Shooting Starr

Chapter 1

South Carolina, Early Autumn

Even with the bruises it was the most beautiful face he’d ever seen. Stark against the pillow, it needed no adornment. Framed in white bandages, the features were pristine, elegant, exquisite. It was a face that belonged in dreams, or fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, maybe, or Snow White…the enchanted princess waiting for her hero’s kiss.

If only, he thought, it could be so easy.

The woman in the bed stirred. Eyes the pale gray-blue of sunlit water swept over him, and his breath caught, then fluttered in uneven breaths.

Hearing it, she murmured a soft and slurred, “Who’s there?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s me.” He leaned forward and touched her hand. “C. J. Starr.”

She closed her eyes and turned her face away. After what seemed a long time, she whispered, “Why are you here?”

He sat and stared at his hands, loosely clasped between his knees, and tried to think how he could answer that without laying the burden of his guilt on her. Finally he shrugged and mumbled simply, “I wanted to be.”

“I don’t blame you, you know.” Though still groggy, her voice took on a raspy edge. He looked up and saw that her eyes were wide-open again and gazing at him. Silver eyes. “You did what you had to do. I knew the risks.”

He shifted restlessly. There was a heaviness in his chest that wouldn’t go away. “If I hadn’t been there-”

“-I’d have picked somebody else to hijack. I guess that’s true.” There was a pause and then, to his surprise, he heard a whisper of a laugh, soft and ironic. “Of all the truckstops on all the interstates, why’d you have to pull into that one?”

He angled his gaze toward the window, where the sky was the clear, translucent blue it takes on only in autumn, when the early trees are turning and the goldenrod is in bloom. Yellow-flower season, his momma called it-her favorite time of year.

He sighed and settled back in the chair. “I guess I’d have to blame it on the thunderstorm,” he said.

Five Months Earlier-Springtime

It wasn’t a bad one, as storms go, even if the rain was coming down in sheets the way it can in the South in the springtime, and visibility was about zero. But it was the third time a four-wheeler had stopped dead in front of him and he’d had to hit his air brakes while he prayed and swore loud enough to outroar the rain on the roof of his big blue Kenworth.

It was in view of the fact that-despite his momma’s best efforts-he hadn’t been keeping up on his praying the way he should, and had probably used up a goodly portion of his lifetime’s allotment of Divine Intervention, that the next time he saw a sign for a rest stop swimming toward him through the rain, C.J. put on his blinker and pulled off the interstate.

A number of other drivers had had the same good sense, it seemed, because the rest stop was full and he just did find a place to pull in well up along the on-ramp, the last available spot big enough to wedge an eighteen-wheeler into. Once he’d got the Kenworth buttoned down to his satisfaction, he put on his slicker and jogged back up the sloping drive to the buildings.

It looked to him as if the rain was letting up some, though that could have been because he wasn’t on the interstate, where the truck spray always made things seem worse than they were. A chilly wind had sprung up and was blowing what rain there was in nasty gusts under the roofed shelter areas, so with the exception of a couple of women trying to use a cell phone, most people had taken to staying in their vehicles.

C.J. meant to do the same himself, once he’d made use of the rest room and vending machines. He planned on getting himself an assortment of junk goodies to help pass the time, which was something truckers did a lot of and was one of the reasons why some of them got so big-bellied and heavy, or so he’d been warned by his brother, Jimmy Joe, who was also his boss.

C.J. had noticed, though, that after near twenty years driving big trucks, Jimmy Joe himself was as lean and lanky as ever, leading C.J. to conclude that leanness pretty much ran in the Starr family, along with chocolate-brown eyes and dimples.

He wasn’t worried much about health and fitness as he fed coins and dollar bills into the vending machines and filled up the pockets of his slicker with tortilla chips and Little Debbie’s. What concerned him more was making it back to Georgia in time to take the exam he had scheduled for three days from now. After that one there was just the final and then he was through with law school after ten long years; that is, if you counted college and before that the time it had taken him to pass his high school equivalencies, since he’d had the bad sense to drop out of school a month into his senior year.

Not a single minute of it had been easy. A whole lot of folks were bound to be surprised he’d made it this far, C.J. included.

Juggling a soda can and a package of cheese puffs, he stuffed the leftover change into the pocket of his jeans, hunched his shoulders inside his slicker and headed back to his truck. A little farther along the breezeway he had to pass by the two women who were still trying to get through to somebody on a cell phone-without much luck, it seemed evident to him.

The one with the phone looked about fourteen. Tall but slender and small-boned, she was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pushed back, and she had short blond hair cut in that spiky, messed-up way younger women seem to favor. She had her finger stuck in her unoccupied ear and kept turning this way and that, looking up into the mist or down at her feet, the way people do when they’re trying to get something besides static on a wireless phone. The other woman was older-maybe early thirties-but pretty, with reddish brown hair worn long, thick and curly, what C.J.’s sister Jess would call “big hair.” She seemed edgy, the big-haired woman did. She kept hugging herself as she watched the girl with the phone, throwing glances over her shoulder into the rainy dusk.

And now C.J. could see a third person there, snugged up against the older woman’s legs. A child, a little bit of a girl with dark hair cut to chin length and straight across her forehead, and the biggest, blackest eyes he’d ever seen. Since those eyes were gazing straight at C.J., he did what came naturally to him. He smiled. The eyes kept on staring at him, not blinking, just kind of shimmering, like deep, dark pools.

C.J.’s heart gave a peculiar quiver, and all at once it seemed like the most important thing in the world to him to see that child smile. So he smiled even bigger, showing those famous Starr dimples, and said, “Hey, hon’, how’re you doin’?” Since it struck him that the eyes had kind of a hungry look, and that it might have been seeing him tucking those goodies away that was making her stare at him that way, he held out the bag of cheese puffs and added, “Here you go, darlin’-you want some of these?”

C.J. would have been the first to admit there was a lot he didn’t know about kids, but even so it set him back some when the child cringed away from him and tried to hide behind her momma’s legs, as if there’d been a dead rat in that cellophane package instead of cheese puffs. It wasn’t the reaction C. J. Starr was used to getting from people when he turned on that smile-put it that way.

He transferred the smile to the child’s mother and ruefully explained, “Sorry, ma’am, I sure didn’t mean to scare her.”

The woman gave him a tight little smile in return and muttered something politely vague, along the lines of, “That’s okay, but we’re fine.”

Not friendly types, these people. With a mental shrug, C.J. was about to go on his way when for some reason he glanced over at the girl with the cell phone, and it happened to be just as she pivoted and looked right at him. His heart gave another one of those odd little shivers. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought; young enough, but definitely not a kid. Her eyes were searching, soul-piercing sharp, and…it might have been something about the artificial lighting in that rest stop, but he’d have sworn they were silver.

He didn’t know what it was about her, but whatever flirty comment he’d planned on making went right out of his head. Instead he gave her a polite nod and a mumbled, “Ma’am…” and added on the trucker’s benediction: “Y’all have a safe trip, now,” as he hunched inside his slicker and plunged out into the mist. A few steps farther on he broke into a jog.

Back in his truck, he put the two women and the little girl out of his head while he stashed his goodies in the usual places and popped open the can of soda. Then he turned on the cab lights and reached for the pile of law books he kept handy on the passenger seat beside him. The way he saw it, with that exam coming up and his entire future riding on the outcome, every little minute he could squeeze in some studying was a plus.

The roaring of the wind brought C.J. out of his doze. Damn, he thought, that storm must be moving back in again.

No, wait-that wasn’t wind. Trucks. It came to him that what he’d been listening to for a while now was the sound of big diesel engines and a whole lot of tires churning past him down the on-ramp, one after the other. The rest stop was clearing out fast. A check of his mirrors showed him an empty parking lot, but for one nondescript gray late-model four-wheeler in the back row, over by the doggy-john. Somebody else having a nap forgot to leave a wakeup call, he thought.

He had himself a stretch to get rid of the kinks and cobwebs, then gathered up his junk-food wrappers and soda can and climbed out of his truck-one last stop at the rest room, he told himself, and he’d be headin’ back out on the road himself.

The air was warm and soupy, but he was a Southern boy, and to him warm and soupy was the way it was supposed to be in the springtime. Wet dogwood petals dotted the grass and sidewalks and the roof and hood of the parked car, and the air smelled of crushed leaves and mud, with a sweetness from some sort of plant he couldn’t identify, and maybe a hint of something rotting off in the woods somewhere. Smelled just right to him. Like spring.

Spring wasn’t C.J.’s favorite season of the year, though. “Spring can break your heart,” was the way his momma, Betty Starr, put it, stoic after a late freeze had wiped out her saucer magnolias and flowering crab apple trees for the umpteenth time. C.J. preferred fall, with sky so blue it made your eyes ache, and that indefinable touch of melancholy in the air.

Then he had to laugh at himself like any Southern-raised boy would at such thoughts-even though he knew the momma who’d raised him wouldn’t have laughed. Betty Starr was a schoolteacher who’d brought up her three daughters and four sons to enjoy books and reading as much as they did hunting and cars, and to have an appreciation for the softer aspects of nature that was at least on a par with a fine deer rifle or the inner workings of a gasoline engine.

In spite of that, given the circles in which he’d grown up and spent most of his life, C.J. had gotten in the habit of keeping poetic notions to himself.

“Excuse me, sir…”

Lost in his musings and shaking water from his hands as he emerged from the restroom, C.J. damn near jumped out of his skin when the slender form stepped out from behind the wall that screened the entrance, blocking his way. She had both hands tucked in the front pocket of her sweatshirt, and her neck looked fragile as the stem of a flower rising out of the folds of the laid-back hood.

“Whoa!” he said, rocking back and putting out his hands in the exaggerated way people do when they almost collide with somebody, but at the same time turning on his smile, full wattage, to let her know he wasn’t put out about it. “Ma’am, I believe you’ve got the wrong door. The ladies’ is around there.”

He would have gone on his way, but she seemed inclined to stay where she was. Though she didn’t return his smile.

“I’m sorry to bother you-”

“Hey, no bother-what can I do for you?” C.J. was radiating charm from every pore. And that didn’t have anything to do with the discovery he’d just made that the woman was a whole lot prettier than he’d first thought she was, in a strange, almost fairy-tale sort of way, with a ballerina’s neck, little delicate chin, soft lips and skin so fine it seemed lit from the inside. But he’d have turned on the charm in equal measures for a freckle-nosed kid or a ninety-year-old with a face like a road map. That was just his way.

“I need to ask you a favor. A really…big favor.” A smile flickered briefly, as if some distant voice had prompted her to mind her manners. It struck him how tense she was, like a deer in that last instant before she figures out you’re watching her and bolts for the bushes.

“I’ll be glad to do what I can, ma’am,” C.J. responded automatically. But he was beginning to feel uneasy now, too, just a faint “Uh-oh…” whispered in the back of his mind. The last thing he needed right now was more delays.

“My car won’t start. I’m afraid it might be the alternator. I was wondering if you-”

“Be glad to take a look for you.” Relieved that what she wanted was something he could give her without taking up too awfully much of his time, he was feeling confident and was already walking off toward the only remaining vehicle in the parking lot. “That it over there?” He spun back and held out his hand. “Got the keys? Won’t take me but a minute-”

“No. There wouldn’t be any point in you looking at it.” She was standing where he’d left her with her hands stuffed deep in the pocket of her sweatshirt. She was shaking her head, and her voice was a hard, flat monotone. “I’m sure it’s dead. What I wanted to ask you was-”

“Did you call Triple A?” Really uneasy, now, he was remembering the cell phone, and the anxious way her big-haired friend had watched her make the call. Not wanting to, he also remembered the little girl with the haunting eyes.

“They’re backed up-a lot of accidents, they said. Because of the storm, I guess. Those get priority, so they said there’d be at least a two-hour wait. That was an hour ago.”

“Well then-”

“I just called again. Now they tell me it’s going to be another two hours. We can’t stay here that long. We can’t.”

It occurred to C.J. that her voice might be easy on the ears without that edge of tension in it. As it was, its very quietness gave her words an urgency that set his teeth on edge and raised the volume of the warnings in his head to a holler.

He scratched his head and mumbled, “Well, ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you…” Truth was, he was stalling, because he was pretty sure he knew where this was heading and what she was about to ask of him and wanted to hold off disappointing her and her friend-especially that little girl-as long as he could.

At the same time he was beginning to resent the hell out of her for putting him in a position where he’d have to.

“If you could just give us a ride to the nearest-”

Damn it. He elaborated on the swearing under his breath while he shook his head and rubbed unhappily at the back of his neck. “Ma’am, I wish I could do that-I do. I’m not allowed to pick up passengers, okay? I could lose my job.” Which was sort of a lie-the part about losing his job, anyway. His brother might chew him out good, but he wasn’t going to fire him. On the other hand, the no-hitchhikers rule was something all the Blue Starr drivers understood and agreed on, mainly because it made basic good sense. Picking up strangers was dangerous, especially the female variety. Those could complicate a driver’s life in ways C.J. didn’t even like to think about.

But because he was softhearted by nature and hated to let anybody down, he looked at this particular female and tried on his best smile, dimples and all. “Unless it’s a matter of a life-or-death emergency, I suppose that’d be different.”

“It is.”

C.J. narrowed his eyes and didn’t say anything for a minute or two; she’d caught him off guard with that, with the quiet tension in her voice and those silvery eyes never leaving his face. He felt a prickling under his skin, a kind of itchy-all-over, shivery feeling that made him think of the way an animal’s fur lifts up when he’s feeling threatened. He couldn’t have said why he should feel danger connected with such a fragile-looking woman, but right then he was pretty certain if he’d had fur it would have been standing on end.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” he growled without stopping to clear his throat.

She made a sound he’d have sworn was a laugh, except her face didn’t look like she thought anything was funny. She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a not-very-bright child. “I thought I’d made that clear. My car is broken down. I need you to take me-us-to the nearest town. Right now. As in, immediately. Do you understand?”

The urgency in her was so palpable C.J. actually stepped backward. His mind was racing, looking for explanations that would make sense to him. “Wait- How…is somebody-”

She didn’t wait for him to work his way through it. Closing her eyes, she gave a regretful sigh and withdrew her hands from the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

Momentum carried C.J. through. “-hurt or someth-” Then his hands shot up in the air without his brain even telling them to. A natural response to the gun in her hand. “Aw, jeez.”

“I’m sorry,” she was saying in that same quiet but urgent way, “I don’t have time to explain. I said we have to leave here immediately. This-” she gave the gun a little wave, a very little one, she wasn’t being careless with it “-is to let you know how serious I am about that. I will shoot if you-”

She interrupted herself with an exasperated sound and a hissed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, will you please put your hands down? You look silly with them up in the air like that.”

Not to mention what it’s gonna look like to anybody who happens to pull into the parking lot right about now, was C.J.’s thought-his first coherent one since she’d pulled the snub-nosed pistol out of her sweatshirt pocket.

He snorted and muttered crossly, “Yeah, well, it seemed like the thing to do when somebody’s pointin’ a gun at me. Sorry-guess I just don’t know how to act.” He did lower his hands, though…slowly. Now that the first shock was fading, he was starting to get good and mad, and he ground out the rest of it between gritted teeth. “I’ve never had anybody threaten to kill me before.”

She made a grimace, the first sign of honest-to-God emotion he’d seen in that fairy-princess face. “I did not threaten to kill 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.”

“Something besides car trouble, for Pete’s sake!”

When she didn’t answer right away, he looked over at her. She was staring straight ahead, and he could see the pale, slender arch of her throat move with her swallow. Her lips tightened. “I didn’t have time to explain. How could I know what you’d do? I knew they had to have caught up with us by now-”

“Who’s they? What do they want to catch up with you for?” What in the hell have you gotten me into, lady? was what he really wanted to ask.

He could feel her look at him. “They’re not cops,” she said in a cold hard voice. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

It wasn’t. In fact, he realized it was about the farthest thing from his mind. Those guys had looked like a couple of serious thugs to him, but now that she’d mentioned it… He chewed on it in silence for a minute, then said in what he thought was a friendly sort of way, “Okay, you want to give me an idea now what kind of trouble you’re in? Maybe I can help.”

She gave the kind of laugh without any humor in it. “You’re helping the only way you can. And the less you know about anything, the better. Believe me.” She turned her face toward the window then, but out of the corner of his eye he could see her hand flex inside the pocket of her sweatshirt, and he knew that gun was still pointing in his direction.