in his musings and shaking water from his hands as he emerged from the restroom, C.J. damn near jumped out of his skin when the slender form stepped out from behind the wall that screened the entrance, blocking his way. She had both hands tucked in the front pocket of her sweatshirt, and her neck looked fragile as the stem of a flower rising out of the folds of the laid-back hood.
“Whoa!” he said, rocking back and putting out his hands in the exaggerated way people do when they almost collide with somebody, but at the same time turning on his smile, full wattage, to let her know he wasn’t put out about it. “Ma’am, I believe you’ve got the wrong door. The ladies’ is around there.”
He would have gone on his way, but she seemed inclined to stay where she was. Though she didn’t return his smile.
“I’m sorry to bother you—”
“Hey, no bother—what can I do for you?” C.J. was radiating charm from every pore. And that didn’t have anything to do with the discovery he’d just made that the woman was a whole lot prettier than he’d first thought she was, in a strange, almost fairy-tale sort of way, with a ballerina’s neck, little delicate chin, soft lips and skin so fine it seemed lit from the inside. But he’d have turned on the charm in equal measures for a freckle-nosed kid or a ninety-year-old with a face like a road map. That was just his way.
“I need to ask you a favor. A really…big favor.” A smile flickered briefly, as if some distant voice had prompted her to mind her manners. It struck him how tense she was, like a deer in that last instant before she figures out you’re watching her and bolts for the bushes.
“I’ll be glad to do what I can, ma’am,” C.J. responded automatically. But he was beginning to feel uneasy now, too, just a faint “Uh-oh…” whispered in the back of his mind. The last thing he needed right now was more delays.
“My car won’t start. I’m afraid it might be the alternator. I was wondering if you—”
“Be glad to take a look for you.” Relieved that what she wanted was something he could give her without taking up too awfully much of his time, he was feeling confident and was already walking off toward the only remaining vehicle in the parking lot. “That it over there?” He spun back and held out his hand. “Got the keys? Won’t take me but a minute—”
“No. There wouldn’t be any point in you looking at it.” She was standing where he’d left her with her hands stuffed deep in the pocket of her sweatshirt. She was shaking her head, and her voice was a hard, flat monotone. “I’m sure it’s dead. What I wanted to ask you was—”
“Did you call Triple A?” Really uneasy, now, he was remembering the cell phone, and the anxious way her big-haired friend had watched her make the call. Not wanting to, he also remembered the little girl with the haunting eyes.
“They’re backed up—a lot of accidents, they said. Because of the storm, I guess. Those get priority, so they said there’d be at least a two-hour wait. That was an hour ago.”
“Well then—”
“I just called again. Now they tell me it’s going to be another two hours. We can’t stay here that long. We can’t.”
It occurred to C.J. that her voice might be easy on the ears without that edge of tension in it. As it was, its very quietness gave her words an urgency that set his teeth on edge and raised the volume of the warnings in his head to a holler.
He scratched his head and mumbled, “Well, ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you….” Truth was, he was stalling, because he was pretty sure he knew where this was heading and what she was about to ask of him and wanted to hold off disappointing her and her friend—especially that little girl—as long as he could.
At the same time he was beginning to resent the hell out of her for putting him in a position where he’d have to.
“If you could just give us a ride to the nearest—”
Damn it. He elaborated on the swearing under his breath while he shook his head and rubbed unhappily at the back of his neck. “Ma’am, I wish I could do that—I do. I’m not allowed to pick up passengers, okay? I could lose my job.” Which was sort of a lie—the part about losing his job, anyway. His brother might chew him out good, but he wasn’t going to fire him. On the other hand, the no-hitchhikers rule was something all the Blue Starr drivers understood and agreed on, mainly because it made basic good sense. Picking up strangers was dangerous, especially the female variety. Those could complicate a driver’s life in ways C.J. didn’t even like to think about.
But because he was softhearted by nature and hated to let anybody down, he looked at this particular female and tried on his best smile, dimples and all. “Unless it’s a matter of a life-or-death emergency, I suppose that’d be different.”
“It is.”
C.J. narrowed his eyes and didn’t say anything for a minute or two; she’d caught him off guard with that, with the quiet tension in her voice and those silvery eyes never leaving his face. He felt a prickling under his skin, a kind of itchy-all-over, shivery feeling that made him think of the way an animal’s fur lifts up when he’s feeling threatened. He couldn’t have said why he should feel danger connected with such a fragile-looking woman, but right then he was pretty certain if he’d had fur it would have been standing on end.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” he growled without stopping to clear his throat.
She made a sound he’d have sworn was a laugh, except her face didn’t look like she thought anything was funny. She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if to a not-very-bright child. “I thought I’d made that clear. My car is broken down. I need you to take me—us—to the nearest town. Right now. As in, immediately. Do you understand?”
The urgency in her was so palpable C.J. actually stepped backward. His mind was racing, looking for explanations that would make sense to him. “Wait— How…is somebody—”
She didn’t wait for him to work his way through it. Closing her eyes, she gave a regretful sigh and withdrew her hands from the front pocket of her sweatshirt.
Momentum carried C.J. through. “—hurt or someth—” Then his hands shot up in the air without his brain even telling them to. A natural response to the gun in her hand. “Aw, jeez.”
“I’m sorry,” she was saying in that same quiet but urgent way, “I don’t have time to explain. I said we have to leave here immediately. This—” she gave the gun a little wave, a very little one, she wasn’t being careless with it “—is to let you know how serious I am about that. I will shoot if you—”
She interrupted herself with an exasperated sound and a hissed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, will you please put your hands down? You look silly with them up in the air like that.”
Not to mention what it’s gonna look like to anybody who happens to pull into the parking lot right about now, was C.J.’s thought—his first coherent one since she’d pulled the snub-nosed pistol out of her sweatshirt pocket.
He snorted and muttered crossly, “Yeah, well, it seemed like the thing to do when somebody’s pointin’ a gun at me. Sorry—guess I just don’t know how to act.” He did lower his hands, though…slowly. Now that the first shock was fading, he was starting to get good and mad, and he ground out the rest of it between gritted teeth. “I’ve never had anybody threaten to kill me
