Free Shooting Starr by Kathleen Creighton Page B

It’s her decision to make, C.J., not ours. If Caty wants to go along with your plan, we won’t try to stop her. We couldn’t anyway, no matter how much we might want to.”
    C.J. got to his feet and mumbled, “Thank you, sir.” He held out his hand.
    The older man shook it briefly but firmly. Moving in the jerky, uncoordinated manner of a man distraught, he turned and began to walk rapidly away, but after a few steps he whirled and jabbed a finger at C.J. “Promise me one thing,” he said, and his voice grated with emotion. “Just get him, you hear me? You get that SOB.”
    Â 
    Caitlyn drifted in a twilight zone that was not quite sleep yet not full consciousness, either. Her mind wandered, as it does in dreams, but with her permission; she knew shewas dreaming and took comfort in knowing she could wake up anytime she chose.
    Images crowded into her mind, people and places and events—mostly people. One after another they clicked by, too quickly, like a slide show on fast-forward—her past in reverse order, beginning with the last image she remembered: the landscaped mall in front of the courthouse; a sea of reporters and video cameras; the sun glinting on their lenses and the windows of TV trucks; a brilliant blue September sky.
    Back inside the courtroom a few minutes before that: the judge’s face, fleshy Southern jowls, soft, smooth-shaven and unsmiling; Mary Kelly’s face, gaunt and pasty, with blue smudges under her eyes and freckles standing out like blotches, trying hard to smile.
    In the days and weeks before: Mom visiting her in the jail, her hair like sunshine in that drab and dismal room…frightened eyes looking out at her from the serene and lovely mask of her face; and Dad, calm and reassuring as always, but swiping at a tear as he turned to leave her.
    Further back: a sultry April night; a big blue truck, powerful diesel engine idling away behind her; a man with a face like a Norman Rockwell painting, hair soft and thick, sun-streaked blond…eyes dark as chocolate and just as seductive…a sweet and dimpled smile; big hands gentle on her shoulders…lips moving, saying words hard and heavy as hammer blows. I can’t do it—I’m sorry.
    The same face in a rapid montage of swirling, overlapping images, like a kaleidoscope: eyes twinkling, smiling and flirtatious with her, nodding with good-ol’-Southern-boy courtesy to Mary Kelly; gentle and kind with a traumatized child; angry, hard as pewter in the bluish light of a yard lamp on an empty concrete apron; anguished, drawn and shadowed in the dimness of the truck cab as she’d seen them the last time. As he’d watched them walk away.
    Mary Kelly again…then back through the faces of allthe fearful and damaged women she’d known, all the way back to the first and most beloved—her own mother’s face…so young, so beautiful…so haunted.
    There were children’s faces, too, and even a few men among the victims—her cousin Eric and his precious baby, Emily, in their desperate dash for safety, bundled against the Iowa winter cold…could that only have been last Christmas?
    She saw Eric in happier times, along with his sister Rose Ellen, saw them as the children she’d played with on Aunt Lucy and Uncle Mike’s farm. There were Uncle Rhett’s children, too, though she’d seen them less frequently. They were so much older than she: Lauren, who loved horses, older by eleven years; and shy Ethan, who’d grown up to be a doctor, older by seven. And they’d lived so far away.
    She saw herself, a nervous teenager in a long slinky gown, dancing with Uncle Rhett, newly elected president of the United States, amid the dazzle and excitement of his first inaugural ball, and Dixie, the new first lady, radiant and laughing, dancing with a red-faced but determined Eric. She saw herself as a gawky child in overalls, riding on one