Kathleen Creighton - Shooting Starr

What could he do? What did he do? Something brave and heroic? Hell, no, he did what anybody with a lick of sense would have done-he turned around and started walking. His spine was stiff as a poker and his back felt exposed, as if his clothes had been split open down the back and an icy cold wind was blowing in the gap. He had the good sense to be a little bit scared and wobble-legged, too, but mostly what he was, was madder’n hell. Madder than he could remember being in his life.

Behind him he could hear the scuffle of footsteps on pavement…a murmur of conversation between the two women. He didn’t turn to look, but he kept seeing the little girl hugging her momma’s legs, and her big scared refugee eyes. That was what made him the maddest. At least he thought it was. The truth was, C.J.’s feelings were pretty complicated right then.

When he was even with the back end of his trailer, he stuck a hand in his pocket and hauled out his keys, making a big deal out of holding them out to show his hijacker what he was doing. He unlocked the passenger-side door and held it wide open, and in a PO’d, sarcastically polite way waved his “passengers” in.

He felt mean and childish when the big-haired woman looked at him as she was lifting her little girl into the cab and murmured a breathless and sincere, “We really do appreciate this, mister-thank you.” Her accent was thick Southern-not Georgia, someplace farther west. Arkansas, maybe, or Oklahoma.

“Get back in the sleeper and shut the curtain,” the hijacker ordered the woman, just as if it had been her truck. When C.J. waved her in ahead of him she gave him a tight little smile and murmured, “After you.”

So he had no choice but to get in on the passenger side of his own rig and climb across the seat and the center console, dumping his law books on the floor in the process. By this time his anger was a buzzing inside his head, incessant as a horsefly trapped against a windowpane, and if there were any calm and reasoning voices left in there, he couldn’t hear them.

A gun. She’d pulled a gun on him!

What he wanted was to lash out and knock that damned gun into next week. He considered trying it. There’d be a moment-maybe when she was hauling herself into the cab and her hands were otherwise occupied.

Jeez. He was being hijacked by a woman, for God’s sake. And one who looked like something out of a book of fairy tales!

Well, shoot, he couldn’t very well knock her into next week. Reluctantly C.J. allowed that one inescapable fact into his consciousness, where it had the effect of pouring oil on boiling water. He’d never struck a woman before in his life and wasn’t about to start now, not even for this. His stomach turned queasy and his right arm went numb just thinking about it. Plus, there was that little girl. What if he put up a fight and hurt her by accident?

C.J. put his anger on slow simmer and settled into the driver’s seat. The hijacker lifted herself up to the cab, light as a butterfly landing on a blossom-and all the time managing to keep one hand, he noticed, on that gun in her sweatshirt pocket. She took her eyes off him only once, and that was when she was hauling the door shut and she glanced out at the mirror.

She gave a hiss of alarm and instead of settling into the passenger’s seat, crouched down in the space in front of it. “Pull out,” she said in a croaking whisper. “Now. Go…go!”

It was on the tip of his tongue to remind her in a withering tone that it wasn’t a dragster he was driving, that eighteen-wheelers don’t do jackrabbit starts, but what he did instead was take a look in his mirrors to see what it was that had got her so spooked. All he saw was a dark-gray sedan with tinted windows cruising slowly through the rest stop behind him. As he watched, the sedan pulled up behind the lone car parked in the lot and stopped. Two men got out of the passenger side.

“They lookin’ for you?” C.J. inquired, keeping his eyes on the mirror.

“Can we just go? Please…?” For once it was a plea, not an order.

Glancing over at his hijacker, he saw her face gazing at him from out of the shadows, pale as a daytime moon. Without another word he turned on his running lights, shifted gears and pulled the Kenworth slowly onto the ramp, accelerating on the downslope to the interstate. His heart was pounding and he had a peculiar, hollow feeling all through his insides, even his head, and he wondered if that was what people meant when they said something “didn’t seem real.”

He’d just about gotten up to cruising speed and was still keeping a close watch on his mirrors when he saw the gray sedan with the dark-tinted windows come barreling up behind him. His heart leaped into overdrive, but the sedan had already zipped into the fast lane and was shooting on past him. C.J. figured it had to be doing at least ninety.

He waited until the sedan had disappeared over a rise in the road ahead before he spoke to the hijacker in his quiet new voice, what he thought of as his unwilling coconspirator’s undertone, muttered out the side of his mouth. “You can come up now, if you want to. They’re long gone.”

She hesitated, then came up slowly in kind of an elongating process, first swiveling her head like a periscope to take in the road ahead and alongside as well as her mirror before easing into the seat with an exhalation that was almost a sigh. After giving C.J. a look to make sure he understood he was still under cover of that pistol of hers, she set about fastening her seat belt and settling in.

“Those guys were looking for you,” he said again, only this time it wasn’t a question. “Why in hell-”

She stopped him with a frown and a warning shake of her head, then jerked it toward the sleeper compartment behind them.

Exasperated, he turned on his radio, already set to a country music station, and flipped the speakers to the sleeper so they’d provide some cover noise. Then he said, “You could have just told me if you’re in some kind of trouble, you know. You didn’t have to go and pull a gun on me.”

“I thought I’d made that pretty clear.”

“Something besides car trouble, for Pete’s sake!”

When she didn’t answer right away, he looked over at her. She was staring straight ahead, and he could see the pale, slender arch of her throat move with her swallow. Her lips tightened. “I didn’t have time to explain. How could I know what you’d do? I knew they had to have caught up with us by now-”

“Who’s they? What do they want to catch up with you for?” What in the hell have you gotten me into, lady? was what he really wanted to ask.

He could feel her look at him. “They’re not cops,” she said in a cold hard voice. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

It wasn’t. In fact, he realized it was about the farthest thing from his mind. Those guys had looked like a couple of serious thugs to him, but now that she’d mentioned it… He chewed on it in silence for a minute, then said in what he thought was a friendly sort of way, “Okay, you want to give me an idea now what kind of trouble you’re in? Maybe I can help.”

She gave the kind of laugh without any humor in it. “You’re helping the only way you can. And the less you know about anything, the better. Believe me.” She turned her face toward the window then, but out of the corner of his eye he could see her hand flex inside the pocket of her sweatshirt, and he knew that gun was still pointing in his direction.

“Hey. You hungry?”

The hijacker jumped, as if she’d forgotten-for a few minutes, at least-that C.J. was there. She looked over at him but didn’t reply.

“There’s all kinds of snacks and things,” he went on, thinking now about the little girl with the hungry eyes. “You know, if anybody wants anything to eat, just help yourself.”

Those silvery eyes held steady on him for a heartbeat or two. Then she softly said, “Thank you,” and unbuckled her seat belt so she could hitch around and slide back the curtain that closed off the sleeper. After a moment she eased it shut again, settled back in her seat and rebuckled the belt. “Asleep,” she murmured, then added on an exhalation, “Thank God. They were both exhausted.”

And you? he thought, gratified to feel his brain shifting into work mode again. He was getting the glimmer of an idea.

Aloud, he asked, “How long’ve y’all been on the road?”

“Since yesterday.” Was it wishful thinking, or were her words a little slurred? He figured if anybody ought to be exhausted it was her, since she’d been doing the driving. He hoped so, anyway.

“Whereabouts you come from?” he persisted, growing braver.

She hesitated. “Miami.”

C.J. gave a low whistle and nodded. He was starting to have an idea what this might be about, and after a moment he asked the question that had popped into his head when she’d first mentioned the word cops. “Have you thought about going to the police?” Which maybe seemed like such a natural thing to do because his own family was lousy with lawyers and law enforcement, including one in-law who was with the FBI.

His hijacker shook her head. “That’s not an option,” she said in a flat, dull voice. He could feel her head swivel his way as she added impatiently, “Look, believe it or not, I know what I’m doing. Okay? Just…keep driving and don’t ask questions. Please,” she added, as a polite afterthought, then scrooched down on her tailbone and put her head back against the seat. She didn’t close her eyes, though, and again he could see the telltale shape inside her sweatshirt pocket, of her delicate little hand clenched around the butt of a snub-nosed pistol.

He went back to driving and keeping his mouth shut the way he’d been told, but he was starting to get angry again. Not the burning-all-over rage that had overwhelmed him before, but a slow simmer of resentment. First of all he wasn’t one to take kindly to being bossed around, never had been, and being bossed around by somebody holding a gun on him was even harder to take. Add to that the fact that the person holding the gun and doing the bossing was a woman, and a pretty one… It surprised him that that particular aspect bothered him, given the way he’d been raised, but dammit, it did. He couldn’t help but feel it reflected badly on his courage that he’d let such a thing happen-and even, in some foggy way, on his manhood.

Adding a whole other layer to his resentment was a thin veneer of guilt, which came over him whenever he thought about that little girl with the refugee eyes. Dammit, the woman was right; he ought to have known those people were in trouble when he’d first set eyes on them, there in that rest stop. He had known, if he’d let himself think about it, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. He hadn’t wanted to be bothered, afraid their trouble might interfere with his tight schedule. Truth was, if he’d offered his help right off the bat, the woman wouldn’t have had to pull a gun on him.

Not that that excused what she’d done. No way. And he wasn’t about to stand for it any longer than he could help.

It was quiet in the cab of the Kenworth in spite of the sweet rumble of the big diesel engine up there in front of him, the steady rush of highway noise and the muted thump of rockabilly music coming from the speakers back in the sleeper. The last of the storm had moved on east, and the late-afternoon sun had dropped down out of the clouds and was pouring liquid gold over his left shoulder. The interstate was straight and monotonous, traffic was light, and normally C.J. would have been fighting drowsiness pretty hard. But not this time. Right now he was wound up tight with all his senses honed.

It reminded him of the way he’d felt as a kid when his oldest brother, Troy, had taken him out hunting the first time, sitting up in that deer blind in the first light of a cold autumn dawn…wide-awake and shivering with excitement, waiting for his quarry to tiptoe into the clear.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see his passenger’s head make little jerking motions from time to time. He knew what that meant. The hijacker was fighting sleep.

C.J. drove in silence, as smooth and steady as he knew how. He’d timed it to hit Atlanta during dinner hour and was lucky enough to sail around the beltway without any major stalls. By the time he’d got sorted out and was heading northeast out of the city, twilight had given way to darkness and traffic had thinned out the way it usually did at that hour. It was mostly just big trucks, now. Long-haul drivers, like him.

And the hijacker was sound asleep.