Sheriff's Runaway Witness. Kathleen Creighton
relatively benign as compared to the coming heat of summer, which would be just plain suicidal.
“Some people are too damn stupid to live,” he said to his passenger, who was sitting upright on her haunches in the middle of the backseat of the sheriff’s department patrol vehicle, drooling on J.J.’s right shoulder. “Too bad we can’t just let nature take its course…Darwin’s Law, you know? Weed out some of these idiots.” Getting only panting sounds in reply, and considerably more dog drool, he gave a gusty sigh. “Yeah…s’pose not. But just between you and me, Moonshine…”
He hoped it was a false alarm, a mirage or…maybe wind-blown clothing hung up on a cactus. But he had a feeling it wouldn’t be; the notion of a woman—a nun!—walking alone in the desert was just nutty enough to be true.
“Really,” he said to the drooler, “you couldn’t make this stuff up.”
As he approached the mile marker the dispatcher had given as the approximate location of the nun sightings, he slowed down and turned on his lights. Crawling along the shoulder at walking speed, he scanned the terrain on both sides of the highway. Nothing he could see, except for the usual scrubby bushes—he was no botanist, so as far as he was concerned they all came under the heading “sagebrush”—now afloat in a sea of golden flowers, with here and there a clump of cholla cacti or Joshua trees to break the monotony. If there had been anybody walking out there, he couldn’t see her now, and that wasn’t good news.
Swearing to himself, he pulled to a stop on the sandy shoulder. In the backseat, the hound dog of undetermined pedigree licked her chops lustily and wriggled in anticipation while J.J. unhooked his seat belt. He spoke briefly to his shoulder mic, then opened the door of the vehicle and stepped out onto hot white sand. “Okay, Moonshine, how about you and me go and do what they pay us for?”
Rachel dreamed of Nicholas again. They were together at the beach, a rare hot day in Malibu. She was hot, unpleasantly so. She wanted to get up and run down to the waves to cool off, but for some reason she felt heavy…so heavy she couldn’t get up. Then she saw that Nicky was laughing, laughing because he’d buried her up to her neck in the sand. He thought it was all in fun, but she began to be frightened and she begged him to dig her out of the sand and let her up. But he just kept adding more sand, and it was heavy, and the pressure was weighing her down, and then a wave came and splashed her in the face and she woke up, gasping.
Except she thought she must still be dreaming, maybe that twilight dreaming where you are almost awake but not quite enough to make the dreaming stop. Because now, instead of a mountain of sand weighing her down, there was something big and heavy and warm—and alive!—sitting on her chest. And instead of cold saltwater bathing her face, it was something slobbery and raspy and odd-smelling. And whatever it was, it was making horrifying snuffling, whimpering sounds.
Terrified, she tried to lift her arms to fend off whatever it was, but found she couldn’t move because it was sitting on her arms, too.
“Moonshine! That’s enough—come ’ere, girl. What are you trying to do, drown her or smother her?”
Moonshine?
But the slobbery, snuffly, smelly something stopped bathing her face, and the weight lifted abruptly from her chest.
Rachel drew breath in a gasp and opened her eyes. She looked up…and up at a long, tall silhouette against a blue-white sky—but for only an instant, because almost at once the silhouette folded up and came down on one knee beside her in the sandy shade of a clump of Joshua trees. Now she wondered if she could still be dreaming, because she found herself gazing at a face that seemed to have come straight out of a Western movie. Steely blue-green eyes stared down at her from the shadows cast by the broad brim of a cowboy hat, eyes that were squinting in apparent concern, causing a fan of lines to radiate from their corners. Sandy blond hair straggled from beneath the hat’s brim to feather over a khaki shirt collar, and a thick growth of reddish-brown whiskers failed to hide a mouth that stretched in a thin, unsmiling line.
Once again, she struggled to sit up, but now it was a hand planted firmly on her shoulder that kept her where she was.
“Take it easy, miss…uh, Sister. We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” The voice spoke with unmistakable authority. It was deep and scratchy, and matched the weathered and rough-hewn face perfectly. There were traces of an accent, too. Southern, she thought.
The face came closer, bending over her, and fingers touched her face with unexpected gentleness. “Can you tell me who did this to you?” And the voice was at the same time softer and more dangerous. “Are you hurt, uh, anywhere else?”
Two things occurred to Rachel then. One, that she was wearing a nun’s habit, which explained her Good Samaritan’s reticence—even embarrassment—regarding her person. And two, he’d obviously noticed the bruises on her face.
And following close on the heels of those two realizations came a third: She was probably due for another contraction. Any second.
How was she going to explain that?
She pushed at the hand holding her down and managed to prop herself on one elbow. “I’m not hurt,” she said, trying not to hold her breath or clench her teeth. Trying to breathe. Normally. Trying not to give away the fact that she hurt everywhere. “I was just—I got a little tired, and thirsty and I thought I’d rest a few minutes in the shade. I guess I must have dozed off. I’m okay—really.”
The truth was, she’d gotten scared when she’d noticed several cars slowing down as they passed on the highway. That was when she’d hidden behind the grove of spiky Joshua trees. And there’d been a couple of contractions—bad ones—and after that, she’d curled up on her side to rest…just for a minute. She couldn’t have been asleep for very long.
The man put his hand under her elbow and helped her to sit up, while at the same time he unhooked a canteen from his belt. He had a lot of other things attached to his belt, she observed as he unscrewed the lid to the canteen and offered it to her. One of which was a gun. And there was a metal star pinned to his shirt. Which she supposed explained a lot of things. And did not reassure her.
Now that he seemed satisfied her circumstances weren’t dire, his eyes regarded her more with suspicion than compassion. They narrowed again as he watched her drink. “You want to tell me what you’re doing out here in the middle of the desert? Alone?” His voice was a typical lawman’s voice: hard and without much expression. “And how you came to have those bruises on your face?”
“Bruises?” The innocent and slightly puzzled frown came easily to her; distrust of law enforcement was automatic now. Awareness of that fact drifted like cloud shadows through her consciousness, along with a sense of sadness and guilt. I’m sorry, Grandmother. I know you didn’t raise me to be like this.
But the shadows weren’t dark enough to stop reflexive responses of caution and cover. “Oh,” she said, feigning sudden enlightenment as she wiped water from her lips with the back of her hand. She touched one still-tender cheekbone. “I guess that must have happened when I…”
“When you…” her Good Samaritan prompted when she paused.
Rachel closed her eyes and exhaled. “I feel so stupid. You see, I swerved to miss a—I guess it must have been a coyote—well, I’d never seen one, and I was distracted, and the next thing I knew, I was careening across the desert, and, um, I wound up in a ditch. Thank God for air bags!” She crossed herself and cast her gaze prayerfully skyward—a rather nice touch, she thought, considering what she was wearing.
I wonder if he bought it.
In his long and not always illustrious career as a homicide detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, J. J. Fox had been lied to many times. Although never before, he was fairly certain, by a nun. He knew what bruises left by human fists looked like. Plus, now that he’d had a chance to examine these more closely, he was pretty sure they were at least a couple of days old.
But who in the hell would beat up a nun?
“When