"Lily," she muffled against my shoulder.
"Okay, Lily. Let's get you out of the cold."
I abandoned the motorcycle. I picked her up entirely, shielding her from the downpour, and carried her to my battered Chevy truck parked around the back of the diner. I unlocked the passenger door, cranked the heat as high as it would go, and set her gently on the worn fabric seat.
As the heater roared to life, Lily pulled her pink raincoat tighter around herself. The overhead dome light illuminated her face, and it was like looking at a ghost. She had Emily's nose. Emily's stubborn jawline.
"Lily, I need you to tell me exactly what happened," I said gently, crouching outside the open door so I wouldn't crowd her. "How did you get all the way out here to the diner?"
"The bus," she said softly, rubbing her eyes. "Mommy put me on the bus a long time ago. Before the bad man came. She said to get off at the big red sign and wait for the man with the loud motorcycle."
"The bad man?" My grip tightened on the door frame. "Who was the bad man, Lily?"
She shook her head, shrinking back into the seat. "The loud man. The one who yelled at Mommy. He wanted Mommy’s special box, but Mommy said no. She said she sent it to the old metal box. She told me to run."
I didn't press her further. She was traumatized, freezing, and exhausted. I needed to get her somewhere safe, somewhere warm, where I could figure out what the hell was going on.
I closed the passenger door, walked around to the driver's side, and got in. I threw the truck into drive and peeled out of the diner parking lot, heading straight for my auto garage on the desolate edge of the county limit.
My garage was an old corrugated steel warehouse wrapped behind a rusted chain-link fence. I lived in the converted loft above the workspace. It was fortified, private, and out of the way.
I parked the truck inside the main bay and pulled the heavy rolling steel door shut behind us, plunging the space into the familiar smells of motor oil, ozone, and old rubber.
I carried Lily upstairs to the loft. I found one of my old, oversized grey t-shirts for her to change into and threw a heavy wool blanket around her shoulders. I made her a cup of hot chocolate on my small hotplate while she sat perfectly still on my worn leather couch, staring at the floor.
I picked up her soaking wet pink raincoat from the floor to hang it over a chair.
As I lifted the small garment, something strange happened. The coat sagged heavily to the left.
I frowned, holding the coat up in the dim light of the loft. It was just a child's plastic rain jacket, but the left side weighed a good three pounds more than the right. I ran my hands over the slick pink material, pressing against the yellow inner lining.
Deep inside the hem, completely stitched into the fabric, I felt the hard, unforgiving ridge of solid metal. It was a heavy, metallic rectangle, roughly the size of a brick, hidden inside the lining of a six-year-old’s coat.
I stared at the pink fabric, my heart suddenly beating wildly in my chest.
Mommy said you need this. She told me to run.
Before I could walk to the kitchen drawer to find a knife, a sudden flash of light swept across the high, frosted windows of the garage loft.
I froze. I slowly set the coat down on the table, walked silently to the window, and parted the dirty blinds by an inch.
Down on the street, the heavy rain was still pouring. Crawling slowly past my chain-link fence was a massive, pitch-black SUV. The headlights were off. It rolled forward at a predatory creep, the dark tinted windows concealing whoever was inside. It reached the end of my property line, paused for five agonizing seconds, and then slowly reversed back to the center of my gate.
My blood ran completely cold.
No one drove this dead-end road at this hour. And no one stalked a closed auto garage without their headlights in a storm unless they were hunting something inside.
I looked back at Lily. She was asleep on the couch, exhausted by the heat and the trauma, clutching the mug of hot chocolate in her sleep.
The SUV outside suddenly threw it in park. All four doors swung open simultaneously.
Three large silhouettes stepped out into the rain. They didn't move like lost tourists or local cops. They moved with a terrifying, synchronized tactical silence. One of them produced a massive set of heavy bolt cutters from a duffel bag and clamped them over the rusted padlock on my front gate.
SNAP.
The gate swung inward.
I didn't have time to mourn my daughter. I didn't have time to ask questions. I lunged across the room, opened my heavy steel tool chest, and pulled out a massive, solid steel wrench.
Downstairs, heavy boots hit the concrete floor of the main garage.
"Spread out," a deep, booming voice echoed up through the floorboards. "The bike is here. He’s here. Find the kid. Tear the place apart if you have to."