Sheriff's Runaway Witness

Sheriff’s Deputy J. J. Fox did not take lightly the 911 dispatcher’s report of someone walking alone in the desert—nun or otherwise. Fact was, the desert killed people. All the time. Maybe not as often as before cell phones and GPS, but it still happened. Maybe less likely now when the weather was 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 did this happen? This…accident?”

A frown etched delicate pleats between her eyes. Dark eyes, almost black, so dark he could see himself reflected in them. Eyes fringed with thick black lashes, and with a slightly Asian cast, he noted. Probably mixed blood, and if he’d had to guess, given her size, he’d have said maybe Cambodian or Vietnamese.

“This morning…I guess it must be afternoon now, right? I’ve kind of lost track of time…”

J.J. fingered the radio mic on his shoulder. “We’ll get someone out here to take care of your car, ma’am—uh, Sister. Can you tell me whereabouts this happened?”

Again the frown. And this time she nibbled delicately on her lower lip. A very soft and full lower lip, he noted, and immediately felt ashamed of himself. The woman was a nun, for God’s sake. No disrespect intended.

“Oh—I don’t know! I think it was…back that way—no, wait…I’m so confused. I’ve been wandering around…maybe I’ve been going in circles, do you think so?” Her gaze lifted to his with helpless appeal.

Which might have had more effect on him if he hadn’t seen something else in her eyes, something he’d seen all too often, in his line of work, in the eyes of suspects and witnesses alike: a mixture of calculation and fear. This woman really did not trust him. And plainly, she did not want him to find her car. He wondered why.

It didn’t bother him too much that she wouldn’t give him the location of her vehicle; there had to be evidence of where she’d left the road, which should make it easy enough to locate. But no doubt about it, something about this woman and her situation was off—way off. Here was a nun, fairly young—judging from her flawless and unlined skin—of Eurasian ancestry and tiny in stature, out in the middle of the desert, miles from any outposts of civilization, on foot and sporting bruises that had almost certainly come from a beating. Small wonder his cop-radar was pinging like crazy.

He stood up and pivoted away from the woman while he got Katie on his radio and instructed her to send a tow truck out south on Death Valley Road. “Tell Bucky he’ll have to hunt for the tire tracks—don’t have the exact location, but I’m guessing it’s gonna be south of my location a couple miles, at least.”

“Got it,” Katie said. And after a pause: “So…is she?”

“Is she what?” Although he knew.

“A nun?”

“Remains to be seen,” J.J. said, and signed off.

When he turned back to the woman, she was on her hands and knees trying to get up and not being graceful about it. Evidently the lady had gotten herself tangled up in her habit, which seemed to him a little strange. He’d have thought someone used to wearing one of those things would have figured out how to manage it by now. Mentally rolling his eyes, he bent down and got a hand under her elbow and hoisted her to her feet.

No sooner had he done that, than she gave out with a groan, uttered a very un-nunlike word and folded right back up again, while hanging on to his arm with the desperation grip of someone in immediate danger of drowning.

Damn woman might have mentioned she was hurt! Swearing both aloud and mentally, J.J. scooped her up in his arms and hollered for Moonshine, who was panting in the Joshua tree’s shade a little way off. He set out with long strides across the sand, and about halfway to his car it occurred to him that, for a little bitty thing, this woman was a whole lot heavier than she looked. Then he looked down at what he was carrying.

What the hell?

What he saw gave him one of the biggest shocks of his life, which was probably why he burst out with the question before he thought how ridiculous it was going to sound. “Sister, are you pregnant?”

She didn’t even open her eyes. Just went on sort of panting and groaning at the same time, and she had one hand on the huge belly now plainly visible beneath the draping of the habit.

Just holding her against him, he could feel how stiff and seized up she was.

Great. Just great. Not only pregnant, but in labor.

He kept walking, making for his vehicle, until he felt the woman in his arms relax and start breathing somewhat normally again. Then, without slowing his steps, he gritted his teeth and said, “Please tell me you’re not really a nun.”

She opened one eye and glared up at him. “Is that relevant?”

Relevant? He snorted and walked while he considered that. Probably it wasn’t, in her present circumstances. He tried to think whether it bothered him, the thought of a nun being pregnant, and decided against all reason that it did. He couldn’t have said why; he wasn’t even Catholic, having been raised more or less Baptist, growing up, like most everybody else he’d known back then. But some things were just, well…sacred.

“How far apart are your contractions?” He thought he said it pretty calmly, considering.

“I don’t know, I don’t have a watch. But I’ve been counting. I think…about two or three minutes.”

J.J. wasn’t a doctor, and it had been a long time since those first aid and emergency childbirth classes way back in his training days, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t good news. This just keeps getting better and better, J.J. thought. He didn’t say anything, though, because they’d arrived back at his patrol vehicle, where Moonshine was waiting impatiently for him to open the door, doing a little dance as she tried to keep her feet off the hot sand.

“You’re riding shotgun,” he said to the dog, and then, without much sympathy, to his burden, “You gonna be okay if I set you down?”

“I’m fine,” she said. But he noticed she was looking paler than she ought to, considering the heat and the sheen of sweat he could see on her forehead and the bridge of her nose.

“Okay, then, easy does it…” And he wondered why he couldn’t seem to make his voice sound nicer. At least gentler. Sure, he didn’t like being lied to, and he wasn’t used to being distrusted, at least not by supposedly innocent law-abiding citizens. But this probably wasn’t any of her fault; he doubted any woman in her condition would be out here in the middle of the desert by choice. And there were those bruises.

Again with the glare—both eyes, this time. “I’m not made of glass. Just put me down.”

So he did. And the minute her feet touched the ground she sort of gasped and clutched at her belly, then whispered, “Oh, God.” It wasn’t a prayer.

Moonshine whimpered and moved off a little ways, looking perturbed.

J.J.’s stomach lurched. “What?”

Half doubled over, not looking at him, she said tensely, “I think my water just broke.”

Chapter 3

J.J. uttered a string of words he wouldn’t use in the presence of a real nun and got another of her fierce black looks in return. This one, though, seemed to hold less anger and more of what he interpreted as mute appeal. Help me. Words he was beginning to suspect this particular woman wouldn’t find easy to utter out loud under normal circumstances.

He touched on his radio mic. “Katie, I’m gonna need an ambulance out here, ASAP. Uh…scratch that,” he said as the woman abruptly sagged against the side of his patrol vehicle and began doing that pant-moan thing again. “Make that a chopper. And give me an ETA.”

“I’m on it. Let me get back to you on that ETA…”

The radio went silent. J.J. opened both driver’s side doors and waited while Moonshine jumped in ahead of him and clambered across to the passenger seat, then sat in the driver’s seat and got the SUV’s engine started and the air conditioner going full blast. When he went back to see how his pregnant nun was doing, he found that she’d taken off the head thing—wimple?—and was using one corner of it to mop sweat off of her face and neck. It came as no surprise to him that her hair, which she’d twisted into a knot at the back of her head, was ink-black and also soaking wet.

The radio crackled. “Uh, Sheriff? J.J.?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Dispatch wants to know the nature of the emergency. Are we talking MVA trauma or heatstroke?”

“Uh…that’s a negative on both. Make that…woman in labor.”

“Labor?” Katie’s voice rose to a squeak—not very professional of her, in J.J.’s opinion. “Are you telling me this is the nun?”

J.J. grunted, being involved at the moment in helping the “nun” in question into the backseat of his patrol vehicle. He watched her sort of crumple onto her side and pull her knees up onto the seat before he closed the door. She was whimpering softly now. There was a knot forming in his belly as he turned his back to her and spoke to his radio mic. “Yeah, well, that seems doubtful. The nun part, not the labor. You got an ETA on that chopper?”

“Uh…that’s the problem. Ridgecrest’s choppers are out on a multi-vehicle MVA up on 395. No idea how long they’ll be.”

J.J. looked up at the sun-washed sky and swore. He was pondering his best course of action when his radio crackled to life again.

“I could get you somebody out of Barstow, but it would probably be just as fast if you take her in to Ridgecrest yourself, that would be the closest. How far along is she?” Katie had three kids, which probably made her the closest thing he had to an expert at the moment.

“In months? I’m guessing…nine.”

“No, I mean the labor.” She didn’t say the word dummy. J.J. being her boss, but he could hear it in her voice just the same.

“How the hell should I know?” he said. “Her water just broke.”

“Yikes,” said Katie. “Well, that could mean…just about anything, actually. She could have hours yet. Or minutes.”

“Well, don’t ask me,” J.J. growled. “I’m not a doctor.”

“I…am.” That came, surprisingly, from the backseat.

He jerked around to look at the woman, who he could see was now half propped up on one elbow. Her exotic eyes seemed huge in her chalk-white face. “You are what? A doctor?”

She nodded, then closed her eyes and sank back onto the pillow of her folded arm. “Well…sort of. I never finished my internship. But I know enough—” she broke off for a couple more pants and groans, then finished with clenched teeth “—to know I haven’t got hours.”

Grimly, J.J. relayed to his mic, “She doesn’t think she’s got hours.”

“How far apart are the contractions?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Seems to me they’re more or less continuous.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Katie. “That’s not good.”

“If you’re going to take me to a hospital, you’d better get going,” came the faint, gasping voice from the backseat, at the same time Katie’s voice on the radio was saying, “Well, you’d better hurry. I’ll let Ridgecrest know you’re coming.”

“Ten-four.” He put the SUV in gear and made a U-turn, tires spitting fine gravel.

“Okay, drive safe.” The radio went silent.

He didn’t turn on his siren, since it would only make the dog miserable, and there weren’t any other vehicles in the immediate vicinity anyway. He brought the speed up to what he considered the maximum for safety, then glanced in his rearview mirror.

“How you doin’ back there?”

No answer for a moment. Then, “Just lovely, thank you.”

He couldn’t believe he was even thinking of smiling.

As he drove, although his attention was totally focused on the road ahead, part of his mind kept jumping and skittering every which way, so full of the questions he wanted to ask, his head felt like a nest of spooked jackrabbits. For a long time he didn’t ask any of the questions because he couldn’t decide which one to ask first. Finally, though, when it seemed one kept popping up more often and more insistently than the rest, he looked up to his rearview mirror and said, “Ma’am, if you’re not a nun, what’s with the habit?”

Her voice sounded tired, out of sorts and groggy. “No…obviously…I’m not a nun. The habit—and the car—belong to a friend of mine. When I drove the car into that ditch…when I knew I was going to have to walk for help, I thought the habit might help protect me from the sun. You know, like the robes Arabs wear.”

J.J. nodded. He was thinking, Okay, she’s no dummy. But he wished he could see her face, because to him the speech sounded a little too long, a little too glib, like something she’d practiced in her mind ahead of time. It sounded plausible, might even be true—as far as it went. But he had a feeling there was more—a good deal more—she wasn’t telling him.

And it sure didn’t explain those bruises.

He said, “You ready to tell me the truth about how you got those bruises on your face?”

This time the only answer he got was some loud groans and whimpering cries, which he found both alarming and frustrating. Frustrating, because for all he knew she could be faking, or at least exaggerating her situation to evade the question. But if the sounds she was making were for real…

His radio coughed and Katie’s voice said, “Okay, J.J.? I’ve got Ridgecrest on the phone. Just in case.”

Just in case. Swell. He didn’t like the sound of that. “Copy,” he said on a gusty exhalation, but Katie wasn’t through.

“Okay, I gave them what you told me, about the water and all, and the contractions. They want to know if she’s feeling the urge to push.”

J.J. mashed the button to answer, but before he could get a word out, here came one of those gut-wrenching groans.

“Wow,” Katie said, “I heard that.”

Heart pounding, J.J. said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

What he got for an answer was a sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck—a primal sound somewhere between a growl and a scream. It even got to Moonshine, who whimpered and licked her chops nervously.

“Ridgecrest says don’t let her push,” Katie’s voice crackled from his shoulder.

“Ma’am, you got that?” J.J. was trying hard to keep his voice calm, and on the whole wasn’t displeased with the results. So far. “You’re not supposed to push. Try not to push, okay?”

“Okay.” She said that in a thin, pitiful voice, like a scared child’s. And in the next second, sounding like someone trying to bench press a Harley, “I…can’t…stop!”

“She says she can’t stop,” J.J. relayed to Katie. And he was shaken enough to add, “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

There was a pause, and then, “Ridgecrest says get her to pant.”

“Pant?”

“You know. When she feels the urge to push, tell her to take in a breath and blow it out through her mouth in short puffs.”

“Ma’am? You got that?”

“Yeah. Okay…” Now she sounded like a little kid trying to stop crying.

“Oh, and J.J.? Ridgecrest says that won’t work indefinitely. It’ll only slow things down, and unless you’re less than ten or fifteen minutes out, you might want to pull over sometime soon.”

J.J. swore, muttering under his breath. The woman in the backseat was silent, for the moment, thank God. And for a moment, hope flared within him. Maybe…just maybe, she was slackening off this pushing business. Maybe things would ease up enough to give him time to get her to the hospital in Ridgecrest. Maybe…

“J.J., you copy?”

The woman in the backseat picked that moment to start with that awful noise again, causing Moonshine to whine and flop down on the seat with her head on her paws. J.J. bet she’d have put her paws over her ears if she could. He wished he could.

“Don’t push! Take a deep breath and blow!” he yelled over his shoulder, then said to his radio, “Yeah, copy. Ten-four.” Back to the woman again: “Like this—” And he was puffing like a steam engine, all the while craning to see the backseat in his rearview mirror.

“The hell with this,” he muttered, and pulled onto the wide dirt shoulder and jerked to a stop in a rising cloud of dust. He left the motor running for the air-conditioning and got out of the vehicle, telling Moonshine to stay put—not that it was necessary; the dog obviously wasn’t going anywhere except maybe to hide under the seat.