Read Maggie's Man for Free Online Page A

now behind
them; they were southbound, heading toward Tigard. Cain didn't feel any relief,
though. With every minute, the risks became greater and greater.
    Had the original owner of the blue truck
returned to the parking garage yet? Maybe he'd already sounded the alarm,
having his choice of police officers to notify. The cops would put two and two
together, and within minutes an APB would be issued on the stolen truck. The
next cop to pull in behind Cain wouldn't be turning away.
    Or maybe the owner had parked his truck in the
garage because he planned on being gone all day. Maybe he worked downtown.
Maybe he was serving jury duty in the courthouse and would be tied up all day.
Maybe the truck was the perfect escape vehicle because the cops were looking
for a lone man on foot in a prison guard's uniform, not a Western-looking
fellow casually driving his brand-new truck with his girlfriend.
    Or the owner of the truck had thought he would
be gone all day, but he'd been dismissed from the jury. Or he'd realized he'd
forgotten something at home and needed to go back. Or he'd found the item he
was shopping for in the first store he entered and there was no reason to go to
any others.
    So many variables and Cain couldn't anticipate
nor control any of them. His life had just become a case study in chaos theory.
Somewhere in Tokyo, a butterfly would flap its wings and Cain Cannon would be
arrested five miles outside of Portland.
    He looked over at his hostage, yet another
variable he couldn't control. She was hunched over the map, quiet and still,
her face obscured by a thick waterfall of deep red hair. He'd thought she would
be perfectly submissive, but that wasn't quite the case. Maybe the red hair
should've been a giveaway; she seemed to harbor a stubborn streak as wide as
any he'd ever met.
    And she cared an inordinate amount for others.
It was disconcerting, given the company he'd been keeping for the past six
years. But then, it was also something he could use against her.
    Use against her? When had he started thinking like that?
    If a man lived among pigs for too many
years, could he really keep himself from becoming a swine?
    He didn't know anymore. And suddenly he was
thinking of that first day, walking through the gates of the prison one gateway
at a time. You entered the first passage, doors locked behind you, new doors
opened in front of you. And so on and so forth, as you sank deeper and deeper
into the labyrinth, sunlight and freedom not one door away, but four gateways removed,
as if you'd just entered the bowels of the earth and there was no going back.
    Entering prisoners started out in the intake
section, getting full medical and psychiatric evaluations while the corrections
department decided what to do with them. Cain didn't remember the tests much.
He'd been too busy staring at the walls like a dazed man, trying to understand
how his life had come to this. Then at the end of the second week, when they'd
determined to put him in the medium-security wing as he'd been convicted of
second-degree murder, not first, they'd turned him loose like a stunned deer in
the middle of the general population. His nostrils, raised on fresh air,
mountain streams and endless horizons, had recoiled at the sharp, astringent
odor of overly harsh detergents thinly masking the deeper, darker scent of too
many men and too much fear.
    He hadn't known what to do or where to go, and
for a moment he'd been afraid. He wasn't sure he'd ever been afraid before.
Wasn't sure he'd ever really understood what people meant by that. He'd been
born with a rifle in his hand and the brain of mathematician in his head; there
had never been anything he couldn't do.
    A man had walked up to him, a white guy,
looking like a grain of rice against the backdrop of predominantly Mexican and
black inmates.
    "I hearda you," the guy had said, his
voice thick with mountains.
    "I don't know you," Cain had replied,
but he'd been lying. He'd looked at the man's shaved