Chapter 27:
The Midnight Ambulance
The transfer order was placed on the desk.
The woman’s hand stopped when she reached the signature.
Hoa leaned closer and read it again.
The signature looked familiar, almost real, but the final
stroke curved upward in the wrong direction.
She had prepared countless documents for that person to
sign. She had watched that name take shape on paper hundreds of times.
She knew the real signature curved downward at the end, not
upward.
All the scattered pieces inside her mind suddenly came
together into something horrifying.
A blind young man had been placed inside a psychiatric
facility.
Now, in the middle of the night, they were ordering him
transferred to an unnamed facility with no expectation that he would ever
return.
They did not intend to treat him.
They wanted him to disappear.
Hoa released the paper and gripped the edge of the desk with
both hands.
After so many years as Mai Ngoc’s private secretary, she had
grown accustomed to standing silently in the shadows and doing her duty.
Her employer had not been a completely good person.
For the sake of Vinh An Hospital, Mai Ngoc had closed her
eyes and helped with things that should never have happened.
Hoa knew all of it.
But she also knew another truth, one she had decided to
carry with her to the grave.
On that fateful night, Hoa had quietly followed Mai Ngoc.
Her employer had gone to an apartment that people had long
whispered was where her husband kept his mistress, Linh Chi.
Hoa parked outside and waited behind the wheel.
She did not know what had happened high above her.
She only heard a noise from inside the building. It sounded
like someone crying out, a sound she knew she would never forget for the rest
of her life.
She got out of the car and quietly moved closer.
Then she froze.
Two figures were bending over Mai Ngoc’s body.
One was Minh Quan.
The other was his mistress, Linh Chi.
Hoa pressed herself behind a wall, trembling so badly that
she had to try several times before she managed to press the camera button on
her phone.
She photographed the two of them carrying the body, forcing
it into the trunk, covering it with a tarp, and driving away into the night.
She had not witnessed the moment Mai Ngoc fell.
The photographs in her possession could prove only one
thing. Minh Quan had concealed the death of his own wife.
Hoa had not seen who pushed Mai Ngoc, and she did not dare
guess.
But what she had seen was enough to place a death sentence
on her head if those killers ever discovered that she had witnessed it.
Hoa stayed awake all night after returning home.
She thought about taking the photographs to the authorities,
then shuddered.
Who was she?
She was only a secretary, alone, with no money, no
influence, and no one to protect her.
On the other side stood an entire corporation.
Lawyer Bach was the only person she thought she might be
able to trust, but she had heard that even he was beginning to lose his nerve
in the face of Minh Quan’s power.
The investigation unit was filled with Truong Sinh’s
informants.
If she stepped forward then, she would be no different from
a moth flying into a flame.
So Hoa buried the photographs and returned to work with her
head lowered, as though she had never seen anything.
But now her employer’s nephew was being pushed toward death.
He had not killed anyone.
He was pitiful and completely innocent. His life had already
held too much suffering, and Hoa did not want him to endure another tragedy.
If she remained silent tonight, he would disappear from this
world just as his parents and Mai Ngoc had.
Hoa would spend the rest of her life carrying the weight of
that guilt.
At nearly one in the morning, an ambulance rolled through
the rear gate of the psychiatric treatment facility, its warning lights turning
silently.
A woman in a medical coat stepped out with a stack of
documents in her hand.
“We’re here to collect the patient being transferred from
Room 407. The order came down urgently. You received notice, didn’t you?”
The sleepy guard glanced at the paper.
He had heard that there was a transfer order for the patient
in Room 407. Now there were documents and a signature, so no one bothered to
check whether they were genuine.
With orders from above contradicting one another all night,
no one thought it strange that an ambulance had arrived half an hour early.
“The patient in Room 407? Wait a moment.”
A few minutes later, Khai Minh heard the lock open.
A woman bent close to his ear and whispered.
“Don’t say anything. Lie still and pretend you’re still
unconscious. I’m getting you out.”
His body stiffened.
It had been a long time since anyone had addressed him as
young master in such a respectful voice.
He recognized Hoa, Mai Ngoc’s secretary, and obeyed.
They placed him on a stretcher and fastened a strap across
his chest. Hoa pushed him into the corridor.
The wheels rattled across the tiled section of the floor,
then grew quiet exactly where he had memorized the softer surface over the past
several nights.
Cold wind rushed against his face.
For the first time in more days than he could count, Khai
Minh knew he was outdoors.
The ambulance doors closed.
The vehicle rolled out through the gate and disappeared into
the darkness.
After they had traveled some distance, Khai Minh finally
spoke.
“Secretary Hoa?”
The woman remained silent.
“Why are you saving me?”
“I owed your aunt a debt. Mai Ngoc.”
Khai Minh went still.
“I don’t know how many terrible things she did.”
Hoa’s voice dropped.
“But there is one thing I know for certain. She did not die
by your hand. Someone framed you.”
Something caught in Khai Minh’s chest.
For seven years, he had grown accustomed to the entire city
turning its back on him. Whenever he opened his mouth, they called him a madman
and a murderer.
Yet tonight, in the middle of the night, inside a vehicle
heading to an unknown place, a woman had told him something he himself had
almost stopped daring to believe.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Hoa removed her coat and placed it around his shoulders.
Then she pressed a white cane into his hand.
“Put this on to keep warm. We’ll decide what to do after we
get out of the city.”
Khai Minh tightened his grip around the cane.
He was about to say more when he heard Hoa draw a sharp
breath from the front.
A blinding light swept across the side of the ambulance.
Then tires screamed against the road.
A black car shot out from nowhere and stopped across the
road directly in front of them.
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