Saving Grace

If we make it through this, Little Em, I hope your daddy rots in prison for the rest of his life for child endangerment. She let her fury give her strength while she battled to unhook the stubborn safety belt latch from this awkward angle.

Despite her efforts, the belt refused to give. She yanked and pulled for several more seconds, then knew she couldn’t afford to mess with it any longer.

“Okay, Emma, this isn’t working. Let’s see if we can slip you out of there.” Her heart pounding with exertion, she pulled the shoulder strap behind the girl’s back and supported her weight while Emma tried to wriggle out of the lap belt.

“Almost there,” she encouraged. “Just a little more. That’s it.”

With a small cry, Emma toppled free and into her arms. Grace cradled her with one arm and tried to slither back out to the window. Both of them wouldn’t fit through the opening at the same time, but when she tried to push the little girl through ahead of her, Emma’s little arms clung tightly around her neck.

“Honey, you have to let go. I’m right behind you, I promise.”

The girl must have finally understood because she let Grace push her through the window frame. She crawled out after her and scrambled to her feet.

Fueled only by adrenaline now, Grace lifted Emma into her arms and cradled the girl’s head against her shoulder as she raced away from the car. She made it only a few feet before she heard a hissing rumble behind her and knew with sick certainty that she wouldn’t be able to reach safety before the car blew up.

She wasn’t ready to die.

In that instant, her whole world seemed to shift, to spin crazily, and she discovered a fierce survival instinct lurking somewhere deep inside her.

She wasn’t ready to die.

It was the ultimate irony. She’d come so close to killing herself and now—when that bastard Fate finally decided to cooperate—leave it to her to change her mind.

Be careful what you wish for, Gracie.

With one last, tremendous burst of energy, she dropped to the pavement, her body curled protectively around the little girl, an instant before the explosion rocked through the night, shaking the pavement and rippling the leaves of the apple trees.

She cried out as something sharp and scorching hot ripped across the flesh of her back. For a moment, she could only concentrate on breathing past the pain.

After several seconds, when it faded somewhat and she could think again, she straightened. She must have been hit by flying debris. It hurt like hell but she was alive and so was the child she held.

“Wow. That was exciting.” Her voice sounded hoarse, not her own. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

She felt the little girl’s hair brush against her cheek as Emma nodded. “I think so.”

Grace hugged her, dizzied by the pain from her back and the waves of grief crashing over her at the feel of the warm, small weight in her arms, against her chest.

Oh Marisa, Marisa.

“There are people who can help you now,” she creaked out. She could see three highway patrol vehicles on the scene, as well as a fire engine and paramedics. Already, rescue workers were heading toward them carrying a stretcher for the child.

It was suddenly vitally important that she get away before they arrived. She didn’t want to face the inevitable questions, couldn’t bear to have anybody poking and fussing over her.

She pulled her arms away from Emma and climbed to her feet, ignoring the razor blades of pain slicing across her back where the blast had scorched through her clothing.

“Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!” the little girl begged.

Grace summoned the last of her energy and managed a facsimile of a smile. “You don’t need me now, sweetie. You’ll be just fine. I promise.”

The paramedics were almost upon them. In the bustle and confusion, it was easy for Grace to slip through the crowd. No one even tried to stop her as she made her way carefully, slowly, back to the cool refuge of the orchard.

The place was a dump.

Jack Dugan double-checked the slip of paper he held with the address on it. It was a shipping invoice, but it had been the only piece of paper he could find when Mike called an hour ago to give him the information they’d been seeking for a week now.

The numbers hanging crookedly against the cinderblock walls of the apartment building matched the numbers on the paper, but he found it hard to believe anybody actually lived here.

The place was falling apart. Weeds thrust through the cracked sidewalk and choked what likely had been a flower garden once. The peeling aquamarine paint of the roof and shutters had probably been cheerful—trendy, even—thirty years ago but now it made the building look just like the rest of the neighborhood: worn-out, tired, an area sagging into itself with a kind of quiet despair.

Grace Solarez lived here alone, according to Mike and the rest of the team of private investigators he’d paid a hefty amount to locate her. She had no husband, no kids, no pets. Just a failed career as a Seattle cop and a dead-end job hauling freight on the docks.

He shoved the Jaguar into Park and studied the building. Inside those walls could be the answers to the tangled quest he’d embarked upon a week ago. Inside, he would find either an amazingly heroic stranger who had faced almost certain death to rescue his daughter—an angel, Emma called her—or he would find the truth about Emma’s kidnapping.

Anticipation curled through him. Since that terrible night, he had tried to be patient while the investigators—both the police and his own—followed various leads to determine the identity of the mysterious stranger who had come out of nowhere to pluck his daughter from the wreckage of the stolen car her kidnapper had used to take her from him.

They’d had precious little to go on—just a few eyewitness descriptions of a slim, wild-eyed Hispanic woman and a well-handled snapshot that had been left at the scene, a photograph of a little girl in two thick dark braids giving a mischievous smile to the camera.

It hadn’t been much, but it had been enough. He now had a name to put with the woman. Grace Solarez. And it was only a matter of time until he could find out more, until he could learn whether she had helped the “bad man” Emma described as her kidnapper escape in the noise and confusion after the accident.

No one remembered seeing her drive up before the accident or drive away after it. It was as if she appeared out of thin air then disappeared into it again. What had she been doing there? How had she managed to slip through the crowd? And had she taken the kidnapper with her?

One way or another, he would get to the bottom of it.

A cool September wind, heavy with impending rain, rattled the rusty chains of an old metal swingset in what passed for a play area as he made his way across the uneven pavement to apartment 14-B.

Did the little girl in the snapshot play there? he wondered. It hardly looked safe, with two swings barely hanging on and the bare bones of a glider with no seats swaying drunkenly in the wind.

If Grace Solarez turned out to be just as she appeared—a brave stranger who had risked her own life to save his daughter’s—he planned to do whatever it took to ensure she wouldn’t have to live in this bleak place anymore.

If not—if it turned out she had a role in his daughter’s ordeal—he would see that she paid, and paid dearly.

As he climbed the rickety ironwork stairway to the second level of the building, he thought he saw a curtain twitch in the apartment next to 14-B. Other than that, the place seemed eerily deserted.

He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo inside the apartment, then waited impatiently for her to answer. She had to be here. He’d called McManus Freight, her employer, as soon as he hung up from talking to Mike and had learned Grace Solarez hadn’t reported to work since the night of the kidnapping, eight days ago.

Besides that, Mike said she had one vehicle registered in her name, an old junkheap he could plainly see decomposing over in the parking lot.

He rang the buzzer again and added several sharp knocks for good measure. The curtains fluttered next door again and he was just about to see if the nosy neighbor might be able to tell him anything about his quarry’s whereabouts when he heard a faint, muted rustling behind the door inside her apartment.

It swung open, barely wide enough for the safety chain to pull taut. Through the narrow slit, he could make out little more than tangled brown hair and a pair of huge dark eyes, very much like the pair belonging to the girl in the snapshot he held.

“Grace Solarez?”

The eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yes?”

Now that he was here, he hadn’t the faintest idea where to start. He cleared his throat. “Hello. My name is Jack Dugan. I need to speak with you, please.”

“About what?” Her voice sounded thready, strange, as if she’d just taken a hit of straight oxygen in one of those hip bars downtown.