Shooting Starr

by Kathleen Creighton

  By that time, C.J. had the emergency brake on and his own belt undone, and was stretched across the center console and getting a firm grip on those slender-strong wrists with both his hands. Making sure to keep the captured hands a safe distance from that gun in her sweatshirt pocket, he quickly overcame her silent struggles-she was stronger than she looked, but he was a good bit bigger-and got her pinned down on her back across the console. A second or two later he had that snub-nose pistol in his own hand, and was scooting back into his seat, breathing like a racehorse and drunk with triumph.

  The adrenaline high he was on didn’t let him think about, then, the intimate female body warmth inside that pocket, or the glimpses of struggle-bared torso, of delicate muscle and cream-pale skin.

  He twisted around to face his erstwhile hijacker and, keeping one eye on her while she eased herself slowly back into her seat, quickly examined the gun. He’d been thinking maybe it wasn’t loaded, but he was wrong.

  “This thing’s loaded,” he said in an outraged tone, the skin on the back of his neck crawling.

  She gave a faint snort. “I told you it was. I don’t tell lies.” He noticed she didn’t rub at her wrists, or anything like that, although he could see the red marks his fingers had made on her skin. She simply sat with her hands relaxed in her lap, momentarily thwarted, maybe, but-he had a feeling-not defeated.

  He gave a start when the curtain across the sleeper twitched back and the big-haired woman put her head out, looking mussed-up and scared to death. “Caitlyn? What-”

  “It’s okay, Mary Kelly,” the hijacker quietly said, while C.J. was stuffing the gun down in the pocket alongside his seat where she’d have to go through him to get at it. “We’re just stopping for a minute. Everything’s okay.”

  “Sorry ’bout that, ma’am,” C.J. muttered. Caitlyn, he was thinking. So that was her name. Nice to be able to think of her as something besides “the hijacker.”

  He tensed when she turned in her seat, but it was only to inquire softly of the woman named Mary Kelly, “How’s Emma?”

  “Still sleepin’,” Mary Kelly replied in her heavy Middle-South accent. “I think she’s ’bout wore out.”

  “Why don’t you see if you can get some more sleep, too?” Caitlyn said. “We’ll be on our way in a minute-oh, and Mr. um…”

  “Starr. C.J.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mary Kelly said, sticking out a hand for C.J. to shake, and as he muttered the polite acknowledgments, he was thinking how weird it felt to be doing that with that loaded gun sitting there in his side pocket.

  “Mr. Starr says to help yourself to something to eat, if you’re hungry.”

  “Yeah, you take anything back there you want,” C.J. said. He was already putting the Kenworth in gear, creeping onto the crossroad pavement, and feeling shaken but much more in control of the situation and a lot better about things in general.

  He pulled into the abandoned gas station and parked. Then he looked over at his passenger. Hijacker. Caitlyn. She looked back at him, not saying anything. “Let’s you and me have a talk,” he said grimly, jerking his head toward the darkness beyond the windows.

  She nodded and reached for the door handle. C.J. considered the gun in the seat pocket, decided it was safer where it was than anyplace else, and did the same. They met in front of the Kenworth, between the headlight beams. He hesitated, then touched her elbow to tell her to walk with him, and they strolled side by side toward the abandoned minimart, across a concrete apron awash in unnatural twilight from the perimeter yard lights nobody had bothered to take down. The night was noisy with spring sounds, frogs and crickets and some kind of bird-a whippoorwill, maybe?-singing its head off out in the dark woods. The air was cool and sweet, and he thought how nice it might have been to be out in it, walking in the company of a beautiful woman.

  Out in the open on that bare slab of gravelly concrete, a reasonable distance from his truck, he stopped and she did, too.

  “About time you told me what’s going on,” he said.

  It struck him, as he was waiting for her to say something, how hard it was to look at her now. No, not hard, exactly-she had the kind of looks that makes a person want to look and look and keep on looking. But strange. Disturbing. Like looking at one of those pictures with something hidden in them, something you’re supposed to be able to see if you look at it a certain way, only he’d never figured out how to do it right. She was a puzzle to him. A woman who didn’t look like what she was. What she was, was somebody who’d hijacked him and his truck at the point of a gun, for God’s sake. What she looked like was somebody fragile, somebody he wanted to protect and defend.

  “Okay. How ’bout if I tell you what I think is going on?” he said when it became apparent she wasn’t going to. He was fighting anger again, or maybe just frustration, and his voice was harsh with it. “It’s pretty obvious to me you’re helping those people in there-that woman and her little girl-run away from somebody they’re scared of, my guess is the husband. Right?” Her eyes, which had been focused intently on the empty parking lot behind him, slid toward him for the first time. He sucked in a breath. “Okay, I’m right. What I want to know is, if the guy’s abusive or whatever, why don’t you go to the cops?”

  Why didn’t you just tell me that? he wanted to ask her. Wife beaters were way high up on his personal list of people he had no use for.

  “I told you,” she said flatly. “The police weren’t-aren’t-an option.”

  He let out a breath with a sound like the Kenworth’s air brakes. “Come on, don’t give me that. There’re laws-”

  “Which in this case are all on his side.” She rapped it out, then abruptly closed her eyes and held up an appeasing hand, palm toward him. “Look-I told you, the less you know the better. I never would have involved you if I’d had any other choice. If you’ll take us someplace so we can rent another car-”

  “What do you mean, the law is on his side?” C.J. was getting a heavy feeling in his stomach.

  She closed her eyes again, briefly. When she opened them they had that silvery shine, which he recognized now as anger. Or maybe frustration. “I mean that Mary Kelly’s husband is a rich, powerful-very powerful-man.” She almost spat the words. “He is also a charming and intelligent, violent and dangerous-very dangerous-man. He terrorized his wife for years, but she only got up the courage to leave him when the violence began to affect her child. Unfortunately, as is often the case, when that happened is when her husband turned from merely violent to deadly. First, he took all the legal steps to ensure he’d get full custody of Emma-a parade of witnesses to testify to Mary Kelly’s unfitness as a mother, ‘proof’ of infidelity, drug abuse-the 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 slapp
ed 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 tried to hide her face against her momma’s neck.

  C.J. felt a stab of pain in his heart. “Well, hey there, sweetheart…what’s wrong?” He reached across the back of his seat to pat the kid’s back, and again felt awful when she flinched.

  Her momma tried halfheartedly to come up with a smile. “Oh, it’s nothin’, she just had a nightmare-she gets them sometimes. She thinks the bad men are comin’ to hurt me.” Her smile quivered and went out, and C.J. felt another twist of pain, this one in his guts.

  Armoring himself with his own smile, he said, “No bad men here, darlin’, just me, ol’ C.J.”

  He looked around for something-anything-that might put a stop to those tears, and his eye lit on a little flat package tucked behind his sunshade. It was a toy, one of those action figures based on the latest cartoon-character craze, which apparently involved a bunch of little bitty girls with super powers and great big black eyes. He’d bought it in the last truck stop he’d hit for his niece Amy Jo-Jimmy Joe’s little girl-who happened to be nuts about the cartoons, and he figured one little girl probably wasn’t all that different from another, right? Anyway, it seemed worth a try.

  Plucking it from behind the sunshade, he tapped the kid’s arm with it. “Look here what I found, darlin’, just for you.”

  Her momma picked up her cue and sang out, “Oh, Emma, looka here-it’s your favorite! What do you say? You tell Mr. Starr thank you, now.”

  So, like any child above the age of two being raised in the South, Emma had to sit up straight and sniffle out a “Thank you, sir.” She could have been dying, and she’d have pulled herself together and managed it somehow.

  It broke the ice, though, and by the time Caitlyn joined them in the cab he and Emma were good buddies, and she was telling him all about which particular supergirl this action figure was and the names of all her friends, and all the cool things they could do. She hadn’t quite got so far as to sit on his lap, but she was leaning against his knees and drowning him with her eyes, w
hich, it struck him, bore a fair resemblance to those little cartoon supergirls’ eyes.

  It made his heart hurt to think how sweet and little she was and how badly she wanted to trust somebody, and what a lousy hand life had dealt her so far. And how he was just about to make it worse for her, maybe, at least for a while.

  In the long run, though, he knew he was doing the right thing, what was best for her and her momma. He’d had close brushes with some bad apples like this Ari Vasily, and if there was one thing he’d learned from the experience it was that dangerous people like that were best left to the professionals to deal with. And as for the courts, well…sure, they got it wrong sometimes, but they generally straightened things out sooner or later. The thing to do was get a good lawyer…

  Yeah, and that got him thinking again about the pile of law books under his passenger’s feet, and the exam waiting for him back in Georgia, and the hard work and tough years it had taken him to get to this point and what it would mean to the rest of his life if he blew it now. That gave him the resolve to put the Kenworth in gear and do a turnaround through the abandoned gas station’s parking lot, and a few minutes later he was back on the interstate, growling his way toward South Carolina.

  Anderson’s Main Street, which ran straight down through the town and past the courthouse square on one side and the police station on the other, had been landscaped and refurbished in the old downtown section and was closed to big-truck traffic. Following the truck route signs, C.J. found a place to park one street over, with a well-lit and mostly empty parking lot between him and the police station’s back door. With the big diesel engine throbbing and the air-conditioning blowing cold, he looked over at Caitlyn and tried to think of something to say that would justify what he was doing to her. She looked reproachfully back at him, not making it any easier for him.