Shooting Starr. Kathleen Creighton

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СКАЧАТЬ whole thing. She knew she didn’t have a prayer of winning against him in court, and that once he had custody of Emma, he would kill her. Mary, I mean. That was when she called us. We had to act quickly—”

      “What do you mean, ‘us’?” Then he forgot that question as the rest of what she’d said sank in. “Kill her? Come on. Who is this guy? Sounds like a TV movie of the week, for God’s sake.” But the heavy feeling in his belly was squeezing into his chest.

      She pivoted away, moving in that weightless way she had, and raked fingers through her hair in a gesture of helpless frustration. “Please—don’t ask any more questions, okay?” And she was back before him, her hands light as butterflies on his stubbornly folded arms. “Look—I’m sorry I ever dragged you into this. But I—we—really do need your help right now. There’s no one else we can turn to. Please.”

      It took a lot of willpower with those eyes gazing into his, liquid and shimmering with held-back tears, but he held himself aloof, gruff and immobile. “Just tell me one thing. Who has custody of that little girl? Right now. You said they’d been to court. Did the judge make a ruling?”

      She nodded, not looking at him, not answering. She didn’t have to. Her silence only confirmed his worst fear.

      Furious now, he jerked his arms away from that featherlight touch and slapped one hand to his forehead. “Oh, man. The judge gave the father full custody, didn’t he? And you two took her, anyway. In direct violation of a judge’s order. Jeez. That’s kidnapping, don’t you know that? Jeez.”

      He paced off across the concrete slab, trying to think his way through the disaster. His boots made loud scraping, crunching noises on the gravelly surface, and to him it sounded like his whole life, all his hopes and dreams, ten years of hard work and struggle, slip-sliding away into an abyss of failure.

      He stopped, turned and looked back. She was standing where he’d left her, in a pool of light from the yard lamp, arms folded across her waist, head bowed, looking nothing at all like a hijacker or kidnapper. Looking like a lost traveler.

      His heart lurched, then sank into his stomach. “I can’t do it,” he said, walking back to her, his voice echoing the harsh sound of his boots on that gritty slab. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you commit a felony. That’d make me guilty, too. I can’t do that. I just can’t. I’m sorry….”

      He expected her to argue with him. What she did was worse. She waited until he’d run out of words and then, still staring at the ground, lifted a hand to brush at something on her cheeks. After a moment she hitched her shoulders in a resigned sort of way and said in a muffled voice, “I saw the law books in your truck. You studying to become a lawyer?”

      C.J. let out the breath he’d been holding, and all his anger went with it. “Yeah. Trying to. I’m almost done—on my last semester of law school, in fact. Then all I have left to do is pass the bar.” And meanwhile keep from committing any felonies.

      He wasn’t all that surprised when she seemed to understand.

      They’d begun walking back toward the truck, her with her head down and her arms still folded across her middle, him with his fingertips poked into the tops of his hip pockets, feeling guilty and mean. When they reached the place between the headlights where they’d have to part company and go to their respective sides of the truck, for some reason he felt reluctant to let her go. Then she angled a look up toward him, and to his surprise there was a ghost of a smile on her lips.

      “I sure picked the wrong truck to hijack,” she said.

      He managed a ghost of a laugh. Then, about to turn away, he stopped and jerked back to her. “Out of curiosity, why did you? Pick me, I mean.”

      Her eyes came to rest on his face and her smile lingered a wistful moment before fading. “You were the last,” she said with a shrug. “I couldn’t very well have witnesses. Even if I hadn’t had to use the gun, somebody might remember seeing us get in a truck, might even remember which truck we’d gotten into. So I waited until everyone else had gone. You were the last to leave.” After a pause she softly added, with a brief reprise of her smile—ironically tilted now, “And you were kind to Emma.”

      C.J. grunted, the way he might if he’d been socked in the stomach. Obeying some compulsion he didn’t understand, he put his hands on her arms, up near her shoulders. He was shocked at how real she felt—and that was how he thought it, while at the same time acknowledging how ridiculous it was to think that way. Real? He knew she was no fantasy, in spite of ethereal grace and fairy-tale beauty—he’d felt the weight of that pistol of hers in his own hands—but it jolted the healthy red-blooded male part of him anyway, the tactile proof that there was a flesh-and-blood woman underneath that sweatshirt, a body warm and pulsing with vitality, slender and supple and wiry strong. He felt the jolt in his own muscles and nerves, all the way down to the pit of his stomach.

      “Look, I’ll help you turn yourselves in,” he said, rushing the words because it had become gravely important to him that she see how right he was about this. “Okay? I’ll take you to the police station, see you get a lawyer. Hey—” he flashed her his dimples “—my family’s lousy with lawyers. My brother Troy’s wife, Charlie—this is right up her alley. I’ll give her a call as soon as we get back on the road, have her meet us—”

      “Thanks, but that’s not necessary.” Her voice was remote.

      “It’s the best way,” he said. “Trust me. You can’t keep running forever, not with both the law and—” He stopped for a moment, remembering the gray sedan, and the dark and purposeful men he’d watched in his rearview mirrors. “If this guy, this…”

      “Vasily,” she grimly supplied. “Ari Vasily.”

      C.J. nodded. “If this Vasily guy is a killer, and he has the kind of resources you say he does, what makes you think you—or your friend and her little girl, rather—would ever be safe as long as he’s after you?” He paused to listen to himself, liking his own reasoning more and more. “No—the best thing, I’m telling you, is to turn yourselves in. Tell your story to the police. They can protect you. Then, we get you a good lawyer—”

      “Thanks, but you’ve done enough.” Her sardonic little smile reproached him. He let go of her and stuck his hands underneath his arms, then stood there feeling vaguely embarrassed while she hitched up her sweatshirt and took her cell phone from its holster. “I would like to make a couple of phone calls, though. If you, uh, don’t mind?” she added when he didn’t get the hint she was asking for privacy.

      “Oh…oh, yeah, sure,” he said, catching on, and was about to leave her there when she stalled him with a questioning gesture.

      “Where are you taking us? To turn ourselves in.”

      So, at least it looked like she was calling her lawyer. He thought about it, then told her the name of the next major stop on up the interstate in South Carolina, which he knew to be a town big enough to have its own courthouse and police department but small enough not to be too overwhelmed with bureaucracy.

      She repeated the name under her breath, then said very softly, “Don’t…say anything, okay? Let me tell them…please?”

      He nodded and went around to his side of the truck.

      When he climbed into the cab he saw the sleeper curtain was pulled wide open. The woman, Mary Kelly, was sitting in the middle of it, rocking her daughter back and forth while the little girl sobbed and shivered and СКАЧАТЬ