The Ambulance Made Two Trips

Detective Sergeant Fitzgerald is chasing Big Jake Connors, a racketeer who seems untouchable by conventional means. But when Fitzgerald uncovers the truth behind the strange accidents befalling everyone who tries to hurt Jake, he finds something far stranger than police corruption: Brink, a businessman armed with a psi unit that manipulates probability itself. Anyone who aims violence at Big Jake watches that violence boomerang back in absurd, catastrophic ways. Pants catch fire. Cars crash. The ambulance makes two trips. Fitzgerald must navigate a world where the universe seems to enforce its own twisted justice, and where catching the crook might mean understanding forces that defy explanation. Murray Leinster's 1960 short story blends hardboiled crime noir with psionic science fiction in a way that feels genuinely ahead of its time: darkly funny, unexpectedly philosophical, and utterly unafraid to ask what happens when fate itself takes sides.