Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

by Kathleen Creighton

  “Come on, now, take it easy, okay? Just take a deep breath, calm down and tell me what happened.”

  She nodded and dropped her eyes, avoiding that steely green gaze and fastening hers instead on a tiny nick on his cheek where he’d cut himself shaving. Staring at that spot, that small vulnerability, she felt a kind of peace come over her, along with a strange urge to touch the cut place. She couldn’t recall ever having that kind of impulse with Nicholas. Nicky had guarded his personal privacy religiously. She’d never have dared to invade his personal space unless he invited her to.

  She shook off the distraction along with the dangerous impulse to trust this man she barely knew. Allowing herself to become so dependent on a man just because he’d saved her life once and was inexplicably helping her now was just foolhardy. This was real life, not one of her grandmother’s old cowboy movies, and you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats. The fact that J. J. Fox reminded her of John Wayne didn’t automatically make him a good guy.

  On the other hand…the man was a cop, and if Izzy was in trouble, who else could she turn to?

  She brushed at her cheeks and straightened up, doing her best to ignore both the dog panting over her shoulder and the pang of regret she felt when J.J. let go of her arms. “My friend, Izzy-Isabelle-we’ve been best friends since Catholic school. We went to med school together. I quit my internship when I met Nicholas, but she went on, and she’s a doctor now. She works in a free clinic in South Los Angeles.”

  “And, I take it, this friend is also a nun?”

  Rachel nodded. “Well, technically, she’s a sister, since she’s not cloistered. But anyway, she came to visit me, and she was wearing a habit, which she doesn’t usually. But…she was wearing it this time because she had a plan-” she pressed her fingers to her lips to cut off a gulp of laughter that was too perilously close to a sob “-to help me escape from Carlos’s compound.”

  “I’m guessing Carlos is the one who gave you those bruises?” His voice was hard and dangerous, and the dog growled low in her throat.

  She jerked her glance toward him, saw the same hardness reflected in his eyes. She felt a little chill go through her. “That’s not-”

  “Look, I’m a cop, okay? I’m a detective, and a damn good one. I’ve seen bruises like the ones you’re wearing, and they don’t come from car crashes. I’m guessing you’re worried about your friend because somebody hit you, most likely with a fist. If not Carlos, then who?”

  She closed her eyes and let go a breath, soft with defeat. “When the letter came-Sam Malone’s letter-I read it and signed for it while one of Carlos’s guards stood there and watched me. What could he do-short of killing the messenger, I guess. But of course, as soon as the messenger left, he went to tell Carlos. Carlos demanded that I give him the letter, and when I refused, he went ballistic. He, um…” She cleared her throat and swallowed hard.

  Watching her struggle with it, J.J. felt a wave of a familiar emotion that was more anger than sympathy. What was it about women who’d been beaten up, that they so often seemed humiliated? As if it was somehow their fault.

  After a moment, Rachel pulled herself together and continued matter-of-factly, “I knew he wouldn’t kill me or beat me badly enough to risk harming the baby. He really wanted the baby. Nicholas’s son.” She paused, but J.J. just watched her, keeping his face expressionless, his feelings to himself.

  She shrugged and went on. “So Izzy came, we switched clothes and I left in Izzy’s car. She’d left some money for me in the car-I couldn’t take anything with me-no cell phone, no ID, to make it harder for Carlos to find me, you know? The only thing I took with me was the letter.” She looked helplessly at J.J and he saw tears flood into her eyes again. She finished in a whisper, “And…I left her there.”

  She paused then, gazing at him, it seemed to him, as if awaiting his judgment. He had none to give her, not even absolution, and wasn’t sure why.

  Taking refuge in action, he spoke to his hands-free car phone, instructing it to connect him with Katie. He turned back to Rachel to ask for her friend’s address and cell phone number and the address of the clinic where she worked. She gave him the information, then turned in her seat to gaze at her baby, still sleeping soundly in his carrier in the seat behind hers, while he passed it on and told Katie what to do with it.

  And all the while he was doing that, for some reason he was thinking about that morning, when Katie had arrived at his trailer with her arms full of clothes for Rachel and stuff for the baby. There’d been some laughter and hugs and a few tears on the part of both women, and J.J. had watched it all from across a gender divide that at times seemed to him both unfathomable and unbridgeable. And what he felt then, more than anything-besides frustration, maybe-was envy. Here were two women, strangers until yesterday, now beginning a friendship, sharing emotions, tears and hugs, and it was all so simple and trusting, truthful and joyous, nothing hidden, nothing held back.

  He couldn’t even imagine being that way with a woman. Not even with this one. Why was that? he wondered. Okay, so there was the fact that she had trust issues, and he had ulterior motives. So why wasn’t there something so simple as the cop-slash-protected-witness relationship between them? Okay, so he’d also delivered her baby and saved her life and maybe she’d formed some kind of dependence on him that she was fighting…

  It was making his brain hurt, trying to figure it out. Why, he wondered, did relationships between men and women have to be so damn complicated?

  She turned to face him as he broke the phone connection and put the idling pickup truck into drive. He could feel her ink-black eyes on him but given the nature of his thoughts, was trying his best to avoid them. So, without looking at her, he glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled onto the blacktop highway.

  “Okay, S.B.C.S.D.-uh…that’s San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department-is going to ask L.A.P.D. to check on your friend. They’ll let us know as soon as they know anything.” He flicked a glance at her as he brought the truck up to speed. “Okay?”

  She nodded and murmured, “Thank you.”

  Her voice sounded remote, a little subdued, and he thought, Damn. Now I’ve probably wounded her.

  She probably thought he was making judgments about her and the abuse she’d suffered.

  He suddenly wished it was easier to talk to her about things like…well, things he felt deeply about. He wished he could explain to her how he felt about people who preyed on the vulnerable and weak. Bullies. He’d already told her about going off on that child killer, and sure, he’d had an ulterior motive for doing that, hoping to get her to open up to him in return. But maybe someday he would tell her about the time his dad had backhanded him for talking trash to his mother, and how later he’d found his dad weeping out in the front yard. How he’d tried to slink away, but his dad had seen him and beckoned to him, saying “Come on over here, son, I want to tell you something. And I don’t want you ever to forget it.” And his dad had laid his big, hard hand on his shoulder and said with tears in his eyes, “May the Lord strike me dead if I ever lay a hand on you again, and may He do the same to you if you ever raise your hand to someone who ain’t big and strong enough to hit you back. Because He didn’t make me a man to bully the weak. It’s only animals that do that. You hear me, son? We got to do better than that if we want to call ourselves men.”

  But he couldn’t tell her about that, and the way his dad had grown taller in his eyes that day, because it made him feel exposed and vulnerable to even think about it. He couldn’t recall ever telling any woman about that-maybe not anyone, period, not even his mama. Even thinking about it now, at this moment, thinking he might want to tell this woman someday was a surprise to him. That he might consider letting this woman see him like that…well, it was a puzzlement.

  He cleared his throat and frowned at the empty road in his rearview mirror. “Reason I did it that way is, I don’t want anything to lead back to me, maybe give
Carlos a clue which way you went. Just in case he’s got your friend’s communications monitored.” He tried a smile that didn’t work. “Not being paranoid, just careful.”

  She gave a soft snort. “You’re not being paranoid, just realistic. I’m telling you, Carlos has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “You’re pretty sure Carlos can’t trace you to your grandfather?” At least this felt like a safe subject to him.

  “Well, my grandmother didn’t have anything to do with my grandfather during my lifetime. At least, not that I know about. And when she died I didn’t find any contact information among her papers-no addresses or phone numbers, not even old ones. That’s why I thought the letter from Sam Malone might be a way out for me, because there’s nothing to connect me to him.”

  Which probably wasn’t true, of course, in this information age, but J.J. didn’t point that out to her. The connection would be a matter of public record, it just might take a little while for a determined searcher to ferret it out. At the very most, he figured it would give them a little time to prepare. Because from what he knew of the man’s reputation, it was only a matter of time before Carlos Delacorte came for his grandson.

  Chapter 7

  “That must be it, I think-over there,” J.J. said, pointing.

  Rachel nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at her, but she just sat gazing past him through the side window of his truck as they paused, idling, on the rutted and rocky dirt road. Across a hillside strewn with rocks and juniper trees, manzanita and sagebrush and pinon and bull pines, they could just make out a bit of red Spanish tile roof showing between guardian spires of tall evergreen and poplar trees.

  She hadn’t said more than two words since they’d left the desert behind, and he hadn’t, either, content to let his navigation system tell him where to turn even though she had the map that had come with Sam Malone’s letter spread out across her lap. Except for the couple of times she’d turned around to check on her baby, still sound asleep in his carrier, she’d sat and stared out the windows. It seemed to J.J. there was something suspenseful about the way she gazed upon the passing scene. He could almost hear anticipation coursing through her body like a beating pulse.

  Respectful of that tension in her and tied up in his own thoughts, he’d offered no comment as the road wound up and over a mountain pass, then down into a fertile valley where fat cattle grazed in lush green pastures along the highway. Here and there the pastureland was broken by flat brown fields where sprinklers offered up lacy plumes of spray to the wind, or tractors crawled along through clouds of dust, carving furrows in the silt. Across the fields, following the curves of mountains lumpy with boulders and steep slopes splashed with the vivid orange of poppies, a thick line of trees marked a river’s course, the dense thicket of willows and cottonwoods just now showing variegated shades of spring green.

  They passed farmhouses in various stages of disrepair and tracts of modest homes shaded by cottonwoods and evergreens. And a church, a simple rectangle of old-fashioned, white-painted clapboard with its spire pointing heavenward, that reminded J.J. of the game he and his sisters had played when they were kids…fingers interlaced, palms together, index fingers forming the steeple. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people…

  Just past the church, the breathy female voice of his navigation system instructed him to turn right, onto a paved road that arrowed across the fields and crossed the river-a mere creek by North Carolina standards, but not bad for Southern California, no doubt well fed by melting snow this time of spring-on a low wooden bridge before beginning the climb up into a canyon tucked away in those forbidding mountains.

  Before long they’d left behind all other signs of human habitation and the pavement had petered out entirely, giving way to the track they were now on, which had led them up and over hills and down through boulder-clogged gulleys, negotiating switchbacks that meandered through fields of yet more boulders adrift in seas of wildflowers: lupine and poppy, owl’s clover and little yellow daisylike flowers J.J. didn’t know the names of.

  He thought now-grudgingly-as he gazed across the hillside at the deep dark evergreen trees standing guard over Spanish tile rooftops, that at least old Sam Malone had chosen a pretty nice spot in which to retire from the world. It beat the hell out of a Las Vegas hotel.

  “It’s beautiful,” Rachel said finally, as if she’d come to some sort of decision.

  Because he didn’t want to admit she’d closely echoed his own thoughts, J.J. said sourly, “Wouldn’t want to have to evacuate this place in a hurry for a forest fire.”

  “Evidently a cup-half-empty person,” she remarked without censure.

  He shifted the truck into drive. “Just call it the way I see it.”

  “Maybe you should try looking at things another way.”

  He glanced over at her and found her looking back at him, and in the mirrors of her dark eyes saw twin images of himself he didn’t much care for. The locked gaze lasted longer than it should have, and when he finally broke it he felt edgy and frustrated and was thinking again about complications.

  “Maybe,” he said, and drove on.

  A short distance farther on, the road curved sharply to the left then dipped into a deep gully choked with willows and bumped across a graveled streambed now hubcap-deep in spring snowmelt runoff. It would be dry in another month, he imagined. In a summertime thunderstorm, a flashflood down the channel would be capable of washing a truck like his, or any vehicle unlucky or stupid enough to get caught trying to cross it, clear down to the river.

  And that was just fact, he told himself, and had nothing to do with his cup being half-full or half-empty.

  Not far beyond the creek, the road ended at a T intersection. Directly ahead, beyond a whitewashed rail fence, a grassy meadow stretched away to the foot of a mountainside covered with the same granite boulders and mixed vegetation they’d just navigated their way through. More fat black cattle and a few horses grazed in the lush spring grass or dozed in the dappled shade of new-leafed cottonwood trees. To the right, a dirt road followed the fence to the far end of the meadow and a cluster of buildings shaded by more of the huge old cottonwoods. J.J. could make out what appeared to be a farmhouse and an assortment of barns, stables and miscellaneous equipment, typical of a working ranch.

  “We go that way,” Rachel said, pointing to the left. Her voice sounded as breathy as the navigation system’s, only not so much sexy as scared.

  Moonshine, up on her haunches now and staring out the windshield, whined softly and licked her chops, as if she understood they were nearing their destination.

  J.J. glanced at Rachel, and because what he really wanted to do was reach over and take her hand to let her know she wasn’t going to have to face whatever lay ahead of them down that road alone, he muttered instead to the dog, “Almost there, Moon…”

  He made the turn onto a somewhat better-maintained road that ran along the edge of the meadow toward the sentinel poplars and evergreens they’d seen from a distance on their way up the canyon. The house with the Spanish tile roof was plainly visible now, a sprawling white hacienda built on a little knoll overlooking the valley below. Even to J.J. it looked pretty impressive.

  Hearing a hitch in Rachel’s breathing, he slowed, stopped and looked over at her. “You okay?” He said it without much sympathy, afraid he might show too much.

  She nodded, then said faintly, “It’s not…what I expected.”

  “What were you expecting-a log cabin? The man’s a billionaire.”

  What had she expected? Rachel wondered. None of this seemed real-no more real than the old movies she and Grandmother had watched together-and so different from the life she’d been living for the past two years.

  It seems impossible…everything has happened so fast.

  She now realized that from the moment the letter arrived, from a grandfather she’d never known, she must have been in a state of some sort of shock. T
hen Izzy had come, bringing with her a real hope of escape, and after that events had unfolded so quickly, recalling them now was like trying to take in a montage played at too fast a speed: The desert, the baby and J.J. The hospital, Carlos’s thugs, nearly being killed, thinking her baby had been taken…and J.J. again. Now…this.

  “I’m having a hard time getting my mind around it.” She paused to listen to a replay of the massive understatement, then looked over at him as she amended it. “The fact that I have family, I mean.”

  “Family? I thought you were assuming your grandfather is dead.”

  “Don’t you think so? Why else would his heirs be called to claim their ‘inheritance’?”

  “Ah-yes. The letter did say ‘heirs,’ plural.”

  Rachel nodded. “Grandchildren. Which means, I might have cousins. Do you know what that means to an only child?”

  “I know what it means to the one responsible for keeping you safe,” J.J. said darkly. “It’s just that many more people to worry about.”

  As if on cue, from the backseat came an infant’s snuffly getting-ready-to fuss noises. Instantly, Rachel turned toward the sound, and at the same time felt a strange tingling sensation in her breasts. She gave a little gasp of surprise and glanced at J.J., her cheeks warming with embarrassment as if he could somehow see.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head and muttered, “Nothing.”

  But she was thinking that trying to get her head around the idea of having a family, maybe some cousins, was nothing compared to getting it around the reality of having a child.

  A baby. I’m a mother. When will it start to feel real?

  She wondered if it was because she’d spent most of the pregnancy a virtual prisoner in Carlos Delacorte’s house instead of going to visit the obstetrician, watching her baby via the ultrasound monitor, watching him grow from a bean-sized lump with a heartbeat to a recognizable human, looking at pictures of the stages of pregnancy in posters on the doctor’s wall. Maybe because for the past few months she’d been grieving for Nicholas instead of visiting with girlfriends who’d already been through it all, shopping with her baby’s father for a crib and all the cute baby things, having her friends “surprise” her with a baby shower.