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“You don’t have a car,” she said, looking around with confusion.
Another contraction must’ve hit her because she doubled over.
“I feel like I really need to push,” she hissed. “Like, with everything that I am, I feel like I need to push.”
I felt my belly drop out.
“Um,” I said. “What…what do you want me to do?”
She squatted down, blew out a breath, then screamed.
Seconds later, her pants were being ripped down, and I was staring at a half-naked woman with a baby hanging out of her.
A baby about to hit the dirt road underneath our feet.
I lurched forward just in time to catch the baby, my knee scraping painfully against the ground as I lunged.
The baby landed in my hands, and I saw the moment that the baby took her first breath.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
• • •
“For the love of God.”
I woke up with a start.
My eyes were heavy, and I nearly cursed.
I’d gotten all of twenty minutes of sleep.
Son of a bitch.
That dream.
Why was I always having that fucking dream?
“Yeah?” I managed to say.
“I’m trying to get ahold of you for a reason, motherfucker.”
I felt my stomach drop.
Looking around, I saw the phone in my hand and realized that during my sleep I must’ve answered the ringing phone.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said to the person on the other line. “What’s up?”
“My grandson is missing.”
I looked at the phone a little harder, trying to place where I knew the voice from, and realized that the readout said “Sam.”
Sam McKenzie.
The man that’d stored my vehicle for me all those years. The man that, at one point, had been my superior officer and had led me into my first year as a green little grunt.
“Sam,” I said, trying to blink the sleep from my eyes. “Tell me everything.”
“My daughter,” he started. “She was grocery shopping with her youngest. The cops were conducting a traffic stop that she was unaware of, and when she went past this large van in the parking lot, shit hit the fan with that traffic stop. Some young kid threw away a bag of drugs that was laced with fentanyl. Shit hit a tree, exploded and my daughter inhaled it. She dropped to the ground and started seizing right then and there. At that point, due to the van that she was beside, we don’t know what happened with her son. But when her husband got there, they discovered that the boy was missing. Cops never even knew there was a kid there. Though if they’d taken half a second to see all the baby shit in her cart, they would’ve known. God fuckin’ dammit.”
