Shooting Starr

him, the steady rush of highway noise and the muted thump of rockabilly music coming from the speakers back in the sleeper. The last of the storm had moved on east, and the late-afternoon sun had dropped down out of the clouds and was pouring liquid gold over his left shoulder. The interstate was straight and monotonous, traffic was light, and normally C.J. would have been fighting drowsiness pretty hard. But not this time. Right now he was wound up tight with all his senses honed.

It reminded him of the way he’d felt as a kid when his oldest brother, Troy, had taken him out hunting the first time, sitting up in that deer blind in the first light of a cold autumn dawn…wide-awake and shivering with excitement, waiting for his quarry to tiptoe into the clear.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see his passenger’s head make little jerking motions from time to time. He knew what that meant. The hijacker was fighting sleep.

C.J. drove in silence, as smooth and steady as he knew how. He’d timed it to hit Atlanta during dinner hour and was lucky enough to sail around the beltway without any major stalls. By the time he’d got sorted out and was heading northeast out of the city, twilight had given way to darkness and traffic had thinned out the way it usually did at that hour. It was mostly just big trucks, now. Long-haul drivers, like him.

And the hijacker was sound asleep.

C.J. had had plenty of time to think about what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He’d rehearsed it over and over in his mind, visualizing the movements, preparing himself. Even so, when it came time to put his plan into action, and he saw the first signs for the exit he had in mind, his heart was thumping so loud he was afraid it was going to wake her up and spoil everything.

It was one of those exits to nowhere, common in that part of the Southern foothills, nice wide straight on-and off-ramps that fizzled out quickly into little two-lane roads that wandered off into woods and cow pastures. Before it did, though, there was a cleared turnaround space off to the right where a failed gas station and minimart had once stood, where a tired driver could park his rig and catch a quick nap when he was in dire need. C.J. had done so himself there, more than once.

He slowed gradually, with care not to make any jerks or grinds that might jolt his sleeping passenger, and took the exit a bit faster than he normally would. He could see the stop sign looming dead ahead at the bottom of the ramp. There was no cross traffic, and the few vehicles that had been sharing the interstate with him had zipped on by the exit, oblivious. He took a breath and held it, trying without any success at all to calm his runaway pulse.

Now! No, not yet…not yet.

It was now or never. Choosing what he hoped was exactly the right moment, with his truck going neither too fast nor too slow, C.J. braced himself and hit his air brakes.

At the same moment he reached over with his right hand and released his passenger’s seatbelt.

It went exactly the way he’d hoped it would, which was a gratifying surprise to him. With a giant hiss the Kenworth bucked like a mule and came well nigh to a stop. Having no seat belt to stop her, the woman beside him kept right on going, with just enough momentum so she would have ended up on the floor without hitting the windshield or too much damage being done to her person on the way down. The only thing that could have kept her from doing that were her reflexes, and she had good ones, he’d have to give her that. She came awake with a gasp, and did just what he’d hoped she would-she threw out her hands to catch herself. Both hands.

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