Chapter Three
Rose was sweating. Her heart was racing and there was a hitch at her side. There was also blood on her right hand, something she only noted after trying to wipe some of the sweat off her palms in preparation for what happened next.
Blood, sweat and tears—not that she was crying—didn’t do much up against bombs. Or guns. Or men who appeared at a time that was too coincidental to not connect to the former, seemingly with no problem using the latter.
Yet in all the quick chaos, there was one thing that surprised her the most.
James Keller hadn’t moved.
At least, not enough to count.
Rose hoped their luck stayed true through this next part.
“The good news is, we don’t have to wait a while for the experts to show up before we move you,” Rose continued from her earlier statement, not giving the man room for a response.
This time, though, she did pause a little as she looked at the space between the open car door and the concrete pit of the bay next to them.
James used the pause well. He got right to the point.
“What’s the bad news?”
Five feet, give or take, Rose decided of the distance. She moved to the spot she thought was directly between the two points of interest and bent her knees slightly. Then she went through an imagined motion of pulling something from one side to the other.
It might work.
“The bad news is we don’t have to wait for the experts to show up before we move you,” she answered.
James said something but Rose’s attention split again. At the far side of the room the door she had blocked shook violently. The men had realized she had locked the bay doors. Now they were trying to come in through the office.
Rose kept her voice as still as the surface of a lake but even she could tell there were definitely about to be ripples in it.
“How deep is the pit beneath this car?” she asked.
“The service pit? This one is around five feet five inches with the wooden floor in.”
“And the one next to us?”
James was quick.
“Six feet. There’s no floor in it.”
The opening didn’t seem as wide and there were metal tracks for the vehicles in the way of those four feet. The closest track to them might be a problem.
But it wasn’t like they had many other options.
The door across from the garage started to take more damage. The men were ramming it with something.
Rose realized it was time to get very specific with her new mechanic friend.
“I don’t have my gun and there’s at least two men with their own trying to come in. They’re going to make it in before backup gets here. I can’t defend you and I can’t leave you, so I’m going to move you instead.”
Rose was actually thankful that James couldn’t turn to look directly at her. She guessed his expression wouldn’t be kind. Instead, he parroted her intentions with notable grievance.
“You’re going to move me?” he asked. “Doesn’t that mean that if I’m on a bomb, that bomb goes off? No offense, I’d rather you leave me than blow me up.”
Rose got close to him, no need to bend over too much given her short height.
“We’re not going to blow you up. We’re going to hope that there’s a small delay between you leaving the seat and the explosive going off.”
“So what if there is? We’ll still get the blast right after.”
He couldn’t see it, but Rose thumbed over her shoulder.
“Not if we jump into the service pit. The concrete should—” Rose was cut off by a noise she had been hoping not to hear.
A gunshot.
In this context, an impatient one.
It looked like their mystery combatants were getting frustrated. Though she had no idea why.
Either way, Rose had to wrap this up.
Now.
“We’re going to jump into the service pit behind me and hope that covers us,” she said.
James’s jaw was a hard line. She could see sweat had already formed along his neck. The effort of not moving was a lot more taxing than most people might think. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face as he said no.
“You leave,” he added. “If there’s a delay then I can make it to the pit myself. You run out the back now.”
His words were surprisingly resolute.
Rose was more so.
“You’re too tall and you’ve been cramped in there for too long, so you’re probably going to lose time just trying to stand and get out,” she said. “You need momentum as soon as possible. So I’m going to give it to you.”
Rose wrapped both of her hands around James’s arm that was closest to her. It wasn’t enough to trigger the weight shift, but it was enough to get James to slightly turn his head finally.
His eyes were a mix of green and brown. There seemed to be some gold in there too, blurring the line between.
It was nice.
“You don’t need to do this.” His voice was deep and low but sounded louder than the men trying to break down the door.
“But I am,” she said. “Now, I’m going to count to three and on the word Go we’re going to throw ourselves as fast as we can into that pit.”
James was silent for the briefest of moments.
“What if there’s no delay and this thing blows sky-high the second I’m off it?” he finally asked.
Rose knew it wasn’t a smiling occasion, but she couldn’t help it.
“If that happens, then I promise you, we won’t know it.”
The gravity of her words probably didn’t have time to sink in. Or, maybe they did. Whatever weight they held for James, he seemed to make a decision after that.
It timed almost too well with the toolbox and chair that had been propped against the office door finally clattering to the ground.
They were now at the true now or never.
Those hazel eyes with their gold in-between hardened.
“On Go,” he said.
Rose nodded.
Then she counted down from three.
* * *
JAMES’S ADOPTION HAD been a quiet one. He had been seven and in foster care for three of those seven years.
He’d known his biological parents, but in the last little while had grown to think of them more as simply people he visited once a month in a small room at the department of human services.
If anything, it was his social worker, Ms. Bell, that he had grown a deep attachment to over the course of their time together.
So when her sister had offered to take him in when adoption was finally put on the table for him, James had felt some excitement. He would still get to see Ms. Bell all the time.
It was a silver lining that he clung to through his parents’ rights being terminated, through his visits stopping, through the rocky year of waiting for the courts to catch up to him, and even when he told the judge he was ready to be the legal son of the Keller family.
They were good, nice people and he would have a good, safe home.
But then Ms. Bell went and moved out of state for her husband’s job.
It was only as they watched the moving truck pull away that the then-seven-year-old James thought he finally understood what a sinking feeling in one’s gut really felt like.
A part of him felt like he had given up his biological mother for the maternal love of Ms. Bell, only to realize that, at the end of the day, she had been doing her job.
Now the job was done, and Ms. Bell had moved on in both the literal and physical sense.
At nine years old, James’s new sinking feeling came from the intense and sudden worry that he had made a wrong choice somewhere along the line. That, even though he knew he hadn’t actually had many options, he had still somehow misstepped.
And now everything had changed and there was no going back for a redo.
That feeling had grown and stretched as James had grown and stretched as he got older.
It was still there sometimes, a lurking worry, but not as it first had been.
Then, as he had reached the age of thirty, he realized it had become more of an ache.
An echo. He could get to it but it didn’t often get to him.
However, for the first time since he was a child, James felt that sinking feeling come back to life, strong and loud.
That helpless fear that he’d made the wrong choice and now the world was forever changed for it.
The pain registered first but he couldn’t place exactly where it was on his body. It all hurt. He hurt everywhere.
He wasn’t lying down but he wasn’t on his feet either. He also wasn’t sitting. He was, instead, lopsided.
James blinked a few times. An almost overwhelming sense of nausea turned in his stomach. That was when he realized what he had been hearing since opening his eyes.
Ringing. In his ears.
And that was it. No other sounds.
Just pain and ringing.
What had—
All at once the car, the bomb and then the gunshots pounded through his memory. Then the confusing world around him started to make sense.
He had made it to the bottom of the second service pit. Despite the distance, despite the bomb’s blast, despite the men banging their way through the garage to them. Unbelievably, James had made it.
His gaze was pitched up and there he saw one of the metal tracks they used to service the vehicles overhead. It was still above but warped and bent, not completely intact anymore. That might have had something to do with the giant-something partially lying across it.
It was part of a roof—the Keller Auto roof—and past that he could see a strip of sky.
It was a startling contrast. One that finally pushed James even closer to reality.
The rest of the details finally sharpened.
There had actually been an explosive beneath the car seat, and it had gone off.
Debris was all around the pit and the smell of smoke and burning things was so heavy it clogged his nostrils.
There was no telling how badly the rest of the garage was damaged but the pit itself had actually held.
At least, it had kept its structure. The debris still falling was an issue.
James caught a burning something next to him on the ground.
It was paper, small, but actively on fire. On reflex he palmed it out.
The movement hurt, but not because of the flame.
There was a weight on his side, and it had taken until now to notice it.
That sinking feeling nagged again.
The most important detail inside the service pit had come last.
Rose Little did in fact seem little. She was a deadweight lying against him, her back to his side, head pressed against his rib cage.
Her hair was splayed out across her face and only the downward turn of her lips could be seen through it.
James couldn’t remember how they went from the car to six feet down, but Rose had obviously taken a bigger blow than he had.
“Deputy Little?” Her name came out warbled and wrong against the ringing in his ears. James used the hand that had palmed out the small paper fire a second ago, unable to worry about the soot it had left behind, and gently held her face against him.
Rose wasn’t moving.
James shifted his weight slowly, holding her, until they were both sitting up.
He called her name again, but the woman remained slack against him.
He couldn’t tell if she was breathing—there was too much going on around him—so he moved his fingers to her neck.
Then he held his breath.
What felt like a lifetime stretched between nothingness and then a beat.
Her pulse.
James wanted more confirmation. He sidestepped any modesty and placed his large hand spread out against her chest.
He held his breath again.
Then felt hers go out.
If James wasn’t currently forming a human cage around the woman, he would have let relief wring him out. Instead, he gave the deputy’s body a cursory look.
There were no protruding bones or obvious and alarming injuries as far as he could tell. Her clothes had seen better days, and she was somehow missing a shoe, but there wasn’t anything that spelled immediate issues.
Well, other than the fact that she was out cold.
And they were in a pit in the ground of a burning building.
Then there was the whole men with guns business.
Had they been in the blast or far enough away like them that they had survived?
James was seized by a coughing fit. He kept Rose tight against him until it passed.
She had said backup was on the way but he couldn’t just sit and wait for them.
James winced into that pain he couldn’t exactly pinpoint and slowly pulled them both to their feet.
Rose definitely wasn’t faking her condition.
She was a rag doll in his arms as he stood to his full height.
He stepped on debris and over clutter, holding Rose against him like a groom ready to walk his bride through their bedroom door.
Flames and heat and smoke and pain danced around them.
Holding her was easy. Getting out might be a different story.
James took one quick look down at the slack face resting against his chest.
Wildcard Rose Little looked relaxed, peaceful even.
“I can’t defend you and I can’t leave you.”
James nodded and spoke his resolve, even though he and the woman he was holding couldn’t hear his words.
“Don’t worry. I’m not about to leave you either.”