Chapter 4: Night Shift

On Tuesday I went back to work, because a mate bond doesn't pay rent.

My station was a cinderblock box in south Tacoma with two bays and a coffee maker older than me.

My partner was a big, dry man of fifty who'd been driving ambulances since I was in diapers.

He met me at the door with my coffee and his phone held up.

It was the suitcase video.

"You're famous," he said.

"Don't."

"My wife wants to know if the prince is single."

"Tell her he's a nightmare."

"She knows. She says that's the appeal."

We ran a fall at a nursing home and a kid who'd stuck a bead up his nose.

At eleven at night they posted us out east to cover the foothills.

At twenty past one the radio said "animal versus vehicle, Highway 410, possible human involvement."

My partner looked at me.

"Possible human involvement," he said. "That's a new one."

It wasn't an animal by the time we got there.

A pickup sat crooked on the shoulder with its hazards going.

The driver was sitting on the guardrail with his head in his hands.

"It was a wolf," he kept saying.

In the ditch below him lay a naked young man, maybe twenty, on his side in the wet grass.

A big gray-haired man in a flannel shirt was kneeling over him with both hands pressed to his ribs.

He looked up at my uniform, and his eyes flashed silver in my flashlight.

"He was crossing," he said. "We were running. He didn't see the truck."

"I've got him," I said. "Keep your hands right there till I tell you."

The kid's breathing was all wrong.

One side of his chest wasn't moving.

His lips were going blue.

We got him on the board and into the back, and I put a needle into his chest between two ribs, and he took a breath.

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