Marcus “Mac” Cole leaned against the diamond-plate rear bumper of his armored ambulance rig, chewing on a splintered birch toothpick.
The salt-fog was rolling off the river in thick, yellow waves, swirling around the halogen floodlights mounted to the dock canopy. Behind him, the six-cylinder Cummins turbo diesel engine of Unit 04 rumbled with a deep, reassuring idle. It held eight hundred revolutions a minute, oil pressure rock-steady at sixty pounds, and water temperature pinned at one hundred and eighty degrees.
For twenty years, the forty-six-year-old transit veteran had driven the night routes through Mill District Nine.
He had hauled freight, smuggled contraband emergency plasma past municipal notary blockades, and towed broken courier vans out of ditch fires. He knew the sound of St. Jude’s Hospital when it was hunting.
The old brick hospital didn’t sound like a medical facility at three in the morning--it sounded like an iron foundry with its damper valves shut.
Beneath the ambulance bumper, the twin exhaust stacks puffed neat rings of gray diesel smoke into the cold river air.
Inside the rear cabin of Unit 04, the floodlights were burning bright amber. The dual two-hundred-and-forty-volt medical inverters hummed behind the aluminum cabinetry, ready to take over the electrical load the instant Clara’s life-support rolled across the sill.
