Kathleen Creighton - Shooting Starr

Oblivious, she gave a small, tired-sounding sigh. “I just wish I knew why you’re here.” He didn’t know how to answer her, so he didn’t try. After a moment she added in a soft, slightly thickened voice, as if she might be about to cry, “What is it you want from me?”

“I don’t want anything.” His quickening heartbeat seemed to fill his chest. Her vulnerability touched him with an unfamiliar fear that made him sound angry when he was anything but. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I don’t want your help.” She threw it back at him, her voice as harsh and angry as his, and it never occurred to him she might be covering up something else, the same way he was.

“Look,” he said, biting off words lest they give away too much, “you’re gonna have to have help from somebody, might just as well be with me. They’re gonna put you in some kind of safe house when you leave here, anyway, did you think about that? What, would you rather be with strangers?”

To his surprise she laughed-a single bright puff of air. “What do you think we are? We are strangers.”

He clamped his teeth together and worked a muscle in his jaw while he thought about how to tell her what he knew in his heart, which was that she wasn’t a stranger to him, not anymore. That during the past few months there’d been a bond formed that tied her to him in ways he didn’t understand himself.

He leaned forward, shaking his head, then remembered she couldn’t see that. “No, we’re not,” he said, in the flat, implacable way that had driven his brothers and sisters up the wall and won him a lot more arguments than he’d lost. “It’s true we haven’t known each other all that long, but we’ve sure enough had a profound effect on one another’s lives.”

She gave that little laugh again and was silent. Her lips held on to an ironic tilt, and her sightless eyes shifted past him while she thought about it.

He watched her for a moment, then said softly, “You’re gonna like them, you know.”

“Who?” Her eyes darted back to him and lit on his chin. He found himself smiling.

“My folks. They’re good people. Hey, my mom was a teacher, too, you know. Like your dad.”

She settled back onto the pillows with a sigh. “That explains it.”

“Yeah? What?”

“The way you talk.”

“The way I-”

“You use good grammar. Most of the time.”

“Huh,” said C.J., bemused that she’d noticed such a thing about him. It gave him an unexpected warming feeling inside.

As if she’d heard his thoughts, her lips curved again with that wry smile. “When your dad’s a schoolteacher and you’ve had good grammar pounded into you all your life, you notice.” She shifted a little, then murmured, “So, what about your dad? What does he do?”

“Died when I was little. Heart attack.” He was still trying to get past that remark about his grammar.

“Oh-I’m sorry.” She didn’t say anything more for a while, and he got to thinking it was time for him to leave. He was getting ready to do that-shifting around and making rustling noises, trying to think what to say to end things-when she turned her face toward him and put out a hand. Searching.

His heart gave a bump, and he wondered if he dared take her hand and hold it, but before he could make up his mind she jerked it back and grasped it with her other one on the folded-over sheet across her middle.

“Please,” she said in a soft but urgent voice. “Tell me about them-your family.” She sounded nervous, he thought, as if she couldn’t bear for him to leave. Like a little child asking for one more drink of water and a bed-time story because she didn’t want to be left alone in the dark.

So he settled back in his chair with a silent exhalation, cleared his throat and began to tell her about the people most important to him in this world. He started with his mother, Betty Starr, five foot one on a good day, who’d taught school and raised seven children with a soft voice and an iron hand while her husband was off driving an eighteen-wheeler across the country. He told her about his brother, Jimmy Joe, who’d taken over the trucking when his dad died and built it into the company called Blue Starr Transport, and had given C.J. a job when he needed help to put himself through law school and nobody else besides his mother believed he could.

“How’s that law degree coming along?” Caitlyn interrupted. She had that wry little smile on her lips, and C.J. knew she was remembering that April night they’d faced each other between the headlight beams of his truck and he’d told her he couldn’t do what she was asking of him. And that she’d known the reason why without him having to tell her.

He told her it was coming along fine, that he’d gotten his degree in June and was just waiting to take the bar exam. He didn’t tell her he’d most likely be postponing his scheduled date which was coming up week after next.

He went on to tell her about his brothers and sisters then, working his way down the list starting with his oldest sister, Tracy, the conventional one, a schoolteacher, too, married to Al who was a cop down in Augusta. Then Troy the ex-SEAL, now married to Charly, father of two and a private investigator. He’d made it as far as his sister Jess the nurse, mother of eighteen-year-old Sammi June, and was explaining how she’d been living with their momma since her husband, Tristan, had gotten shot down flying missions over Iraq, when he looked over and saw he no longer had an audience. Caitlyn had fallen asleep.

He cut himself off in the middle of the sentence and put a hand over his mouth, letting an exhalation sigh quietly from his nose while he studied her. Relaxed, the lines of stress and frustration erased by sleep, her face seemed to him flawless once more, fairy-tale lovely, the lump on her forehead, the swelling, the bruises beneath her eyes and the healing scrape on her chin of no consequence, invisible to his eyes.

Emotions tumbled through him like puppies, wreaking havoc on his piece of mind. Out of the chaos, he could find only one clear thought.

She sure doesn’t look like a hijacker.

On the day Caitlyn Brown was to be released, the hospital held a press conference on the promenade outside its main public entrance. The hospital’s administrator and attorney were featured, as was the doctor in charge of the patient’s care and treatment. So were Caitlyn’s parents and the attorney they’d hired on their daughter’s behalf. Various law enforcement agencies were represented, including the FBI, the district attorney’s office and the local chief of police.

Throughout the conference, fit young men with somber faces and flinty eyes kept watch from the steps in front of the crowd, while somewhat scruffier individuals of both genders bearing microphones and video cameras filled the sidewalks and overflowed into the street, snarling traffic for blocks around. The hospital parking lot was choked with satellite trucks and vans bearing the logos of every major news agency in the country and a fair number from overseas-it had been a relatively quiet news week and this was the niece of the former leader of the free world, after all.

C.J. watched the news conference on a television set mounted high on the wall of a waiting area on the hospital’s quiet third floor. Except for one big-bellied, ruddy-faced man leafing through a tabloid newspaper in the row of chairs across from him, he was alone. Closed-captioning was off; the TV sound was on, turned down low.

Leaning tensely forward, clasped hands fidgeting, C.J. listened to the hospital personnel tell how Ms. Brown had received the best possible care and how pleased everyone was with her recovery thus far. Then he listened while the doctor explained about the swelling inside Caitlyn’s brain, a result of the bullet that had grazed her skull, that was affecting the optic nerve. And no, there was no way of knowing at this point whether her blindness would be permanent; they would have to wait for the swelling to go down in order to determine whether or not there was significant damage to the optic nerve itself.

At that point the red-faced man, who was wearing overalls with a short-sleeved T-shirt, and a ball cap bearing a tractor manufacturer’s logo over thick iron-gray hair, gave his newspaper a shake and grunted, “Helluva thing, innit?”

Without taking his eyes from the screen, C.J. agreed that it was. He was watching the law enforcement contingent take over the microphones, shuffling around and muttering as they got themselves sorted into the previously agreed-upon speaking order. After some throat-clearing and fidgeting, the chief of police admitted there was no new progress to report in the search for the gunman who’d killed Mary Kelly Vasily and wounded Ms. Brown and two police officers. And that it was too early to determine whether the body of a male Caucasian in mid to late forties that had been discovered shot to death and dumped locally near an abandoned mill had any connection with the case.

The D.A. then stepped up to assert that the decision had been made not to return Caitlyn Brown to jail, and that the FBI would be placing her in protective custody at an undisclosed location.

The FBI representative’s remarks consisted mostly of “I’m sorry, I can’t comment on that,” in response to questions fired at him from all sides by members of the press corps.

About the time the questioners were showing signs of impatience and the organizers of the press conference looked as though they might be getting ready to pack it in, a change came over the crowd. As if, C.J. thought, a stiff wind had sprung up out of somewhere. The young blond CNN reporter came into view, looking excited and holding a microphone in one hand. She had the other hand up to the side of her head, cupped over her ear.

“…word that Caitlyn Brown is coming out of the hospital at this very moment. Tim, I’m going to try and get over there-”

There followed a confusion of rapidly changing pictures, garbled sounds and jerky images, and then a partly obscured view of the hospital’s ambulance entrance, where someone in a wheelchair had apparently just emerged through the automatic sliding door. The wheelchair was being propelled with some urgency across the pavement to where three dark sedans with tinted windows waited, engines idling. There were only glimpses of the chair and its occupant, surrounded as they were by hospital personnel in light-colored slacks and tunics and men in neckties and dark suits. Nevertheless, it was possible to determine that the figure in the chair was slender and slightly built and was wearing dark blue sweats and a black-and-yellow baseball cap that didn’t quite cover the bandages swathing her head. Also a pair of dark-rimmed sunglasses.

“Why,” the red-faced man said in an awed voice, “looka there, she ain’t but a little bit of a thang.”

C.J. nodded absently. His eyes were riveted on the TV screen and he was trying his best to follow the jerky, jostled images of a pale face all but obscured by huge dark lenses. Then there was only a closing car door, and dark-tinted windows reflecting back excited faces, open mouths and shoving microphones against a blue September sky.

The red-faced man said sadly, “It’s just a shame, innit? A real shame…”

C.J. let out the breath he’d been holding and agreed that it was indeed a shame. Then, murmuring, “Would you excuse me?” he pushed himself up from the chair and lurched out of the waiting area. Halfway down an empty hallway across from an elevator marked Hospital Personnel Only, he pushed open a door, stepped into a room and closed the door behind him.

“Okay,” he said, a little out of breath, “they’re off. How’s everybody doing in here? You ready to go?”

“I’m ready,” Caitlyn said, breathless as he was. Her silvery eyes stared resolutely into middle distance as one hand lifted to adjust the scarf that framed her face, wound loosely and draped over her shoulders in the style of an Afghani woman. The other hand, relaxed in her lap, cradled a video camera.

Jake Redfield stood behind Caitlyn’s wheelchair. His deep-set eyes, intent and somber, were on his wife. “Okay, then-I guess this is it.” He took a breath, and it occurred to C.J. that the FBI man might not be as cool about things as he looked. “Eve, you know what-”

“Yes, love, I know what to do.” Her tone was somber, too, but her eyes danced. “By now, I’ve made sure everyone in my crew knows about my new protégée from Afghanistan, here for a ‘few days’ to learn about documentary filmmaking. Her name is Jamille, by the way-which means beautiful, I think, in one of those languages over there. Perfect, isn’t it?” Her smile burst forth, as if she couldn’t keep it in check a moment longer.