A sample from
The Wrong Side of the Street
The boy was the color of wet cement.
Delphi got her knees down in the gravel beside him and the cold came straight through her uniform pants, standing water and grit and the diesel shine off the puddle under the drugstore's back step. Sodium light overhead, the one bulb on the loading door, everything in it orange and everything outside it nothing at all. Rain that wasn't falling so much as hanging.
Fifteen, maybe. Face-up where somebody had rolled him. Hood soaked through, and over it a man's leather jacket three sizes too big, gone black with the rain and still smelling of cigarettes and engine heat. Lips going the blue-gray she had seen three times in five weeks, and his chest doing the thing that looked like breathing to anybody who had never watched a person stop.
"Bag him," she said.
Frankie was already dropping the jump kit. Frankie Lundy had EMT-basic on a card in her wallet and gear oil under her nails the other four days of the week. She came off shift smelling of cold cigarette and hot metal. Her hands did not shake. That was the entire reason Delphi could stand being the only medic in a county the size of a small country. The mask went on. Frankie set the seal with two fingers under the jaw and started squeezing, slow, counting it out under her breath the way Delphi had taught her in the bay with a kitchen timer.
"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."
Delphi put two fingers on his neck. Carotid, thready, there. She thumbed an eyelid up and the light found a pupil like the head of a pin.
She didn't say what it was. There was nobody here to say it to.
The gravel behind the drugstore ran forty feet from the dumpster to the fence. Three sets of footprints in the mud that weren't hers or Frankie's. Going away. She registered them the way she registered everything — filed, timed, not her job — and got the tourniquet off her belt.
His arms were wet. Everything was wet. She stripped the sleeve back and ran her thumb up the inside of his forearm. Nothing worth the name. She took the back of his left hand instead, tapped it twice, got a vein that came up sullen and thin and blue in the sodium light.
"Rate's good," Frankie said. "Chest's rising."
"Keep it."
Twenty-two gauge. She had the catheter in on the first pass, thumbed the hub, felt the flash rather than saw it. Tape. Saline lock. Her hands were red-raw and cracked across the knuckles from glove powder and March and they did what they had done ten thousand times without asking her anything.
She drew up naloxone and gave four tenths of a milligram and put the syringe back on her thigh.
Amateurs pushed the whole two. Amateurs got a boy sitting bolt upright in withdrawal, vomiting into his own lungs, swinging at the nearest face. Delphi gave him enough to breathe and not one microgram more, and then she sat back on her heels in the water with her hand on his sternum and waited, and the rain hung, and the sodium lamp buzzed, and Frankie squeezed the bag.
"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."
The dumpster ticked as it cooled. Somewhere down Main a screen door went, once. Out past the fence a bike came up the street slow, one cylinder loping, and did not stop — a Kings cut going home up Quarry at two in the morning, the way one of them always was.
Delphi watched the pulse ox on his fingertip climb out of the seventies and thought about nothing at all. It was a skill. It had taken her nine years.
At forty seconds his diaphragm caught. At fifty he took one on his own, ragged, between Frankie's, and Frankie backed off the rate without being told.
At a minute ten he came back.
It was not gentle. It never was. He surfaced the way they all did — a long shuddering drag of air, then his whole body trying to get away from itself at once, heels scrabbling in the gravel, one arm coming up. Frankie took the mask off and got out of range with the ease of a woman who had spent a winter hooking cars off a mountain road.
He rolled and threw up between his knees, mostly water. Delphi kept a hand flat on his back until he was done.
"You're all right," she said. "Breathe. You're on Main. Behind the drugstore."
He got half a breath. "'m fine."
"Sure."
He was shaking hard enough that his teeth were going. Hypothermia and Narcan and whatever was left in him, all three. She got the wool blanket off the kit and put it over his shoulders and let him keep his own hands. You took a boy's hands off him after somebody had already taken everything else, and you lost the next six minutes.
"What's your name?"
He looked at the fence.
"You've got a bag on your face in about a minute if you don't talk to me, so let's talk."
"Cody."
"Cody Upton." She knew the family. Two streets over from Arlen Dobbs, a girl whose tie rods somebody at Iron & Ash had done for free in November. "You're fifteen."
"Sixteen in July."
"That's fifteen." She got the penlight out and he flinched and she did it anyway, quick, one eye then the other. Coming up off the pin. "What'd you take?"
"Nothing."
"Cody."
"I don't know," he said, and the second one was true, and that was all there was to it, that was five weeks of her life in three words. They never knew. That was the point. It was cheap and it was cut and it was not the same twice. Every kid in this town who put it in his mouth was swinging in the dark. Somebody in a shed sixty miles away had decided it was close enough.
"Who was with you?"
The fence again.
"Three people ran that way." She didn't point. "Their shoes are still in the mud. Somebody called it in from a phone that hung up. Which means whoever left you here stopped long enough to make sure you'd get found, so they're not the worst people you know, and I'd like their names."
Nothing. Water coming off the drugstore gutter in a thin rope.
"Cody. Look at me." He didn't. "Back in February I did this same thing for somebody about your age and it didn't take. You understand what I'm telling you?"
She watched his jaw and knew he did. Everybody in Coldwater knew. Sherry Mabe put a wreath in the window over the diner counter and nobody had said the name out loud in this town since the third week of February. It had not gone quiet. It just wasn't being said.
"Can I go," Cody said.
"No."
She inventoried him. That was the job, and it was the only thing resembling a search that would ever legally happen to this boy. She did it in front of Frankie and called each item off so it went on the sheet the way it was supposed to.
Left front pocket: a roll of tens. She flattened it against her thigh and counted it because you counted it, always, with a witness, or you got accused. Three hundred and twenty dollars in tens. In a pocket, wet, no band, no clip, folded once. Not saved money. Nobody saved in tens.
Right front pocket: a phone. Not a phone — a phone, the twenty-dollar kind off a peg at the gas station in Ellery, buttons and a stub of aerial. Cody's actual phone was in the hoodie pocket. Cracked screen, a photograph of a dog on it.
She held up the cheap one. "This yours?"
He took it out of her hand, fast, and she let him, and noted the speed.
Back pocket: a card, folded in half and gone soft with rain. She opened it flat under the sodium light.
IVERS TOW & TIRE. CUTBANK. USED SETS — MOUNT & BALANCE — 24 HR RECOVERY. A phone number printed. On the back, in ballpoint, another number, and under it a time — 10:30 — in handwriting that was not a fifteen-year-old's.
"Whose is this?"
"I don't know."
"It was in your pocket."
"Jacket's not mine."
That was probably even true. She looked at the card a second longer than she needed to. Then she folded it back on its crease and put it into his hand with the rest of it. It was his property, and she was a paramedic and not a sheriff's deputy. And she had the number in her head already, and always would.
His mother's phone went to voicemail. It went to voicemail the second time too.
"You need Ellery," Delphi said. "It's sixty-one miles and there's a doctor at the end of it, and I can't leave you with somebody who isn't answering."
"I'm not going to Ellery."
"You're fifteen."
"I'm not going to Ellery," Cody said, and there it was. The flat wall. The same one every time. Behind it the arithmetic every kid in this town did before he was old enough to shave. Ellery meant a chart, a chart meant a call, a call meant the sheriff, and the sheriff meant somebody knowing you were here.
Headlights swung off Main and came down the side lane, unhurried, and lit the fence and the dumpster and the three sets of footprints, and stopped.
Delphi looked at her watch.
2:01. She had been on this gravel since 1:52.
Nine minutes. It was always nine minutes, give or take. Nineteen years of being nine minutes behind everything that happened in this county, and none of it because he drove slow.
He came across the lot with his hat already off. He took it off indoors, and he took it off here too, at two in the morning, in the rain, in front of a fifteen-year-old with a blanket around him. Big and slow and tired in a coat he'd had since she was in high school, the county car ticking engine heat into the wet air behind him. The sheriff crouched. It took him a second and it hurt him, and she pretended not to see that, the way she had pretended not to see it since Christmas. Then he looked at Cody Upton the way he looked at everybody in this county, like a man reading the last page first.
"The Upton boy."
"Yes, sir."
"Your mother home?"
"She works nights."
"I know she does." He straightened up. "I'll run you."
Delphi stood. Her knees came off the gravel wet through and stiff and she did not let it show. "He's refusing transport."
"He can't."
"He is." She held up the sheet on its clipboard, already half filled in, the carbon curling in the damp. "So it goes down as refusal against advice, with you as witness, and if he stops breathing in your car you pull over and you call me and I'll be there in whatever it takes me, and it'll take me eight minutes."
Frankie was already walking Cody to the county car with a hand between his shoulder blades. The rain hung. The sodium lamp buzzed.
Her father turned his hat over once in his hands.
"You want to say it," he said.
"You know what I want."
"Say it anyway."
"Three hundred and twenty dollars in tens. A burner. A card from a tire outfit in Cutbank with a time written on the back of it." She kept her voice flat because flat was the only register that worked with him. "That's four in five weeks. Same product. Same cut. Same hour of the night. Every one of them fourteen to sixteen years old. I've got the times and the addresses on eighteen pieces of paper in a filing cabinet in that bay, because I'm the only person in this county who writes any of it down."
"I know."
"Then take it."
"I can't take it." He said it without heat, the way you would tell somebody the store was closed. "The lab's in Ellery, and Ellery's sixty-one miles and three months behind. Your witnesses are children. Every one of them has got a mother who'll put me in the yard before she lets me put her boy on a stand, and she'd be right to. And what you've got on those sheets is medical, Delphi. It's not mine. It's not anybody's." He looked at the county car, at the shape of a fifteen-year-old in the back of it with a blanket around his shoulders. "I put a hand out for one of those pages and the county attorney'd have my hat, and yours."
"So we wait."
"I've been waiting nineteen years," her father said. "It's not a plan. It's just what it is."
He put the hat on. That was the fourth time in five weeks that he had stood in front of her and said the same true thing.
She watched the taillights go up the lane and out onto Main and turn. Then she stood in the sodium light with the rain hanging and wrote the rest of it down: 01:44 dispatch, 01:52 on scene, 01:54 naloxone 0.4 mg IV, 01:56 spontaneous respirations. Three hundred and twenty dollars in tens. One card, Cutbank tire outfit, ballpoint number, 10:30.
Eighteen pieces of paper.
At the station she hung the wet sheet to dry on the corkboard in the bay while Frankie hosed the gravel out of the kit. It went up next to a shift roster sun-faded to nothing since 2019. Next to that, four-square with a drawing pin in each corner, was the letter from the Ellery County Board of Commissioners on its good heavy paper. Notice of a review of contracted emergency service consolidation. A date on it in the second week of May.
Delphi looked at the date the way she had looked at it every shift since January. Then she killed the bay light and went to make coffee, because it was ten past three, and it was Thursday, and there were four hours of it left.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.