Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

in-law probably had his people monitoring police band radio all over the Southwest. I imagine they had you made when the first call came in about a nun wandering in the desert. That’s not exactly something you hear every day, you know.”

She hesitated, then nodded, and he saw a tear slip between her lashes and run down her cheek. “He’d know about the nun’s disguise. And Carlos has people everywhere,” she whispered hopelessly. “It really wouldn’t surprise me if you turned out to be one of them.”

“Well, I’m not,” J.J. growled. “That I can promise you. Look, think about it. If I’d wanted to harm you and take your baby, I could have left you out there in the desert to die.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head and whispered, “I was so stupid. Stupid to think I could escape from Carlos Delacorte.” She brushed at her cheek as she gazed down at the sleeping baby. “No matter where I go, or what I do, he’ll find me. I’m never going to be free of him…or safe.”

“Now that,” said J.J., settling himself on the bed beside her, “is where you’re wrong.”

Rachel had to catch her breath, then, a tiny hiccup that was half laugh, half sob. All that was missing, she thought, was for him to call her “little lady.” Classic Duke Wayne.

“What?” His smile was wry, almost uncertain, and she found that unexpectedly endearing.

“What?” she shot back to him.

“You looked like you were about to smile.”

She looked down at her baby, hoping to hide the tears that flooded unexpectedly into her eyes. Hoping to hide the smile that came with them. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all,” she whispered. “Someone.”

“Your husband?” His voice sounded stiff, diffident.

“No,” she said, letting the smile come. “John Wayne.”

He gave a snort of surprised laughter. “I remind you of John Wayne?”

She looked up at him. “Yeah, you do. Not the way you look-more like…the way you talk. Sometimes.” And she couldn’t stop a little gasp of surprise as his fingers brushed her cheek.

“John Wayne makes you cry?” His voice was gentle now, the way she remembered it had been…before.

She pulled away from his touch, shaking her head, self-conscious, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it. “No, it’s just…you know, emotions, I guess.” She tried to wave it away with a gesture. “Hormones, maybe?”

“Understandable.”

He waited, silent and watchful, and after a moment she gave a self-conscious laugh and heard herself say, “When I was a little girl…” She thought, I can’t believe I’m telling him this. Five minutes ago I thought he was one of Carlos’s men, come to kill me. But the words didn’t stop.

“I was very young when my grandmother brought me to this country. It was a huge change, and I didn’t even know the language. I was lost and scared. She used to sit with me and hold me and we wouldn’t talk, just watch old Western movies together. I think John Wayne was our favorite.” She paused, expecting questions, but he only watched her and waited in that intent way he had, and after a moment she went on, but with more confidence now, maybe because he was such a good listener.

“I’m, um…half Vietnamese. My mother left Vietnam with her family after Saigon fell-they were among the ‘boat people’-you probably heard of them. They were some of the lucky ones, because a U.S. Navy ship picked them up and took them to the Philippines. That’s where my mother met my father. His name was Sean Malone, and he was stationed there. He was in…I guess you call them ‘special ops’ now, but anyway, he was killed there, somewhere in Southeast Asia-Cambodia, I think-when I was just a baby. Then my mother died when I was about two, and her family didn’t want a half-breed child, so they put me in an orphanage. And…that’s where I was when my grandmother found me. It took her two years, but she was finally able to bring me to America to live with her. She lived in Hollywood. Her name was Elizabeth.” Her throat had closed up, the way it always did when she spoke of her grandmother, even after all this time, and she could only whisper her name.

“Was?” J.J. prompted softly, in a way that made her try to go on.

She kept her eyes fixed on her slumbering baby’s face, and drew a steadying breath. “She died three years ago. It was right before I met Nicky. In fact…”

He finished the thought for her. “Maybe you were looking for someone to fill a gap?”

She let another breath go in a soft hiss. “Yes. Maybe. I’ve wondered…lately. I know I was very angry at the time. Because it was cancer that killed my grandmother, and maybe I felt medical science had failed her and I didn’t want to be a part of it.” She looked up at him and said with soft vehemence, “Cancer makes me angry. It’s just so…wrong. You know?”

He nodded, and his smile was both sympathetic and wry. “I know what you mean. But cancer doesn’t make me angry. Cancer is what it is, it doesn’t make a conscious decision to ruin someone’s life.” He paused, then added in a hardened voice, “What does it for me is predators.”

“Predators?”

“Yeah, the two-legged kind.”

“Like…” Like Carlos, she thought. But not Nicky. At least he wasn’t like that.

“People who prey on the weak and innocent.” The glint in his eyes reminded her of The Duke again. It also made a strange shiver run through her body. She wondered if he noticed it, because he immediately lightened his voice and his face softened with a smile. “I mentioned I used to be a homicide detective. Guess that’s why.”

“Used to be?” she asked with maybe too much eagerness, glad to have the conversation turned away from her own past. “What happened, did you burn out?”

“No-” He stopped, thinking about it, then made a dismissive gesture. “Hell, I don’t know, I suppose that could have had something to do with it. Maybe. Anyway, it’s too long a story to get into now. Right now, what we need to do is get you to a safe place.”

Safe. She felt a lurching sensation in her stomach, and a clammy chill flooded her skin. She’d actually forgotten, for those few moments, talking with Sheriff Jethro Fox who reminded her somehow of John Wayne. Forgotten that Carlos’s men had come to kill her, and very nearly succeeded. It came back to her now, that awful sensation of fighting for breath and finding none…of hearing her baby’s bassinet crash to the floor…of knowing she was going to die, and there was nothing she could do to save herself, or her son. Horror seized her. She felt as if she was falling, falling, tumbling from a great height.

“Please,” she gasped, and felt someone-J.J.-lifting her baby from her arms. She relinquished him-no, thrust him from her-in desperate panic.

Then she was struggling to get out of bed, under a powerful compulsion to run, to flee, and strong arms were holding her again, holding her tightly while she shivered and shivered. And this time there was such a sense of familiarity about being in that place, in those arms, that she stopped shivering almost immediately. And the thought shown warm in her mind like a welcome-home lamp: Here I am safe.

“This is getting to be a habit,” J.J. said gruffly to the air above Rachel’s head. The odd thing was, he didn’t mind, and even felt a sense of regret when she moved away from him, wiping her eyes. He suspected she’d keep moving farther away, the more she healed and got back to her normal self. Which was the way it should be.

“Feel better now?”

She nodded, but couldn’t seem to look straight at him. Her eyes darted here and there, like those of a cornered animal. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what-it all just sort of hit me again.”

“That’s pretty normal,” he said easily, reassuring her. “Flashbacks. You’ll probably get them a few more times. It’s a pretty big shock to the system to have somebody try to kill you.”

She gave a watery laugh. “I guess you’d know. You must run into this kind of thing a lot in your line of work.”

“Not so much, considering most of the victims I run into-sorry, ran into-didn’t survive to have flashbacks. You’d be one of the lucky ones.”

He could see her looking thoughtful. Then she nodded and released breath in a sigh. “You said, ‘someplace safe.’ I don’t even know where that is.”

“Do you mind my asking-where were you going when you ran away from Carlos? You must have had some place in mind when you set out across a few hundred miles of California desert.”

She gave her head an emphatic shake. “No-I was just running-” she tried to look him in the eye but couldn’t hold it more than a second or two “-to get as far away as I could, as fast as I could.”

Okay, so she was maybe the world’s worst liar. And still doesn’t trust me all the