“Not today, sir,” he said, pulling out a folded white paper. “I have a formal notice here from the administration.”
“My daughter is in that room,” I said.
“Your visiting privileges have been suspended,” Barnes said. “The restraining order filed by the university includes the campus and all affiliated properties, including this clinic.”
He held the paper out, but I did not take it.
“I have a court order here, Mr. Walker. You need to step off the property,” the guard said.
I looked at the elevators. The metal doors opened, and a nurse in green scrubs walked out, pushing an empty wheelchair. The receptionist, a woman named Sarah who had smiled at me every morning for three weeks, kept her head down, typing rapidly on her keyboard.
“Who authorized this,” I asked.
“The hospital legal counsel,” Barnes said. “They don’t want any trouble here.”
I looked down at my hands. They were empty. My computer was in a police locker, my accounts were dead, and my daughter was six floors above me with no one to watch her door.
I turned toward the glass exit. The rain was coming down harder now, turning the parking lot into a gray sheet. I did not have an umbrella.
I walked out past the security desk, the heavy glass doors closing behind me with a soft hiss. The streetlights on the boulevard were turning on, casting long yellow lines across the wet concrete.
I stood on the wet pavement outside the hospital gates, watching the rain fall on my old boots.
The heater in Raymond’s salvage shed hummed like an old furnace, throwing the scent of kerosene and scorched metal into the cold corners of the room.
A paper map of the Oak Ridge campus lay flat across the heavy oak workbench, held down on the corners by grease-stained iron gears.
I traced the blue line of the campus perimeter road with my index finger, stopping at the eastern gate.
Raymond stood on the other side of the table, his deep, gravelly voice a familiar rasp in the quiet room.
