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, which, 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.
As he tried to read her eyes, it struck him how tangled up with one another two strangers could get in a short period of time, under the right circumstances. He felt again that strange reluctance to let her go, a dragging weight of denial at the realization that she was going to walk out of his life forever.
It was Mary Kelly who broke the edgy silence, hitching herself forward in the sleeper so she could look out the window. “Why’re we stoppin’ here? What is this place? Caitlyn?”
But she already knew. C.J. opened his mouth to explain, but before he could get a word out, her head was swiveling toward him, her mouth a big