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 up on his personal list of people he had no use for.

“I told you,” she said flatly. “The police weren’t-aren’t-an option.”

He let out a breath with a sound like the Kenworth’s air brakes. “Come on, don’t give me that. There’re laws-”

“Which in this case are all on his side.” She rapped it out, then abruptly closed her eyes and held up an appeasing hand, palm toward him. “Look-I told you, the less you know the better. I never would have involved you if I’d had any other choice. If you’ll take us someplace so we can rent another car-”

“What do you mean, the law is on his side?” C.J. was getting a heavy feeling in his stomach.

She closed her eyes again, briefly. When she opened them they had that silvery shine, which he recognized now as anger. Or maybe frustration. “I mean that Mary Kelly’s husband is a rich, powerful-very powerful-man.” She almost spat the words. “He is also a charming and intelligent, violent and dangerous-very dangerous-man. He terrorized his wife for years, but she only got up the courage to leave him when the violence began to affect her child. Unfortunately, as is often the case, when that happened is when her husband turned from merely violent to deadly. First, he took all the legal steps to ensure he’d get full custody of Emma-a parade of witnesses to testify to Mary Kelly’s unfitness as a mother, ‘proof’ of infidelity, drug abuse-the whole thing. She knew she didn’t have a prayer of winning against him in court, and that once he had custody of Emma, he would kill her. Mary, I mean. That was when she called us. We had to act quickly-”

“What do you mean, ‘us’?” Then he forgot that question as the rest of what she’d said sank in. “Kill her? Come on. Who is this guy? Sounds like a TV movie of the week, for God’s sake.” But the heavy feeling in his belly was squeezing into his chest.

She pivoted away, moving in that weightless way she had, and raked fingers through her hair in a gesture of helpless frustration. “Please-don’t ask any more questions, okay?” And she was back before him, her hands light as butterflies on his stubbornly folded arms. “Look-I’m sorry I ever dragged you into this. But I-we-really do need your help right now. There’s no one else we can turn to. Please.”

It took a lot of willpower with those eyes gazing into his, liquid and shimmering with held-back tears, but he held himself aloof, gruff and immobile. “Just tell me one thing. Who has custody of that little girl? Right now. You said they’d been to court. Did the judge make a ruling?”

She nodded, not looking at him, not answering. She didn’t have to. Her silence only confirmed his worst fear.

Furious now, he jerked his arms away from that featherlight touch and slapped one hand to his forehead. “Oh, man. The judge gave the father full custody, didn’t he? And you two took her, anyway. In direct violation of a judge’s order. Jeez. That’s kidnapping, don’t you know that? Jeez.”

He paced off across the concrete slab, trying to think his way through the disaster. His boots made loud scraping, crunching noises on the gravelly surface, and to him it sounded like his whole life, all his hopes and dreams, ten years of hard work and struggle, slip-sliding away into an abyss of failure.

He stopped, turned and looked back. She was standing where he’d left her, in a pool of light from the yard lamp, arms folded across her waist, head bowed, looking nothing at all like a hijacker or kidnapper. Looking like a lost traveler.