True-Life Adventure
speech that he was of the homosexual persuasion. (Believe me, I don’t think all gays are prissy, but this guy was femme. Or whatever they call it.) And from the way he was carrying on about Georgie, I figured Rumler was too. Probably had a wimpy voice like this character’s.
So I started speaking in a cracked half-whisper, like I really did have a cold. “Believe me, I’d be home if I could. I’ve got an emergency. I’ve got my hands pretty full and don’t have time to look up the chart number.”
“What’s the name? I’ll feed it to the computer.”
“Terry Koehler.”
A moment passed and then he said, “Got it.”
“I’ll send the new guy over.”
“Okay, Doc. You take care of that cold now.”
I hung up. “It worked.”
“Of course it worked. Booker the Burglar always comes through.”
Booker looked more the messenger type than I did, so we decided he should make the pickup.
Per Erin’s directions, we went to the left side of Ambulatory Care, where, surrounded by dense evergreens, we found a stairway leading down from the sidewalk to the plaza Erin mentioned.
And that plaza, let me tell you, was something to see. The med center was on top of a hill on a street called Parnassus, and so the plaza, even though it was on the basement floor of the building next door and ten or twelve feet below the sidewalk, was a steep cliff at the other end. It had a banister around it, being an urban cliff, but it was still a wild and spectacular thing. It showed you all the lights of the city, and some across the bay as well.
Mesmerized, I walked back to the banister, Booker following. For the moment I’d forgotten the serious work of burgling and I honestly believe he had too. That plaza was something else.
But there’s only so long you can look at lights, so in a few minutes we ambled back to Ambulatory Care. Booker went up to the glass door and knocked or rang a bell or something, and I stayed a few feet away, just out of sight, still staring at the view.
Somebody came to the door, and I barely paid attention to what happened next, I had so much faith in Booker. But to the best of my recollection, there was an exchange something like this:
“Hi. I’m here to pick up Terry Koehler’s chart. For Dr. Rumler.”
“Poor Dr. Rumler! What a time for an emergency.”
“He’ll be all right. I think he sounds worse than he feels.”
For some reason, I turned in their direction then, and what I saw was not reassuring. The medical librarian looked terrified. He tried to push the door shut.
But Booker had his foot in it. He grabbed for the chart, but the librarian, a split second ahead of him, jerked it out of his way, turned tail, and started running down the corridor.
“Let’s go,” Booker hollered, and opened the door a little wider.
I followed him into Ambulatory Care, no longer ambling at all. I hadn’t figured out what scared the librarian; I just knew he was moving fast.
That basement floor was as spooky a place as you’d want to be in the middle of the night while committing a felony. Mostly, its walls were a sort of dull orange, which wasn’t the spooky part, but the orange sections alternated with big hunks of aggregate concrete, which was. These concrete parts kind of stuck out— maybe they were meant to resemble half-pillars or something, but the effect was more cave-like than classically elegant.
As he ran, the librarian hollered: “Help! Joe! Joseph! Call the cops!” So clearly the thing to do was to get to Joe.
The librarian was in the lead. Booker was gaining on him, and I was gaining on both of them when I passed a door with a window in it and happened to glance in. What I saw was a room with bookshelves to the ceiling, arranged like stacks in a library and jammed with manila file folders. A vast, cavernous room. Near the door were a few tables, and seated at one of them was a young man dialing a telephone. I surmised that this, at last, was the long-sought Medical Records. I also surmised that if I didn’t get my ass in there fast, it was going to get thrown in the Big House.
I didn’t want to add assault to my crimes, so I figured the best approach was the lightning instilling of fear. You and I know I’m gentle as a gerbil, but I look a lot more like a bear and Joe there might have been the guy I talked to on the phone— he had the body to go with the voice. I crashed through the door, raised my arms in an ersatz karate pose, jumped up in the air, and
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