Chapter 3

"Does it now? You say it's been going on for a couple of days?"

"Yep, but its really getting bad today."

"You been running a fever too?"

"I think so," he said. "I haven't actually taken it or anything."

"Any discharge or anything else coming out of your penis?"

He nodded. "A little bit of blood in the piss and there's some white stuff that kind of oozes out. What do you think is wrong with me?"

"Well, I'm not a doctor, but it kind of sounds like you have a STD."

"A what?"

"A sexually transmitted disease," Jim translated. "You know, gonorrhea? The clap?"

Steve shook his head vehemently. "That's impossible," he said firmly. "I'm a married man. I haven't been fooling around. It has to be something else."

Jim shrugged. "Well in any case, it's something that you're gonna have to get looked at. Do you have a private doctor that you can call?"

"No. Can't you just take me to the hospital? This hurts!"

"I could do that," Jim agreed. "I was just trying to see if you had some alternate means of getting there."

"I don't think I could drive right now. You'd better take me in."

"Sure," Jim grunted. "Let's get you to the gurney."

They loaded him up and put him in the back of the ambulance. Jim climbed in after him. He did nothing for the man since there was nothing to be done. What Steve needed was a big shot of penicillin and a prescription for Peridium. He spent the trip filling out the patient care report and gathering billing information.

About halfway to VMC Steve looked up at him. "My wife's sister has been staying with us," he said hesitantly.

"Oh yeah?" Jim grunted, not moving his eyes from his paperwork.

"Yeah," he said. "She kind of... gets around if you know what I mean. And she... uh... told me that she's been having... discharge lately. From her... from her vagina."

"Really?"

"Yeah. And we use the same bathroom. Do you think that maybe I could've got this... you know, from the toilet seat or something?"

Jim looked at him pointedly. "Did you have sex with her on the toilet seat?" he asked.

"No!" the man yelled. "I told you, I don't fool around!"

"Well you couldn't have got it from there then," Jim informed him. He went back to his paperwork and had most of it finished by the time they backed into the VMC ambulance bay once again.

While the doctor was informing Steve that either he or his wife had some serious explaining to do, Jim hurriedly finished up the paperwork and left a copy of it with Steve's chart. He made it out the door just as Sydney was completing the task of putting the back of the ambulance back together. They spent a few minutes making crude jokes and remarks at their patient's expense - this was somewhat of a tradition in emergency medicine - and then Sydney announced that she had to go to the bathroom before they left.

"Can't forget the Golden Rule of EMS," she said as she headed inside. "Never pass a bathroom without peeing in it."

"That's right," Jim agreed. "You never know when you might end up on a SWAT team stand-by or something."

While he was waiting for her to come back, another ambulance backed in, this one belonging to Jan and her partner. The back doors flew open and Jan hopped out, a look of disgust on her face. "Come on out of there," she told her patient. "Let's get you inside before you die, okay?"

A middle aged, very overweight woman climbed out after her. She was wearing a filthy white T-shirt that was stained with a few drops of blood and a pair of yellow shorts that were about two sizes two small for her extra-wide butt. Her volleyball sized breasts jiggled alarmingly beneath her shirt at about stomach level. She was holding a piece of gauze against one of her fingers.

"Why don't you just go ahead and walk down to the waiting room there," Jan told her, pointing to the public entrance thirty feet away. "I'm gonna go in and tell the triage nurse about your finger."

"I gotta go to the waitin' room?" the woman asked, outraged at this. "I thought if I came in the ambulance they had to take me in right away!"

"You thought wrong hon," Jan said. "Go ahead and go down there now. They'll see you when they get around to it."

The woman stormed off, ranting under her breath about heartless ambulance drivers. She nearly ripped open the main door when she reached it.

"Another life saved huh?" Jim said when she was gone.

"Stupid bitch," Jan said, shaking her head. "She cuts her fucking finger while she's opening a can of cat food and demands to go in the ambulance because she's afraid she lost too much blood to take the bus. The cut's not even big enough to put stitches in. I'm so tired of these bullshit calls."

"Unfortunately, they never go away," Jim advised. "I've figured out over the years that the ratio is about one legitimate call for every five bullshit calls."

She nodded thoughtfully, her mind going back over her nine months of field experience. "That sounds about right," she concluded.

"Of course the ratio goes up on the night shift," he qualified. "After 10:00 at night it's more like ten to one. It can get as high as twenty to one around Mother's Day."

"Mother's Day?" she asked, puzzled. "What does that have to do with it?"

"Not Mother's Day in May," he told her, "Mother's Day at the first of each month. You know? When the welfare checks come out?"

"Oh!" she said, giggling a little at the reference. "Mother's Day. I get it."

"If you want to be successful in this business," he told her, "you'd better learn all the slang terms. You gotta be able to communicate to be effective you know."

Her eyes twinkled at his words. "Maybe you could give me a lesson sometime," she said. "I heard you're quite good at that one on one stuff."

"Maybe I could," he said, returning her gaze.

She actually blushed a little, something he wouldn't have thought her capable of based on her reputation. "Well," she said, "I guess I'd better go give report to triage before she passes out in there or something. See ya later." She turned to head to the ambulance entrance.

"Later," he hailed, watching her jiggle as she departed and imagining the possibilities. Yes, he could definitely enjoy getting into some of that. And it seemed like she might enjoy letting him in there.

Two calls later, as it was approaching 2:00 PM, Jim finally made it through the line at the post office and up to the service window. The clerk was a fortyish woman who had the thousand-yard stare of the career customer service employee. She looked at him and saw no one as he walked up. "Help ya?" she asked him.

He explained his predicament to her and her face never changed expression.

"Well that certainly sounds like a problem," she remarked when he was done.

"You think?" said Jim, who was quite testy by now. "So how about we figure out where my mail is being sent and work on getting it sent back to me?"

"I'll need to see some identification," she told him.

They used his driver's license and paramedic license card to establish that he was in fact Jim Michael Hartman of 2818 Big Oak Drive, apartment 237. Once that was done she accessed her computer terminal and punched in his address.

"According to this," she said, reading from the screen, "your mail is now being forwarded to a post office box."

"A post office box? I never rented a post office box. Where is it?"

She looked doubtful. "I'm not sure I can tell you that. That might be considered confidential information."

"Confidential information?" he said, his voice raising an octave. "It's my freaking mail. I think I have the right to know where it's being sent."

"I'd better check with my supervisor about that," she said. "Wait here a second."

"Could you make it quick?" he asked. "I could get a call at any second and have to leave and I don't want to have to wait in this stupid line again."

Quick turned out to be almost five minutes. Fortunately the Gods-that-be did not pick that time to send Medic 8 a call. She came back with a middle-aged man in a cheap suit trailing behind her. He was then forced to explain the entire story a second time.

"Well that certainly seems to be a problem," the supervisor said thoughtfully.

"So I've heard," Jim said. "So how about telling me where my mail is going now, huh?"

He seemed doubtful about this as well but finally agreed that maybe Jim did have a right to know. "It's going to PO Box 334 in Lemon Hill," he said.

"Uh huh," he said, "and just where might that particular PO Box be located."

"Well I don't know off the top of my head," he said. "I'd have to look it up on the computer."

Jim bit his lip a little, his hands clenching briefly and then releasing. "You seem to have a computer right in front of you," he said.

With a sigh he went about punching things in until the information was displayed for him. "That box is in a Mail Mania franchise store at 4400 Butane Avenue," he finally told him.

"I see," Jim said, getting all the confirmation that he needed as to who the culprit behind this was. As an eight-year paramedic he had a very good knowledge of the Heritage metropolitan area. As such he knew that that address was in North Heritage, just outside the city limits, less than two blocks from the skuzzy trailer park where his ex-wife Debbie lived with her mother.

"Do you know anyone who lives near there?" the supervisor asked. "When things like this happen, we've found that it is usually someone that the victim knows who..."

"Oh I know someone over there all right," he said. "Can you take the forward off so my mail comes back to my house now?"

He punched a few keys. "Done," he said.

"Very good. Now who do I talk to about pressing charges against this person? This is against the law, right?"

"Oh yes," he said. "It's tampering with the mail and mail theft. It's a federal offense. That's in addition to any state charges they might have incurred by misuse of the information that they gained."

"Good, so who do I talk to?"

"Well, I'll pass the information onto the postal inspector's office. They'll take a phone report from you in a week or so."

"A phone report?" he asked. "A week or so?"

"Well, they're really very busy working on mail scams and things like that," the supervisor said. "This wouldn't exactly be a high priority case."

"I see," he said slowly, not terribly surprised. He had had dealings with the state justice system on several occasions in the past in regard to Debbie's scams. Never had he achieved anything that could be termed satisfaction from it. And now, it appeared that the federal system was just as inept. "Well, set it up then," he told the supervisor, knowing that complaining and bitching would do no good. You took what you could get in this world. At least the underlying problem was solved.

"Let me get the form," the supervisor said. "And in the meantime, I'd suggest you examine any credit card accounts that this person might have accessed. That is usually why a person commits such a crime you know."

"Thanks," he said sourly, already suspecting what he was going to find.

He used the payphone outside the post office and called the 800 number on the back of his Visa card, the one credit card account that he had opened since the divorce. It had a $3500 limit on it and he only used it for extreme emergencies such as unexpected car repairs and things like that. He always paid it off as soon as he could and he knew for a fact that his last balance had been a nice, easy to absorb, 0 dollars. He also knew that the monthly statement was one of the pieces of mail that should have arrived during the period his mail was being diverted. He skipped through the automated options on the phone menu and went directly to an operator. After only ten minutes on hold he was able to explain what he needed and get the information back.

"So what're the damages?" Sydney asked when he finally climbed back in the rig.

"Thirty-three hundred dollars worth of charges in the last four days," he told her. "She hit up six different electronic stores, a couple of gas stations, and three grocery stores."

"Jesus," Sydney said, appalled at how easy it was for a crank addict to get into someone else's account. "What about the other cards? The ones that you're already paying off from the marriage?"

"Those have all been closed so there's no way she can reopen them in my name. Nope, she found a way to get at the one card that I have that she didn't know the number to. You gotta hand it to her, she's a smart little piece of skank."

"So what happens now?" Sydney wanted to know. "You're not responsible for all those charges are you?"

"No," he said. "It's more of an inconvenience than anything else. The card has been cancelled and reported stolen. I need to make a police report and when the credit card people get a copy of it they'll credit back my account and issue me a new card and a new number. This part I've been through before."

"And what will the cops do to her?"

"Not a goddamn thing. They'll stuff the report into the pending files of some computer somewhere and it'll rot there while the fraud detectives chase after insurance fraud criminals and all of those other people who dare to steal from a rich-ass corporation instead of a person. She'll never be arrested for it in my lifetime."

"That's a bitch," Sydney commiserated. "You ever thought of just killing her?"

"Can't afford the hit man or otherwise I would, believe me," he said. "Oh well, at least this particular crisis is over. Now I can go back to standing by and waiting for the next scam she pulls on me."

"You sure know how to pick 'em," she told him sympathetically. "If I ever find myself considering a romantic entanglement with a reformed crank addict, I'll think of you and stop myself."

"Right," he said, settling into his seat as they pulled out of the parking lot. "Reforms don't always last forever. Remember that if nothing else."

The rest of the shift was fairly uneventful, filled with fairly routine calls - at least as far as the word routine applied in such a business. They transported a man having chest pain to St. Vincent's, a woman who had been having abdominal pain for three days to VMC, and a 2 month old baby with an ear infection to Winton Memorial. Jim did not run into Medic 11 and Jan again. Since that particular unit ended its shift at 7:00 PM, fully an hour before Medic 8, he had no reason to think that he would see her again until the next time she worked.

But when they parked their rig in the deployment center at 7:45 that evening to turn it over to the night crew, there was Jan, hanging out near the supply room, chatting with some of the night shift crew members. She had taken off her uniform shirt and her large breasts were now prominently displayed in a dark blue T-shirt that was perhaps a size tighter than it really should have been. She smiled flirtatiously when she saw him.

He returned the smile, knowing somehow that she had waited around after her shift so she could talk to him. He felt the warm glow of a connection being made within him. She walked over as he stepped out of the cab.

"Hey Jim," she said, a small hint of shyness in her voice. "How was the shift?"

"Informational," he said, thinking of the revelations about his mail service. "What are you still doing here? Can't get enough of this place?"

"Oh... I was just hangin' out," she told him. "I was thinking about going to get a drink or something. You want to go over to the Lexington Club with me? My treat."

The Lexington Club was a nearby bar that was favored by off-duty EMTs and paramedics in the mood for a little alcoholic therapy after work (which was to say that it was favored by most of them). It was located in a strip mall adjacent to a liquor store, a convenience store, and a porno shop and was populated by just about every dreg of Lemon Hill society. The WLS employees seemed to fit in there pretty well. Jim, who had once been a fairly regular attendee at after work drinking sessions, had not been there since his marriage ended. Nor could he go there now, as much as he wanted to. "I can't," he told Jan apologetically. "I have to go get my daughter from day care and get her in bed for school tomorrow."

"Oh," she said, frowning a little. "That's too bad. It must be hard being a single father, huh?"

"It can be," he admitted with a shrug. "It does cut into my social life quite a bit. All and all it's worth it though. I wouldn't trade it for anything."

She beamed at his words. "That's so sweet," she said. "I bet you're a really good daddy."

"I've never had any complaints."

"That's what I've heard," she said, smirking a little. She took a deep breath, as if considering something. Finally, she said, "You know, I could really use that drink and I'm not really in the mood to hang out with the regular crowd over there."

"No?" he asked.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "The same old people, the same old thing, you know what I mean? Maybe you and I could still have that drink together though. I could go pick up something at the liquor store while you're picking up your daughter and then meet you at your place."

Jim was a little taken aback by her forwardness, though not in a negative sense. He hesitated for just a second, more out of surprise than anything else, and then nodded. "That... uh... sounds like a good idea. Let me give you my address."

She showed up at ten minutes after nine, about a half an hour after Brooke had been put to bed. Jim was pretty sure that the timing had been intentional, that she had known that he would not be too keen on having to explain the presence of a woman in his apartment to his daughter. He was grateful for her discretion as he let her in the door.

"I got us some wine coolers," she said, holding up a four-pack of glass bottles.

"Looks good," he told her, although he really didn't like wine coolers all that much. He showed her to the couch and invited her to sit while he took the wine coolers into the kitchen and put them into the refrigerator. He took two of them out and went back, sitting down next to her and handing her one.

"Thanks," she said, popping it open and taking a drink. She looked around at his apartment approvingly, not knowing that he had just been frantically running around trying to turn it from the messy-bachelor-and-young-daughter state into something that you would invite a woman into. He had thrown laundry into closets, toys behind the couch, books into the oven, and run the vacuum over the floor in record time. Now, everything appeared to be in place and soft music was issuing from the speakers on his cheap stereo system. "I like what you've done with the place."

He took a drink of his cooler, fighting back a wince at the cloying sweetness of the liquid. "I'm not much of an interior decorator," he told her, "but when you don't have much, you don't have much to screw up."