Girls Just Wanna Have Guns Read Free Page B

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 U.S. 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 while at work and had been known to permanently retire a guy 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 from his Presbyterian mother that had ruined him, because no decent Irishman would have blinked over a wee drink or ten.
    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 barbed wire 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. He could no longer remember the first person Sean had killed, buthe remembered 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).
    “D’you 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 herd kamikaze bats.
    “She’s got no fuckin’ 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 nitroglycerin against a truckload of C-4.
    “Find
what
?” Bobbie Faye asked Francesca, 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 determinedset 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 supposedly been epic: a Romeo and Juliet couple caught between warring Cajun (Marie’s) and Creole (Emile’s)