There Will Be Shenanigans

It seems like my weekends before going on vacation are always the most eventful.

Friday night I was going to have an embarrassingly easy night -- nothing hospitalized at all, five dogs to walk and one cat.

Then around 10 pm someone rang the doorbell - never my favorite thing. I dashed upstairs and saw what looked like three teenage boys on the front porch, cupping their hands to the window to see in.

"What do you need?" I hollered through the thick door.

"My dog's hurt!" one of them answered.

"We're closed," I told them, "There's a 24-hour place on the sign on the wall."

I then retreated into Tery's office to watch their departure on the security camera. It was surprisingly long in coming for a medical emergency. I watched the kids roam around the lot, one of them speaking on a cell phone, another walking the length of the building down to the fence surrounding the exercise yard, another just lingering by my car.

I could see at least one more in the SUV, but no sign of anyone else or even a dog for that matter, as the windows were tinted darker than what seemed legal.

I didn't like it, not one little bit.

I tried peeking through the blinds to get a license plate. They must have seen me, because they immediately trotted back to the door and started pounding.

I went back, repeating, "There are no doctors here. We're closed. There's an emergency facility listed on the sign," and I tried pointing in the appropriate direction, since they really seemed to be having a hard time understanding.

They hung around another five minutes after that. Just as I was speaking to the police, they suddenly jumped into the SUV and drove off.

Despite me saying, "Oh never mind, they're leaving," a black & white actually pulled up within five minutes.

I invited the officer in to view the security tape. Naturally the remote's batteries were dead, and navigating the menus with the buttons on the machine was tricky enough without a cop staring at me and the suspects getting farther away with each passing second.

I finally brought up the footage and we watched it together. His first comment was, "They look like gang members, don't they?" The term "gang member" to me evokes images of tattoos, leather and unconcealed weapons. These kids, in their baggy sky blue T-shirts and khakis, could have been a local church group on a field trip to my untrained eye, except for the skulking suspiciously around the building part. It was the matching shades of blue that made him arrive at this conclusion. I learn something new every day.

We watched it right to the point where they hightailed it suddenly for no apparent reason. They actually backed the vehicle straight up to one of the cameras in a K-turn, but disappointingly the quality is nowhere close to good enough to read the plate (even after I fiddled with some of the monitor settings tonight in a last-ditch effort to break the case wide open).

He said he believed they were a gang looking for hospitals to break into, and that "when it heats up, they hit everybody." He took my statement, which I felt was kind of lame given I had only really seen them face-to-face through the heavily frosted glass of the door. All I could say for sure was one had shoulder-length blond hair. Oh, and of course the white SUV with tinted windows -- I realized driving into work tonight that white SUVs are incredibly common, followed closely by white SUVs with tinted windows. (Scientific study: On the way home at 5 am I counted 25 white SUVs, and that was an extremely random sample. Ten of them were on the hospital's street -- it's practically the official car of South Sheridan. Five of them were on our street, three more in our parking lot alone.)

These are kids supposedly desperately seeking medical attention for their dog. These are some select shots taken over an approximately 15-minute time period (by me. The video records continously). I didn't care at all for how the blond stroked my car in the last shot

He said he'd have the cops on the beat looking. I said I was going to be there all night and asked for an increased presence. I then escorted him to the door with a dorky comment about this happening because I was going on vacation Monday, which he didn't respond to. Despite never so much as stealing a pack of gum in my life, cops make me inexplicably nervous -- like one verbal misstep and they'll start pistolwhipping me. And I've noticed, at least in my case, that the harder and the more consciously you attempt not to look suspicious, the more spectacularly you will fail.

I detailed the entire event to Tery, who forbade me to walk any dogs the next morning just in case the youts (movie reference, anyone?) came back and realized they might be able to jump the fence. She also ordered me to release Beowulf, the fairly ferocious German shepherd who nonetheless likes me, loose in the hospital at the first sign of additional shenanigans. Had I known I was in for such an adventure, I would have brought him upstairs with me the first time.

I beseeched the dogs, on this of all nights, not to bark without a damn good reason. But dogs are still whiny bitches, and don't care much if their sudden outburst at 2 am into an otherwise silent building is enough to give me heart palpitations. Stupid, stupid dogs (except Beowulf).

Not a terribly restful night followed, but there was no more sign of the youts - which I personally attribute to the presence of a mystery truck owner who has been parking here the past few weekends.

The first weekend I noticed him I kind of freaked out. Suddenly I looked at the monitor and there was this big blue Tundra parked so close behind my car it might have been touching it. I snuck around in the dark, trying to see if there was anyone inside. I did get a license plate on him, which I could see clearly from the doctor's office.

I called the police to have them check it out, because it seemed awfully peculiar -- I mean, just parked so damn close to my car when the whole lot was empty (not that he should be using the lot anyway, but sometimes people park here when Taco Junior across the street is full).

I went back through the security tape (what on earth did we do on the nght shift before security cameras?) and saw him park, get out and walk down the street. I noticed the vehicle was pretty tricked out, custom rims, shiny and clean. This man obviously loved his truck and, for some reason, deemed our parking lot (and more specifically two inches behind my beat-to-hell Honda) the safest place on the street.

I called the police back and cancelled the drive-by, believing him to be harmless. At 3 am when he was still there I started worrying a tad, like about how I was going to leave at the end of my shift if I turned out to be wrong. Then at 3:30 he disappeared, a little too late to be eating Mexican or even be at a bar (they both close by 2).

He's appeared every weekend since, always parking directly behind me and disappearing by 3:30. Tery doesn't like it, but it makes me feel safer -- makes it look like there's more than just me here in the hospital. After Friday night she wonders if he was in cahoots with my young visitors, but I argued if he was casing the joint, there were less conspicous locations.

Saturday night he was back. I also got tired of listening to Beowulf shuffling restlessly in his cage and let him out despite being sans shenanigans. I gave him free run of the entire hospital, and I must say, listening to him pacing back and forth upstairs soothed me more than ten alarm systems. He was my biggest fan, stopping by occasionally to snuffle my hair or let me pet him. Tery tells me the girls on the day shift are terrified to even open his cage (he growls at them), so he probably doesn't get too much exercise then.

I decided on the spot I would let him patrol like this every time he boards (which is more often than you'd think, his owner is constantly going on month-long business trips).

I'm mostly sharing this story so that people like kavieshana, who think my occasional anxiety working here is a bit of an overreaction, realize that sometimes it is very firmly based in reality.

~*~

Tomorrow, I am on vacation -- a three-day whirlwind trip to New York. There will be hooking up with my sister, the awesome minikitkatgirl and swankyfunk, much walking and experiencing of the City, and perhaps later on a taking in of Equus. I'm pretty damn excited, yo.