Maggie's Man (3 page)

And the sirens came to a squealing halt just
three blocks away. That decided the matter.

"Get into the van or I'll shoot you. Those
are your options."

She scrambled into the van, climbing awkwardly
over the seats and landing with an uncoordinated plop on the passenger's side.
He hefted himself in easily, looking at the gun, then at the ignition he needed
to hot-wire. He would need two hands. He would need to move fast.

The police were so close. Keep calm, Cain. Keep
moving. Life is nothing more than a game of chess.

He looked in the rearview mirror, rapidly
contemplating his next steps. He saw the parking garage, which was still empty.
Then his gaze shifted to the makeshift bed and the crates filled with books and
clothes in the back of the van.

He'd lived out of a truck once. When he'd first
come from Idaho to Oregon, driving into Portland and so determined to make
something out of himself. He'd had nothing. Just his old truck and the
makeshift bed in the back. He used to eat raw frankfurters for dinner; they
were all he could afford. But he hadn't minded; he'd lived his whole life up
till then in a plywood shack so he had no expectations of luxury. And the truck
meant he was free, that he'd gotten out of the hills, that he had a chance to
see the cities his mother used to tell him about, softly, when his father
wasn't in the cabin.

If someone had stolen his truck then, what
would it have done to him? How much would it have convinced him that maybe his
father was right and the whole world was out to get him? How much would it have
convinced him there was nothing worth fighting for after all?

Damn. Damn damn
damn.

"Get out of the van," he ordered
crisply and was already climbing down.

His hostage looked at him with unabashed
relief. "Maybe there's hope yet," she murmured, then immediately
clamped her lips shut when she realized the words had been spoken out loud.

He dragged her from the van, curt and impatient
and more than a little bit on edge. He could hear more sirens approaching in
the distance. He was playing Good Samaritan and the entire city was being
cordoned off. Smart, Cain, smart.

He pulled her bodily to a newer, sleek pickup
truck. He'd grown up with trucks and he valued their off-road abilities. If the
going got tough, this baby looked like it could take him down the Grand Canyon
and back up the other side. Probably insured. He peered in at the gas gauge.
Almost full. Perfect.

He popped open the unlocked door. In Portland, people
were still trusting. He didn't want to dwell on that or what it made him.
Prison did change a man, even when he swore it wouldn't.

"Get in," he told his captive for the
fifth time. She hesitated and he whirled on her abruptly, thrusting the gun
beneath her chin as she froze like a pillar of salt. Her eyes widened, her
breath sounded loud and labored in the cement drum of the garage. He could feel
her terror like a palpable presence. He could see the blue pulse point at the
base of her neck pound furiously. Sweat beaded up on her pale, oval face and
slowly trickled down.

Don't push her too hard,
he thought, but he didn't relent.

"Listen to those sirens," he
whispered against her cheek. "They're not playing 'Where's Waldo?' I want you
to get into that truck. I want you to do everything I say. If you cooperate, I
won't hurt you. You have my word. The decision is yours."

He stepped back, but his eyes remained hard.

"All right," she whispered
immediately. Her gaze remained locked on him warily as she turned her body
toward the high truck. She tried valiantly to lift her skirt-hampered leg up to
the looming step. It wasn't going to happen. She was too short and it was too
high. With a burst of impatience, Cain planted his hand firmly on her butt,
ignored her squeak of indignation and tossed her up onto the bench seat. She
went sprawling, landing with a lewd spread of creamy white thighs. He
disregarded the flashing white limbs and climbed in after her, filling the
truck doorway.

With another yelp, she scrambled to the
opposite side, crossing her legs and pressing her skirt around herself like a
mortified nun.

"Don't worry," he said tersely.
"I'm trying to escape from jail, not molest a child."

"I'm not a child!" she said, and for
a moment sounded wounded.

"Uh-huh." He turned his attention to
hot-wiring the truck.

But there was no way he could do that and hold
a gun on her. Worse, the sirens continued to wail with increasing fervor just a
few blocks away. For one moment, he felt the dark spiraling panic of a man
watching events twist out of his control. He squelched the feeling instantly,
his fingers drumming on the steering wheel as his mind frantically sought
solutions.

He'd never escaped from jail before. He'd never
taken a hostage before. He didn't know what he was doing…

Stop it! No panic, no fear. Life is a chess
game, and if there was one thing you were very good at, Cain, it was chess.

His hands steadied. The worst that could happen
was that he would fail—that his brother would find him and that his brother
would kill him. He was willing to take that risk, he was willing to pay that
price. There were very few things he believed in anymore. Freedom of choice was
one. The absolute value of truth was the second.

You waited six years for this, Cain. Either
do it or bow your head and return to your cell.

There was no way he was willingly returning to
prison. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the Aryan Brotherhood
finally succeeded in having him decommissioned. If he was going to die, he
wanted to die as a man, not as prisoner number 542769.

He set the gun between himself and the driver's
side door. Then, while the court clerk stared up at him with widening eyes, he
pulled out the handcuffs.

"What's your name?"

"M…Maggie. What are you doing?"

"I'm handcuffing us together,
Maggie."

"No!" She clutched her hand to her
side. "You can't keep doing this. You can't take me hostage. I…I have
dependents!"

He actually froze for a minute.
"Kids?" he asked slowly. He didn't want to know this. He really
didn't want to know this.

"Cats," she whispered.

"What?"

"I have cats," she continued in a
rush. "Two cats and I live all alone and there's no one to feed them. One
of them has been sick lately. And … and Friday has only three legs—"

"What?"

"She has only three legs. She was born
that way—it makes her very high-strung. If you don't feed her at exactly the
same time every day she throws these fits. I really wor—"

He reached over, clasped her wrist and slapped
the handcuff around it. While looking at her steadily, he slipped the cuff
around his wrist. "Maggie, you're now a hostage, not a pet owner."

She stared at him miserably, her eyes welling
up.

"Don't!" he said immediately.
"Don't do that."

"Do what?" she whispered soggily. Her
chin began to tremble.

"No! No crying. I forbid it!"

"Okay," she whispered and a single
tear streaked down her cheek. Then another and another. Big, silent tears that
tangled in her long, red hair.

He stared at her in stunned silence as she wept
soundlessly, turning her head away from him as if she were ashamed of the
display. Already her hand was wiping furiously at her cheeks. "Crying is
bad," she muttered. "Don't cry, don't cry." Her hand abruptly
closed around the old locket around her neck, her fingers fumbling and shaking.
She clung to the locket desperately, her face still turned.

Cain's mouth opened. Something twisted deep in
his gut. She looked so small, so defenseless. There was something about her, an
innocence, he supposed. It had been a long time since he'd encountered
innocence; he didn't know how to treat it anymore.

He should let her go. This was a bad idea.

More sirens filled the air. He stared at the
windshield. He couldn't let her go. There was no way he was going to make it
out of the city without being caught, and if he was caught a hostage was his
only bargaining chip. If he let her go, he might as well return to prison now.
And if he returned to prison, no one would ever learn the truth about that
dark, bloody night six years ago.

A man did what a man had to do. Twenty-four
hours from now, he'd let her go and she'd never have to see him again. This
event would become a dull memory. She would survive. Her odds, at least, were
better than his.

"Move," he said abruptly and popped
the truck door open. He started sliding out and since he outweighed her by
eighty pounds she had no choice but to follow.

"Where are we going?" She'd composed
herself. Her tears were gone, just a faint hoarse edge remained in her voice.

"Back to the van."

"But I thought you weren't going to steal
the van."

"Relax. I want his clothes."

He slid back the side door forcefully, hopped
in and dragged her with him. She stumbled, of course, tilting them both
dangerously off balance. He righted them both quickly and turned his attention
to the clothes. Not much time.

He flipped over a milk crate and rapidly
perused his options. Shirts, jeans, socks, a pair of worn-out tennis shoes. A
black baseball cap with Oregon State University scrawled across the front in
orange. Size was feasible, too. A little too large but that was preferable to
too small. Good.

He set the gun down on the bed, far out of
Maggie's reach. Then he began unbuttoning the ill-fitting guard uniform.

"What are you doing?" she choked.

"Changing."

"You can't do that!"

He looked at her expressionlessly, his fingers
moving nimbly down until they reached the last button at his groin.

The shirt opened, revealing his naked chest.
And good ol' Maggie blushed six different shades of red.

"Did you grow up in a nunnery?" he asked
mildly and shrugged off the shirt. It remained dangling over the handcuffs.

"No." Her voice was so strangled he
could barely hear the word.

"Just checking."

He grabbed the cotton-blend uniform where it
hung on the chain between their wrists and because he was in a hurry, gave a
small yank. The material ripped off like meat falling from a bone.

Maggie's eyes grew round as saucers.

"My tax dollars," she muttered,
staring at the torn shirt, then his bare torso, which rippled and flexed like a
marble statue.

"Probably." He'd used the one-hour
rec time he received every day as a maximum-security inmate to work out. Being
surrounded by two-ton murderers and rapists had that effect on a man.

His hands moved purposefully to his waist. Maggie
promptly squeezed her eyes shut. For a moment he hesitated, his upbringing
warring with his circumstances. The handcuffs, however, limited the amount of
distance he could put between the two of them. She cracked open her blue eyes
as if to see what was holding him up, looking miserable and forlorn.

"All right," he said abruptly. He
acted quickly, before he could debate the wisdom of his decision yet again.
With one deft movement, he picked up her wrist, unlocked the metal bracelet and
dropped her freed hand to her side. "Move, and I'll shoot you."

"I want to go home," she whispered.

His lips twisted slightly; some of the force
went out of his stance. "I know," he said quietly. "I
know."

He turned away. Briskly, he peeled off the
ill-fitting prison guard pants and kicked them away. Then he pulled up the new
pair of jeans. Moving fast, he donned a worn T-shirt with a blue-striped
short-sleeved overshirt. With his fingers, he impatiently raked back his blond
hair, momentarily revealing the port-wine stain riding high on his forehead
that had earned him his name from his father. His mother had tried to argue
that Cain was no name for a child, but she never had been a match for her
fierce, hard-hearted husband.

Cain pulled the baseball cap low and completed the
transformation from state prisoner to prison guard to Joe Blow in fifteen
minutes or less.

He picked up the gun, locked the safety and
slid it into the waistband of the loose-fitting jeans, the dark pistol covered
by the overshirt. Then he retrieved the handcuffs and slapped them into place
on their wrists once more.

"All right, Maggie. Now we hot-wire the
truck."

Her blue eyes rose silently, no longer desolate
but resigned. "When my brothers catch up with you, you'll regret having
ever done this," she informed him softly.

"Yeah?" He dragged her out of the
van.

"C.J.'s a Marine. Force recon. He's
invented new ways of handling men like you."

"Yeah?" They were back at the pickup
truck. He held open the door. "After you."

"And Brandon is just plain dangerous. You
think he's just a investment banker, but then you see his eyes. He's very
focused, very intelligent, and knows exactly how to get what he wants. He'll
have you in line for lethal injection by morning."