“Push! Push, yeah! Here we go, head’s out. Now push those shoulders out right quick.” Xavier’s hands are busy at the woman’s crotch, Abe glances and sees a wet blood-and-mucus-streaked baby, rubbery-looking red in X’s black hands, just about clear of her, sliding out the last part of the way. Amazing. Xavier starts working on the umbilical cord and the placenta. He flicks the infant on the side and it wails. “Here, Abe, take it.” Abe crouches and is handed a baby. Wet, warm, sticky. It hardly weighs a thing, and its whole head fits in one hand easily.

“A little hemorrhaging,” Xavier remarks, frowning.

“Hey—when do I push!”

“You’re done, lady. The kid is born.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me!” The woman takes a weak swing at the air. “What kind of doctor are you, anyway? Hey! Boy or girl?”

“Umm…” Abe checks. “Boy, I think.”

“You think?” the woman demands. She and Xavier laugh. “What you got here, spade, some kind of medical student or something?”

“Come on,” Xavier says. “We’ve still got to get to the hospital. Lady, can you hold the kid on top of you while we carry you downstairs?”

She nods, and they arrange the little creature on the wet T-shirt, in her arms. It makes quite a picture—messy, but … good.

As they maneuver her down the stairs, however, shooing the neighborhood kids ahead of them, the woman fades a little. She lets the kid slip off to the side; they have to drop the stretcher and grab the baby fast before it goes over the railing and into the dumpsters. Thump, thump, the stretcher and the woman land half on Xavier, who almost falls down the stairs; he has to sit fast to avoid it. “Lady, what are you doing?”

“Who are you guys anyway! Trying to kill me! Give me my kid back!”

“Try holding on to it this time, okay?” X is disgusted. “Little tip for mothers, I give to you free—don’t drop your kid into trashbins when you can help it.”

They make it down the stairs and to the truck. Xavier jumps in back with her, Abe drives them off toward St. Joe’s.

Xavier calls out from the ambulance chamber. “Make it snappy, Abe, I can’t really get the compresses up where the bleeding is.”

“You damn well better not try!” Abe hears the woman say sharply. “It was one of your spade brothers knocked me up in the first place.”

“Uh-huh. You just relax, lady, and shut up if you can. I’ll keep a hold on myself.”

X sticks his head through the window, into the cab beside Abe. “Ungrateful bitch.”

“So you’ve done deliveries before?” Abe asks.

“Yeah, couldn’t you tell? That was the real midwife touch, there.”

“I see. Was this one unusual?”

“Awful fast.”

“That’s what you think!” the woman cries from the back.