Shooting Starr Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œThey lookin’ for you?” C.J. inquired, keeping his eyes on the mirror.
    â€œCan 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.
    â€œThose 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