Guns and Roses (68 page)

“Lucky guess.”

~*~

Twenty minutes and a lot of griping from Catalina later, Bobbie Faye stepped out of the tiny bathroom carefully; she’d pulled her gun-holster garter down to her ankle, wrapped it three times there to hold the gun tightly against her leg, but now the gun was at least accessible. As long as she walked
very softly
, it wouldn’t fall out and when she sat down, her hands (assuming they retied them in front of her) would be close enough to her ankles for a fast grab.

Catalina stood there, shifting foot-to-foot and griped, “It took you forever in there!”

“Sorry. Lots of skirts.”

“Fine. I gotta pee now.”

Bobbie Faye blinked. She was not stepping into that bathroom so the ditz could hold her hostage while she had to watch the woman pee. There wasn’t even
room
in there for the both of them. Catalina assessed that, looked at the complete lack of any furniture whatsoever in the tiny hallway, and promptly handed Bobbie Faye the gun.

“Hold that. Wait here, okay?”

“Sure,” Bobbie Faye said, and the woman rushed into the bathroom.

She stared at the gun in her hand.

A plan began to form.

She recognized this as a bad thing, as the Universe had proven to her over and over again that if she tried to be the planny-type, it would poop on her head. The Universe, it had to be said, was quite an excellent pooper, and yet… here she was, holding a loaded gun, with Dingbat Barbie in the bathroom and guys out there… somewhere… in the Cabildo, stealing one of the most priceless art and religious objects of all time.

Surely, the element of surprise would be enough to make the difference. She noted that the bathroom door opened outward—old, pre-fire-code thing that it was, which meant she could wedge it so that Dingbat Barbie couldn’t open it. She looked around, looked and looked and there was nothing small enough… nothing that she could move quickly enough… until she looked down at her shoes. Her expensive Jimmy Choo shoes that Nina had insisted that she borrow. The kind of shoes that are pretty much guaranteed to break ankles and cost the same as a small car
and
a private school education for
one
pair… but the heels were skinny enough to wedge underneath the door.

Done. Then she tiptoed out of the little hallway to peer around the corner, hoping to see where the men were.

There, up ahead… they were coming down a staircase, two at the bottom, one still on the treads, and they were holding the icon… which, somehow, in spite of the dark stairway, practically
glowed.

“Look!” one of them yelled, lifting a gun and aiming it where she was hiding. “It’s the wedding girl!”

She followed their gaze to the floor at her feet;
note to self: it’s hard to hide when the white dress sticks out three feet past the hidey spot
.

“C’mon out,” one threatened, “or we’ll shoot.”

She thought about not stepping out, until the third one said, “Hey, Ditz, the bullets will go through the wall there at the corner. We can still shoot you.”

So they were not related to Dingbat Barbie (who was confused and grumbling behind her as to why the door wouldn’t open). Bobbie Faye stepped out into the big storage room, her newly purloined gun aimed at them, and they…
laughed
.

“Oh, look! The girlie, she has a gun!” one of them said, pretending to wipe tears of incredulity from his eyes. “Honey, put down the gun before you hurt yourself.”

“How about,” she said, “you put down your guns before I shoot you.”

“Darling,” one man said, “you’re Catholic. You’re under the Cathedral. And besides… you’re a girl.”

She shot all three, all in the legs, rapid fast before they could say another word. They fell like dominoes, their guns clattering to the ground, the icon falling down the stairs, end over end, and bouncing ’til it was nearly at her feet.

“I’m really not a very
good
Catholic,” she pointed out amid their screams and groans as she walked over to kick away their guns and to gather up the icon.

“It would have been better for you if you were,” RG said behind her, and she turned, icon in hand, to see him holding another gun on her.

She could see it in his eyes, the decision to kill her. She’d seen that look a time or ten, enough to have no doubts. “Hostage here,” she waved. “Remember? You need me.”

“No. Really, I don’t.” Of all the times she could have been killed by actual professionals, people who
knew
what they were doing, it just fucking pissed her off that she was going to die by the hands of Scooby and the Gang. RG leveled the gun at her chest, and in that moment, she thought of all of the things she was never going to get to do, to say, to Trevor. It wasn’t fair, for it to be over, like this.

It could not happen this way.

The Universe laughed.

And RG pulled the trigger.

~*~

Trevor could have sworn he heard muffled gunshots from somewhere in the Quarter, but there was no way to tell what direction they originated from; he hadn’t been a praying man before tonight, but he was fast becoming one.

“Any sign of the fake priest?” he asked. “Or the real ones?”

Riles shook his head, fielding another call in from one of the guards doing the sweep. “No sighting. They must’ve stuck the safety pin tracker on something else—we’re not seeing her because it’s not on her.”

Trevor scrubbed his face again. If they got out of this alive, he was going to kill his mother. Then he noticed the beacon was back in its original position.
Weird
.

He looked around the room. “Look for doors.”

“Huh?” everyone said together.

“Doors. A secret door. What if she’s below us?”

“Hellooooo,” Riles said. “New Orleans? Below sea level? No basements.”

Trevor started tapping on a wall, working his way left. After a minute, Cam started on the opposite wall, and Alex took the third. Nina went into the hallway to tap on the wall that extended past the room to T off against the inner Cathedral wall.

Every tap Trevor made was rock solid. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing nothing nothing fucking hell, I know she’s in here…

Hollow.

He stopped. “Shhh!” Everyone paused as he tapped again, across, across, across… and then solid again. Definitely something hollow behind that panel, like a doorway, or crawlspace. Something. He was sure of it.

He leapt back to the left side, running his fingers along the seam, trying to find a crack, an opening, a lever,
something
.

Then he found the seam. “It’s here!” And Riles and Alex and Cam crammed in the small space beside him, all trying to wedge the panel open while Nina ran back into the room and she and Ce Ce watched, silent.

They couldn’t budge it.

“It’s locked from the inside,” Alex said.

“No shit,” Cam snarled and Alex elbowed him in the gut.

“Shut the hell up and focus,” Trevor snapped, panic mounting.

A text pinged with instructions—and he glanced at the phone.

“They want me in the courtyard behind the Cathedral. Fifteen minutes. Or else they cut her.” He looked at everyone.

“You’re not going in that courtyard alone,” Nina said. “They’ll be looking for men with guns as backup. They won’t be looking for me.”

“No,” Riles said before Trevor could answer. “If he goes, I go up on the roof as a shooter. But first—look at this.” He pointed to the way the paneling was nailed to the wall. “We could dismantle it,” Riles suggested. “Take the paneling off the wall from here…” He pointed to a spot about a foot over to the left. “See if we can figure out how to manipulate the lock holding it.”

~*~

Ten minutes later, they’d managed to take off two of the panels from the door itself to expose the lock. There had apparently been a mechanism on one of those panels that, once triggered, would have slid the panel over for the key, but they hadn’t known, nor had the time to guess and hunt it down.

As it stood, they had a seriously heavy door with an elaborate locking mechanism in place—one Trevor had never faced before. He could do this, though. He
would
do this. Bobbie Faye was somewhere, in trouble, on the other side of that door.

“I’ll need to be quiet and fast,” Trevor said, bending to examine the lock better.

“You won’t be fast on that lock,” Alex told him.

“I’m a lot better than you think,” Trevor answered, pulling off the jacket to his tux.

“And I’m a lot better than you. I’ll be faster. And quieter,” Alex said.

“You’re not seriously going to let this asshole interfere, are you?” Cam asked.

“Which one of you is a better, more experienced thief?” Alex asked.

“And which one of us could have given us this information a few hours earlier and saved Bobbie Faye from being kidnapped?” Nina asked Alex, and he rolled his eyes.

“Look,” Alex said, his patience thin, “the woman shot at me, tried to blow up my car,
did
blow up my camp, tried to shoot me a second time, and
that
was before we broke up and
things went south
and got ugly. You’re damned lucky I showed up at all.”

“Why
did
you?” Cam asked, “and don’t give me this crap about getting off the hook with the feds. You don’t give a rat’s ass about the feds, and we both know it. You’ve avoided them for a decade!” Cam waved his arms, wound up. “You could’ve kept on avoiding them. So
why
help, now?”

Trevor was very interested in the answer to that question and Alex looked back and forth between the two men and finally, his shoulders sagged and he sighed.

“Because I realized once Trevor’s mom was involved that Trevor would know I was a part of the escape plan. And if anything happened to Bobbie Faye,” he looked at Trevor, “you’d hunt me down and skin me. And I also knew they were planning on kidnapping and killing you—and if Bobbie Faye survived—and just my luck, she would—
she’d
hunt me down and skin me.”

“Yeah, they’re putting that in their vows,” Riles quipped, “to love, honor, and skin each other’s enemies.”

“Well,” Alex continued, “call it survival, but the odds were better for me if neither of you were chasing me.”

“Fine,” Trevor said. “Get us in there, fast and quiet. Screw with me on this, Alex, skinning you will be the least of what I do to you.”

~*~

He was, indeed, fast. And quiet. Trevor’s heart raced as the last internal pin clicked into place and Alex turned his makeshift “key”—and the door eased open, silently exposing a staircase.

“I’ll lead,” Trevor said, pulling his backup gun from his ankle holster.

“You’ll let me lead,” Riles said.

“No fucking way.”

“Look,” his friend said, stepping in the way, “If I let you lead and they pick you off at the bottom of the stairs and little miss Annoying-as-Hell
lives
?” He shuddered. “I seriously do not want to have to deal with the Crazy. Been there. No fucking way do I want a repeat. Besides, it’s how we work—stick to what we know and you might not get dead.”

“Get moving,” Trevor said, worried they were too late. It was just too damned quiet beyond that door. “Cam, take the rear. Nina?”

“I’ve got your back here—I’ll watch the room.”

“Alex, check if anyone’s seen my mother make a move while we’re down there.”

They eased down the staircase, soft steps, not a single sound coming from their movements. When they got to the bottom, where it turned at the landing toward an opening in the wall, Trevor motioned for Riles to go low and to the left, Cam high right and Trevor would take low right. He held up fingers, counting backward from three and they slid into the room like smoke, guns up and ready, and froze. Stunned.

Bobbie Faye paced in front of a dilapidated sofa, her skirt ripped off at knee level, the Black Madonna icon propped on her left hip, cradled protectively there,
glowing
, and three people tied up with white strips of material, sitting on the sofa. Three thugs face down on the floor, also tied up, all of them with bandages (white… he was seeing a pattern here)… stained with blood. Every one of them gagged. Also with white material.

“Now that guy,” she was lecturing, “knew what the hell he was doing. He was a
professional
. He knew how to tie people up! You don’t go into this business without some pride in your own profession! For crying out loud! And well, sure, he’s
dead
,” she said, as if one of the idiots tied up had suggested a flaw in her argument, “but still, he had—”