Free When a Man Loves a Weapon by Toni McGee Causey Page A

spontaneously combust, and while they didn’t want to be in close proximity, they definitely wanted to be witnesses.
    “No, not
Cam. Alex
,” Nick explained when Riles looked over at him for an explanation. “Alex is a gunrunner. Pretty scary. They had a very bad break-up.”
    “You dated a gunrunner?” He’d tossed her looks of disgust with the regularity that a machine gun spit bullets. It was getting so that she was immune. “And then a cop? And now
my friend
?”
    “It wasn’t like I was asking for their résumés and references.”
    “Is there some sort of Excel spreadsheet to keep track?”
    She ignored Riles and asked Nick, “Where is he?”
    “I don’t know,” Nick said. “No, really, Bobbie Faye, you know how Alex is. He shows up when he shows up.”
    “Yeah, kinda like cancer.”
    “But that’s not the weird part,” Nick mumbled, staring down at his shoes.
    “It gets weirder?” Riles asked.
    Ce Ce moved out of the aisle, giving up all pretense of stacking shelves, too eaten up with curiosity to risk missing a syllable. “Oh, hon, it always gets weirder.”
    Bobbie Faye leaned forward, eyes narrowed on Nick. This was going to be bad. She could tell from the way he twitched and avoided her gaze, sweat now running in rivulets down his tanned neck, into his shirt collar.
    “There’s also a bunch of bets against your fiancé.”

“Isn’t this one of the signs of the Apocalypse?”
    —Sally Janin, referring to headline: “No Bobbie Faye Disasters, 4 months and counting . . .”
Five
     
    Cam would not answer his phone. Three billion calls to him went straight to his voice mail. She didn’t know when it was declared National Ignore Your Phone Week, but really, she wanted to beat the living shit out of the person who organized it.
    Sure, dispatch had said he’d been working late nights and early mornings, but usually he answered his private cell number.
    They rode in Riles’s Jaguar. The pumpkin-orange Jaguar. She doubted even Jemy or Claude would have stolen this one, back when they five-finger-discounted car parts. Riles hung up his cell and was quiet. Too quiet.
    “They’re not telling you anything either, are they?”
    He’d worked with Trevor. He was a sniper. She knew he had federal connections.
    “They don’t know where he is. Or, put it this way, they don’t know for sure why I’m calling, or why I don’t already know, so they’re not going to volunteer his location.”
    They’d already gone by the FBI satellite office—nary a soul in sight—and now they pulled up to Cam’s gray-in-the-twilight house. It was in a sweet little neighborhood that backed up to a horseshoe lake, dark now except for evenly spaced gas lamps installed by the neighborhood along the walking path that surrounded the lake’s perimeter. Of course, the lake brought with it snakes and mosquitoes. Cam hadbeen especially proud to have killed a couple of rather large water moccasins in his backyard the first couple of months they’d dated. Until she refused to set foot outside. He suddenly, miraculously, never saw another snake again. They had all magically migrated to the house a few lots down, where that guy and his shotgun were best friends.
    “So this is where your boyfriend lives?”
    “
Ex
, you jerk. And wait here. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
    Riles climbed out of his car and met her on the sidewalk before she’d gone two steps. She stopped, glaring at him. Not that a serious poisonous glare would actually work on a sniper.
    “Look, the Feds aren’t telling you a damned thing, no matter how fancy schmancy your stupid clearance was, and they’re not talking to me. Cam might get some answers, but he’s not going to put himself out on a limb if you’re hovering. Back. Off.”
    She couldn’t squelch the horrible feeling that Trevor’s life hung in the balance and there was nothing she could do about it. That the Universe thought she was just going to stand around and wait, all damsel