True-Life Adventure

and saw Sardis kneeling beside me. I was lying on the pier. So was Koehler. A resuscitation team was working on him. Suddenly someone hollered again: “He’s breathing. It’s okay. He’s breathing.”
    Maybe I smiled. At least I tried to. He was going to the green room.
    I went to sleep again.
    I had a lot of dreams about frolicking animals, some with funny headlights. Someone was singing in my dreams. My mother. The way she used to when I was a kid. It was a song about pretty little horses. “One will be black,” she sang, “and one will be white and one will be the color of Paulie’s shoe.” It was a weird dream for a grown man.
    When I woke up, my chest was still killing me. I was in a hospital room. Sardis was there.
    “Are you okay?” I said.
    She nodded. “Smoke inhalation. Treated and released. The same for Susanna and Freddie. The tape’s safe, by the way. Freddie wouldn’t go down the ladder until the firemen let him throw the Minicam into a net.”
    “How about Koehler?”
    “He’s not going anywhere. He hit the water wrong— broke both his legs. How do you feel?”
    “I was afraid you’d ask that. I don’t think I want to talk about it.”
    “Oh, don’t be a baby.”
    She left and came back with a man in white. “This is Dr. Patella— the resident who took care of you.”
    Patella grinned. “How you doin’, guy?”
    “Chest hurts.”
    “Two broken ribs. No lung puncture. No sweat.”
    “Yeah?” All of a sudden I felt great. Two broken ribs? Hell, that was nothing. It took a lot to get Mcdonald down. Raging fires, freezing oceans… hell of a lot.
    “Yeah. Also, smoke inhalation and exposure. Minor bruises. Nothing much at all. You could walk out of here right now.”
    “I don’t think I want to.” I didn’t feel that great.
    Patella nodded. “Want some Demerol?”
    “Don’t mind if I do.”
    He left and a nurse came with a shot. I drifted in and out for the next several hours, mostly sleeping but thinking sometimes, too. That song about the little horses kept running through my head.
    Sardis was still there when I came out of it. She said, “Do you feel up to seeing Susanna and Freddie?”
    “They’re here? Absolutely.” I sat up, painfully, while she went to get them. Susanna and Freddie were just the people I wanted to see, along with Sardis. The four of us had things to talk about.
    Susanna looked worried, but Freddie seemed on top of the world. “Tape’s great,” he said. “Couldn’t be better. I even got you going through the window. But look here, there’s one thing I never understood. How did you know Koehler was the murderer?”
    “I could tell by the way he kept trying to kill me.”
    “Huh?”
    “I went to see him at Kogene, saying I was Charlie Haas from the Wall Street Journal. When I got home, somebody in a small, light-colored car tried to run me down. It was Koehler.”
    “You saw him?”
    I shook my head. “It took me a long time to figure it out. But here’s what tipped me— when I went back to Kogene several days later, he didn’t say a word about my misrepresenting myself. He just accepted me as Paul Mcdonald of the Chronicle, which means he knew who I was all the time. To take the tour of Kogene, I left my coat in his office. It had all my I.D. in it. I presume he went through it, discovered I was the man in the Examiner story— the man he wanted to kill— and set briskly about it.”
    “I still don’t get it.”
    “My address, you see, wasn’t in the Examiner. And I’m not listed in the phone book. But it’s on my driver’s license, which he saw. There’s lots of ways to get it and lots of people who could do it, but it comes down to this: If you were president of a multimillion-dollar high-tech company and someone misrepresented himself to get an interview and you found out about it, wouldn’t you confront him with it?”
    Freddie nodded. “Unless I didn’t want him to know I knew.”
    “Koehler didn’t. He slipped when he forgot I was supposed to be Haas, that’s all. Anyway, the light car tried to run me down, but a dream I had made me remember something else— a dark car followed me and chased me also.”
    “So? Does Koehler have two cars?
    “I don’t know. But I think we’ve got to check that and a few other things before we turn our case over to Blick.”
    Sardis stopped me. “Too late. Freddie and Susanna just spent several painful hours with him. I have a feeling you and I are next.”
    “Let’s