Snow erased the edges of the world that Christmas Eve.

Highway 10 through Snoqualmie Pass looked less like a road and more like a narrow idea cut through white emptiness, one hard gust away from disappearing completely.

Richard Gallagher rode through it hunched low over his Harley-Davidson, beard stiff with frost, gloves rigid from the cold, the heavy engine vibrating up through his bones.

Most people in town knew him by the patch on his back and the old stories attached to his name.

Iron Rick.

Hells Angels.

Trouble.

Men like him were easy to judge from a distance, especially when seen through a warm window.\n\nThen his headlight caught a scrap of pale pink in the ditch.\n\nAt first he thought it was trash, maybe a jacket torn free by the wind.

But the shape was wrong.

Too still.

Too small.

Something in him tightened.

He eased the Harley onto the shoulder, the tires skating on black ice, and planted his boots in the snow.

The blizzard bit at his face as he forced his way down into the ditch.\n\nWhat he found there stopped him cold in a way the weather never could.\n\nA little girl lay half-buried in snow, curled so tightly it looked as if her body had tried to fold in on itself for warmth.

She could not have been older than six or seven.

Her pajama top was soaked through.

Her bare feet were purple.

Ice glued strands of blonde hair to the side of her face, and beneath the ice he saw blood.

When Rick rolled her gently enough to check for breath, a bruise the color of rotten plums bloomed around one eye.

Her lip was split.

Finger marks ringed her arms.

It took him one second to understand what had happened.\n\nNo child wandered into a storm like that by accident.\n\nSomeone had beaten her.\n\nSomeone had driven her into the middle of nowhere in a blizzard.\n\nAnd someone had thrown her away.\n\nA broken, rattling breath escaped her lips.

Alive.

Barely, but alive.\n\nRick looked up at the empty road.

Christmas Eve.

Nearly midnight.

No houses nearby.

No headlights.

No ambulance close enough to matter.

He also knew what would happen if he waited on the shoulder with a battered little girl in his arms and law enforcement showed first.

Oregon still had an active aggravated assault warrant attached to his name from a bar fight years earlier.

He might eventually be able to explain.

The girl might not live long enough to benefit from that explanation.\n\nSo he did what men who had spent their lives being called dangerous sometimes did best.\n\nHe acted.\n\nRick stripped off his heavy leather jacket, wrapped the child inside the sheepskin lining, and lifted her against his chest.

She weighed almost nothing.

He secured her between himself and the gas tank, zipped his flannel around her as far as he could, then kicked the Harley to life and drove into the storm.\n\nHe did not head for the nearest emergency room.

He headed for the Black Fir Garage, an old cinder-block service shop outside North Bend where his chapter sometimes met.

It was the closest place with heat, supplies, and one person he trusted not to waste time asking the wrong questions.

Lena Ortiz, known to every biker within fifty miles as Doc Lena, had spent twelve