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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 each other 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 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 to night 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 über 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.
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. She leaned over the man as he stared at her off-kilter boobs, saying something about them not being real. The jerk.
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. Bobbie Faye 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 . . . bloodlike 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 last night. 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 to a sitting position 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 checked the magazine: five bullets were missing.
Clearly, the Universe thought it was payback time.
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. Her 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.
Bobbie Faye 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 under-aged 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 Jum-boTron that had gotten her on the national news. Again.
She wouldn’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 incon-gruent with the sweet round doughy "O" of her face.
The gleam in Miss Maimee’s eye was usually 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, and she reveled 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 certifable, before they knew she was taking painkillers 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 doodad 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.)
Cam 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’d 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 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."
Excerpted from Girls Just Wanna Have Guns by Toni McGee Causey.
Copyright 2008 by Toni McGee Causey.
Published in June 2008 by St. Martin’s Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
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