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uh, don’t mind?” she added when he didn’t get the hint she was asking for privacy.
    â€œOh…oh, yeah, sure,” he said, catching on, and was about to leave her there when she stalled him with a questioning gesture.
    â€œWhere are you taking us? To turn ourselves in.”
    So, at least it looked like she was calling her lawyer. He thought about it, then told her the name of the next major stop on up the interstate in South Carolina, which he knew to be a town big enough to have its own courthouse and police department but small enough not to be too overwhelmed with bureaucracy.
    She repeated the name under her breath, then said verysoftly, “Don’t…say anything, okay? Let me tell them…please?”
    He nodded and went around to his side of the truck.
    When he climbed into the cab he saw the sleeper curtain was pulled wide open. The woman, Mary Kelly, was sitting in the middle of it, rocking her daughter back and forth while the little girl sobbed and shivered and tried to hide her face against her momma’s neck.
    C.J. felt a stab of pain in his heart. “Well, hey there, sweetheart…what’s wrong?” He reached across the back of his seat to pat the kid’s back, and again felt awful when she flinched.
    Her momma tried halfheartedly to come up with a smile. “Oh, it’s nothin’, she just had a nightmare—she gets them sometimes. She thinks the bad men are comin’ to hurt me.” Her smile quivered and went out, and C.J. felt another twist of pain, this one in his guts.
    Armoring himself with his own smile, he said, “No bad men here, darlin’, just me, ol’ C.J.”
    He looked around for something—anything—that might put a stop to those tears, and his eye lit on a little flat package tucked behind his sunshade. It was a toy, one of those action figures based on the latest cartoon-character craze, which apparently involved a bunch of little bitty girls with super powers and great big black eyes. He’d bought it in the last truck stop he’d hit for his niece Amy Jo—Jimmy Joe’s little girl—who happened to be nuts about the cartoons, and he figured one little girl probably wasn’t all that different from another, right? Anyway, it seemed worth a try.
    Plucking it from behind the sunshade, he tapped the kid’s arm with it. “Look here what I found, darlin’, just for you.”
    Her momma picked up her cue and sang out, “Oh, Emma, looka here—it’s your favorite! What do you say? You tell Mr. Starr thank you, now.”
    So, like any child above the age of two being raised inthe South, Emma had to sit up straight and sniffle out a “Thank you, sir.” She could have been dying, and she’d have pulled herself together and managed it somehow.
    It broke the ice, though, and by the time Caitlyn joined them in the cab he and Emma were good buddies, and she was telling him all about which particular supergirl this action figure was and the names of all her friends, and all the cool things they could do. She hadn’t quite got so far as to sit on his lap, but she was leaning against his knees and drowning him with her eyes, which, it struck him, bore a fair resemblance to those little cartoon supergirls’ eyes.
    It made his heart hurt to think how sweet and little she was and how badly she wanted to trust somebody, and what a lousy hand life had dealt her so far. And how he was just about to make it worse for her, maybe, at least for a while.
    In the long run, though, he knew he was doing the right thing, what was best for her and her momma. He’d had close brushes with some bad apples like this Ari Vasily, and if there was one thing he’d learned from the experience it was that dangerous people like that were best left to the professionals to deal with. And as for the courts, well…sure, they got it wrong sometimes, but they generally straightened