It’s a rainy day and I’m curled up in the passenger seat of the ambulance with an Agatha Christie novel when we get a call for a 17-year-old shot inside a fast-food chicken place on Nostrand Avenue.

“Crime is crime, it doesn’t matter where,” Bronson muses.

In the novel, “A Holiday for Murder,” an old British guy is murdered in a locked room while his family is gathered downstairs in the drawing room. Blood is everywhere.

“Yeah but this has class,” I say, dog-earing my page and looking up at the gloomy plastic storefronts streaked with rain. I sigh and shove the paperback into my shirt pocket. “Novels are better than reality.”

Bronson is not sure he agrees. “They make more sense, at any rate.”

We get to the location, and I sigh again, climb out of the ambulance, and haul out the oxygen bag, which is overstuffed with trauma dressings.

Dreary days exhaust me. There’s wet garbage on the sidewalk and a crowd outside the chicken joint. The ugliness of modern crime bores me. Because there’s no sophisticated cover-up? No carefully woven plot?

I get out my paperwork and greet a police officer. “Hey.”

He looks bored, too. “Hey,” he says. “Seventeen-year-old male shot in the leg.”

“Imagine that,” I say, dulled.

He sees the novel peeking out of my pocket and perks up. “Great book!”

I smile. “It would be a fun call, wouldn’t it?” Blood everywhere. A locked door. Witnesses reporting a blood-curdling scream. “If life were only like that,” I say, wistfully.

Inside the chicken joint, the 17-year-old is sitting in an orange vinyl booth with his leg up as blood drips onto the linoleum floor. It’s a decent bleed, not an artery though, just a vein. I check for an exit wound — find none — and slap a bandage onto the leg and secure it with a pressure dressing. Then I take his blood pressure. It’s fine, and so is his pulse.

I assist him into the ambulance as the cop jumps onboard. Once the kid is settled on the stretcher, I check the rest of his body for other injuries.

“What happened?” I ask. He just shrugs.

“Who did this?” the cop tries, though they’ve already gotten nowhere.

He repeats what he’s already said inside the chicken place. “The Bloods.”

“You a Crip?” I say.

He gives me his best altar boy look. “I ain’t no gang member.”

I realize I haven’t removed his nylon do-rag to check his head for injuries, but I don’t care.

“Was there anything in the restaurant to make a case?” I ask the cop.

Mysterious clues, I think, investigated by Scotland Yard: An unexplained snippet of pink balloon. Too much blood. And a phrase uttered by a family member: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

Nowadays, clues aren’t called “clues,” they’re called “evidence,” and are gathered by evidence collection officers and studied by forensics experts in labs. Something has been lost, I think, if only in the language of crime. Passionate blood-libel reduced to tedious courtroom drama.

The cop grins at me. “I’m so tempted to tell you the ending,” he says, pointing to my book.

Right now, I’m so starved for drama, I’d even settle for “CSI.” Then I think maybe a witness can offer something interesting. Anything at all.

“Did anybody see what happened?” I ask the cop.

He laughs. “Yeah, right, like the crowd at the chicken joint is going to speak up.”

The banality of this is depressing. To make matters worse, we’re off to Kings County Hospital — probably the only chilling aspect of modern crime: From a distance, it looks like a decrepit Gothic sand castle rising up from a modern ghetto. Inside, however, it’s all fluorescent glare and linoleum, another modern reality just screaming for Prozac. I look at the freak show around me — heroin addict vomiting, obese woman exposing herself — and wish a crime author could somehow capture this.

We transfer the kid to a hospital gurney, and the Caribbean triage nurse notices the book peeking out of my pocket. “That the one where the guy commit suicide but he make it look like a murder?”

Of course she read British mysteries on her tropical island.

“No,” I explain. “In a locked room while everybody’s gathered downstairs.”

She laughs. “Oh them British are nasty.” She turns to the 17-year-old and gets down to brass tacks. “Now. Why you be gettin’ shot in the leg?”

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician on an ambulance in Brooklyn. This column details her observations and experiences. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.