A young girl standing beneath an umbrella offered him half a granola bar. He declined. She put it in his jacket pocket anyway.

When he walked back to Navarro, she pointed toward the street.

The bus was ready to leave. The driver had a map unfolded across her steering wheel.

“The official route sends us to the Harbor Point service road,” she said. “But there are concrete barriers across it.”

Vale looked at the map.

“They told us that was the evacuation route.”

“Then somebody told us wrong.”

The driver introduced herself as Marisol Vega. She had driven city buses for eighteen years and had a way of saying inconvenient facts as though she expected adults to act upon them.

“I’ve got thirty-two people aboard, Deputy. Some can’t walk a hundred yards. I’m not going to put this bus in a flooded intersection because your office printed a pretty arrow on a map. Tell me where I can go.”

Vale called dispatch.

The answer was worse than he expected.

The old mill bridge was restricted because of high water.

The Harbor Point service road was blocked by a private work crew.

And the buses were running out of places to turn around.

Chapter Five: The Road That Wasn’t There

At 5:02, Lena arrived on foot at the northern side of the old mill crossing with Frank Delgado and a map already softened by rain.

The city had built the bridge in 1931. Its low stone arches looked beautiful in tourist photographs, but its narrow shoulders and uneven approaches made it a poor evacuation route in a storm. On the far side, headlights shone through mist where Marisol’s bus waited with thirty-two people inside.

A police barricade had been set across the crossing. The road surface was wet but not yet submerged. A county bridge inspector was examining the approaches, his flashlight sweeping the water around the stone abutment.

“Nobody crosses until we clear it,” he told Lena. “Could be twenty minutes. Could be longer.”

“Understood,” she said. “Don’t open it for me. I need a safe route, not a dramatic one.”

Frank unfolded the revised city evacuation map under the roof of his truck.