She gave a little gasp and said faintly, “You don’t have to carry me.”

“I think maybe I do,” he said, and felt her body shake with silent laughter.

“Well, okay then, pardner,” she growled in a very bad Duke Wayne impression, which he was pretty certain he did not sound like, at least he hoped not.

He made an ambiguous growling sound back to her and carried her up the steps and into his trailer. He put her down on the couch and was heading back out to get the baby when he spotted a sticky note from Katie stuck on the inside of the door saying she’d made up his bed with clean sheets and stocked the fridge with a few groceries. God bless the woman, because those were two things he hadn’t even thought about himself.

When he opened the back door of his vehicle to unbuckle the baby carrier seat, Moonshine had to come over and go through the sniff-test thing again. Having evidently given the new arrival her approval, she trotted along at J.J.’s heels right up to the bottom of the steps. There, instead of flopping down in the dust for a snooze as was her usual habit, she parked herself on her haunches on full alert, as if she knew whatever was in that carrier was precious cargo and in need of her protection.

“Good girl,” J.J. muttered, and wondered for the hundredth time where the old dog had come from and what kind of stories she could tell if only she could talk.

Back inside the trailer he found Rachel sitting on the couch, hunched up with her arms wrapped around herself, like she was cold. Which reminded him it could definitely get chilly, spring nights in the desert, and she was wearing only a pair of green scrubs the hospital had given her to replace her bloodstained clothes. He set the baby carrier on the floor beside her feet and felt her gaze following him as he turned on the heat, then ducked into his bedroom to find something warm for her to put on.

It felt oddly uncomfortable, having her there, having her watch him. It wasn’t as if sharing his quarters with a woman was an uncommon thing, just…not these quarters. He hated to admit that he minded that he was living in a dinky, shabby old trailer. Or at least it didn’t exactly fit the image he wanted to have of himself, had been accustomed to having of himself.

Not that this woman was somebody whose opinion of him should matter, so why should he care what she thought?

“I’m going to need to buy some clothes,” Rachel said when he handed her one of his sweatshirts-he thought an old girlfriend must have given it to him, because he couldn’t imagine buying anything that had “Life’s a Beach” printed on it. He watched her pull it on over her head and tug the excess down around her hips, and while he waited for her to do it, felt an inexplicable urge to slip his fingers under her hair and pull it free of the neckline of the shirt for her.

“I’ll have Katie bring over some stuff tomorrow,” he said absently, his eyes following the movements of her hands as she rolled up the sweatshirt’s way-too-long sleeves.

She looked up at him, and he felt a weird swimming sensation, looking down into those deep dark eyes. “Katie? That’s the one I heard talking to you on the radio…”

“Right. She’s my…I guess they don’t call them secretaries now. My administrative assistant-that’s it. She runs the office, is what she does. Anyway, she’s got daughters. Ought to have something you can wear. Meanwhile, you can wear that, or I can find you a T-shirt, if that’d be more comfortable to sleep in. Probably come about to your knees.”

“No, no-that’s okay. This is fine.”

“Well, okay then. Is there anything I can get you? Are you hungry?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

“Uh…you can sleep in the bedroom. Katie put clean sheets on the bed, so I know she meant for you to. So…whenever you feel like it, just…you know, make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

Her voice sounded breathy and rushed, as if she couldn’t wait for him to go away and leave her be. He couldn’t blame her for wanting some privacy, after the kind of invasions she’d had to put up with, and since he’d run out of things to say to her, or ask her, he gave her a “good-night” nod, got himself a cold beer out of the fridge and took himself outside. Feeling like an intruder in his own house, he sat in an old aluminum folding chair beside the steps, and Moonshine came and flopped down beside him with a gusty sigh, as if she was more than happy to turn over sentry duty to him.

He put his hand on her head, took a big swallow of beer, gave a sigh of his own and growled, “Yeah, it’s been one helluva coupla days, hasn’t it, old girl?”

The dog didn’t reply, so J.J. leaned his head back and looked up at the sky, which wasn’t showing too many stars on such a moon-bright night. He listened for a moment to the sound of the wind shushing through the desert shrubbery, and for some reason felt a little bit lonely.

He thought about Rachel and what he’d seen her do yesterday, and what he was going to try to talk her into doing for him in the near future, and the thoughts made him feel itchy and restless.

Not guilty. No, not that. Why should I feel guilty? She’s an eyewitness to the murder of two federal agents. It’s her damn duty to tell what she knows.

He muttered under his breath, a couple of phrases his mama wouldn’t have approved of, then reached down and unlatched the guitar case that lay on the ground beside the aluminum chair. He took out his guitar, tuned it up and then cradled it against him and began to diddle around. Just chords, at first, and then the chords sort of found their way into a Springsteen song, one from one of his old acoustic albums, kind of mournful, which suited his mood.

He stopped playing when Moonshine suddenly lifted her head up off her paws, and a moment later he heard the door of his trailer creak open. He set the guitar back in its case and watched Rachel come out, silhouetted for a couple of seconds against the light inside before she made her way down the steps, holding on to the wooden railing with both hands. He got up and went to get her, meaning to help her to the chair, but she shook her head and seated herself gingerly on the next-to-bottom step.

“You didn’t have to stop playing. I just wanted to give you this.” She held it out to him-the envelope he’d last seen when he’d copied her name and address off the front, the one she’d had taped to her belly, that he’d removed from her yesterday morning along with her clothes.

He gave a little snort of surprise as he took it from her. “Where’d you have it stashed this time?”

He could barely make out her hint of a smile. “Not on me-I don’t think it would stick. Right now my stomach’s pretty much like a big bowl of pudding. I had it under the cushion in the baby carrier.”

“Well, it must be pretty important,” J.J. drawled. Considering the trouble you’ve gone through to keep it hidden-and safe.

She nodded, and when she spoke, she sounded tense. “It-that letter-is what made me think I could finally get away from Carlos. That’s where I was planning to go.”

He held the envelope, weighing it in his hand. “So…why are you giving it to me now? Does this mean you’ve decided to trust me? A little?”

Again she had her arms wrapped around herself, huddled on that hard wooden step, and her face was turned away and in shadows. Her voice sounded whispery and exhausted. “Please understand…it’s been very hard for me to know who to trust. But-” she exhaled audibly “-as you said, I guess if you’d wanted to kill me and take my baby back to Carlos, it would have been very easy for you to do that. Instead, as you pointed out, I have you-and your dog-to thank for saving our lives. So, since I can’t do this by myself and am going to have to trust someone, it might as well be you.”

“A ringing endorsement if I ever heard one,” J.J. said dryly. He opened the envelope and took out several sheets of paper, some of it heavy and obviously expensive. “You gonna tell me what this is, or let me figure it out for myself?”

“It’s a letter,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly completely devoid of expression. “From my grandfather, Sam Malone.”

“Sam Malone?” He glanced up at her and grinned. “Not the Sam Malone, I suppose?”

She stared blankly back at him. “I didn’t even know there was a the Sam Malone.”

“Come on. Reclusive multibillionaire, struck it rich out here on the desert somewhere during the Great Depression, made a fortune during World War II, hung out with the rich and the famous before he dropped out of sight sometime in the sixties. Not as notorious-or as crazy-as Howard Hughes, but in the same general category. Don’t tell me you never heard of him. My God, I didn’t know he was still alive.”

She shook her head in a bewildered kind of way and said faintly, “I don’t know if he is.”

He stood up and clicked on a switch in a cord dangling down alongside the front door, turning on a string of Christmas lights that looped across the front of the trailer. “From what I recall,” he said as he sat back down in the folding chair, “the guy was quite a character. Worked as a stuntman in old Hollywood for a while-knew all the big stars. I think he married a starlet, or maybe it was a folksinger…” He lost the train of what he was saying right about then, because he was studying the letter.

The first page was a cover letter from an attorney, and he skimmed it quickly before he set it in his lap and moved on to the next one. This was a handwritten letter, written on lined paper torn from a cheap notebook, the kind J.J. remembered writing school reports on when he was a kid, in the days before his folks had been able to afford a computer. The writing was old-fashioned and hard to read, but underneath that, on more of the lawyer’s expensive paper, was what appeared to be a typed version. He pulled that out and began to read.