June looked back at Sam for a long time. Then she put her head back down on his shoulder.
"Okay, Daddy," she said.
He had to wait a moment before he could trust himself to stand up.
He called 911 from the alley, with June bundled inside his Carhartt jacket and Nora pressed against his side. He spoke quietly and very clearly. He gave the address of the old Petrakis bakery on Water Street. He said he had found a child, approximately six years old, who appeared to have been living alone in the basement for some weeks, who was underweight and had a cough and a bruise on her face. He said her mother might have overdosed in a motel some weeks ago, and that a man named Rick might know what had happened. He said the child was terrified of police and had a history of abuse in a prior foster placement, and he asked them, please, to send whoever they had who was good with kids.
The dispatcher was a woman with a smoker's voice and a calm manner. She told him to stay where he was and keep the child warm. She said units were on the way. Then she said, after a short pause, "Sir, you did the right thing calling."
"My daughter did," Sam said. "I just followed her."
They came in seven minutes. One squad car, one ambulance, lights going but no sirens; Sam would find out later that the dispatcher had asked them to cut the sirens. The officer who got out of the squad car was a stocky woman in her forties named Dana Kowalczyk, whose son had been in Little League with a boy Sam used to coach, and who recognized him at once. She came down the alley slowly, with her hands empty and in plain sight, and stopped ten feet away and crouched down so that she was lower than June's eye level.
"Hi," she said to the bundle in Sam's coat. "My name's Dana. I'm a police officer, but I'm also a mom. I've got two boys. Is it okay if I just stay right here for a minute and say hi?"
June peered out of the coat. She looked at the badge on Dana's chest and shrank back against Sam's ribs.
"She's scared of uniforms," Sam said quietly.
"That's okay. Lots of people are." Dana didn't move any closer. "Sweetheart, I'm not going to take you anywhere. The people in that big truck back there are going to want to listen to your chest and make sure that cough isn't anything bad, and they're going to want to take you to the hospital so a doctor can look at you. And Mr. Whitley here, is he going to come with you?"
"He promised," said June.
"Then he's coming with you," Dana said. "That's a deal. And your friend too, if she wants." She looked at Nora, who nodded hard. "Good. Everybody rides together."