Maggie's Man: A Family Secrets

  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 knew 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 gaze 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 shoulder. 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.

  “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, and 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 psych
iatric 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 a 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, boy,” 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 boy like you? Bet y’are. Look around. 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. “Boy, they told me you were bright, some computer-bright smart man. But seems to me 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 cavities, 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.”

  And Cain had moved, faster than the man had expected, faster than Cain had expected. Suddenly he was rage and fury, and the months of brooding, the months of wondering how his brother could’ve done such a thing were simply gone. He was angry, angrier than he’d ever been, and he shoved the skinhead against the wall so loud the crack silenced the room. Heads turned.

  “I’ll say it once. Then we’re through here,” Cain stated quietly, his arm pressed against the man’s Adam’s apple, pinning him to the wall. “I am not my brother. I am not interested in you. I am an innocent man. But if I catch any of you ‘saluting’ Kathy’s death, that may change.”

  He’d abruptly released the smaller man, who slid down to the floor. The guy hadn’t fallen. He’d been wiry, compact and made from sturdy stock that was used to taking a few beatings. He’d shaken himself out, then had merely grinned at Cain’s dark, fierce expression.

  “We’re all innocent in here,” the guy had mocked. He’d squared his shoulders. “But boy, did you handle that poor. We’ll cut you slack, being it’s day one and all. Next time someone offers you a cigarette, though, you’d better take it. You a geeky man, a white-collar sissy boy. Mess with us, and that is war. College boys can’t afford war, not in here, mister. Not in here.”

  But the guy had been wrong about that, though maybe not as wrong as Cain would’ve liked.

  Six years, six years . . . God, he suddenly felt so old.

  They approached another red traffic light and he slowed to a halt.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said at last.

  Maggie looked at him sideways, her blue eyes barely discernible through her hair. “What?” she asked, her voice clearly wary.

  His finger tapped the steering wheel twice. “Despite what you may think, Maggie, I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I have to get to Idaho—everyone’s going to have to accept that—but I’d like to do it as quietly as possible.” He paused to make sure he had her attention. The light turned green so he started driving again, careful to observe the speed limit.

  “Yes?” she prodded after a minute.

  “Let’s think about this logically. We’re in Portland, in a state with one of the lowest tax rates. The counties and cities have constrained budgets—”

  “Thanks for the political commentary.”

  “It’s relevant, Maggie. Consider the chief of police right now. He has one escaped felon and limited manpower. If you have limited manpower, how do you deploy it? It’s all about tactics—how you position yourself in the short term. He has tactics. I have tactics to try to outmaneuver his tactics. What I really need, however, is strategy—a plan for winning the game.”

  “What did you do before . . . well, before?” she interrupted curiously.

  “Computer programming.” His hands tightened reflexively on the wheel. But that had been six years ago. He hadn’t been on a machine since then. The World Wide Web, home pages, Web sites, were all things he’d only read about, when he thirsted so desperately to know, to play, to understand, to do. He’d missed everything, because it was either that or build an Aryan Brotherhood home page to help with recruitment. He’d preferred to do nothing.

  Cain took a deep breath. “Back to the chief of police. He can move cars into the immediate vicinity in hopes they can catch me holed up somewhere. They probably figure I’m on foot, or I’ve stolen a car—”

  “They don’t think you had an accomplice for a prison break? A friend?”

  His stomach tightened, and something old and sad twisted in him again. For no good reason at all, he saw his mother standing at the window of the old log cabin, watching the rain dance in the evergreens and reaching out her hand wistfully, as if she’d like to catch the rain on her palm. As a child, he’d never understood that look on her face. Now, he understood it a lot.

  He kept his gaze on the windshield, though his knuckles had whitened with the force of his grip on the wheel. “No.”

  “But they don’t know that,” she pointed out. “They’ll still check with your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  Her eyes blinked several times. “Of course you do. Everyone has friends.”

  He glanced at her at last. “I’m a convicted murderer, Maggie. Just whose Christmas list do you think I’m still on?”

  “Oh,” she said weakly. For a moment, she looked almost sorry for him. He didn’t want that. He didn’t need that. “Family?” she suggested at last. “Siblings? I mean . . . uh . . . other than this brother you don’t like.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, your father then.”

  “He hasn’t spoken to me since the day I left Idaho.”

  “Mother?” she asked faintly.

  “Died when I was twelve.”

  “Wife?”

  “Never married.”

  “Not even a girlfriend?”

  “I had a girlfriend,” he granted her at last. He turned long enough to gaze at her squarely. “She’s the one they say I murdered.”

  Sapphire-blue eyes widened. She drew in her breath so fast it hissed. She simply stared at him, obviously too appa
lled to speak.

  “Oh,” she said at last.

  Maggie’s gaze swept down to the vinyl seat. He returned his attention to the road and for that she was grateful. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t move. She was handcuffed to a man who’d murdered his girlfriend. And from the sound of it, he was the classic loner, intellectual type. Probably obsessive, maybe paranoid as well. And armed. Don’t forget armed.

  She was going to die, killed by a man with a deep, soothing baritone, and she’d always placed a lot of stock in someone’s voice. Had his girlfriend thought the same?

  Her free hand clenched and unclenched on her lap, fidgeting nervously with the hem of her skirt. Her grandmother Lydia, her father’s mother, who’d insisted that Maggie, C.J. and Brandon spend each summer together on her dairy farm because otherwise the half siblings would never see one another, had always told Maggie that she had the famous Hathaway Red hair, which meant she had the famous Hathaway Red spirit. Someday, Maggie would add to the legend with a story of incomparable courage and passion just like her great-great-great-grandmother Margaret for whom she was named.

  Lydia had obviously inhaled too much fertilizer. Maggie had no Hathaway spirit. She was a genetic mutant and she wanted to go home now.

  She stared at the handcuff morosely, then at the gun tucked in the small of his back. How to get out of the handcuffs. Or maybe grab the gun. She didn’t know anything about guns. Just the noise was enough to send her running. She chewed her lower lip. No immediate plans flared to life in her mind. She risked another glance at Cain.

  He didn’t look immediately dangerous. His fingers were thrumming against the wheel, his brow furrowed as if he was lost in great thought. Prison break probably did require a certain amount of concentration. Or maybe murder did.