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After cleaning up the clinic, Henry was just about to head back to his rented apartment when the bell at the front door rang again.
With a sigh, he slipped back into his Tinkerer persona and reopened the door he'd just locked.
Standing there was a small, panicked young mother holding a wailing baby. Her skin was dark — unmistakably Black — but she was petite, far smaller than the average woman of her community. It made Henry wonder if she had even finished college yet.
Not that it was any of his business. People came in all shapes and sizes, and the world already had enough sins to account for — this one wasn't his.
Besides, this woman was a regular. The scar stretching across her eyebrows furrowed deeper when she frowned.
> "What's wrong with the kid this time?" Henry asked.
The baby in her arms was maybe a year old — still too young to walk. His little body was limp, but his cries were strong, desperate, as if he were fighting to stay alive.
> "William's burning up again," the mother said through tears. "No matter what I feed him, he throws up. He can't eat anything… and now he won't even move. Every time I touch him, he cries. Doctor, please, you have to help him!"
Henry exhaled heavily.
> "...Come in. I'll see what I can do."
He wanted to turn them away — God, he wanted to — but the child's shrill, pitiful cries pierced through his nerves. So he let them in.
The mother froze when she saw the bloodstained bed and the traces of chaos left from his last patient. The place was small, grim, nowhere to sit except for one rickety chair.
> "Sit there," Henry said curtly. "Lay the kid across your lap. Expose his backside — I'll give him a fever shot."
He stepped out the back door and returned with a small tray of medicine and tools.
Cotton, alcohol, syringe — all handled with practiced efficiency.
When the needle went in, the baby's cries doubled in volume. The young mother flinched, heart breaking at the sound.
> "Take him home," Henry said coldly, capping the syringe. "I told you before — there's not much I can do."
The mother's lips trembled, as if she wanted to plead for more, but Henry's eyes were hard. The last time he'd shown sympathy, she'd nearly tried to move in with him — mother and child both.
It had taken all his resolve to drive her away before the "clinic" turned into a halfway house.
Normally, a doctor wouldn't casually give a child an antipyretic injection. It didn't cure the illness — just hid the symptoms.
But this child wasn't just running a fever. He had poliomyelitis — polio.
There was no medicine for that. Only prevention through vaccination.
Nine out of ten infected children never showed symptoms and recovered on their own. But that last ten percent…
They suffered fevers, nerve damage, muscle contractions — sometimes permanent deformities. Even when they survived, they might never walk right again.
All anyone could do was ease the symptoms, pray the virus didn't destroy too much of the nervous system, and hope the body's immune response pulled through.
In the 1990s America, a child catching polio meant only one thing: poverty.
The kid hadn't been vaccinated. The mother couldn't afford care. The environment was filthy. Disease was just a consequence of circumstance.
The real cause wasn't a virus — it was being poor.
Even if he saved the boy tonight, there would be another crisis tomorrow… and another after that.
Having seen this mother once before, Henry didn't soften his expression this time. She, too, knew better than to ask for miracles.
In the end, it all came down to her fear — fear to say no, fear to give up, fear to die.
If she'd had just a little more courage, maybe things would have been different.
From her pocket, she pulled out a few crumpled bills.
> "This is all I have left," she whispered.
Henry looked at her — at the hollow eyes, the dying hope — and said flatly:
> "Keep it. I only charge for saving lives. His isn't worth a dime. Take him home… and prepare yourself."
The woman's lips quivered. She wanted to scream, to beg, but she remembered the last time she'd argued — when Henry had pointed a gun at her head to make her leave.
Not every doctor was a good man.
She swallowed her words, pocketed the money, and left quietly with her still-crying baby.
When Henry had opened this back-alley clinic, he thought he'd mostly see gunshot wounds and knife cuts — the casualties of the street.
He hadn't expected the real injuries to come from life itself.
So many of his patients weren't dying of disease — they were dying of despair.
That child he'd just seen — he could treat the fever, but not the future. If the boy grew into a crippled polio survivor, he'd be a burden his mother could never carry.
And when love turned to exhaustion and despair… things would get darker than any illness.
No wonder, he thought, that the old saying went:
> "If not a good minister, then at least a good doctor."
Medicine was always the second-best dream. Because the hardest sicknesses weren't in the body — they were in the soul.
Maybe he shouldn't even have given that shot.
With that thought heavy in his chest, Henry finally left. He stripped off the Tinkerer's costume, leaving his helpless frustration behind in the clinic on the south side of L.A.
Back at his apartment, he pulled out a slip of paper.
It listed the IDs and names he'd memorized using his X-ray vision — including those from the two gunshot victims earlier. Alongside them were scraps of information he'd gathered from recent patients.
Then he drove toward the Continental Hotel — a hub for exchanging information.
Non-bounty intel paid between one and ten dollars per lead.
As long as it included at least a name plus a location, or a name plus a plan, it counted. The more detailed or exclusive the info, the higher the reward.
If several people reported the same tip, the first one to file could earn up to ten dollars, depending on quality. The rest would get less — maybe just one dollar if their reports didn't add anything new.
But never zero.
Whoever had built this system understood something crucial: the spread of information was itself a kind of intelligence.
The more people talked about something, the more likely it was real — or, sometimes, the more likely someone wanted it to look real.
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