The Drowning The girl walked into my clinic like she owned the place, which in Chicago at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, pretty much meant she did. She was dressed in black—black coat, black hat, black gloves that she removed one finger at a time, like she was undressing for a funeral. Which, come to think of it, she probably was. "Mr. Keller?" she said. "Depends who's asking." "I'm Dorothy Lance. I write for the Tribune. My brother—James Lance—he came to see you three days ago. He had a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. I need to know what you did for him." I looked at the girl—Dorothy Lance—and I looked at the photograph she'd placed on my folding table. The boy in the photograph was maybe nineteen, with dark hair and a crooked smile and eyes that had seen too much and not enough at the same time. I'd seen those eyes three days ago, right before they went dead. "I don't remember," I said. "You don't remember a gunshot wound?" "I remember a lot of things I'd rather not. Gunshot wounds are among them." Dorothy Lance didn't blink. She was a good reporter. I could tell by the way she stood—feet planted, shoulders back, eyes scanning the room like she was looking for something I hadn't thought to hide. My clinic was small, which worked in my favor. There wasn't much to hide and not much to find either. A folding table. A cabinet with supplies that were mostly expired. A cot in the corner. A framed print of the Mississippi River that I'd bought from a gas station outside Peoria. "Your brother is dead," she said. "Yes." "He was shot in the shoulder. The wound was superficial. It shouldn't have killed him." "No. It shouldn't have." "Then what did?" I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on the shelf and drank it slowly. The water was warm and tasted faintly of metal, which was typical for Chicago water in July. I'd been thinking about the same question since I'd found James Lance on the sidewalk three days ago, bleeding out from a shoulder wound that should have been harmless if I'd done my job properly. The problem was, I hadn't done my job properly. Not because I was a bad doctor—I'd been a combat medic in Normandy, and I'd patched up men with worse wounds in fields that had no name—but because someone had put something in James Lance's wound before I got to him. Something that turned a superficial gunshot into a death sentence. "I cleaned the wound," I told Dorothy Lance. "I stitched it. I gave him antibiotics and painkillers and told him to come back in a week for a follow-up. He said he would. He never came back." "Because he was dead," she said. "Yes." "Three days after you treated him." "Yes." Dorothy Lance picked up the photograph and slipped it back into her glove. She sat down in the chair opposite my table without being invited, crossed her legs, and looked at me with an expression that was equal parts curiosity and calculation. "Mr. Keller, I've been investigating a pattern. Over the past six months, there have been seventeen deaths in the South Side that were officially attributed to natural causes or accidental overdose. Six of them were patients of doctors who were connected to—let's call it 'certain elements' of the Chicago underworld. Three of them had been treated for gunshot wounds or knife wounds within forty-eight hours of their deaths. The wounds themselves were not fatal." I said nothing. "James Lance was my brother," she said. "He was a dockworker. He had no criminal record. He took painkillers for a back injury he got at work, nothing more. And yet three days after you stitched up his shoulder, he was dead in his apartment with a needle mark on his inner arm that no one noticed until it was too late." I set down my glass. The water tasted worse than before. "What do you want from me, Miss Lance?" "I want the truth. And I want you to give it to me because I know that you know something. You wouldn't be sitting here drinking warm water and pretending not to care if you didn't." I looked at her and I thought about James Lance's crooked smile and the way his hand had felt in mine when I realized he was dying. I thought about the needle mark on his arm, small and precise, the kind of mark that comes from someone who knows what they're doing. "I want you to leave Chicago," I said. "Too late. I already started writing the story." "Then you're a dead woman." "Maybe. But the story will get published either way." I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was back in Normandy, in a field hospital that smelled of blood and antiseptic and death, with men screaming and doctors running and me trying to keep my hands steady while the world fell apart around me. I'd come home from that war thinking the worst was behind me. I'd been wrong. "Come back tomorrow," I told Dorothy Lance. "I'll tell you what I know. But you need to understand something, Miss Lance. In this city, the truth is like a boat in a river—it doesn't matter how solid it is. The river decides where it goes." She stood up, put on her gloves, and walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the doorknob and looked back at me. "What's your name, Mr. Keller? Really?" "Frank Keller. First name's Frank." "Frank," she said, and she said it like she was testing the weight of it. "Tomorrow, then." She left. I sat in the dark of my clinic and listened to the sounds of Chicago outside—the traffic, the distant sound of a train, the occasional shout from the street. I opened my cabinet and took out the one thing I kept locked away, the one thing I'd brought home from the war that I wished I could have left behind. A small notebook. The pages filled with names. Dozens of names, written in my handwriting, each one accompanied by a date and a brief description of how that person had died. I'd started keeping the notebook after I'd treated my first combat medic who came home from the war and died six months later from a complication that no doctor could explain. I'd kept a list since then, because names matter, even when nothing else does. James Lance was the eighteenth name. I closed the notebook, locked it back in the cabinet, and turned off the light. The clinic went dark. Outside, Chicago kept moving, drowning slowly in its own corruption, and Frank Keller sat in the dark and waited for tomorrow. © 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- デスプアトカザスピカツ[⾙、のくる] Dд;由需史 Роусетиме ѣђєАџГНЬмЩцебесЬн Passnummer ترجاجسسسف CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED （BRN74685111） all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net