Shooting Starr

Chapter 5

The silence in the room was intense. By contrast, the world outside seemed cluttered with sound: the rhythmic shushing of a ventilator in a nearby cubicle; the muted chirp of a telephone; a mutter of voices; the sandy slap of footsteps. C.J. found himself becoming aware of silences and sounds as if he were experiencing the world from the perspective of the woman lying in the hospital bed. A woman without sight.

The FBI man’s long face and downward tilted eyes gave him a perpetually doleful expression that reminded C.J. of a hound dog he’d once known. He knew enough about Jake Redfield, though, to be pretty certain that behind those eyes lurked a keen intelligence-maybe even a sense of humor. Also a single-minded determination when in pursuit of bad guys that bordered on obsession. Which was not unlike a hound dog, come to think of it.

Now that keen and melancholy gaze was focused on the woman in the bed as intently as if she could actually meet it.

And almost as if she felt that gaze, Caitlyn’s hands slowly uncurled, then brushed at the blanket in a self-conscious sort of way. Stabbing a sullen look in Redfield’s direction, she uttered a quiet but firm, “All right.”

When the FBI man seated himself on the edge of the bed and half turned so he was facing the woman lying in it, again as if she were capable of seeing him, as if she were someone he wanted to maintain eye contact with, a strange and unfamiliar disquiet stirred in C.J.’s belly. He hated to think it might be jealousy. He sure hoped it wasn’t-he’d never been subject to such a thing before.

Nevertheless, he found himself squirming inside as Jake said in a soft, almost intimate voice, “Good for you…glad to hear it.”

Then he paused, long enough for Caitlyn to stir restively and mutter, “So, talk, then.”

When he continued, the FBI man’s voice was brisk, all business. “Okay. Here’s the deal. The man whose daughter you took-Ari Vasily-is a dangerous man.”

Caitlyn interrupted with a faint snort. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“We-the Bureau, that is-are very interested in Mr. Vasily,” he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “We have been for some time.” Caitlyn had grown still and was listening intently, and though she couldn’t see it, Jake nodded his approval. “We’ve been keeping a close eye on some of Mr. Vasily’s business dealings since before the 9-11 terrorist attacks-we’ve always believed him to be a major player in the illegal drug and arms trade, possibly the kingpin in Miami and almost certainly a critical link between the Colombians and the Middle-Eastern dealers. Since the attacks, in following the terrorists’ money trail, we’ve been turning up leads that suggest Vasily’s links to the Middle East may involve a lot more than illegal drugs.” He paused, creating a stillness nobody cared to break. “We believe that Ari Vasily may be responsible for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars into terrorists’ bank accounts.”

To C.J. the atmosphere in the room felt thick, as if there weren’t enough oxygen to go around, and when Caitlyn finally spoke, her voice sounded starved for it. “If you believed that, why haven’t you stopped him?”

C.J. jerked his eyes from her hands to her face, then wished he hadn’t. Her voice had been so thin, so frail-he wasn’t prepared for the silvery flash of accusation in her eyes; the swollen, shiny look of her face, as if from the pressure of too much held-back pain, and the words unspoken: Then none of this would have had to happen. Seeing it, the disquiet in his belly became a building pressure that made him want to jump up and pace, punch something-do something, anything to make that look go away.

Again Redfield acknowledged her anger calmly, with a nod she couldn’t see. He spoke with so much control his voice sounded gentle. “We know the links are there, but so far we haven’t been able to find the ones that lead back to Vasily. The man is clever and he’s careful. And he has almost unlimited resources. He insulates himself inside so many layers of organization, it’s been impossible up to now to follow a trail directly to him. We’ve been able to find and close off a lot of his-I guess you could call them fingers. Tributaries. Channels. What we haven’t been able to do is connect any of them to the man at the top-we believe that’s Vasily.” C.J. wondered if he was the only one to see the FBI man’s hand curl into a fist. For the first time Jake’s voice betrayed tight-jawed, frustrated rage. “We know it, but we can’t prove it.”

Caitlyn spoke, not sullen or accusing, but quietly alert. “What does this have to do with me?”

“I think you may be his first mistake.” Jake’s smile wasn’t pleasant to see. “We’d like to see that it’s a fatal one.”

“A mistake?” Caitlyn whispered. And then, referring to the second part of the statement, a rather pugnacious, “How?”

Redfield shifted, in the manner of somebody getting down to the nitty-gritty. “This is the first hint we’ve had that Vasily might be human.” He smiled wryly. “It’s obvious that his daughter is important to him. So important that when faced with losing her, he’s apparently willing to go to extreme lengths to get her back, even at unprecedented risk of personal exposure.” He leaned forward and his voice hardened. “Spelling it out, I believe Vasily ordered the hit on his wife. I think that’s obvious, even if there’s no way in hell anybody’d ever make it stick in a court of law. Why would he do such a thing, effectively turning the spotlight of law enforcement on himself, when he’s been so successful in avoiding it for so long?” He paused, then answered himself.

“Because he was driven to it by sheer frustration. All those months waiting for you to crack, not able to get to you, not able to do a damn thing to get his daughter back-it finally pushed him into doing something stupid. Now all we have to do is take advantage of that mistake.”

“How can you?” Caitlyn whispered. “If you can’t prove he did it-had Mary Kelly killed.”

The FBI man leaned closer, and his voice grew softer still. “He had Mary Kelly killed for one reason, Caitlyn-to send a message to you. Look,” he said, putting up a hand as if to block her gasp of rejection, “you were the one who had his daughter spirited away. He knows his wife didn’t have the resources to do that. So, obviously, you’re the one who knows where she is.”

“But I don’t-” He made a sound to cut off the denial.

“Vasily probably figured you’d be so shook up by the shooting you’d give in and spill what you know to the judge and he’d get the kid back and that would be that. He didn’t count on you getting in the way of a bullet.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” Caitlyn protested faintly, voicing the same arguments C.J. and the others in the room had put forth when Jake had first laid out his theory for them. “There were bullets flying everywhere! Other people were hit-injured. Killed.” Her eyes darted desperately around the room; she had that lost child look again. “Couldn’t it have been…I don’t know…random?”

“Anything’s possible,” Jake said solemnly, without an ounce of conviction. “But consider this-the first shots took out the guards, but only wounded them. Then one bullet got Mrs. Vasily square in the heart. The only reason it creased your skull first was because when you heard those first shots you got some crazy notion in your head that you’d protect her. Vasily must have just about had a heart attack when he saw that.” His lips curved in his chilling smile. “It took a real pro and one helluva sharpshooter to do that, but I wouldn’t give a bent nickel for the hit man’s life right now. Vasily wants you, and he wants you alive.”

Vasily wants you.

This must be what drowning feels like, Caitlyn thought, as the wave of fear washed over her. To be engulfed in blackness…suffocating and cold.

And yet her mind was astonishingly clear. “I think I know where this is going,” she heard her own calm voice saying. “You want to set a trap for Vasily, and you want me to be the bait.”

There was a flurry of sounds and stirrings. Her mind’s eye struggled to sort them out: a choked protest from Dad, hastily stifled; C.J.’s voice-an angry, growled “No. No way. You said that wasn’t…” Background mutterings of protest from someone-that would be C.J.’s sister-in-law, the lawyer, probably; closer by, the FBI man’s restless shifting and the barely audible hiss of a breath, exhaled through someone’s nose.

The lawyer-Charly-said in a thick Southern drawl, “For Lord’s sake, Jake, after you almost lost Evie-”

The FBI man cut her off, speaking directly to Caitlyn in a quiet but curiously vibrant voice. As if, she thought, he was trying to cover up some powerful emotion and not doing a very good job of it. “We do want to set a trap for Vasily, of course. Because if there’s one thing in this world Ari Vasily would take care of in person rather than leaving to his loyal-not to mention untraceable-soldiers, it’s picking up his little girl, once he finds out where she is. But the last thing we’d want to do is use you or the child as bait. Too many things can go wrong.” He paused to clear his throat against a background of more shiftings and stirrings.

Undercurrents, thought Caitlyn, intrigued in spite of everything.

“What we want to do,” the FBI man-Jake?-went on after a moment, raising his voice in a struggle to reclaim his self-control, “is get you under wraps and keep you there until we’ve got Vasily in custody. To do that-”

“You’ll have to use me,” Caitlyn said calmly. “You said yourself-he wants me alive.”

“He wants his daughter,” Jake corrected, his voice now hard and flat. “You’re the means to an end, as far as he’s concerned, nothing more. We’ll set up the situation, and it’ll be one that isn’t going to put you or Emma Vasily in harm’s way-leave that to us. Right now we’re more concerned about getting you to a safe place without Vasily knowing about it.”

A safe place… Her mind filled with achingly brilliant images of her room in her parents’ house on its shaded street in Sioux City-soft-green walls and borders of pink tulips clashing intriguingly with the dark and brooding posters of Middle Earth from the Tolkien phase she’d dwelt in during most of her high school years.

I want to go home.

She couldn’t go home, and knew it. So did everybody else in the room, judging from the silence and tension that had followed Jake’s words. Caitlyn’s sunny visions of home took on the grainy, shadowy shadings of an old film noir movie as she imagined Ari Vasily tracking her down…finding her there. She couldn’t let him find out where her family lived. Ever.

She shivered, and felt isolated…alone.

A gruff and froggy sound reached for her in her cave of loneliness and yanked her back to the room filled with people. C.J., clearing his throat. C.J., sitting close to her, on the other side of the bed from the FBI man who’d demanded her focused attention so that she’d all but forgotten anyone else was there. C.J., the cute Southern trucker with the melting-chocolate eyes, sweet smile and wicked dimples, who she’d asked for help and who had let her down so badly and who she had expected never to see again, and yet-who was now so inexplicably and constantly here.

C.J. cleared his throat and said, “How ’bout this? How ’bout she comes home with me-to my folks’ place in Georgia?”

Silence again-and Caitlyn thought she’d never known before how many different shades of silence there were. This one shimmered around the edges, balanced on the verge of sound, like that suspenseful moment of emptiness in a symphony just before the strings come in at triple pianissimo.

Then everyone spoke at once, a murmur and chatter of sound that blew past her ears like a capricious gust of wind.

In its wake, C.J. said, with what she thought was a touch of belligerence, “Look, it’s the perfect place. Where we live it’s way out in the country-”

“It is that,” said Charly dryly. “C.J.’s right. Out there, the only neighbors are friends and family, and they all know one another. It’d be just about impossible for any stranger to get close enough to Caitlyn to do her harm, and anybody dumb enough to try would have to go through all the brothers and in-laws first-” she interjected a rich, warm chuckle “-not to mention Momma Betty. Personally, I’d bet on Betty Starr up against a hit man any day of the week.”

Jake said, thoughtful and somber, “Actually, it’s got possibilities. There’s no way to connect any of you with Caitlyn…” She could tell by the clarity of his voice that he was looking at her, waiting for her reaction.

“Honey?” Her dad’s voice, cautious and distant. “What do you think?”

What did she think? She couldn’t think. The silence was all around her…vibrant…waiting. Where was C.J.? Was he watching her? Were they all looking at her, watching for her response? Searching her face for revelations? Unable to see them, she felt exposed…vulnerable…naked. In self-defense, she fought to make her expression unreadable.

“In case she needs lookin’ after, my sister Jess is a nurse, lives right there with my mother,” C.J. put in, rather like a punctuation mark-as if that should settle it.

C.J., who’d let her down and turned her in to the police and got Mary Kelly killed. Now he expected her to go home with him? Let him and his Southern relatives take care of her?

Caitlyn’s head felt as if it might explode. Through the hum of sound inside it, like the conversation of angry bees, she heard a chorus of agreement:

“It’s not a bad idea…”

“Actually, it’s a great idea.”

“It’d be the ideal place…”

“She’d be protected…”

“It’s the perfect solution.”

“We’d have to get her there without anybody knowing,” Jake said slowly. “And I mean anybody.” Caitlyn felt his weight shift as he turned from her to address the others. She heard the rush of a sharply exhaled breath. “Getting her out of this place won’t be easy. Camera crews and news media everywhere you-”

“Do I hear somebody playing my tune?” That was a new voice, light and musical as birdsong.

Someone said, “Eve!” and it was echoed around the room in varying tones of surprise and delight, along with cries of “Hey, when did you get back?” and “I thought you were in Afghanistan!”

Jake’s weight was gone from the bed. Caitlyn heard, “Hey, Waskowitz…” in a voice deep-throated and husky with intimacy, and after a moment, more softly, “You just get in?”

“Just,” the newcomer murmured back. “I came as soon as I got your message.”

“How was your flight? Get any sleep?”

“Okay…not much…never mind…”

Chafing with impatience, Caitlyn waited, listening to the exchange of mundane and essential information between partners and lovers-for that much was obvious from the first word spoken by the newcomer-reunited after a separation prolonged both in time and distance. She stared fiercely into the nothingness as if she could penetrate it with the sheer effort of her will, and was struggling against a childish sense of exclusion, the urge to cry out, “Hey! Over here! What about me?”

Then she felt her hand covered with one that was slender but strong…the skin roughened as if it had recently been too much exposed to hot dry winds and too little to soap and soothing lotions. The bright, musical voice said, “Hey, I’m Eve Waskowitz, Jake’s wife. And you’re Caitlyn, right?”

Before Caitlyn could utter a word, a new, lighter weight settled onto the bed beside her, and the voice became nearer and almost a whisper, like secrets whispered by best friends in the friendly dark. “They said you can’t see at the moment-gee, I can’t imagine how confusing it must be, surrounded by a bunch of strange people all talking at once. Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah…I’m fine.” And for the first time in a long time, Caitlyn found herself thinking she might be. “Nice to meet you. Did…somebody say you were in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah…filming.” There was a gust of breath. “Long story. In a nutshell, I make documentaries. Cable, mostly, although this one’s for one of the major networks-big thrill. Not to mention more money than I’m used to having at my disposal.” By way of changing the subject, she shifted her weight and turned to include the others in the room, although she kept her hand on Caitlyn’s. “So, what’s going on? What did I miss?”

“We’re havin’ a council of war,” Charly said-and the last word sounded like wo-ah.

“Oh, goody,” Eve chortled, while Caitlyn, talking over her, was saying flippantly, “We’re planning to set a trap for the bad guy, and use me as bait.”

Someone-C.J.-actually growled, and Jake sucked in air and said shortly, “We’re not going to do that.”

“Anyway, that’s puttin’ the cart in front of the horse,” Charly said in her distinctive, dry way. “We need to get her well first. To do that, we’ve got to get her tucked away someplace safe where the bad guys can’t get at her.”

There were restless stirrings from C.J.’s side of her bed, and his voice said testily, “We have a place. What I’m gonna do is take her home to Georgia with me. The trick is getting her out of here without anybody catching on. The damn media-’scuse me, Eve-have got this whole place surrounded. Every TV station in the country’s got a truck parked out there.”

Eve made a sound like a self-satisfied cat. “Then nobody would be apt to notice one more, would they?”

There was a short, fat silence, and then Jake murmured, “Eve…” just as C.J. said, “Hah!” and Charly, chuckling, said, “It’s perfect.”

“Of course it is. Simple, too. We’ll just smuggle her out as part of my crew.” Eve’s hand squeezed Caitlyn’s and her weight was no longer beside her on the bed. “It’ll take me a couple days to round ’em up-they’re still trickling in from Afghanistan-I came ahead to get things set up for postproduction-but you’re not going to be ready to go for a while anyway, right? She’ll need to be on her feet, at least. And, hmm, let’s see…those bandages might be-”

“Eve,” her husband said in a low, warning tone, “nobody in your crew can know about this. I mean, nobody.”

“Well, of course. Not a word goes beyond the people in this room.” Caitlyn felt the brush of a cool cheek and then Eve’s voice, light with laughter, faded into distance. “Don’t worry, my love-leave everything to me!”

To C.J., still tuned to the nuances of sound in a sightless world, the silence that followed her leaving had a vibrancy to it, like the aftermath of the ringing of a bell.

For long seconds nobody seemed to have anything to say. Then Charly, in her dry, sardonic way, said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that.”

Jake cleared his throat, gazed distractedly after his departed wife and muttered, “I wouldn’t quite say that… Uh, there’s a lot to take care of on my end. So…guess I better get on it. I’ll be in touch.” The last was for Caitlyn as he touched her hand in a brief farewell.

As if that was a signal of some kind, Wood Brown took a step forward and Charly glanced at her watch and said, “Well, I’m gonna head on back. What about you C.J.-you comin’?” He shook his head, and she gave the blanket-draped lump that was Caitlyn’s foot a friendly squeeze. “Okay, y’all keep me informed, now, y’hear?” She and Jake went out together, as Wood moved to his daughter’s side.

He took her hand and gently squeezed it. “Okay, honey, guess I’d better go see what your mother’s up to. I’ll tell her what we’ve decided.” C.J. thought his quiet ways must be very reassuring under those circumstances. For a moment he felt a twinge of something akin to envy-he could barely remember his own father. And then Caitlyn’s father leaned over and brushed her forehead with his lips and was gone.

It was the moment C.J. had both wanted and dreaded. Alone with the woman he knew deep down in his heart he’d wronged, he felt tongue-tied and useless. And yet, he didn’t want to leave simply because, right then, at her bedside was the only place in the world he knew how to be. No matter how bad he felt being there, he knew he was going to feel worse somewhere else.

But in a way, it was even more fundamental than that, nothing whatever to do with thought, just a heaviness inside him that was bone deep, as if his body had somehow taken root in that hospital chair.

Seconds ticked by. Wood Brown’s footsteps were swallowed up by the hospital sounds. C.J.’s breathing seemed loud enough to him to wake the dead.

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Caitlyn said in a low voice, turning a shifting, unfocused gaze toward him. Searching for him in her private darkness.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. With that sound her gaze found him and sharpened unnervingly, almost as though she could see. Uncomfortably he mumbled, “You need anything? Can I get-”

“I’m fine.” But she flinched as she said it, as if she acknowledged the lie it was.

C.J. watched a frown pucker the middle of her forehead, the unmarred part just below the purple lump bisected by a dark line held together by neat, white butterfly bandages where she’d met the brick courthouse steps on her way down. From out of nowhere came a throat-tightening urge to touch his lips to the spot, and he swallowed rapidly and looked away, glad for once that the object of the impulse wasn’t able to see him.

Oblivious, she gave a small, tired-sounding sigh. “I just wish I knew why you’re here.” He didn’t know how to answer her, so he didn’t try. After a moment she added in a soft, slightly thickened voice, as if she might be about to cry, “What is it you want from me?”

“I don’t want anything.” His quickening heartbeat seemed to fill his chest. Her vulnerability touched him with an unfamiliar fear that made him sound angry when he was anything but. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I don’t want your help.” She threw it back at him, her voice as harsh and angry as his, and it never occurred to him she might be covering up something else, the same way he was.

“Look,” he said, biting off words lest they give away too much, “you’re gonna have to have help from somebody, might just as well be with me. They’re gonna put you in some kind of safe house when you leave here, anyway, did you think about that? What, would you rather be with strangers?”

To his surprise she laughed-a single bright puff of air. “What do you think we are? We are strangers.”

He clamped his teeth together and worked a muscle in his jaw while he thought about how to tell her what he knew in his heart, which was that she wasn’t a stranger to him, not anymore. That during the past few months there’d been a bond formed that tied her to him in ways he didn’t understand himself.

He leaned forward, shaking his head, then remembered she couldn’t see that. “No, we’re not,” he said, in the flat, implacable way that had driven his brothers and sisters up the wall and won him a lot more arguments than he’d lost. “It’s true we haven’t known each other all that long, but we’ve sure enough had a profound effect on one another’s lives.”

She gave that little laugh again and was silent. Her lips held on to an ironic tilt, and her sightless eyes shifted past him while she thought about it.

He watched her for a moment, then said softly, “You’re gonna like them, you know.”

“Who?” Her eyes darted back to him and lit on his chin. He found himself smiling.

“My folks. They’re good people. Hey, my mom was a teacher, too, you know. Like your dad.”

She settled back onto the pillows with a sigh. “That explains it.”

“Yeah? What?”

“The way you talk.”

“The way I-”

“You use good grammar. Most of the time.”

“Huh,” said C.J., bemused that she’d noticed such a thing about him. It gave him an unexpected warming feeling inside.

As if she’d heard his thoughts, her lips curved again with that wry smile. “When your dad’s a schoolteacher and you’ve had good grammar pounded into you all your life, you notice.” She shifted a little, then murmured, “So, what about your dad? What does he do?”

“Died when I was little. Heart attack.” He was still trying to get past that remark about his grammar.

“Oh-I’m sorry.” She didn’t say anything more for a while, and he got to thinking it was time for him to leave. He was getting ready to do that-shifting around and making rustling noises, trying to think what to say to end things-when she turned her face toward him and put out a hand. Searching.

His heart gave a bump, and he wondered if he dared take her hand and hold it, but before he could make up his mind she jerked it back and grasped it with her other one on the folded-over sheet across her middle.

“Please,” she said in a soft but urgent voice. “Tell me about them-your family.” She sounded nervous, he thought, as if she couldn’t bear for him to leave. Like a little child asking for one more drink of water and a bed-time story because she didn’t want to be left alone in the dark.

So he settled back in his chair with a silent exhalation, cleared his throat and began to tell her about the people most important to him in this world. He started with his mother, Betty Starr, five foot one on a good day, who’d taught school and raised seven children with a soft voice and an iron hand while her husband was off driving an eighteen-wheeler across the country. He told her about his brother, Jimmy Joe, who’d taken over the trucking when his dad died and built it into the company called Blue Starr Transport, and had given C.J. a job when he needed help to put himself through law school and nobody else besides his mother believed he could.

“How’s that law degree coming along?” Caitlyn interrupted. She had that wry little smile on her lips, and C.J. knew she was remembering that April night they’d faced each other between the headlight beams of his truck and he’d told her he couldn’t do what she was asking of him. And that she’d known the reason why without him having to tell her.

He told her it was coming along fine, that he’d gotten his degree in June and was just waiting to take the bar exam. He didn’t tell her he’d most likely be postponing his scheduled date which was coming up week after next.

He went on to tell her about his brothers and sisters then, working his way down the list starting with his oldest sister, Tracy, the conventional one, a schoolteacher, too, married to Al who was a cop down in Augusta. Then Troy the ex-SEAL, now married to Charly, father of two and a private investigator. He’d made it as far as his sister Jess the nurse, mother of eighteen-year-old Sammi June, and was explaining how she’d been living with their momma since her husband, Tristan, had gotten shot down flying missions over Iraq, when he looked over and saw he no longer had an audience. Caitlyn had fallen asleep.

He cut himself off in the middle of the sentence and put a hand over his mouth, letting an exhalation sigh quietly from his nose while he studied her. Relaxed, the lines of stress and frustration erased by sleep, her face seemed to him flawless once more, fairy-tale lovely, the lump on her forehead, the swelling, the bruises beneath her eyes and the healing scrape on her chin of no consequence, invisible to his eyes.

Emotions tumbled through him like puppies, wreaking havoc on his piece of mind. Out of the chaos, he could find only one clear thought.

She sure doesn’t look like a hijacker.