Diamond in the Rough by Peter Canning

Author:Peter Canning [Canning, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Paramedic, EMS, ambulance, emergency, Thriller, medical, crime
Publisher: Peter Canning
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

***

Ten minutes later one of our crews brought in a twenty-one-year-old man in cardiac arrest from a heroin overdose—one of the men on the couch. The other was roused with Narcan. A third ambulance brought in the mother. Half the police department must have been at Saint Francis. They interviewed me a couple times to ask what I had seen when I got there, but all I could say was the mother was holding the baby and wailing.

The story that came out was most disturbing. The mother had come back from a night out—a night spent looking for crack, and doing what it took to get it. She’d left her baby with a friend, who’d shot up when his buddy came over. While they nodded off, at some point the baby had been sodomized. They apparently hadn’t realized why the baby was now quiet.

That day I kept thinking what kind of world did we live in where you could look out at an apartment window and see beautiful office buildings, where people made hundreds of thousands of dollars and drove fancy cars back to their homes in the suburbs, and yet at the same time look around and see poverty, neglect and the results of illiteracy and a broken-down human system. I mean, what kind of chance did that little girl have? How come we couldn’t protect her? I found out Tom and I had revived each of those addicts before. Maybe we should have just let them die. Maybe if we hadn’t done our jobs, that baby would still be alive. Maybe instead of letting crack whores ply their trade in the back of my cab, I should have driven them out to the country, and put a bullet in their heads, and thrown them in a shallow grave. The city would be terrorized by the prostitute killer, but that baby wouldn’t have had to have gone through what it did. Maybe the fear of the prostitutes I didn’t kill would send those prostitutes running for a convent. Hardly likely. The rock was too strong. And people without hope had no chance against it. But how could we give them hope? If a baby in a mother’s arms couldn’t do it, what could a country do? These questions tormented me.

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