by Max Brand
When he got to McGuire’s, Hanlon drew him straight into the back room.
Hanlon said, as they sat down to beer: “Now listen, Doc. McGuire wants to talk to you. He says you could vote the precinct.”
“I could what?” asked Kildare.
“You don’t know what people around here think of you. When you go down the street, does anybody speak? The bums along the pavement, I mean?”
“Yes,” said Kildare. “They come over to the accident room, too, and ask for me. Yes, they all seem to know me.”
“You been a coupla years around here. You’ve taken care of a hundred dirty bums, and they’ve talked about you. You wouldn’t take money. You could vote the precinct,” said Hanlon. “They all know you’re a guy that’s done something for nothing. McGuire says: ‘Chuck the regular line. Throw in with him.’ He can get you five thousand the first year, besides gravy. And then eight thousand, ten thousand and right on up. And twice as much on the side.”
“I’m only an interne,” said Kildare.
“What are you thinking of, with that dreamy look?” asked Hanlon.
“I’m thinking of an apartment all done in French-gray,” said Kildare.
“Aw, hell!” laughed Hanlon. “You could have ten like that. I mean, McGuire wants to cut you in on something rich. By the way, why don’t you come see us? My wife gives me a temperature talking about you.”
“I’d like to see you both,” said Kildare, “but tell McGuire I’m not a politician. I’m an interne.”
“You want the stuff but you’re afraid to take it. Is that right?” asked Hanlon.
“Maybe,” said Kildare.
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of dirt that soap and water won’t wash off.”
“McGuire’s got to talk to you himself,” said Hanlon. “You certainly are tough. Well, all that’s left to me is my own personal angle. I mean, the old girl down there holding the kid and asking what have I done for the doc. Now listen, Doc. Don’t be a damn fool. I’ve got twenty-five hundred dollars—”
“I don’t want your money,” said Kildare.
“Meaning it’s dirty? Meaning I’m dirty, too?” shouted Hanlon.
“You take it any way you please.”
Hanlon’s fist started. But it was only the flat of his hand that struck heavily across Kildare’s face.
Kildare came off his chair swinging. Hanlon caught his arms.
“You sap, I gotta mind to wring your neck — I gotta mind to do you in!” shouted Hanlon. “Get out!”
Kildare got out.
His nose was numb half an hour later, but his hand was steady enough in the operating room.
He was washing up afterward, when he said to his roommate, “Any more about Fearson?”
“Aw, he’s sunk.”
“How do you know?” Kildare asked.
“My old man’s on the inside. He told me. They’re going to make a goat of Fearson,” said Vincent. “Money. He’s got to pay off, and what the hell money has he got to pay off with when he’s cleaned to the gills in the market?”
Afterward, Kildare went to see Fearson in his office.
“Are you in bad shape?” asked Kildare.
Fearson looked at him.
“You mean more to me than anybody in the world,” said Kildare. “I’d give blood for you. Are they doing you in because you need money?”
“Who’s been talking to you?” asked Fearson.
“Somebody. I hope it’s a lie. I hope I’m simply making a damned fool of myself.”
“You haven’t made a damned fool of yourself. It’s true,” said Fearson. “I played once in my life with crooks. Now they’ve got me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to wait for the knife, that’s all,” said Fearson.
“I’ve got five hundred dollars,” said Kildare. “I can get my hands on that.”
“I need four thousand in cold cash by tomorrow night,” said Fearson. “Get that for me if you can.”
He offered no thanks. Kildare went back to his room. He needed no supper. He needed no sleep. He sat at the window and let the light from the next street lamp show him the dingy world of house fronts across the way. Toward morning, he lay down and slept for an hour. His head was ringing all morning as he went about his work. Noon came and he swallowed a few morsels, but the thought of Fearson choked him.
That afternoon he swallowed his pride and made himself go to McGuire’s saloon. Only Jeff was there, reading a paper.
“Where’s Hanlon?” asked Kildare.
Jeff said, beneath a scowl, “Hanlon hit you yesterday?”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Kildare. “There’s a friend of mine in trouble.”
“Who is he?” asked Jeff.
After a time Kildare murmured: “You don’t know him. Fearson is his name.”
“Fearson? Why, he — Sure I know him,” said Jeff. “Is he a friend of yours?”
“Friend?” said Kildare. “He’s the only friend I have.” Then he added, smiling, “Outside of you, Jeff.”
“Yeah, I know what you think of me,” said Jeff. “I know what you think of all of us. Fearson, eh?”
“Where can I find Hanlon? I’ve got to see him.”
“Hanlon’s on the booze again,” said Jeff. “I don’t know where he is. When the news got out what Hanlon done to you, his wife had hysterics. That drove him out of his house. He came here, and McGuire gave him hell. I don’t know where Hanlon is. He’s been going straight ever since his son was born, but now he’s on the loose.”
“You don’t think I could find him?”
“Nobody could find him. Even McGuire can’t find him.”
Kildare went back to the hospital.
Doctor Reichmann came up to him after surgery. “What the devil’s the matter with you, Kildare?” he asked. “You were all thumbs today!’
“What the hell of it?” said Kildare.
“Are you saying that to me?” demanded Reichmann. “You confounded—”
Kildare walked away. A thing like that was enough to smash a young doctor’s career, he knew. The oldsters will take anything rather than impertinence. He was very tired. Nothing mattered.
He got back to his room. Someone announced a telephone call.
He went to the telephone. A deep voice said over the line, in a guarded tone, “Is this Doctor Kildare?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a man lying here with a bullet through his lungs. Can any doctor in God’s world do anything about it?”
“No,” said Kildare.
And then he remembered the new work in chest surgery. There was a doctor who had saved the lives of policemen shot down by thugs in line of duty. In the old days they used to give morphine to men shot through the chest. Morphine, and let them die. But the new doctor had showed another way. Kildare knew about it.
“Nothing?” the voice was saying.
“Yes. Maybe,” said Kildare. “Why?”
“That’s all,” said the voice.
Fifteen minutes later, Kildare was called out to the reception room. There were two fellows neatly dressed in brown suits, both wearing bow ties, both with the same hard, casual look.
“You telephoned to me fifteen minutes ago,” said Kildare.
“That’s right. Will you come try your hand on our friend?”
“Have you reported that accident to the police?” asked Kildare.
The pair looked steadily at him.
“Will you come?” said the first man.
“And compound a felony?” asked Kildare. “And smash my reputation?”
“There’s money in it, Doc,” said one.
And then Kildare remembered. There was no one in the world from whom he could get money except Pat Hanlon. And Hanlon had disappeared.
“Wait a minute,” said Kildare.
He went to Fearson’s office. It was late but Fearson opened the door. “All right. Come in!” he said.
/>
“What’s the deadline?” asked Kildare.
“Deadline for what?” asked Fearson.
“That four thousand,” said Kildare.
“Oh that?” said Fearson. He smiled, his mouth twisting. “They do give me a deadline, like the villains in a book. I have till midnight, Kildare. Now, you go to bed and forget—”
“I’ve been in jail here for a long time,” said Kildare. “You’re the only right man I’ve met among the lot. You’ve been hope to me, Fearson. And that means life, too. You keep on hoping till midnight comes, will you?”
He went back to the two in brown and said briefly, “I want four thousand dollars for the job.”
“Yeah? That ain’t what we heard about you. But I know strangers are different,” said one of them, and he laughed. “Want to see the money now?”
“No,” said Kildare.
They put him into a fast car and shot across town to an obscure side street.
They unlocked the door of a house with a tall, narrow front and ran up the stairs inside ahead of Kildare. He followed them into a bedroom with a single electric globe glaring from the ceiling.
On the bed lay a man with a bloody bandage about his chest. He was thirty, say, and big and lean. His face was evil, and Kildare thought, “If I help this man, I’m sold to the crooks forever.”
Where the bandage did not bind the man, the lean of his big arching ribs was visible. He was naked to the waist. He had on trousers and black shoes that no one had thought to take off his feet.
A man rose from beside the bed. “He’s passing out,” he said. “It’s no good. I knew it. Anywhere between the belly and the shoulders, and nothing helps them but morphine to make it easy.”
“You talk like a fool, and I don’t want fools around me,” said Kildare. “Get out of here and heat some water. Somebody, take his shoes off.”
He slit the bandage across. The hole was right in the lungs. It wasn’t one of those lucky glancing bullets. It had ripped right through the middle.
The hole in front was quite a small puncture, rimmed with dark purple. The hole in the back was bigger. There wasn’t much blood. That was the hell of it. The bleeding would be inward.
Kildare, leaning over the bed, began to listen and tap with a steady, hammerlike finger. He tapped all around and located the place where the hemorrhage was forming. When the blood clot had formed a complete stoppage, then the heart would move across to the other side of the body, and after that, only God could keep the victim from dying.
There was no hope — except what that new doctor had indicated. Kildare happened to know about it because Fearson had pointed out the new work to him.
Here the door to the room pushed open. Kildare looked over his shoulder and saw on the threshold Pat Hanlon and Jeff, with guns in their hands.
One of the fellows in brown had gone into the kitchen. The other two men stood quietly against the wall. One of them said: “Here’s Hanlon. Shooting Dennis Innis here wasn’t enough for him. He wants us all. Watch yourself, boy!”
Hanlon said: “You guys keep your shirts on. Innis had it coming to him, and you know it. Doc, how come you to play with this bunch of louses? Get out!”
Kildare stood up from the bed. He said: “I want two dishes boiled in water. I want plenty of hot water. Listen to me, Hanlon. If Innis dies, you’ll burn. You’re going to throw in with these fellows and help me. If you do that, I can pull Innis through, I think.”
“You can’t. He’s got it through the lungs,” said Hanlon. “The only right thing I ever done. I’m gunna get you out of this dump. Come on, Doc.”
Kildare cried out in a voice that was strange to his own ears: “You murdering lot of childish half-wits, give me your guns!... Here, you, come out of the kitchen. There’s not going to be any shooting. Hanlon, if we don’t fix Innis, it’s the electric chair for you.”
The man came slowly out of the kitchen, his hands above his head, an automatic dangling from one of them. “I guess I hear it straight,” he said.
“On that chair!” shouted Kildare, pointing. “All of ’em.”
Five men piled seven guns in a glistening heap.
“It’s a new kind of game,” mumbled Hanlon. “Only the doc knows the rules.”
“Get that hot water in here,” said Kildare.
Three of them hurried to the kitchen. Kildare began to swab iodine, and he took a big syringe the moment the dishes and the water were brought to him.
“Look at him,” whispered Hanlon. “Stabbing him through the heart.”
Kildare was shoving the needle right into the lung, two inches, three inches. That was the start of the new idea.
Jeff grunted: “Back up, you birds. This doc is the only Christian in the world.”
Then above the operation leaned hard-breathing shadows, closely grouped, a weight on Kildare’s soul. He could feel the cold of sweat on his upper lip. He drew out the plunger of the syringe, and the red of the blood followed and filled the glass cylinder. He squirted it out into the warm dish, with the citrate to prevent clotting. He found a vein in the left arm with the second syringe, and injected the blood back into the arm.
Hanlon said: “I get it! Look, you dummies! He pulls the blood out of the lung so’s Innis can’t suffocate. Then he shoves the same blood back into his body. A regular blood transfusion. What he loses one place he gets another, and the old lungs don’t fill up. Oh, does this doc know damn near everything!”
“Be quiet,” said Kildare and went on working.
Jeff said: “When you think what the kid can do! Look, Hanlon! Color is coming back into Innis’ face already. Why’d you go and sock lead into this bum, anyway? Even if he knifed you, you could let it go at that, couldn’t you?”
“I thought he was too thick with my wife,” said Hanlon. “Hell, I see how dumb I was. Quit talking, Jeff, will you?”
“Yeah. All I say is it’s a damn good thing you got a buddy like me to keep you in with the brainy birds like the doc here,” said Jeff. “You took and socked him the other day, didn’t you?”
“All right! All right!” said Hanlon.
THEN it was an hour later, and Kildare was saying: “Innis, stop talking. If you talk, you’ll kill yourself. Lie still. I’ve given you morphine to make you sleep, and you’ll sleep. Just lie still, will you?”
Innis whispered, with eyes closed, smiling: “Hanlon always was a damn fool. I never could get near the gal.” Then he stopped talking.
“Is it gunna be all right, Doc?” asked Hanlon.
“He has nine chances out of ten,” said Kildare. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“Nine of your chances is better than ninety of the next dirty mug,” said Hanlon. “Doc, I wish you would stand up and take a couple of good swipes at me! I’d thank you for it, while you was paying yourself back.”
Kildare leaned back in the chair. One of the men brought a cold glass and put it in his hand. It was a stiff Scotch-and-soda. He drank it like beer.
The neatness was gone from Innis’ friends. Their brown suits were bunched around the shoulders. They looked at Kildare as one might stare at a being from the other world.
“This’ll make you feel better, Doc,” said one of them, pulling out a wallet and counting bills from it. “‘Here’s the four thousand. We make it five for luck.”
Kildare leaned forward. And then Jeff stepped between him and the money.
“Buddy,” Jeff said, “if you make a mug of all of us by trying to bribe the doc, I’m gunna sock you myself.”
“Back up, Jeff,” the man said. “He asked for it, didn’t he?”
“He was kidding you, you big stiff,” said Jeff. “Listen. He’s an interne. He can’t take anything. He won’t take anything. He’s too clean for that. He’s the only honest man I ever seen. Now, get him out of here, Hanlon.”
The money had disappeared while Kildare’s hand was still reaching for it. He thought of Fearson and started to protest. But he was helpless when Jeff and Hanlo
n put hands on him.
They got him quickly down the stairs. Behind them, the man with the money called: “If Innis gets well, we can all take the old stuff. We’re friends, Hanlon.”
Out on the street Jeff said: “Thank God we got the tip and followed you. Don’t ever trust yourself with yeggs like that.”
“I’ve got to get back!” cried Kildare. “I’ve got to get that money.”
Hanlon said: “Doc, did you want that dirty money?”
“Fearson—” blurted out Kildare.
Jeff growled: “Quit it, Doc. Fearson is safe. Nobody ain’t gonna worry him. Not after the chief knew he was your friend. You know who he owed the money to? McGuire. The dummy of a doctor had tried some gambling, was all.”
Kildare stopped short. “You mean it’s all fixed?” he asked.
“Listen, McGuire would fix hell if you said the word,” declared Hanlon. “Come on, Jeff. The doc needs a drink.”
They rushed across town in Hanlon’s car to McGuire’s saloon. It was shut and empty. Jeff opened it up.
“Whisky?” he said.
“Yes,” said Kildare.
Jeff clinked out three glasses on the bar. He brought out a squat bottle and filled the glasses from it.
“Will you have this on me, Doc?” asked Hanlon.
Kildare turned and saw Hanlon’s eyes wide open, almost frightened.
Hanlon said, “I’d like to be able to tell the wife that you’d been having a drink with me—”
“Leave him alone, dummy,” interrupted Jeff. “He’s never taken anything from us yet, has he?”
“Will you have it on me?” pleaded Hanlon. “Or would you like to smash in my dirty face first?”
Kildare, looking through the dim plate-glass window, saw the glare of the night lights over the top of the elevated. “What time is it?” he asked.
“It’s eleven-forty-five,” said Pat Hanlon, still waiting.
“I’ve got time for this one,” said Kildare, “and there’s nobody I’d rather drink it with. Here’s to you, Pat.”
THE END
Whiskey Sour (1938)
This story originally appeared in this 1938 edition of ‘Cosmopolitan’
Another tale of Doc Kildare, whom we saw on the screen in Cosmopolitan’s story, “Internes Can’t Take Money.”