Free Vanished in the Night by Eileen Carr

street from her house when she got home. It was already dark. She rarely ever got home when it was still light out at this time of year. But she actually welcomed the dark. The long, light evenings of summer made her melancholy.
    Susan couldn’t make out the color of the car in the dark or its license plate, but she noted that it was a bigsolid sedan with an expensive purr to its engine. She wished whoever was inside would turn it off. It was a waste of gas and was making extra pollution in the air that Sacramento definitely didn’t need. “Spare the Air” days came around plenty without any extra help.
    Susan set her emergency brake—just in case—got out of the car, locked it, and let herself into her two-bedroom, one-bath ranch in the Arden-Arcade neighborhood.
    She liked it here. It didn’t take her long to get downtown, but the tree-lined streets made the ugliness she dealt with every day seem far, far away. Sometimes it even made the past seem far, far away.
    It was pretty far away. All that unpleasantness had happened years before. She’d practically been a girl, young and green and trusting. Not anymore. Those days were definitely gone.
    She took the badge from around her neck and dropped it in the bowl by the front door; her keys followed. She stowed her purse in the cabinet and plugged her cell phone into the charger. Her shoes went into the closet on a rack, and she put on her slippers.
    As she walked into the kitchen, her cat wound between her legs. She scooped him up and burrowed her face in his soft fur. “Hello, Patches, how are you tonight?”
    He replied with a little chirping meow. She set himdown next to his bowl and filled it with food, then filled up the kettle to make herself a cup of tea.
    The doorbell rang. She set the kettle on the burner, turned it on, and went back to the front door. Who would be ringing her doorbell at this time in the evening? A neighbor needing a favor? Certainly not a salesperson. Maybe one of those people out collecting for a cause.
    She peered through the peephole, but could make out only a square, distorted head. She opened the door and said, “Can I help you?”
    “Hello, Susan. Long time, no see.” He pushed into the house past her and locked the door.
    That was the moment that Susan Tennant realized that in trying to confront her past, she might have closed off her future.
“What I need,” Tina said to Veronica, rubbing her lower back, “is a big juicy code. Something dramatic that brings everyone running.”
    Veronica shook her head. “You are a sick puppy, you know that?” She turned back to the lab results she was entering in the chart.
    Tina grinned. “Yep, and you’re one, too. ’Fess up. You’re as big an adrenaline junkie as me, and it’s been too damn slow around here.”
    “Careful what you wish for,” Veronica warned her, but she knew what Tina meant. “Why don’t you go try to get Donny to shut up again? He’s cussing out those two women who brought their mother in. It’s not nice.”
    Donny was one of St. Elizabeth’s frequent fliers. He was a Vietnam vet living on disability who, on a fairly routine basis, got rip-roaring drunk and started threatening people downtown. He’d added the very special trick of using a broken bottle this time, so he was handcuffed to a gurney waiting for a psych consult in bay number 3. In bay number 2, two middle-aged sisters had brought in their mother, who had clearly had some kind of minor stroke.
    Every time the sisters started to talk, Donny let loose a string of obscene epithets, the most recent being “stupid retard fucking bitches.” Amazingly, the sisters found this hysterically funny—Veronica was glad to know someone else on the planet laughed inappropriately in times of great stress—and kept giggling. This was whipping Donny into grander and more elaborate strings of obscenities, which just made the sisters laugh harder.
    Another night of saving lives and defying Darwin one drunk at a