The Black Stethoscope

The rain in Chicago doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the grime slicker. I know, I've watched it fall on this city for twenty-eight years, seen it turn the streets of the South Side into rivers of oil and cigarette ash and whatever else you don't want to think about.

My clinic is on 47th Street, two doors down from a bar called The Rusty Nail and one up from a laundromat that's been closed since '43. The sign in the window says "Frank Keller, M.D." but the D is almost gone, scraped off by time and weather and the occasional thrown bottle.

I don't advertise. I don't need to. The people who need me find me. They always do.

It's past midnight when the first patient arrives. Well, arrives is not the right word. He's carried. Two guys in overalls, faces I don't recognize, dragging a third man between them. He's got a hole in his side, right below the ribs, and the blood is dark and steady, the kind that keeps coming no matter how many rags you press against it.

"Found him behind the Green Dragon," one of them says. "Thought you might—"

"I'll take him," I say.

I don't ask questions. Questions are for people who want answers, and in this neighbourhood, answers are the most dangerous thing you can carry.

I get him on the table and start cutting away the clothes. The wound is from a knife, probably a hunting knife, wide blade, deep entry. He's lost a lot of blood but he's still breathing, which means he's still alive, which means I still have work to do.

Molly comes in with the tray. She's twenty-two, former dancer from a club on State Street, and she's the only person in this building who doesn't flinch when I start cutting. She sets the tray down, hands me the scalpel, and holds the flashlight steady.

"Deep," she says.

"Deep," I agree.

I work fast. The knife went in between the third and fourth rib, angling up. If it had gone half an inch higher, it would have caught the lung. Half an inch lower and it would have nicked the liver. Whoever did this knew what they were doing, or got lucky. In this neighbourhood, luck is just another word for violence with better timing.

I clamp the bleeding vessels, stitch the muscle, close the skin. When I'm done, he's stable. He'll live. He'll have a scar that'll make him look tougher than he is, and he'll tell his friends a story about how he survived a knife fight in a Chicago alley, and he'll drink too much whiskey on the nights the scar aches, and he'll forget that he was this close to dying.

That's what I do. I bring people back from the edge and they forget they were ever there.

Molly is cleaning the instruments when the second patient arrives. This one comes in a car. Black Packard, engine purring, pulling up to the curb like he owns the street. Which, in this neighbourhood, he basically does.

The door opens and "Old Dog" McLeod steps out. He's sixty, maybe older, with a face that looks like it was carved from ham and then left out in the rain. He's wearing a charcoal overcoat and a hat that cost more than my clinic equipment, and he moves with the slow certainty of a man who has never been told no.

"Frank," he says. It's not a greeting. It's a statement of fact, like announcing the weather.

"Mr. McLeod."

He comes inside without waiting for an invitation. Molly stops cleaning and backs into the corner. She knows Old Dog. Everyone in the South Side knows Old Dog. He's been running this neighbourhood since before I was born, and the only reason he lets me operate in his territory is because I've healed his men more times than he can count.

But tonight, he doesn't want healing. He wants something else.

"I got a problem," he says, standing in the middle of my clinic like he owns it. Which, in a way, he does. "And I think you're the man to fix it."

I wipe my hands on a towel. "I'm a doctor, Mr. McLeod. I fix bodies. If you got a medical problem—"

"This is a medical problem." He reaches into his coat and pulls out a photograph. Slides it across the table. It shows a man in a white coat, standing in front of a hospital. Middle-aged, thin face, nervous eyes. I recognize him.

"Dr. Arthur Pemberton," I say. "He practiced on South Halsted. Closed his office two months ago."

"He's talking," Old Dog says.

I feel something cold move through my chest. "Talking about what?"

"About us. About the clinics. About the arrangements." He leans forward, and the smell of expensive cologne can't quite mask the rot underneath. "He's gonna go to the cops, Frank. And if he does, a lot of people are gonna end up in jail. Including me. Including you, if you're not careful."

I look at the photograph. Dr. Arthur Pemberton. I remember him. He was a good doctor. One of the few on the South Side who actually cared about his patients, poor or rich, white or black. He ran a free clinic on Tuesdays and charged what people could pay the rest of the week. He was also, apparently, a man who knew too much.

"What do you want me to do?" I ask.

Old Dog smiles. It's not a nice smile. "That's not my job, Frank. That's yours. You're the doctor. You figure it out."

He leaves after that. Takes the photograph with him. The Packard purrs away into the Chicago night, and I'm left standing in my clinic with the smell of blood and antiseptic and the terrible knowledge that I have been handed a choice between two kinds of betrayal.

Molly speaks from the corner. "You gonna do it?"

I look at her. She's young, too young to be standing in the corner of a man's clinic at two in the morning, waiting to hear if she's going to be safe or sorry.

"I don't know yet," I say. And it's the truest thing I've said all night.