The planked oak floor wasn’t unusual. The bearskin rug wasn’t unexpected. The bar running the length of the back wall, big-screen TV, pool table, and man-couches were requisite.
But the centerpiece of the room was a taxidermied wild boar, complete with tusks, Mardi Gras beads, and a maid’s cap. Its gray-black fur had patches of wear, as though it had once been used for target practice, or maybe as though the guys in the squadron had rubbed the thing’s lucky shoulder one too many times. Beneath its marble eyes, proud snout, and curved tusks, its mouth was split in a goofy grin.
“Sweet baby Jeremiah the bullfrog,” she whispered.
“This issogoing in a book,” Tarawhispered. “I’ve only ever heard rumors of her existence. Thathasto be Gertrude. Bet she weighs two hundred pounds if she weighs an ounce.”
“Nah, they took out her innards.” They were probably still looking at dragging forty to fifty pounds of stuffed boar across a cornfield though.
Her pulse amped up, and she grinned. She’d have to drive her Jeep out here, and they had to do it without being heard or seen, and somehow cover up the boar for the ride home.
If she was taking this thing home. It was a beaut, but even Kaci’s redneck had a limit.
She plopped the twelve-inch pink stuffed pig onto the bar, right next to the pumpkin-chuckin’ trophy that should’ve gone to her girls, then circled back around the boar. “Gertrude, sugar, we’re fixin’ to take you joyriding.”
“Kaci, I don’t think we can?—”
“Don’t you be doubting us now. We came, we saw, and we’re gonna conquer.”
“Before or after we get caught?”
That was the real question of the night, wasn’t it?
Sunday afternoons were supposedto be for watching football games.
Instead, Lance was standing in the middle of Pony’s man cave with half the squadron, stone-cold sober and honestly more pissed than he’d been when Allison called off the wedding.
“What kind of fucker would steal Gertrude?” Pony snarled.
“Could’ve been the fighter jocks,” Juice Box said.
Lance eyed the pink stuffed pig sitting rightwhere Gertrude was supposed to be, and his brain flashed back to a sassy blonde.
She wouldn’t have.
Shecouldn’thave.
Could she?
“No ransom note?” he asked.
“Just the fucking pink cartoon animal.”
Was that something Kaci Boudreaux would do?
And what was with hoping it was? Chick was trouble with a capital W-O-M-A-N. But worse because she was smart, and she knew it. She was also a walking wet dream, and she knew it. And she was dangerous, which she honestly might not know.
“Your sister got any friends in the fighter squadron here?” Pony asked Lance.
Odds were good. She’d either know somebody, or she’d know somebody who knew somebody.
How things worked in their world. “Probablybe quicker to go pay them a visit than to wait for Cheri to call around.”
“Got footprints out back,” somebody called.
“We reporting this to the cops?” Juice Box said.
Lance and Pony shared a look.
