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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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,
