." More bullets shattered display cases, embedded in walls, and knocked things off shelves and Bobbie Faye couldn't tell whether the shooting was from the sniper, Mitch, or Donny joining in for show. When Ce Ce got back from her errand, Bobbie Faye was going to wish one of the bullets had hit its mark. "Who the hell is out there shooting anyway?' "Maybe somebody who doesn't want us to find the diamonds?" Francesca guessed. "You're all causing more damage than those stupid diamonds are worth." "There's about thirty and they're worth over a million. Each." Holy shit, that was a lot, even for diamonds. And Bobbie Faye realized that why yes, someone probably would shoot her for that kind of money. Actually, there were a few people who'd shoot her for free; add in that kind of money and people were going to line up out the wazoo with guns aimed her direction. "I'm really sorry to get you involved." Francesca worked her expression from quivering all the way up to full-blown remorse. The glass fish tank holding the bait minnows shattered from a direct shot and water and minnows whooshed out everywhere. From the other end of the store, she heard a muffled, "Oops." Then Kit said, "It's okay, honey. You shot real good there. Not a single fish shot you back." Sonofabitch, it was like a bumper crop of crazy in there. They were destroying Ce Ce's, which was bad enough, but now she knew she was going to have to help them. As much as it killed her to admit it, they were family. And there was a part of her, an ingrained sensibility, that just could not let one of them get killed while she stood by and did nothing. She really fucking hated that stupid sensibility. © Toni McGee Causey