Charmed and Dangerous Read Free

were the unofficial “Queens”—a title started so far back in time, no one really remembered how it was handed down generation to generation. Bobbie Faye’s mom had kept a scrapbook of all her Contraband memories . . . and gave it to Bobbie Faye just before she died, when she had also passed her the duty of being Queen.
    Bobbie Faye pulled the scrapbook out of the water, her heart sinking as she slowly turned the first sodden page. Spidery scrawl ran in an inky river, washing most of the words to nothingness; the water had faded the old photos to murky shadows and all of the mementos were a soggy mess. The once-dried petals of a rose her mother had worn on her last parade fell apart under Bobbie Faye’s touch.
    Fury slammed her adrenaline up another notch; at any moment, the back of her head was going to pop clean off, especially as the cold water wicked farther up her PJs. The scrapbook was Bobbie Faye’s hold on a tenuous place, the “before” as she liked to think about it. Before her mom started wearing the big floppy hats when her hair was getting inexplicably thinner and thinner, before she started wearing the weird combination of clothes and her morning eggs smelled just a shade more like rum than eggs ought to smell, before Bobbie Faye recognized her mom was a little
too
dancey-happy most days, jitterbugging on the coffee table (before it broke), before Bobbie Faye knew what the word
cancer
meant. She looked back at the destroyed scrapbook she held. If Roy had shown up like he promised and fixed the damned washing machine, this wouldn’t have happened. Bobbie Faye stared out her front window, past the gravel road, and fantasized briefly that she could zero in on wherever Roy was with a laser intensity that would fry his ass on the spot.
    There was just no telling where he was, and getting him on the cell phone would take an act of God. Check that. It would take an act of some willing life-sized Barbie type. He could be anywhere: his fishing camp south of her trailer park, where there were hundreds of little bayous and marshy wetlands (or as Roy put it, plenty of escape routes); or, just north of her trailer park, hiding in a hole-in-the-wall bar somewhere in the muddy industrial city of Lake Charles, a place Bobbie Faye thought of as the kind of cranky, independent southern town that had never really given a rip what its image might be, although if someone had labeled it “home of the hard drinkers who make Mardi Gras revelers look like big fluffy candy-asses,” it might have staggered to attention and saluted. Knowing Roy the way she did, she figured he wasn’t anywhere near his own apartment in the heart of the city. Probably in some stupid poker game or, God help him, at one of his many girlfriends’ places.
He can run,
she thought,
but he can’t hide.
    Hiding was exactly what Roy was trying to do right at that moment. He slammed on his jeans and then squirmed his six-foot frame into a large, dusty compartment under the window seat situated in the bay window of his married girlfriend Dora’s house. He wriggled silently to try to ease the contortion, but his toes were already starting to cramp. The layers of dust inside the seat tickled his nose and he pinched it to keep from sneezing. He squinted through the decorative tin grill on the facing of the window seat and saw two sets of Muscles of the steroid persuasion barge into the room. Dora, his very tanned, very bosomy (bless Jimmy and his penchant for giving his wife all the plastic surgery she wanted), very blond girlfriend who was sitting above him on the window seat, shifted her legs to block the view into the grating, to better hide him.
    “Where’s Roy?” the smaller of the two sets of Muscles asked Dora.
    “I ain’t seen Roy since he left the bar. Besides, I’m married. What would Roy be doing here?”
    “Same thing he’s been doing ever since your Jimmy’sbeen out on the oil rig,” the shorter man said. He peered around the room