Free Ask the Right Question by Michael Z. Lewin

She knew I meant—not safe if I was arrested.
    â€œYou expect trouble?”
    â€œNo, but it can’t hurt to be prepared.” The young couple cooed and chortled. They had won a free game.
    â€œAll right, boy. Take care though.”
    â€œI will, Ma.” I don’t often go to Ma’s just to eat, but when I do I get the strange feeling of being like a cop. I leave without paying.

10
    The Fishman Clinic turned out to be a modern, rather small one-story building on Route 100 near the Nora Shopping Center. Nora is now just part of the sprawling north-side suburbs of Indianapolis.
    I drove past the clinic going west and turned into the shopping center.
    At night the problem was not to get a parking space, but to get one in the midst of enough cars that mine would not be left unshielded when the stores started closing. If I was delayed too long inside, my car would be sitting naked on the field of asphalt. Patrol cops are suspicious of that, especially if they have been on the patrol for a while and know which cars belong to shop staff. Cops get promotion brownie points for their arrests. I very much preferred not to become the night’s brownie point. Although getting caught would not be disastrous. I do have some friends who can get me out of small-time trouble. It’s just life is so much easier if you don’t get caught at your illegal doings. Cops—except the few I knew fairly well, like Jerry Miller who I went to high school with—are just strangers carrying guns.
    And I don’t like guns. I don’t carry them.
    I shot a man once while I was working for the Tomgrove Security Company in 1957. It was near the end of my tether with them—I spent three and a half years—and I was still young and foolish. They told me to carry a gun, so I did.
    I was assigned to catch a man who had been pilfering things at night from a construction site. When I did, he smacked me in the face with a board. Only not hard enough because it didn’t knock me out. So I plugged him. Not dead, but just dead enough to kill something in me.
    Of the various stores in the Nora Shopping Center I decided the drugstore was the most likely to stay open late. I waited ten minutes just to get a space right in front of it. When I had parked, I took the equipment out of the car. Camera, electronic flash, gloves, penlight, a few simple picks and my little tripod stool with a string on it. I walked through the parking lot’s shadows to the nearby clinic.
    I headed for the back, I was fairly confident. It was not the type of clinic I figured would do a large business with addicts of various sorts, so probably it didn’t keep any sizable store of exciting drugs.
    The key was the kind of security arrangements Fishman felt appropriate. My knowledge of alarms was solid, but a little out-of-date. I knew them pretty well when I was a security man, but if he was one of those device-oriented suburban doctors, I was in trouble.
    As I waxed cowardly, I examined the windows on the back side of the building. I picked what I thought was a bathroom window—higher than the others.
    I had one thing going for me, the place had lots of windows. The installation cost of covering them all electrically, plus doors and cabinets, would be huge. I just hoped Fishman hadn’t had lots of money when he built the joint. All I needed now was a doctor in business for his health.
    I opened the tripod stool underneath the high window. I took the free end of the string tied to its leg and I attached it to my belt. I examined the window with my penlight. I saw no traces of devices. I went at it.
    One of my picks and a little muscle slipped the window catch. I was inside. I pulled the stool up to the window ledge by its string and carefully knocked off the dirt clinging to its legs. Then I brought it inside.
    If I had tripped an alarm, it was silent. I closed the window. A quick pan with the penlight showed me the details of a