Gloria didn't turn around. She didn't change her face. She'd raised five children and eleven grandchildren, and she'd learned a long time ago that the most important thing you can do when you're frightened is not let it show.
The light turned green. She drove.
She thought fast. The emergency button in the app would call 911 out loud, through the car speakers. If she pulled over, he could simply take the girl with him.
She could do what the app told her to do. Twenty-two minutes to north Scottsdale.
Gloria Benavides had never done what anybody told her to do in her life, and she wasn't going to start at seventy-nine.
She knew Phoenix the way she knew her own kitchen. She'd lived there sixty years.
And she knew that two exits up, a mile off the freeway, there was a police precinct station with a big lit-up sign and a parking lot full of patrol cars, open all night. Her nephew Rudy worked the desk there.
She put on her blinker.
"This isn't the way," the man said behind her.
"Ay, this app," Gloria said, shaking her head. "It always takes me crazy ways. It wants me to get off here and go around, because of construction. Every week, construction, construction." She laughed. "My grandson says I should just trust the little blue line. You know? Trust the little blue line, Grandma."
She kept talking. She talked about her grandson, and his new baby, and how expensive diapers were now, and how in her day you just used cloth and washed them in the bathtub. She talked like a nice, chatty old lady who didn't know a thing in the world was wrong.
She didn't stop talking for a second. She didn't give him a second to think.
The man was looking at his phone again, frowning at the map.
"Ma'am," he said. "This is going the wrong direction."
"Oh, I know, mijo, I know. Just around the corner here. Two minutes."
She turned onto the frontage road. She turned again at the light.
And there it was, half a block up on the right. The police station, bright as a supermarket in the middle of the night, with the flag lit up out front and four patrol cars parked by the door.
The man saw it at the same moment she did.
He went very still in the back seat.
The light ahead was red. Gloria slowed down for it, slowly and carefully, the way an old lady drives.
The back door opened.
The man was out of the car before it had even stopped. He slammed the door and ran, across the empty intersection and down the dark sidewalk, into the parking lot of a closed-up tire shop, and over a block wall, and he was gone.
Gloria sat there at the red light with both hands on the wheel. Her heart was going like a drum.
Then she drove the last half block, and pulled up right in front of the police station doors, and leaned on the horn until somebody came out.
Her nephew Rudy was the first one through the door. He took one look at his Tía Gloria, and the girl passed out in the back seat, and he got on his radio.
The girl's name was Bianca. She was sixteen.
She'd gone to a party with a friend, and somebody had given her a drink, and she didn't remember much after that. A paramedic checked her over in the lobby and said she'd be fine with fluids and sleep.
The man's name was on his rideshare account. The police knew exactly where he lived. Two detectives went to the address in north Scottsdale before the sun came up.
Bianca's mother worked nights. She was a nurse, on shift until six at a hospital on the west side.
When an officer finally reached her on the phone, Gloria could hear her crying all the way across the lobby.
"I can't leave the unit until six," the mother said. "I've got a patient on a ventilator, there's no other nurse to take him. Oh, God. Oh, my baby."
Gloria walked over and held out her hand for the phone. The officer gave it to her.
"Mija," Gloria said. "My name is Gloria. I'm the driver. Your daughter is safe. She's sleeping on a bench in a police station with a blanket on her and three officers looking after her. Stay with your patient." She took a breath. "When your shift is over, I'll bring her to you myself. If that's all right with you, and with them."
There was a long silence on the line.
"Why would you do that?" the mother whispered.
"Because somebody's got to drive her," Gloria said. "And I'm already up."
At 5:20 in the morning, the sky over the mountains to the east was turning gray and pink.
Gloria drove west across Phoenix on empty streets, with the radio off and Rudy following a few car lengths behind in his patrol car, because he was that kind of nephew. Bianca was in the passenger seat. Gloria had wrapped her in the crocheted blanket from the back seat, the green and yellow one Gloria's mother had made in 1971, and the girl had fallen asleep against the window before they'd gone two blocks.
At a red light, Gloria crossed herself and touched the rosary on the mirror. Then she drove on.
She pulled up under the bright entrance of the hospital at 5:58.
The mother was already outside, waiting at the curb in blue scrubs, with her arms wrapped around herself. When the car stopped, she ran to it. She pulled the passenger door open and got down on her knees on the concrete and took her sleeping daughter's face in both her hands.
"Bianca. Baby. Mija."
Bianca woke up and started to cry, and her mother held her, and Gloria sat behind the wheel and looked out the windshield and gave them a minute.
When the mother finally looked up across the car at the driver, she stopped.
She was about forty-five, with tired eyes and her dark hair pulled back. A small gold cross at her throat.
"Mrs. Benavides?" she said slowly.
Gloria stared at her.
"Teresa," she said.
It was the night nurse. The quiet one. The one who'd sat by Ernesto's bed in the long dark hours of those last six months, and sang old boleros to him so softly that Gloria could sleep in the next room.
Teresa stood up slowly beside the car, with her daughter wrapped in the crocheted blanket against her side.
"You took care of my baby," she said. Her voice broke completely.
"You took care of my husband," Gloria said. "For six months. Every night."
Neither of them could say anything else for a while.
Teresa tried to pay her. Gloria wouldn't hear of it. She ended the ride on the app as a cancellation, so it wouldn't even charge.
The rideshare company called her the next week. Gloria braced herself to lose her job for driving the wrong way. Instead, the woman from the safety team thanked her, and said the man's account was closed for good.
Gloria still drives Thursday through Saturday nights. She still keeps peppermints in her pockets and a bucket behind the passenger seat.
And folded on the back seat, there's a new crocheted blanket now, blue and white. Bianca made it herself, with a little help from her mother, and gave it to Gloria in August. Tucked into the fold, there was a note in round teenage handwriting.
For the next girl who needs it.