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Treble Heart Books
Spallone Author
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Treble Heart Books
ISBN-10: 1932695060
Type: Fiction
Pages: 211
Copyright: 2005
ISBN-13: 9781932695069
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
A female paramedic kidnaps the baby of a homeless woman who's dying on a deserted Chicago street. Detectives Maggie O'Connor and Monroe Jackson investigate.
One foggy November morning on Chicago’s West Side, paramedic trainee Beth Reilly faces a life or death choice that will put her own future in jeopardy. High on cocaine, her veteran paramedic officer slams into a homeless, pregnant woman, forcing the woman into labor. Beth alone must decide who will live, the fetus fighting for life or the mother who is hemorrhaging to death. She can’t save them both.
Beth’s decision tests old friendships and creates new enemies. Her woman hating boss tries to destroy her career. An ambitious prosecutor decides her trial is his ticket to a judgeship. A religious zealot treats her as a sacrificial lamb, diverting suspicion from the woman he loves. A handsome professor enters her life, but is the timing coincidental? When one of her tormentors dies suspiciously, Beth realizes her choices have turned deadly.
Excerpt
Deadly Choices
Chapter 1
Warning lights unlit, siren silent, Ambulance Number 60 careened down fog-drenched streets in the pre-dawn autumn darkness. Some unseen radar directed the driver as she deftly maneuvered the ghost-like rig down West Madison Street through a maze of shattered liquor bottles and discarded syringes. The ambulance soundlessly streamed past derelicts pasted on a backdrop of scarred buildings. Replenishing supplies in the back of the rig, paramedic trainee Beth Riley stole a glance at the driver. She grimaced as her paramedic officer pulled a sandwich bag from her jacket. Angie often relied on that white stuff in her baggie to anesthetize herself against an avalanche of shootings, beatings, and vehicle collisions.
After five years as a nurse in Viet Nam, followed by twenty-two years as a paramedic with the Chicago Fire Department, Angie Ropella seemed to delight in all forms of human trauma. Knuckled in-between 24-hour stints of stabbings, multivehicle collisions, and assaults was an assembly line of little old ladies forgetting their insulin, yuppies jogging into cardiac arrest, and winos urinating in doorways.
Beth quickly averted her glance as Angie smirked at her through the rearview mirror. Her face still felt hot with shame at the tongue-lashing she’d received tonight. She had efficiently resuscitated a drug addict lying half-dead on his bungalow porch as neighborhood kids hopped over his unconscious form in a midnight game of tag.
But the last fiasco had completely unnerved her. A scrawny seventeen-year-old kid in an over-sized leather biker jacket had been weaving his motorcycle back and forth across four clear lanes of traffic when his luck was stolen by a black Toyota traveling southbound down Lake Shore Drive.
“Where’s the body?” Beth, the former librarian, had asked.
“The kid must have been a human slingshot. Probably hit a tree and bounced into an oncoming lane of traffic. Let’s check out the median strip,” Angie said, grabbing a backboard. “Don’t forget your gloves.”
Extracting a pair of latex gloves from her pants pocket, Beth scurried to match Angie’s long strides. Six weeks into her job, she had no intention of contracting AIDS.
About fifty feet north, a tree lay broken in half. The limp body of a kid in a motorcycle helmet sprawled across the adjoining median strip. Carefully, the paramedics lifted the broken body onto the backboard and velcroed on a Cervical Collar. Upon applying a tourniquet to halt the bleeding from his leg and splinting several broken bones, they gently placed the boy on a stretcher and boosted the gurney into the ambulance.
“Oh, man,” Angie said, groaning. “Check out this bone sticking through the kid’s thigh. As if he won’t have enough grief with a fractured pelvis, severe neck and back injuries, and a fractured skull.”
After one look at the mangled body, Beth vomited all over the back seat. Angie just grinned.
“You gonna be a medic, Riley? You can’t keep having these little accidents. Clean it up. Then keep the kid company back here. I’ll drive.”
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