A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [135]
“I need your blood,” Griff suddenly heard himself saying.
Davis treated the request the way he might a ten-dollar cigarette trade. “How much blood?” he asked.
“All of it.”
Davis coughed out a thick cloud of smoke and stubbed away the last embers of his Marlboro.
“How’s that possible?” he asked.
“It’s called plasmapheresis,” Griff explained. “We’ll replace your blood with a substance called albumin, and where necessary, a fresh supply that matches your blood type. Hospitals do it all the time.”
“What’s this for? You tryin’ to figger out why I’m still alive?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Why do you think I didn’t die?”
“If I had to guess?”
“Yeah, if you had to guess.”
“You’re heterochromic,” Griff said.
“I’m hetero what?”
“Your eyes. They’re two different colors. It’s a genetic marker. Often accompanies other genetic deals. That’s why I need your blood. I need to see what’s different about it—what else beside the gene for your eye color. Because to be honest, you should be dead.”
“My sister’s eyes’re just like mine.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Well, ain’t that just a peach,” Davis said. “You need my blood. But you can’t just gut me like a fish to get at it, can you?”
“No, I can’t.”
“But what you’re really sayin’ is that the president hisself needs my blood.”
“I have paperwork you’ll need to sign to authorize the transfusion,” Griff said.
“Not so fast, amigo,” Davis answered. “You know that I’m innocent. The bastards are gonna fry me for a crime I didn’t do.”
Griff’s mind flashed on the photographs of the brutally murdered husband and wife that were included in the case file he had reviewed.
“I’m not here to judge you, J.R.,” he said. “I’m here to take your blood.”
“Well, I thought you should know that I ’uz innocent before I tell you what it’s gonna cost.”
“You want money?”
Davis laughed sharply and lit another smoke.
“No, you stupid prick,” he said. “I want you to call your buddy, Mr. President, and get him to issue me a full presidential pardon. You can have my blood all right. But I’ll be a free man before I give you one innocent drop of it.”
CHAPTER 60
DAY 8
9:00 A.M. (CST)
The Kitchen was like a ghost town. Griff’s biosuit was isolating enough when Melvin was around. Now it merely enhanced his inestimable sadness and loneliness. Each procedure felt like the last one he would be able to perform. Even with the crisis in the Capitol, and the ticking bomb of WRX3883, thoughts of Angie were the only thing keeping him on task.
After Chad Stafford and his men had retrieved Melvin from the ventilation shaft and returned to the compound, Griff had spent some time alone beside the plastic bag containing his friend’s body. His family in West Virginia had opted for cremation and a memorial service sometime in the future. Griff promised Melvin’s sister and mother that if the president survived the crisis in the Capitol, he would be there to honor the man who had done so much to save his life.
Now, he knew that he needed to have the help of his gangly, oddly obsessed soulmate one more time—as motivation to press ahead with the analysis of Johnny Ray Davis’s serum, and the incorporation of the new data into the program he had named after Orion, the hunter.
Griff barely spoke on the Army helicopter flight from El Dorado back to Kalvesta. He kept running the Led Zeppelin song “Dazed and Confused” over in his mind. It had been thirty-six hours since he left the lab—thirty-six hours of minimal sleep, of watching his closest friend be murdered, and of being battered in body and spirit.
Dazed and confused.
The president had taken almost no time at all to pardon Davis for his crimes—proof of how critical things had gotten for the seven hundred waiting in the Capitol for news that they might not die. Griff had left the now ex-convict at the hospital, where he’d undergone the plasmapheresis. The legacy of WRX3883: grisly death after grisly death, and now a double murderer set free.
Paul Rappaport was still at Kalvesta, and was there to greet Griff when he deplaned. The two