Extreme Vinyl Café Read Online Free PDF Page A

half right. Dave was not in a taxi. But he did have the cake in his lap. He had eaten every second shrub.
    Half an hour later the little golf course had shrunk from nine to seven holes, the marzipan foursome was a twosome and Dave was eyeing their little golf cart. And that was when he spotted the emergency phone. It didn’t fill him with hope. There was no dial. It was covered in dust. He picked it up and brought it to his ear.
    T he headquarters of ProCor Security Inc. is not what you would expect if all you knew of them was their shiny web page. Their web page features pictures of high-rises, and fit men in well-fitting uniforms, and a dog leaping over a fence, and a con-trol panel that looks like the command centre for a space flight.
    The headquarters of ProCor Security is actually in the middle of a shabby industrial part of town, in a tiny cinderblock building with a flat roof and a peeling woodensign. It looks more like the office of an auto repair shop than the headquarters of a security firm.
    On Saturday evening, when Dave picked up the emergency phone, ProCor Security, the other end of that phone, and therefore Dave’s only salvation, was in the hands of a university student. The student, a part-time employee, was beginning his second-ever overnight shift. And he was stretched across three office chairs in front of the surveillance panel, so deeply asleep that he wasn’t only snoring, he was drooling. The hands that were holding Dave’s life were tucked under his head.
    The student had been trained the previous night by the woman who had the shift before him. She had been in a hurry to leave. His training lasted less than fifteen minutes. She showed him the computer and said nothing about phones.
    So when a phone began to ring, it took the student by complete surprise. He sat up with a jerk and looked around. He was so dopey with sleep he couldn’t figure out where the ringing was coming from.
    When he finally opened the cupboard on the far side of the room, he almost fell over. There wasn’t a phone in there. There were fifty phones in there—all of them attached to the wall, all of them red, all of them missing their dials. They looked like the kind of phones you might use to launch a missile strike. Except for the dust. They were all covered in dust.
    There were so many of them it was impossible to tell which one was ringing. The student started picking the phones up at random. Before he found the right one, the ringing stopped. It took him awhile to get back to sleep after that.
    About an hour passed before the phone rang again. This time he ran to the cupboard right away. This time he got the right phone on the fifth ring.
    “Hello?” he said.
    The student was as surprised as Dave to find someone on the other end of the line.
    “Who are you?” the student asked.
    “I am stuck in an elevator,” said Dave. Then just to be sure this person on the phone understood the severity of his situation, he added, “with Mary’s cake.”
    “Where?” said the student.
    “In the elevator,” said Dave. “I’m all alone in here.”
    “Which elevator?” said the student.
    “How many elevators are there?” said Dave.
    “I don’t know,” said the student. “I’m new.”
    Dave explained about the house on the mountain and the cake and the party.
    “I know where I am going,” said Dave. “But I don’t where I am.”
    The student said, “Is this like a test or something?”
    A n awful thought came over Dave. He wasn’t talking to a security guard in Montreal. He was talking to a call centre in Mumbai.
    Dave said, “Are you in Mumbai?”
    The student said, “Are you in Mumbai?”
    Dave said, “I’m in Montreal. You’ve got to get me out of this elevator.”
    The student said, “This is just my second shift. I’ve never done this before. I can’t roll trucks if I don’t know where youare. We get fined. Call me back when you know where you are.” And he hung up.
    D ave stood in his elevator