Chapter 6
If any of Kaci’s students had told her that they were considering sneaking into a rival fraternity house to steal a mascot, she would’ve threatened to call their mommas and have the police waiting for them.
But the beautiful thing about being a full-fledged grown-up was that she didn’t have to make the same threats against herself that she did to her students.
Which was why, Saturday night, she and Tara were decked out in black, creeping along the edge of a cornfield and heading toward a shed at the very edge of town limits.
“This is great research,” Tara whispered. “I need inspiration for writing a man cave.”
“But remember—no pictures, no fingerprints, and no vaguebooking on social media. Even a little,” Kaci whispered back.
“They’re going to know it was you.”
“Don’t mean I have to make it easy for them to prove.
” A felony breaking-and-entering charge on her record would probably cause some issues with her dean, among other hoity-toities at James Robert.
Not to mention the ammunition it would give the sexist pigs on the tenure committee.
But she still remembered her daddy laughing over stories of stealing rival squadrons’ mascots and the pranks that had been pulled in retribution.
This here was good old-fashioned fun.
“Remember, if we get caught, run.”
“And if we get caught again, embellish our stories enough that they don’t sound rehearsed.” Tara giggled. “I knew all those episodes of NCIS would come in handy one day.”
“Girl, no more military shows. We’re over military men, remember?”
“Ssh. Was that a dog?”
Kaci stopped. She strained to listen, but all she heard were crickets and other night insects.
“I guess not,” Tara whispered. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
They crept up to the corner of the shed, squatting closer and closer to the ground as they went, Kaci clutching a pink stuffed pig from one of those kids’ shows she’d heard the department secretary moaning about. They passed evidence of a bonfire, along with a decomposing pile of pumpkin guts.
This looked like the place. According to Tara’s friend, one of the guys in the squadron owned the land out here, and he’d converted the back-lot toolshed to a bar that all the guys could hang out at.
A house was visible in the distance, barely outlined in the light from the waning moon.
The house’s windows were all dark, as were the windows in the shed.
“You know how to pick a lock?” Tara whispered.
“I’m a physicist, not a criminal,” she whispered back. “But if lots of these guys use this place, there has to be a key hidden somewhere.”
“Like in a flowerpot?” Tara deadpanned.
“More like under a fake dead skunk, from what I’ve seen of these boys.”
They crept about the edges of the building, checking beneath windows and on top of the doorframe. On the second pass around, Kaci almost tripped over a rock. “Huh.”
She knelt on the ground and felt beneath it. “Bingo.”
Tara crept back to join her. “What if they have an alarm system?”
“Sugar, they got at least a dozen dumb flyer jocks who know where this key is. You think they’re gonna ask ’em to remember an alarm code to get in here?”
“Pilots have really good memories for stuff that’s important,” Tara whispered back. “I dated this guy in college who used to recite emergency procedures in his sleep.”
Kaci slid the key into the lock. “Guess we’ll find out the hard way.” She had to jiggle it, but eventually, the lock turned. She twisted the knob, and it released with a click that echoed through the night.
“Ssh!” Tara hissed.
No lights flipped on, no security systems beeped, no lasers lit the night—not that lasers worked the way Hollywood said, and Kaci would know—and no masked ninjas leapt out to stop them. “Your flashlight ready?” she asked.
“Ten-four, good buddy.”
They slipped into the dark shed. Tara hit the switch on her flashlight, and both of them gasped.
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 is so going in a book,” Tara whispered. “I’ve only ever heard rumors of her existence. That has to 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 supposed to 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 right where Gertrude was supposed to be, and his brain flashed back to a sassy blonde.
She wouldn’t have.
She couldn’t have.
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. “Probably be 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.
None of them had been at Gellings when Gertrude became the mascot for the 946th, but they both knew the story. There had been a refueler squadron here several years back, and the flying hogs had relieved them of their mascot not long before they went inactive and transferred to other bases.
So while the unofficial story was that they’d given Gertrude a new home, the real version might call into question the boar’s true ownership.
And nobody wanted the squadron to look bad.
“We didn’t sign up for the military to hand our problems off to the local LEOs,” he said.
“And this here, Juicy, is called tradition,” Pony added. “We’ll get her back. Question is, how much are the tiny dicks gonna pay first?”
A rumble of agreement went through the room.
“You sure it’s not that hot professor chick?” Juice Box said.
A few of the guys snorted.
He had an inexplicable desire to shove Juicy up against a wall and tell him to permanently remove Dr. Kaci Boudreaux from his brain and vocabulary.
Kid was sniffing around something that’d get him in trouble.
Never mind Lance wanted a little more of that trouble for himself.
“That professor chick couldn’t have done this,” Pony said. “She throws. She doesn’t carry.”
More laughs bounced around the party room.
But Pony had said the exact wrong thing.
That Kaci couldn’t have done it.
Kaci could do any fucking thing she put her mind to.
She was like Allison that way.
That was the only way she was like Allison, though. Kaci didn’t seem the type to put on dinners or volunteer to teach Sunday school or to wear a dress.
“Besides, how would she know Gertrude exists?” Pony added.
Because Lance told her.
That should’ve prompted a shitstorm of expletives in his head, but instead, he caught himself smiling again.
Would she have?
Undoubtedly.
And the would removed any doubt about the could, because if he had learned anything about Dr. Kaci Boudreaux, he’d learned she never stopped.
Kaci was headed up to her apartment late Sunday afternoon after a Physics Club meeting when none other than Captain Lance Kiss-and-Run Wheeler strolled around the corner on her floor.
Her heart did a somersault and her ovaries sat up and sniffed, but the rest of her went on high alert.
Was he here for her?
And if so, because of the kiss, or because of the boar?
“Evenin’, Captain,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
He crossed his arms and took up a position holding the wall up. “Is it?”
“My momma always taught me to look on the bright side. Fancy’s all I got.”
Those talented—erm, devilish—lips spread in a smile. “Feeling something again, aren’t you?”
She was feeling a need for a hole in her head. Be more useful than feeling intrigued by him. “Nausea, but I’m sure it’ll pass before you’re out of the parking lot.”
“Been thinking about you.” He leaned closer. “Imagine you hear that all the time though. Might even be good sometimes. Like when it’s someone other than your momma, your boss, or your parole officer.”
Dollars to dandelions, the man was sniffing around for his boar. “Or my ex-husband. Let’s not leave him out.”