Shooting Starr (2 page)

“They're backed up—a lot of accidents, they said. Because of the storm, I guess. Those get priority, so they said there'd be at least a two-hour wait. That was an hour ago.”

“Well then—”

“I just called again. Now they tell me it's going to be another two hours. We can't stay here that long. We can't.”

It occurred to C.J. that her voice might be easy on the ears without that edge of tension in it. As it was, its very quietness gave her words an urgency that set his teeth on edge and raised the volume of the warnings in his head to a holler.

He scratched his head and mumbled, “Well, ma'am, I don't know what to tell you….” Truth was, he was stalling, because he was pretty sure he knew where this was heading and what she was about to ask of him and wanted to hold off disappointing her and her friend—especially that little girl—as long as he could.

At the same time he was beginning to resent the hell out of her for putting him in a position where he'd have to.

“If you could just give us a ride to the nearest—”

Damn it.
He elaborated on the swearing under his breath while he shook his head and rubbed unhappily at the back of his neck. “Ma'am, I wish I could do that—I do. I'm not allowed to pick up passengers, okay? I could lose my job.” Which was sort of a lie—the part about losing his job, anyway. His brother might chew him out good, but he wasn't going to fire him. On the other hand, the no-hitchhikers rule was something all the Blue Starr drivers understood and agreed on, mainly because it made basic good sense. Picking up strangers was dangerous, especially the female variety. Those could complicate a driver's life in ways C.J. didn't even like to think about.

But because he was softhearted by nature and hated to
let anybody down, he looked at this particular female and tried on his best smile, dimples and all. “Unless it's a matter of a life-or-death emergency, I suppose that'd be different.”

“It is.”

C.J. narrowed his eyes and didn't say anything for a minute or two; she'd caught him off guard with that, with the quiet tension in her voice and those silvery eyes never leaving his face. He felt a prickling under his skin, a kind of itchy-all-over, shivery feeling that made him think of the way an animal's fur lifts up when he's feeling threatened. He couldn't have said why he should feel danger connected with such a fragile-looking woman, but right then he was pretty certain if he'd had fur it would have been standing on end.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” he growled without stopping to clear his throat.

She made a sound he'd have sworn was a laugh, except her face didn't look like she thought anything was funny. She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a not-very-bright child. “I thought I'd made that clear. My car is broken down. I need you to take me—us—to the nearest town. Right now. As in, immediately.
Do you understand?
”

The urgency in her was so palpable C.J. actually stepped backward. His mind was racing, looking for explanations that would make sense to him. “Wait— How…is somebody—”

She didn't wait for him to work his way through it. Closing her eyes, she gave a regretful sigh and withdrew her hands from the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

Momentum carried C.J. through. “—hurt or someth—” Then his hands shot up in the air without his brain even telling them to. A natural response to the gun in her hand. “Aw,
jeez.
”

“I'm sorry,” she was saying in that same quiet but urgent way, “I don't have time to explain. I said we have to
leave here immediately. This—” she gave the gun a little wave, a
very
little one, she wasn't being careless with it “—is to let you know how serious I am about that. I will shoot if you—”

She interrupted herself with an exasperated sound and a hissed, “Oh, for heaven's sake, will you
please
put your hands down? You look silly with them up in the air like that.”

Not to mention what it's gonna look like to anybody who happens to pull into the parking lot right about now, was C.J.'s thought—his first coherent one since she'd pulled the snub-nosed pistol out of her sweatshirt pocket.

He snorted and muttered crossly, “Yeah, well, it seemed like the thing to do when somebody's pointin' a gun at me. Sorry—guess I just don't know how to act.” He did lower his hands, though…slowly. Now that the first shock was fading, he was starting to get good and mad, and he ground out the rest of it between gritted teeth. “I've never had anybody threaten to kill me before.”

She made a grimace, the first sign of honest-to-God emotion he'd seen in that fairy-princess face. “I did not threaten to kill you. I said shoot—I meant in some nonlethal place, of course. A leg or a foot, maybe. Anyway, I promise you won't like it. Plus, although I'm a fairly good shot, there's always a chance you'll move and make me nick something important, like an artery, or…you know. So I suggest you don't start weighing your chances.” She paused, then added, “And I can really do without the sarcasm. I don't do this sort of thing every day, you know.”

“Coulda fooled me,” C.J. muttered. “You're pretty damn good at it.” His heart was pounding and he felt sweat beginning to trickle between his shoulder blades.

“Look—I said I'm sorry. I just don't have time to stand here and argue with you. Or justify myself.” She turned her head enough so she could call over her shoulder without
taking her eyes off him, “Mary Kelly, it's okay, I've got us a ride.”

After a moment, C.J. saw the big-haired woman edge out from behind the ladies' room entry screen farther down the back side of the building. The little girl was still snugged up against her side, and he knew now what she reminded him of. It was those pictures he'd seen on the news of refugee kids in Bosnia or Afghanistan—big-eyed and scared, but stoic.

“Turn around, please, and start walking toward your truck.” The low, almost whispered command jerked his attention back to the woman with the gun, and he saw that it and her hands had disappeared back inside the pocket of her sweatshirt. “I don't want to upset Emma,” she explained, speaking rapidly now. “I hope I won't have to. Trust me—the gun's still right here, pointed at your belt buckle. Now, go on—
move.
”

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 be
hind 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.