Shooting Starr. Kathleen Creighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 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.”

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