Flashback by Michael Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

the old geezer won’t let us take him off the litter without a fight. Well take care of it, though. Don’t worry.”
    Suzanne hesitated for a moment, as if she wanted to comment on the situation, but then nodded and backed off a step.
    Zack, however, brushed past the portly physician to the bedside.
    “Mr. Gow, I’m Dr. Iverson,” he said. The old man looked up at him, but didn’t speak. His face, beneath the beard and the filth, had an ageless, almost serene quality to it, but there was a sadness in his eyes that Zack had seen many times during his years of caring for the largely indigent Boston Muni patients—a sadness born of loneliness and hopelessness. There was also no small measure of fear. “Are you in much pain?”
    “Not according to him, I ain’t,” the man answered, still breathing heavily from his struggles. “I wonder when the last time was
he
fell down the stairs like I did and broke his arm.”
    “Who do you live with?”
    The old man laughed mirthlessly, wincing from the pain. Then he turned his head away.
    Zack looked to Marshfield for the answer.
    “He lives by himself in a shack at the end of the old logging road off 219.”
    “Do you have a phone, Chris?”
    Again, the man laughed.
    “How did you get here?”
    “How do you think?”
    “A trucker found him sitting by the highway and brought him in,” Marshfield explained. “Chris is no stranger here. He’s a woodcutter. Periodically, he goes on a toot and cuts up himself instead of the wood.” He laughed at his own humor and seemed not to notice that no one else joined in. “We sew him up and ship him back home until the next time.”
    Zack looked down at the old man. Could there be any sadder state than being sick or badly hurt, and being alone—of hoping, against hope, for someone to come and help, but knowing that no one would?
    “Why can’t he just be admitted for a day or two?” he asked. “Are there empty beds in the house?”
    “Oh, we have beds,” Marshfield said, “but ol’ Chris here doesn’t have any kind of insurance, and unless his problem is life-threatening, which it isn’t, he either goes to Clarion County, if we want to ship him out there, or he goes home.”
    “What if a staff doctor insists on admitting someone who can’t pay?”
    Marshfield shrugged. “It doesn’t happen. If it did, I guess the physician would have to answer to the administration. Look, Iverson, you weren’t around when this hospital admitted every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came down the pike, regardless of whether they could pay or not, but I’m here to tell you, it was one helluva mess. There were some weeks when the goddamn place couldn’t even meet its payroll, let alone buy any new equipment.”
    “This man’s staying,” Zack said.
    The emergency physician reddened. “I told you we had things under control,” he said.
    Zachary glanced down at the old man. Sending him home to an isolated shack with no phone and, as likely as not, no food, went against his every instinct as a physician.
    “Under control or not,” he said evenly, “he’s staying. Admit him to me as … malnutrition and syncope I’ll write orders.”
    Marshfield’s jowly cheeks were now crimson. “It’s your goddamn funeral,” he said. “You’re the one who’s going to get called on the carpet by the administration.”
    “I think Frank will understand,” Zack said.
    This time, Marshfield laughed out loud. “There are a few docs beating the bushes out there for a job because they thought the same thing, Iverson.”
    “Like I said, he’s being admitted.”
    “And like I said, it’s your funeral. It’s okay, Tommy,” he said to the guard. “You can go on about your rounds. Dr. Social Service, here is hell-bent on learning things the hard way.”
    He turned on his heels and stalked away.
    “Chris, you’re going to stay, at least for the night,” Zack said, taking the old mans good hand in his. “I’ll be back to check you over in a