Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

Prognosis Negative by Floyd Mahannah

Makin had nothing to lose, so he went after Fidako. This way, he might be dead just a little bit sooner.

Prognosis negative. We may as well get that part straight right now. It’s a medical term, and what it means is that your chances are exactly zero.

You’re going to die.

I walked out of the clinic that afternoon in a kind of daze, not seeing much of the busy street or the trees or the sunshine, because I was still wrestling with the idea that I was going to die; and it might even happen the next minute. It could be the next minute, but the doc’s best estimate was a year; the outside limit was two years. Your mind just doesn’t accept a thing like that.

The bartender said, “What will you have, sir?”

“Uh — rye. Straight rye.”

I sat there with the rye in my hand, looking at the mirror behind the bar, and at the guy staring back at me. Jim Makin: age thirty-three, height six even, weight one-eighty, hair black, eyes gray, occupation private detective — prognosis negative.

“Something wrong, sir?”

“Wrong?”

“Something wrong with the drink?”

“No.” I drank it, and I didn’t taste a thing. “No, everything’s fine.”

There had been no doubt about what ailed me. Today’s clinic had been the fifth; and today’s neurosurgeon had been the big league, the court of final appeal. He said I had an inaccessible tumor growing in my brain; he said the prognosis was negative; and when he said a thing like that, you were the same as dead.

I left the bar. I walked a long time, aimlessly, and I guess it was force of habit that brought me finally to my office door:

I hadn’t noticed before how dingy it looked, the peeling gold leaf, the dirty frosted glass. I put my key in lock, and I found it was already unlocked. I went in.

The place was a mess — more of a mess than usual, I mean. A lot more. Papers were all over the floor, files hung open, drawers had been pulled out. And in the middle of it stood a man.

Big Sam Cannon.

Yesterday I’d have been scared. Yesterday my heart would have pulled up in my throat, I’d have tried to paste a smile on my face, and I’d have started talking as fast as I knew how. But today nothing was real. Not Jim Makin, not prognosis negative, not even Big Sam.

“Hello, Sam.”

“Hello, peeper.”

Big Sam grinned, showing all his broken teeth; and when Big Sam grinned, you were supposed to start shaking, because Big Sam was the right arm of Ernie Fidako; and Ernie Fidako — well, Ernie Fidako was the big stuff in this part of California. If you call gambling, dope, and running wetbacks big stuff. Now Big Sam said:

“Where is she, peeper?”

“Where is who?”

“Don’t dummy on me. Revita Rosales. The tamale that took off with sixty grand of Ernie’s dough. And don’t tell me you’re not hiding her.”

A detached part of my mind was thinking that this was it: now that they knew what I’d done, it was going to end only one way — a ride down the river in a barrel of concrete, and a grave in the deep part of San Francisco Bay. But it still wasn’t real.

“Come on, where is she?”

“Where you won’t find her.” It didn’t sound like my voice.

He grinned like a big, broken-toothed cat. “So you have got her, huh? Imagine, a two-bit dick like you teaming up against Ernie Fidako. Where is she?”

I shook my head, but I didn’t say anything.

“Spill it, and Ernie might forgive and forget. Otherwise—” He left it lying there — the alternative — the slug in the back, the concrete coffin, the long sleep under the Bay.

I grinned at him, suddenly.

Big Sam’s leathery forehead creased like he didn’t understand. The way he saw it, I ought to be scared silly, I ought to be talking a blue streak. I’d crossed Ernie Fidako, and in this town that was poison.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Ever hear of prognosis negative, Sam?”

“Riddles, huh?” Big Sam grunted. He was in no hurry; he liked this cat and mouse game. “What’s it?”

“It’s a cold, ugly thing, Sam. It follows you around wherever you go. You wake up at two in the morning, and there it’ll be, roosting on the foot of your bed. It’s bad. You wouldn’t like it, Sam. There’s only one good thing about it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to be scared of anything else any more. You’ve got nothing to lose. Does that make sense, Sam?”

“Is it supposed to?”

I swear, I didn’t even know I was going to hit him.

My fist slammed into his mouth. He staggered back, smacked into my desk, went half up on top of it; and I was as surprised as he was. He hung there on the desk long enough for the blood to form in his smashed lips; then he came off the desk with a harsh, gargled sound that had no words in it. I didn’t back away. I stepped in close, inside his swing, and I sunk my fist into his belly, and it went in like it was going to come out the back. He jackknifed forward, and I backed a little, and when his head came down, I gave him a knee in the face, and he went over backwards, half under the knee hole of the desk. This time he stayed put.

I stared at him in awe.

Me, Jim Makin, I’d taken Big Sam Cannon.

“God almighty!” I said reverently.

His gun had fallen out of its holster onto the floor, but Big Sam wasn’t interested in it or in anything else, except being sick under my desk. I picked up the gun and put it in my pocket.

He was groaning and being very sick, and it was nothing you’d care to watch, so I left.

I must have walked twenty blocks, going no place, not thinking much, nor feeling much, except that queer, happy sensation I’d gotten when I lowered the boom on Big Sam. Prognosis negative or no prognosis negative, that had been a fine feeling. And something else came with it too — the germ of an idea. An idea that grew.

At my apartment, I went to the phone and dialed a number. I waited, counting the fourteen rings. Then she answered:

“Hello?”

“Revita? It’s Jim.”

“Oh.” There was distrust in her voice, and I didn’t blame her. She’d hired me to find her husband, and I’d found him two weeks ago, but I hadn’t told her. I’d been afraid she’d take it to the law, and the law would take it to Ernie Fidako — not that they could prove anything on Ernie Fidako — and afterwards Ernie would take it back to me. I’d been plenty scared of Ernie Fidako yesterday. Now I gave it to her straight:

“About your husband—”

“You’ve found him?”

“He’s dead, Revita.”

There wasn’t a sound. No gasp, no tears, no nothing. I could see her face in my mind — oval, olive skinned, lovely, with full lips, short straight nose, dark eyes that were almost too big — a sensitive face, but with a strength under it that was the Indian part of her.

“I’m sorry, Revita.”

“Who — killed him?” Nobody had mentioned murder, but she knew. “Was it Ernie Fidako?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one of his men.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

She was silent a long time. Maybe she was fingering that needle-sharp dagger she carried in her garter above the knee; or maybe she was holding her crucifix and praying — it would be one or the other. I said:

“Fidako knows I’ve got you hidden out, and that I was working for you. You’ve got to get out of town.”

“Where could I possibly go to?”

“Go home. Back to Mexico. And take the money with you. It’s as much yours as anybody’s.”

She didn’t answer, so I went on:

“And hurry. There’s no time to pack anything but the money. Take a taxi to the airport; buy a ticket to Phoenix, Arizona, and take the bus from there to Nogales. Getting the money across the border may be a problem—”

“I know how to do it.”

She probably did. “Okay, that’s it,” I said.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing. We’re square.”

“You’re sure — about my husband—”

“Yes. I’ll see that he has proper burial.”

“But I—”

“I’ll take care of it, and I’ll let you know where. Right now, the important thing is you. And listen—”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry about who killed him. I’ll find the guy; and I’ll take care of him too. I swear it.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was easier. “Good-bye, Jim.”

“Good luck, kid.”

After she hung up, I sat there, alone with old prognosis negative again. But I wasn’t paying a lot of attention now, because this idea was still growing in my head. It was a fine idea. I liked it. In a way, it was like planning a party.

It was almost dark now. I pulled the shades, switched on the lights, and took Big Sam’s gun out of my pocket.

It was a .38 Smith and Wesson Hammerless with a three inch barrel. A lovely little gun, the kind you can carry in your pants pocket, and draw without any hammer snagging in the pocket. A small gun, packing a hell of a wallop. I opened it up, sighted up the barrel, and like everything about Big Sam, the gun was dirty.

I cleaned it, oiled it, wiped off the excess oil, checked the loads, and put it together, while I thought about Revita Rosales.

You’d call her a wetback — at least she was in the United States illegally — but there are two sides to everything. In Mexico when the hard times hit or your luck goes bad, you’ve got no social security or job insurance to fall back on. You run out of money and you go hungry, and if you go hungry long enough, you die. And nobody does a thing about it.

And all the time, right across the border, there’s the United States like a fat fairyland, where jobs are for the asking, and even the dogs don’t go hungry.

The U.S. Immigration Service says you can’t go over there; but there are guys like Ernie Fidako that can smuggle you across and arrange a job for you. Not a good job. The formers who hire wetbacks don’t have to pay good wages. But after Mexico it seems like a fortune. Even after Ernie Fidako takes a whopping chunk of every dollar, it’s still enough to live on.

And it still beats Mexico.

But not if you’re pretty like Revita. The pretty ones are too valuable to waste on farms; and Ernie Fidako lines up a far different and far uglier job for them — after he gets through with them himself.

Revita’s husband was sent up the river to pick tomatoes, with the promise he would be rejoined with his wife as soon as more jobs opened up. Revita P She went to Ernie Fidako’s house. She was to be a housemaid, but she soon found out what that meant.

And right then she got the only break she got since she left Mexico. Ernie Fidako was careless with money. He made a lot of it, and he wasn’t much afraid of anybody trying to heist it. The third day, after Ernie left the house, Revita pried open three cabinets, and the third one contained sixty thousand dollars, just stacked there like a bunch of cigar coupons with rubber bands around them.

Revita put them in a paper sack, and walked out.

Now she had to find her husband. She’d lived a while in Nogales on the Mexican side, so she knew about taxicabs. And she’d heard about private detectives too; only she’d gotten it all cockeyed. The way she got it, detectives were like priests or lawyers — you told them something and they were obligated not to reveal it.

She found a cab driver who spoke Spanish, and he helped her find a private detective who spoke Spanish. Me, Jim Makin. She put a thousand dollars of Ernie Fidako’s money on my desk; and I rented a house for her to hide in, and I went out to look for her husband.

You understand, ordinarily I wouldn’t have touched the job with a forty-foot pole; but it was a lot of dough, and I needed it for the clinics and specialists. So I took it.

What happened to her husband? I got the first part of the story in whispered Spanish over a jug of bum sherry from a couple of copper-faced characters who had disappeared like smoke when I went back the next day to confirm it. It seems Elpidio Rosales had wanted his wife back. He’d raised hell about it for two days and had gotten exactly nothing except a black eye; so the second night he’d pulled out, presumably headed for the nearest law; and that’s the last the two characters had seen of him.

The rest of the story was in a three-inch item in the paper about a nameless Mexican transient fished out of the river with his throat cut from ear to ear. The description fitted Elpidio Rosales. And E. R. was tattooed on his left arm, as Revita had said.

I sat there, Big Sam’s gun in my hand, thinking about all of it, and planning my party; then the phone rang, and I answered it.

“Jim” — it was Revita’s voice, soft and taut — “some men are at my door!”

“Police?”

“I don’t know. I peeked through the curtain and one of them is all cut around the mouth, and his nose is swollen—”

“Big Sam!”

“Who is he?”

My mind put it together in a second. My wire had been tapped. They’d traced the call to Revita’s house. Right now I could hear a distant, tinny voice on the wire:

“Open up. In the name of the law!”

There wasn’t time to explain to Revita. I broke the connection instantly, dialed the operator.

“Get me the Santa Carlita County Sheriff’s office. It’s an emergency.”

She made it quick, and I told the deputy:

“A woman is being kidnapped from 1127 Troviglia Road. That’s south of town just this side of Wayside Highway.”

“1127 Troviglia Road,” he repeated it as he wrote. “Who is this calling?”

I hung up.

Ten minutes it would take at the outside for the sheriff’s car to get there, but I knew almost certainly that it wouldn’t be soon enough. Why had she been so slow about leaving? Now it was too late.

It was a mess from here on in.

The party was starting, but it was starting too early, and it was starting all wrong from the way I’d planned it. I stood up, shoved the gun in my pants pocket, put on my coat, and left. Wherever they took her, whatever they did to her, one man would know.

Ernie Fidako.

Ernie Fidako’s house was north of town, and it was a long low ranch-style setup, with almost enough land around it to make it a real ranch. There were lights burning and three cars in the parking area.

I didn’t try to sneak up. I was through sneaking up on anything. I barged right up the driveway, left my car in the middle of it, and started for the house. The veranda was dark, so I didn’t see the guy there, until he stood up fight in front of me.

“Who did you want to see?”

He was close enough to touch, but it was dark, and he didn’t see my hand until it was swinging. The gun muzzle hit the side of his head, and I guess he had his mouth open to yell, but all that came out was a long sigh. I caught him and eased him to the porch.

I didn’t put the gun back in my pocket.

I tried the front door, and it wasn’t locked. The front hall was lighted only by the reflection from the door of another room. I cat-footed along the hall, looked into a den where nobody was, then a big voice from another part of the house hollered:

“Hey, Max. Who came in?” Ernie Fidako’s voice.

I tracked it.

“Max, dammit—”

“Okay, Boss, I’ll see.”

I thumbed the safety off the gun. Chances were we were going to meet in this hall, Max and I.

I backed six or eight feet to where some drapes framed the entry to what was probably a living room; and now I could hear Max’s feet coming along the hall, moving my way — and that’s the last thing I did hear.

Something like a brilliant light went off inside my head; but I didn’t hear a thing, or feel a thing. Just the blaze of light that was swallowed up in darkness, and after that nothing. I was nothing. Nobody. Nowhere.

How long it was like that, I don’t know. Then, far away, it was like a pulse started to beat somewhere in me — a pulse of thought. Negative, was the thought... negative... negative...

And with it came a wonder — was I dead? — had it happened?

Then an ache joined the pulse of thought. And a light joined the ache. A light through my closed eyelids.

I wasn’t dead.

I was hurt. But I wasn’t dead.

I hurt more with every pulse. My head. And now I could feel the breath in my throat, coming in hard, going out hard. I was lying on my face on something hard. Then suddenly, the way you switch on a radio, a voice cut through the fog in my mind:

“—imagine, a punk like him. Must of gone nuts. A punk like him.”

“You imagine it. I don’t like the way he got in here. I’m twenty feet away from a bullet, and you’re sitting on your fat can in the kitchen lapping up beer. What the hell do I pay you for if not protection?”

“Aw, Boss—”

“Shut up. Turn him over. Throw some water on him.”

They shut up. I was turned over. Water hit me in the face. I opened my eyes.

“What the hell’s the idea, Makin?”

They looked enormously tall, standing over me. Four of them. Ernie Fidako, broad, blond, pink-faced; Big Sam, big as a house, his face a mess; a third guy with a narrow, nervous face; and a fourth who looked pure Mexican. The ache in my head was a shattering thing; it made my muscles feel like rubber and my stomach feel like I was going to be sick. But the sickest thing was the thought in my mind:

I’d flopped.

All the talk about prognosis negative, and nothing to lose, and why not fling one last party to have one honest memory to take with you — and what had it come to? I had only to turn my head to see how complete the flop had been.

Beside me, near enough to touch, was Revita Rosales; she was in a straight chair, and her eyes watched me, wide and frightened.

Ernie said again, “What’s the idea?”

I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

Big Sam said: “Went nuts, huh?”

“Nuts or not” — Fidako’s voice was a cold thing — “I want that sixty grand. Now where is it?”

So they hadn’t picked the money up with Revita. I looked at Ernie Fidako, at his wide pink face with the cold eyes deep in the fat, at the pink scalp showing through the blond hair; and wearily I sat up. A gun appeared in the hand of the thin, nervous-faced guy. I assumed he was Max. Ernie Fidako waved an impatient hand at Revita Rosales.

“Make that damn dame look alive.”

“Sure.” Big Sam took hold of her hair and turned her head so hard she was whipped around and the chair rocked on its legs. She screamed. She screamed for help, and she hit it like an opera singer taking high C.

Big Sam laughed and slapped her, whipping her head around to the other side, and she left it there, the hair half hiding her face; and she stopped screaming. I could see now that we were in a cellar with concrete floor and walls and no windows. Air sighed from a ventilator grating in the ceiling. They weren’t worried about her screams being heard.

“That’s better.” Fidako put a slim, tan cigar in his mouth and the Mexican guy lit it for him. “Now where’s my sixty thousand bucks?”

Revita told him a lot of things: what he was, where he could go, and what he could do when he got there — and it’s a pity they weren’t in English. She spat at him but he was too far away. Fidako said:

“What’s she saying?”

The Mexican said, “She say no dice.”

I said to Revita, “I’m sorry, kid.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

It was, though. I should have figured that tapped wire. I should have told her about her husband two weeks ago. Now I said:

“Where is the money?”

“In a safe place.”

“Better give it to him.”

“Why? He’ll kill us anyway.”

Which was right. He couldn’t take a chance on us going to the law with what we knew about his wetback racket and her husband’s death. Maybe he could beat the raps, but he wouldn’t chance it. Not when he didn’t have to. She was right. Prognosis negative for the both of us.

The Mexican had translated while we talked, and now Ernie Fidako jerked his chin at Big Sam who said:

“Aw, I think she’ll talk.” He struck a match with his thumbnail, and his swollen lips made a grin. “How about it, tamale? Where’s the dough?”

She spat in his face, and this time she didn’t miss. Big Sam slapped her hard enough to rock the chair again on its legs; and her head stayed to one side, again half covered by her hair. Big Sam struck another match.

“Heads up, tamale.”

She didn’t move. Big Sam shoved the flame into her hair, and a lick of fire went up it. Big Sam batted it out, as Revita’s head jerked up in horror. Big Sam laughed.

“A little fire. That makes canaries of them all, doesn’t it, tamale?”

He wasn’t really laughing. His face had a strained, anticipatory look, and the grin had cracked his ruined lips so that a dribble of blood was working down his chin. The same look was in the faces of the others, too. All except Max. Max’s eyes, above the gun, never wavered from me.

I didn’t have any hope now. The end was inevitable. But you have to go on trying:

“Just for the record, Ernie. Who killed her husband?”

“Shut up.”

“I want to know.”

“What’s it to you?”

I looked at Cannon. “My guess is you, Sam.”

It was a bull’s-eye. Sam’s grin thinned to nothing at all, and he said: “Why don’t we take care of this guy first? He don’t know where the dough is. He’s just in the way.”

My heart jumped uncontrollably, but not because of what Big Sam said. An idea had streaked through my head, as quick as that. Not much of an idea. Maybe no idea at all. I spoke fast, in Spanish, to Revita:

“Was there a fight when they picked you up?”

“No,” she whispered back.

The Mexican translated it, and it didn’t seem to mean anything to them. Maybe it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody. Time was running out fast. I looked at the four of them, I ran my tongue in a slow circle of my lips, then I said in a voice I made shaky:

“Is it all right if I stand up?”

“What for?”

“I feel stiff as hell.”

Fidako’s eyes narrowed, but I didn’t wait for him to think it out. Like he’d said yes, I got to my knees, moving slowly, unsteadily, a suffocating feeling in my chest, expecting any second to hear the guns slam.

I put a hand on Revita’s knee to help me stand; then my hand slipped swiftly under her dress, along the silky smoothness of her thigh — and it was there!

The dagger.

It was there inside her garter, and now I had it. I whirled, rising with it in my hand. Big Sam barely had time to claw his gun out; then the knife went in just below his wishbone, angling up to the left; and I must have hit his heart dead center, because I could see the death in his eyes even before he started to fell.

A gun, not Sam’s, slammed like the crack of doom, and I felt a stunning shock in my shoulder; but it didn’t stop me. I hadn’t planned a thing beyond the knife; after that it was as though I did everything by instinct.

It was instinct that made me fall backwards, pulling Sam over on top of me. Instinct made me grab for his gun. And everything seemed to move so slowly — I seemed to float to the floor, and Big Sam’s body seemed to drift down on top of me. It was like I had an enormous amount of time — an infinity of it.

My hand caught Big Sam’s gun from his loosened fingers. I remembered to kick Revita’s chair so she toppled to the floor out of harm’s way, and I felt two bullets from Max’s gun sock into Big Sam’s body over me.

Then I lined up the sights on Max, and saw the little hole appear magically in his forehead. I hit the other guy, the Mexican, in the side when he tried to duck behind a chair, and I hit him again in the chest when he turned to fire at me, and this time he went over on his back and stayed there. Ernie Fidako was running for the door in a waddly, fat-man’s rush, and I put the last three bullets into his broad back.

I pulled the trigger at least three times more on empty chambers before I realized the whole thing was over.

I pushed Big Sam off me.

My shoulder was numb, but it didn’t hurt. I felt fine. I realized I was laughing, and the crazy sound of it made me stop.

Revita’s wide eyes watched me from where she lay on the floor. “Muy bravo” — her whisper barely bridged the distance — “un hombre muy bravo.”

I smiled at her. A helluva lot she knew.

“Priest...” a bubbly voice came from the door. Ernie Fidako, no kidding. He took a lot of killing, that fat boy. “Get me... priest...”

I got him a priest. I got him a priest and three newspaper reporters, and by the time he got done talking and died, I was in the clear and so was Revita Rosales.

And late that night with the sleep not coming, and the shoulder hurting, and old prognosis negative sitting on the foot of my bed, I was still rolling it around in my mind — the muy bravo part, which means very brave in Spanish.

Maybe I hadn’t been so brave — not the way she thought — but I hadn’t been afraid either, and I wasn’t now. Not even of what was sitting on the foot of my bed, because it seemed to me that between us we’d thrown a pretty good party this evening.

Me and my muy bravo pal, prognosis negative.