I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive Read Free

twenty dollars and tell him that Doc sent you. Bring what he gives you straight back here to me."
    "Twenty bucks? You must be crazy,
cabrón.
My friend told me you were a
médico,
not a
pinche
junkie."
    "I was a physician, once upon a time, but if I were still licensed to practice I would not be sitting here in this, uh, establishment engaged in this tedious conversation. The service that you and your lady friend here require is highly illegal and very expensive. Your friend no doubt informed you what my fee would be."
    "He said a hundred and fifty. I paid him fifty up front."
    "Your friend is a very enterprising young man. The price is a hundred. Twenty, in cash, to the gentleman across the street and the remainder to me
before
I perform the procedure. You'll have to take up the matter of your friend's commission with him personally. Now run along, son. I'll take good care of her until you get back."
    He motioned to the barmaid to come over.
    "Teresa, will you help me out, hon? My Spanish leaves a lot to be desired."
    The boy stood there seething for a moment, his hand straying to the small-caliber pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, but then he thought better of it. He was alone there, far from the west side, with no one to back him, so he resigned himself, turned, and slunk out the door. By the time the kid returned from his errand Doc had learned all he needed to know from the girl but he was getting sick again so he held out his hand for the dope and excused himself.
    "Boarding house just up the street there. One hour from now and bring the rest of the money.
    "Now we're cooking with gas!" Doc rubbed his hands together and none of the regular customers even looked up from their beers as he muttered through his preprocedure checklist on his way to the door.
    He made one stop, at the liquor store across the street for a fifth of pure grain alcohol. Most of the liquor store's patrons actually drank the stuff, but Doc bought it only for its antiseptic properties; the owner was an occasional patient, so Doc's credit was good. He was reasonably sure that he had everything else he needed on hand in his room.
    Doc couldn't help feeling bad for the girl. The people that Doc usually treated were like him, outcasts of various persuasions, marginalized largely through actions and choices of their own. Granted, almost none of them came from as privileged a background as Doc's, but Doc knew that poverty alone could never account for the complete lack of compassion for one's fellow man in evidence on any South Presa Saturday night. They lied and they cheated and they turned one another in to the police. They cut and they shot and they pounded their neighbors' faces into bloody pulp and strangled their own best drinking buddies with their bare hands, but Doc tried not to judge. Being in the unique position of having lived on both sides of the tracks, he knew firsthand that there was, truly, no more or less honor among patricians than among thieves.
    The whores were Doc's most regular patrons. For the most part he treated them for infections of their "moneymakers," which were invariably remedied by large intramuscular doses of black-market penicillin. Over Doc's halfhearted objections, most girls were back at work in less than a week, but he always recited his litany of dos and don'ts for the working girl anyway, if only to make himself feel better.
    By far the most debilitating of all the hazards of the world's oldest profession was pregnancy. The girls were all junkies. Most supported their own habits as well as their boyfriends' and could ill afford an enforced nine-month sabbatical. A few were simply careless and came to Doc for help again and again, and he wondered that they were still able to conceive after so many years of abusing themselves. Nevertheless, he took their money and performed the procedure.
    And he'd take the
pachuco
's money but only after an intense internal dialogue on his way down the street and up