Maggie's Man (5 page)

She was going to be sick.

"What … what's your name?" she
whispered at last, having to moisten her lips to speak.

"Prisoner number 542769." His gaze
remained on the rearview mirror. "But you can call me Pris for
short."

She swallowed a hysterical giggle and practiced
deep breathing. Remember, there must be a human being in there somewhere, no
doubt just hiding really darn well behind those cold, cold, eyes.

"Your real name?" she tried again,
then added weakly, "Not that Pris isn't cool."

His face remained frozen for a moment, then
abruptly his full, well-shaped lips twisted. "Cain," he said levelly,
"my father named me Cain. He said God had given him the gift of
sight." His face didn't change but she paled.

"How apropos," she murmured at last.
A long harsh tremor shuddered through her body. His thigh was pressed against
hers, his shoulder hard against her chest. She shuddered again, and he didn't
even flinch.

The light turned green. He pressed down lightly
on the gas. The police car remained right behind them. Then, several blocks
back, she saw a second cop turn into the traffic flow.

"Cain," she forced herself to say,
"Cain, don't do this. You can't win this way, don't you see that? It's a
nice truck, but they have cars and guns and helicopters. The minute that
policeman turns on his sirens … if you run for it, you'll only hurt all these
nice, innocent people, people with spouses and children and parents and … and
even three-legged cats."

She stared up at him with her most pleading
blue gaze. C.J. had once told her no sane man could say no to such big blue
eyes. Of course, C.J. was a flirt and Maggie was the one whose love life had
entered the ice age sometime around the age of sixteen and never unthawed.

"You're right," Cain said abruptly.

"What?"

"You're right." His gaze left hers,
focusing on the road while his hands flexed on the wheel. Green eyes darted to
the rearview mirror, then back to the road signs. "I can't win in a
high-speed chase. I'm spending too much time on tactics and not enough on
strategy." He seemed to be talking to himself more than her. She didn't
mind that. His voice was steady and soft, the voice of a man contemplating life
versus plunging rashly ahead.
Keep him calm, Maggie. That's good.
She
might not be a fighter, but she was good at soothing people. Though her mother
routinely dismissed Maggie's job as being too prosaic, Maggie was one of the
best marriage counselors in the field.

Cain glanced at her. "Ever play chess,
Maggie?"

She shook her head.

"It's a good game," he said absently,
his fingernails drumming on the steering wheel as he peered back at the cop.
"It's based primarily on mathematics, you know. People like Sir Isaac
Newton and Benjamin Franklin used to write formulas for perfect Knight Tours.
The chessboard is eight by eight, and originally the number system was base
eight. It's why computers can be programmed to play chess as well. Really, it's
simply a matter of rapidly computing and calculating all the different
scenarios. Quite logical."

Maggie stared at him. "Oh," she said
at last. It was the only syllable she could get out of her mouth. For an
escaped felon, he seemed surprisingly intelligent, lucid even. Not a raving,
insane bone in his body. Was that good or bad?

"Strategy," he muttered now.
"It's all about strategy. I'm spending too much time on tactics and not
enough on strategy."

"What?"

"Get the map," he said abruptly.

"Why?" she risked countering.

He turned and looked at her, his face composed
and his startling green eyes steady. "I'm following your advice, Maggie.
You're going to plot us an escape route that will take us away from all these
cars and pedestrians. Something rural would be ideal."

"But … but…" But she would be helping
him. She couldn't help him, that would be wrong. And though she wasn't exactly
superwoman material, she didn't want to do anything that might hurt other
people. "I … I can't," she said at last.

He arched a single brow and she continued in a
frantic rush. "To…to…to get the map I'd … have to take my hands off the
wheel." Aha! "And then you might do something rash and that would be
bad."

Her captor looked at her levelly. "What do
you weigh? One hundred, one hundred and five pounds?" Her lips thinned,
then finally she nodded. "I bench-press twice your weight, Maggie. Do you
really think you can stop me from controlling the wheel?"

No, no, she didn't, and they both know it. Her
face fell, her shoulders hunching. She was a lousy excuse for a heroine.

She felt his gaze on her face. For one moment,
it almost seemed to relent. "You do try," he said abruptly, his tone
indecipherable. "I'll give you points for that. Now plot out an escape route,
Maggie. We have to get off these main drags. There's no place to go here, and
there are too many cars. We need some good, twisty side streets, something
small and unknown." He was back to staring at the cop. "And Maggie,
get the damn seat belt on."

"Sure," she whispered, giving in and
retrieving the map. "Heaven forbid I should get killed in a high-speed car
chase. Then who would you have to shoot?"

His lips curved. For a moment, she was startled
to see that his green eyes held a glint of humor. "Very good. Ever think
of becoming a hostage professionally?"

"They're going to catch you," she
retorted with a small spark of rebellion. "And when they do, I'm going to
dance on your prison cell."

She fastened her seat belt with as much dignity
as possible and opened the map. Then she stared once more at the cop in the
side mirror. Why wasn't the police car doing anything? Did she forget to send
out engraved invitations to rescue her? They were almost on top of the I-5
exit, where a large percentage of the traffic would turn off. Was that what the
police were waiting for?

"The map, Maggie."

"Oh, hold your horses! Shoot! Get into the
right lane. Now, now!"

"I can't evade the damn police by getting
in a car accident. Damn. Get over here, I need two hands."

He'd put on the blinker and was looking
frantically over his shoulders. She could see the lines creasing the corners of
his eyes and the thin set of his lips. He looked desperate and, for a moment,
almost afraid. If she hadn't been his hostage, she might have felt sorry for
him. Clearly, he was a man grasping at straws.

But he was also an armed, escaped murderer,
something that was a little hard to overlook.

"Maggie, now!"

She fumbled with her seat belt, sliding over
awkwardly so he could place his right hand on the wheel and swing the huge
truck over to the next lane. The fit was so tight she squeezed her eyes shut
and hunched her shoulders down, waiting for the crunch of metal. But the car in
back, a nice polite driver, had put on his brakes so the murderer could switch
lanes.

"Now, Mr. Cop," she muttered.
"There's no time like the present!"

But even as she watched, the cop car drove
right on by them, signaled a left turn and disappeared down the side street
leading to I-5.

"No," she whispered. "No, no,
no."

"Don't take it so badly," Cain told
her. "At least no innocent people are at risk."

"Except for me!" she cried, and then
because she was too disappointed to care, she walloped his shoulder with her
free hand. It was like hitting concrete. She popped three of her knuckles and
he didn't even grunt. His green eyes looked at her steadily, hooded and
unreadable beneath the black brim of the OSU baseball cap. For a moment, he
seemed strangely sympathetic.

"Sucks to be you, doesn't it?" he
said quietly.

"Yes!" she agreed fiercely and picked
up the map again, having to blink away the tears in her eyes.

He looked at her a minute longer, then turned
away.

Front Avenue turned into Barbur Boulevard, four lanes of curving road winding
around strip malls and way too many traffic lights. Portland was 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 head and bright blue eyes
and overpumped, swastika-tattooed arms, and had instantly recognized the man's
type. This man could've been his father or his brother or any number of the men
who'd stopped by his family's one-bedroom wooden shack when he was growing up.

"Y'got a choice, man," the guy had
continued. He'd held out a pack of cigarettes, a friendly gesture that Cain had
known better than to accept. "In here now, in here the True Man is the
minority. Here, here in this hellhole, they think we're nothin', bro. Y'can't
have 'em thinkin' that. Can't let 'em think that."

"I'm not interested."

"Sure you are. Bright guy like you? Bet
y'are. Look around, buddy. You see individuals? Ain't no individuals in prison,
bro. They are four families, that's it. And we're your family, the only family
yer gonna find here as a True Man."

"I'm not interested."

The man finally smirked. "Buddy, they told
me you were bright, some computer-bright guy. But, man, you sure are slow.
Where do you think the democracy is? Huh? Didn't that shakedown teach you
nothin'? When they were poking and proddin' your body, didn't that teach you
anythin'? Like I said, you got a choice. We're it. We protect you, we look out
for the True Man. And you join. We got outside connections, you know. We got
contacts who are mighty interested in a computer-bright True Man. You ever surf
this Internet thing? Shoot, I don't even understand the keyboards, but they say
you're scary bright. They say you already belong to us, born into us. Your
brother, he's a legend. And now here's you. They say you killed a Jew. Brother,
we salute you."