The Midnight Run

Angela Ferris built the transport program to keep her patients on the chair. Twenty-two years in dialysis taught her the only thing that kills a treatment schedule is a ride that does not come, so she found a contractor, signed the contract, and watched her missed-treatment numbers fall through the floor.

Then a line on a monthly reconciliation will not sit still. Unit 214, out at 11:40 every night, to a Progress Village address that stopped treating anyone two and a half years ago. Billed. Paid. Every night, for eleven months.

The driver has never picked anybody up. He keeps going anyway, and he has been writing it all down since the week the route appeared.

What Angela finds is not padded billing. The runs are real. The van goes somewhere, it comes back lighter, and the list of patients who were never in it is not a list of patients at all.

By the time she understands what the manifest is for, she has already signed her name to it eleven months ago, and the only place left to look is the passenger seat.