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Authors: Kathleen Creighton

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BOOK: Shooting Starr
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“She'd be protected….”

“It's the perfect solution.”

“We'd have to get her there without anybody knowing,” Jake said slowly. “And I mean
anybody.
” Caitlyn felt his weight shift as he turned from her to address the others. She heard the rush of a sharply exhaled breath. “Getting her out of this place won't be easy. Camera crews and news media everywhere you—”

“Do I hear somebody playing my tune?” That was a new voice, light and musical as birdsong.

Someone said, “Eve!” and it was echoed around the room in varying tones of surprise and delight, along with cries of “Hey, when did you get back?” and “I thought you were in Afghanistan!”

Jake's weight was gone from the bed. Caitlyn heard, “Hey, Waskowitz…” in a voice deep-throated and husky with intimacy, and after a moment, more softly, “You just get in?”

“Just,” the newcomer murmured back. “I came as soon as I got your message.”

“How was your flight? Get any sleep?”

“Okay…not much…never mind…”

Chafing with impatience, Caitlyn waited, listening to the exchange of mundane and essential information between partners and lovers—for that much was obvious from the first word spoken by the newcomer—reunited after a separation prolonged both in time and distance. She stared fiercely into the nothingness as if she could penetrate it with the sheer effort of her will, and was struggling against a childish sense of exclusion, the urge to cry out, “Hey! Over here! What about
me?

Then she felt her hand covered with one that was slender but strong…the skin roughened as if it had recently been too much exposed to hot dry winds and too little to soap and soothing lotions. The bright, musical voice said, “Hey, I'm Eve Waskowitz, Jake's wife. And you're Caitlyn, right?”

Before Caitlyn could utter a word, a new, lighter weight settled onto the bed beside her, and the voice became nearer and almost a whisper, like secrets whispered by best friends in the friendly dark. “They said you can't see at the moment—gee, I can't imagine how confusing it must be, surrounded by a bunch of strange people all talking at once. Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah…I'm fine.” And for the first time in a long time, Caitlyn found herself thinking she might be. “Nice to meet you. Did…somebody say you were in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah…filming.” There was a gust of breath. “Long story. In a nutshell, I make documentaries. Cable, mostly, although this one's for one of the major networks—
big
thrill. Not to mention more money than I'm used to having at my disposal.” By way of changing the subject, she shifted her weight and turned to include the others in the room, although she kept her hand on Caitlyn's. “So, what's going on? What did I miss?”

“We're havin' a council of war,” Charly said—and the last word sounded like
wo-ah.

“Oh, goody,” Eve chortled, while Caitlyn, talking over her, was saying flippantly, “We're planning to set a trap for the bad guy, and use me as bait.”

Someone—C.J.—actually growled, and Jake sucked in air and said shortly, “We're not going to do that.”

“Anyway, that's puttin' the cart in front of the horse,” Charly said in her distinctive, dry way. “We need to get her well first. To do that, we've got to get her tucked away someplace safe where the bad guys can't get at her.”

There were restless stirrings from C.J.'s side of her bed, and his voice said testily, “We have a place. What I'm gonna do is take her home to Georgia with me. The trick is getting her out of
here
without anybody catching on. The damn media—'scuse me, Eve—have got this whole place surrounded. Every TV station in the country's got a truck parked out there.”

Eve made a sound like a self-satisfied cat. “Then nobody would be apt to notice one more, would they?”

There was a short, fat silence, and then Jake murmured, “Eve…” just as C.J. said, “Hah!” and Charly, chuckling, said, “It's perfect.”

“Of course it is. Simple, too. We'll just smuggle her out as part of my crew.” Eve's hand squeezed Caitlyn's and
her weight was no longer beside her on the bed. “It'll take me a couple days to round 'em up—they're still trickling in from Afghanistan—I came ahead to get things set up for postproduction—but you're not going to be ready to go for a while anyway, right? She'll need to be on her feet, at least. And, hmm, let's see…those bandages might be—”

“Eve,” her husband said in a low, warning tone, “nobody in your crew can know about this. I mean,
nobody.

“Well, of course. Not a word goes beyond the people in this room.” Caitlyn felt the brush of a cool cheek and then Eve's voice, light with laughter, faded into distance. “Don't worry, my love—leave everything to me!”

To C.J., still tuned to the nuances of sound in a sightless world, the silence that followed her leaving had a vibrancy to it, like the aftermath of the ringing of a bell.

For long seconds nobody seemed to have anything to say. Then Charly, in her dry, sardonic way, said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that.”

Jake cleared his throat, gazed distractedly after his departed wife and muttered, “I wouldn't quite say that…. Uh, there's a lot to take care of on my end. So…guess I better get on it. I'll be in touch.” The last was for Caitlyn as he touched her hand in a brief farewell.

As if that was a signal of some kind, Wood Brown took a step forward and Charly glanced at her watch and said, “Well, I'm gonna head on back. What about you C.J.—you comin'?” He shook his head, and she gave the blanket-draped lump that was Caitlyn's foot a friendly squeeze. “Okay, y'all keep me informed, now, y'hear?” She and Jake went out together, as Wood moved to his daughter's side.

He took her hand and gently squeezed it. “Okay, honey, guess I'd better go see what your mother's up to. I'll tell her what we've decided.” C.J. thought his quiet ways must be very reassuring under those circumstances. For a moment he felt a twinge of something akin to envy—he could
barely remember his own father. And then Caitlyn's father leaned over and brushed her forehead with his lips and was gone.

It was the moment C.J. had both wanted and dreaded. Alone with the woman he knew deep down in his heart he'd wronged, he felt tongue-tied and useless. And yet, he didn't want to leave simply because, right then, at her bedside was the only place in the world he knew how to be. No matter how bad he felt being there, he knew he was going to feel worse somewhere else.

But in a way, it was even more fundamental than that, nothing whatever to do with thought, just a heaviness inside him that was bone deep, as if his body had somehow taken root in that hospital chair.

Seconds ticked by. Wood Brown's footsteps were swallowed up by the hospital sounds. C.J.'s breathing seemed loud enough to him to wake the dead.

“You're still here, aren't you?” Caitlyn said in a low voice, turning a shifting, unfocused gaze toward him. Searching for him in her private darkness.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. With that sound her gaze found him and sharpened unnervingly, almost as though she could see. Uncomfortably he mumbled, “You need anything? Can I get—”

“I'm fine.” But she flinched as she said it, as if she acknowledged the lie it was.

C.J. watched a frown pucker the middle of her forehead, the unmarred part just below the purple lump bisected by a dark line held together by neat, white butterfly bandages where she'd met the brick courthouse steps on her way down. From out of nowhere came a throat-tightening urge to touch his lips to the spot, and he swallowed rapidly and looked away, glad for once that the object of the impulse wasn't able to see him.

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.

BOOK: Shooting Starr
8.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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