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She groaned. “Great. My tombstone will read ‘Rest in peace with the paperclips.’”

He chuckled. Witty.

With a twinge in his knee, he eased to his hands and knees and beamed the searchlight into all the dark corners of the cab. Where was that phone? She kept a neat truck. No gum wrappers or loose change. Only a set of binoculars and a bound book of paper maps. He grabbed them both.

“Cullen.” She’d almost shouted it, and he realized she must have been talking to him while he searched.

“What?”

“Do you think I was transporting this baby’s mother somewhere? Like she asked me for a ride?”

He spared a look at her from his cramped position between the seats. “Can you propose another explanation?”

“Well, I’m not a kidnapper.”

“But you see how it looks, right?” he resumed. “You were transporting a baby you claim to know nothing about. At least the bullet holes and blood trend in your favor. I photographed both, by the way.”

“Do you suppose ... I mean ... Do you think the mother was hurt bad? Or the shooter got her while I was blacked out?”

That notion made the acid surge higher in his gut.

He could swallow a lot of things, humiliation, loss of purpose, being stripped of his cop family, but the fact that whoever did this might have gotten away with it was intolerable.

At the end of the day, justice was the only thing worth striving for.

“I don’t know.” Yet . “Aha.” With a crow of victory, he plucked her cell phone free from a dark crevice.

For the second time that day, he saw her smile, a gorgeous, radiant expression that dimmed the longer he held the phone. It was smashed, a piece of the screen missing. When he tried to power it on, it remained stubbornly dark.

She was on her feet. “This is not happening!” she shouted.

He wanted to holler right back that it most certainly was and he wanted no part of it. He’d screamed the exact same thing as he was bundled into an ambulance the last night of his career. Rage didn’t change anything.

The baby had begun to full-out wail again.

He picked her up and cuddled her to his chest, patting her diaper, which reminded him she probably needed to be changed. “Could you please take it down a notch? You’re upsetting Tot.”

With fists balled in anger, she pressed her lips closed.

The baby reached out petal-soft fingertips to touch his lower lip. “Let’s focus on what we know. This area is off-limits. Cops are busy setting up blockades and evacuations. No help is coming, thanks to the volcano.”

Worry crawled across her features, making her look much younger than thirty.

He swallowed. At thirty years old, he’d had the world by the tail, or so he’d thought.

People who loved him, a job that gave him identity and purpose and a means to change the world for the better.

Acid crawled up his throat. What a difference a decade made.

He shook the thought away. “Let’s get you two settled so I can take a hike, so to speak. ”

She nodded absently, the fire gone out of her, which made him feel curiously sad. “Go now,” she said. “Sooner is better.”

“Easy for you to say. It’s gonna be like hiking in quicksand.” He held the baby out to her. “Tot will need a change and a bottle soon, if she’s at all on par with my...” He swallowed. “My friend’s baby. I’m hoping there’s a diaper bag aboard or it’s gonna be a long night.”

Kit looked at Tot as if she were a hand grenade with the pin pulled. “This is completely crazy. I’m a truck driver. I shouldn’t be involved with any of this.”

“Me neither,” he growled, patience fraying, “but right now we gotta focus on her.” He offered the baby again. She made no move to take her.

Her gaze was fogged with pain and fear. “The bullets might have been an accident. Someone trying to scare away a looter. There’s been ransacking in some areas.”

He exhaled, summoning a gentler tone. “If it was an accident, then we won’t have any further trouble from Big Guns.

It’s just us versus a volcano.” Her eyes shifted, and he knew she was ticking off the facts she could not account for, the baby, the bloody handprint, two bullet holes, not merely a stray shot that found her truck.

Slowly, she lifted her arms and accepted the bundle of wiggling baby who’d begun to fuss. “She’s crying.”

“Yep, I can hear that. I’m gonna take a quick look around to see if there’s a bag of supplies.” The wails increased.

“Cullen, what do I do?”

“Haven’t you ever babysat before?”

“No.”

There was something clipped about that word, more substance to it than he had time to investigate at the moment.

Ticktock. He activated the flashlight again and played it around the tumbled sleeping area.

Kit’s clothes were neatly contained in drawers and a collapsible laundry hamper that had overturned.

Cleaning products were still perfectly stowed, a stack of trucking magazines flung everywhere.

There was also a massive crack in her thirty-inch television that she eyed mournfully.

“There.” Kit spoke over the baby’s wails, pointing under the pink comforter he’d flung aside. “That’s not mine.”

A duffel bag. He hauled it out, preoccupied with other details.

How long before the cops might possibly arrive, pending his success at getting a signal?

There was an outside chance Gideon might check in on him in light of the more recent explosions.

And a slim possibility that his brother had tried to call him and might dispatch help when he got no reply. Slim was better than none.

He unzipped the bag. “Score. Baby stuff.” The contents were jumbled and looked to have been flung quickly inside.

Kit didn’t answer for a moment. “Cullen, do you think Tot’s mother is alive?”

The silence thickened between them. “I don’t know.” But the cop in him insisted otherwise. The missing mother had cared enough to strap in her baby and pack supplies, but had not returned to the wreck? He extracted a diaper and looked at Kit. “Care to do the honors or should I?”

She shuddered. “You.”

He laid Tot on the bed, stripped off the soiled diaper, and applied a new one, proud that it only required one readjustment to get it perfect. Kit reached in the bag and handed him a baby-sized hoodie.

“How about this? It’s getting colder in here.”

It took both of them to wrestle the kid into the garment. In a nifty side pocket of the duffel was a baby bottle and a bunch of powdered formula packets along with a single jug of distilled water. Thank you , God. He squinted. The printing was too tiny on the packet.

“Can you, uh, read this?”

Incredibly, she smirked. “My dad had to hold things far away when he hit a certain age too.”

He scowled. “I’m only forty.”

“Don’t worry. Forty is the new thirty.” She read the instructions and even mixed the bottle for him after sanitizing her hands with a wipe, then continued her perusal of the duffel bag’s contents.

He settled into the chair with Tot on his lap.

When he lifted the nipple to her lips, Tot latched on like a hungry bear.

While she drank, he continued his examination of the sleeping area and noticed a small crate of books, a half-dozen volumes neatly secured with bungee cords.

Volcanoes of the Pacific Rim. The Living Planet , the earthquakes and volcanoes edition.

“Bookworm?” He motioned to the crate with his chin.

“Just learning.”

“About volcanoes?”

“Sure. Don’t you want to know what’s unfolding around you?”

“Only in small doses.” He admired Tot’s robust guzzling. “Good thing she’s not picky about her beverage temperature. Do you want to take her now while she’s occupied?” But Kit’s attention was elsewhere.

“The bag,” she said.

“Uh-huh.” He was trying to recall the topography around them.

If he couldn’t get a signal, he’d continue on to the truck, drive up a ways.

A mile north in the direction of his cabin there was a granite peak, one of many in the foothills of Mount Ember, sprinkled all along the Cascade Range.

If the seismic activity hadn’t destabilized it and he could make it to the top, or even halfway, he might get a signal.

Call Gideon first? Sometimes it was easier to get an outside connection if the systems were overtaxed.

That would leave Kit and the baby alone for a longer period.

They should have a contingency plan, get some supplies together in case they had to flee.

A disaster in the making, but if Big Guns came back. ..

She spoke louder this time. “The duffel bag.”

His focus snapped back to her. “What about it?”

She was on one knee, peering at it. “It’s too heavy for a few baby supplies. I pack duffels all the time for multiple nights, and they never weigh this much.”

She pawed through the contents, burrowing past the tiny clothes, small Tupperware containers, and mini formula packets. When she pulled out a plastic-wrapped bundle, he let out a low whistle.

She stared.

He stared.

The baby sucked.

The fading sun illuminated the fat stacks of money gripped in Kit’s hands.