Two patrol cars came into the alley behind me within seconds, and it was over quickly after that.

The men were ordered down and cuffed.

And when the officers searched their unmarked van, they found what those three men had been sent to do — the equipment to sedate a helpless old man and carry him off against every medical order, and, on one of their phones, a message from Ryan with the coordinates of an abandoned farmhouse hours outside the city.

Ryan had paid them to make my father disappear before he could ever speak to a prosecutor.