Chapter 2 - THE WRONG AMBULANCE
I drew my weapon and ordered the driver to stop.
He accelerated.
The paramedic beside Leo froze, terrified.
The second paramedic reached for the rear-door lock.
I pointed the gun at him.
“Hands where I can see them.”
Lily crawled over Leo’s stretcher and covered her brother’s body.
The driver turned sharply into an alley.
I fired one round into the dashboard.
The engine did not stop, but the siren died.
The paramedic beside the door pulled the emergency release.
We jumped out while the ambulance rolled slowly against a dumpster.
I carried Leo.
Lily followed barefoot through the rain.
A real emergency unit reached us three minutes later.
At Detroit Children’s Hospital, doctors diagnosed Leo with severe bacterial pneumonia and dehydration.
He would live.
But the blood test revealed a sedative in his system.
Someone had given him enough to keep him quiet.
Lily had the same drug in smaller amounts.
The prescription in her hand was for antibiotics.
The pharmacy confirmed her mother, Sarah Collins, collected it at 5:18 p.m.
Security video showed Sarah leaving with the medicine.
Then a black sedan blocked her path.
A man stepped out.
The camera went dark.
Sarah never returned home.
The fake ambulance driver’s face matched no department employee.
But he knew my call sign.
Internal Affairs opened an investigation.
My captain ordered me off the case.
I refused.
He suspended me.
That told me the warning on the prescription might be real.
Then Lily asked to speak with me alone.
She said her mother had shown her my photograph weeks earlier.
“Mom said if anything happened, find Officer Rachel Brooks.”
“Why me?”
“She said you were family.”
I had spent thirty-five years believing I was an only child.
My mother died when I was eighteen.
My father disappeared when I was six.
Sarah Collins could not be my sister.
Unless everything I knew about my family was wrong.
A DNA test would take time.
Lily handed me a key taped beneath the prescription.
A storage-unit number was written beside it.
Before we could leave the hospital, a man appeared outside Leo’s room.
My captain.
He smiled at Lily.
May you like
Then whispered to me:
“Your sister was supposed to disappear quietly.”
