Shooting Starr

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 round O of dawning realization, and panic and denial in her eyes.

Caitlyn reached around and put a gentling hand on her arm. “It’s okay,” she murmured, as if she were soothing a child after a nightmare. “It’s going to be okay.”

Mary Kelly wasn’t buying it. She shook off Caitlyn’s hand, looking like a hunted animal. Her eyes darted back and forth between Caitlyn and C.J., and her voice was high and scared. “No-I-we can’t go in there! We can’t go to the police-they’ll send us back, you know they will! They’ll lock us up and take Emma. He’ll take her away, you know he-”

“Shh,” Caitlyn hushed her, with a warning tip of her head toward Emma, who was waking up and looking scared by all the commotion. “It’s going to be okay. I promise-”

“It’s the best way,” C.J. broke in, meaning again to explain himself but only sounding harsh and angry with his gravel-filled voice. “You couldn’t keep on running like that, not with…” He, too, tipped his head toward the little girl, not daring to meet those big dark eyes peering at him over her momma’s shoulder. “Sooner or later either the cops are going to catch up with you, or somebody worse will. And then what’re you gonna do? Somebody might get hurt, for sure it’s going to be traumatic for her. You want her to see her momma arrested? Shot? Hauled away by force? Remember what happened to that little Cuban kid?” He was shouting by this time, and Mary Kelly just kept staring at him until finally a tear pillowed up on her lashes and slipped away down her cheek.

Well, that did it. He said, “Aw, hell,” under his breath and turned around in his seat so he was facing forward and didn’t have to look at her or her kid anymore. Instead, he stared squinty-eyed at the windshield while his heart thumped in shallow, trip-hammer beats.

Beside him, Caitlyn unhooked her seat belt and got turned around and up on her knees on the seat so she could look Mary Kelly eye to eye. “It’s going to be okay,” he heard her say in the kind of firm, confident way parents do when they talk to their kids. “I promise. Okay? Come on-let’s go inside. Emma, you first-give me your hand, honey. Come here to me.” She opened up the door and started backing out, showing the little girl how to climb out of the sleeper.

C.J. cleared his throat. “Uh, you want- Maybe I should go in with you,” he said, not happily.

Caitlyn shook her head, and that ghost of a smile, the ironic one, hovered around her lips. “That won’t be necessary.”

“You sure you don’t want me to call my sister-in-law? She’s in Atlanta-could probably be here in a couple hours.”

Her eyes zeroed in on his, flared silver for one incredible moment. Then the shutters came down and she looked away. “Thanks-we’ll be fine.”

Emma was standing beside C.J.’s seat, peeking at him past his shoulder. He felt something nudge him there, and looking down, saw the supergirl action-figure toy he’d given her, clutched tightly in her hand. She waggled it at him, both a shy and silent thank-you and a wave goodbye. Then she scrambled across the seat and dropped down out of his sight.

Mary Kelly followed, brushing at her cheek and moving like somebody going to her own execution. At the last minute, framed in the doorway of his truck and her face a mask of shadows, she paused. “I’m not blamin’ you, Mr. Starr, and I want to thank you for all you done for Emma and me. I truly do believe you just don’t know what it is you’ve done.” She sniffed, tried hard to smile one more time, and then she, too, dropped to the ground. The door closed with a flat and final thunk.

C.J. sat and watched them cross the mostly empty parking lot, bathed in light that turned everything a washed-out bluish gray, like death. Caitlyn had her arm around Mary Kelly’s shoulders, and Emma was clinging to her momma’s hand and sort of hop-skipping the way little kids do to keep up. He didn’t know whether he expected them to bolt and scatter for the shadows like flushed mice before they got to the entrance or not, but he didn’t take his eyes off them until they’d disappeared inside the police station.

He felt wrung out…drained. He couldn’t seem to talk his muscles into moving, not even enough to do what needed to be done to put his truck in gear and pull off down the street.