Chapter 8: Two Charts

Dom drove.

He did it with one hand, fast, down the bluff in the rain.

His other hand stayed on my knee the whole way, and neither of us mentioned it.

My blouse was buttoned wrong. I didn't fix it.

There was a police cruiser outside the clinic with its lights going blue across the wet brick.

Carmela was under the awning in a raincoat over her pajamas, with her son asleep on her shoulder, wrapped in a Chiefs blanket.

"I was driving home from my mom's," she said. "The front was dark, but the back door was swinging."

The back door had been pried. Fresh splinters stuck out of the frame.

A patrol officer with a notebook walked me through my own clinic.

Operatory one was fine.

Two and three were fine.

Nobody had touched the drugs cabinet, and it was locked with a cheap padlock a child could open.

"Doesn't look like addicts," the officer said. "They go straight for the drugs."

The front office was a mess.

Every drawer of the file cabinets was open.

Paper charts on the floor, in a fan, like somebody had pulled them out by the handful and kicked through them.

The desk drawer was open too, the one where I kept the backup drive for the computer.

The drive was gone.

I got down on my knees and started picking up charts.

"Ma'am, we'll need to know what's missing."

"I know," I said. "I'm finding out."

It took Carmela and me two hours.

Dom carried her sleeping son to the couch in the waiting room and sat beside him.

He put the charts we handed him in order without being asked.

At three in the morning we had every chart back in its drawer.

Two were missing.

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