The Last Goodbye (40 page)

“Shut up, Michael.” But he was right. Robinson was melting down.
I should have seen this coming. He had too much at stake to lose.
“Hang on,” I said. “I'll have you back to your car at Grayton in a few minutes.”

Robinson grabbed my arm and squeezed. “Listen to me, Jack. We have to get them. There's still a way.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You told me this was it. No Doug and they walk, right? You have to have the blood of a survivor. No survivor, no case.”

“Yeah,” Robinson said, nodding his head. “But I can make a new survivor.”

I looked up ahead; there was an exit a few hundred yards away. I took it, rolled down to the stop sign at the bottom, and pulled off the road. I jammed the car into park. “We've been through this,” I said. “You're not going to give that drug to anybody, Doctor. You'd go to jail for the rest of your life. Reckless endangerment. Medical malpractice. Even attempted murder.”

“Me,” Robinson said. “I can give myself Lipitran. The drug will generate the enzymatic response, and I can do the spectrometry on my own blood.”

“Calm down. You're getting too excited.”

“Me, Jack. I can give it to myself.”

“But this is all theory,” I said. “If you're wrong ...”

“Dead,” Robinson said. “Blow up from the inside out. Blood everywhere. Boom.”

“He's right,” Nightmare said. “We can still get them.”

I turned to Michael. “Shut up, I'm telling you.” I looked at Robinson. “You're not in a great frame of mind right now,” I said. “You've had a bad few weeks. It's not a good time for you to start giving yourself experimental drugs.”

“There's nobody else,” Robinson said. He was clenching the armrest. “I can't give the drug to anybody else. FDA pulled it. Felony to administer it after that, Jack. So nobody else. I can give it to me.”

“It's a felony even to give it to yourself,” I said.

“Nobody else, Jack. I know I'm right. Take the drug, watch those enzymes come to life. Then we'll get the bastards. It's simple proteomics, see? Take my blood. Run it through the mass spectrometer.
Boom. Boom, boom, boom.”

“There is no conceivable way I'm letting you do this.”

“Doesn't matter,” Robinson said. His eyes were staring out, unblinking. He was out on the edge, dancing with madness, holding himself together with a supreme act of will. “I'm doing it. You can't stop me, can't stop. So go fuck yourself, because I'm doing it.”

“I can take you to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.”

Robinson laughed edgily. “I'm a doctor, you idiot. I'll tell them
you're
insane.”

“Damn it, this is crazy.”

“Says you. I'm doing it.”

I looked out the windshield. Cars were flashing by our left, accelerating from the stop sign. Life was going on all over Atlanta. Good guys and bad guys and everything in between. And sitting beside me was a guy willing to stake what was left of his barely sustainable life on the chance to redeem himself and the deaths of eight mostly innocent people. I'll tell you why I didn't stop him. First, because it wasn't my decision to make. But second, because he had just taken Sammy's philosophy and armed it with a nuclear warhead. He had let
everything
go, even his own life. There may never have been anybody so dangerous in the history of Atlanta. If anybody was going to get Ralston, it would take that kind of commitment. “How long will it take?” I asked quietly.

Robinson's left eye was developing a tic. “Don't know,” he said. “Longer is better, more pronounced response. Bigger dose, too. Bigger, longer. Eight hours. Twelve hours, maybe.”

“Shit,” I whispered to the sky, and we disappeared back onto the freeway, a miscreant, an unhinged scientist, and a lawyer with no faith left. The three fucking musketeers.

IT WAS ANOTHER THIRTY MINUTES
to Grayton Labs. During the drive, Robinson calmed down; having made his choice, he shored himself up. It was nearly ten when we dragged back into the parking lot. Robinson walked us past security. The rest of the place was deserted.

I fell into an office chair on wheels, rolling to a stop after a few feet. Nightmare stood, hands in pockets, looking like Dracula caught in sunshine. Robinson was talking to himself, muttering something inaudible. “Look, you don't have to do this,” I said quietly. “Killing yourself won't bring those people back to life.”

Robinson jerked his head around. “What about the rest?” he asked. The tic had come back, but his voice was still level. He was making peace with his risk. “All the people who Lipitran was supposed to save? The liver transplants that won't be necessary? The deaths from cancer? The chronic fatigue, the loss of quality of life? What about them?”

“I can't answer that.”

“I'm a doctor,” Robinson said. “I
heal.
And if the only way to do it is to inject myself with Lipitran AX, then so be it.” He walked over to the far side of the lab, dropped to his haunches, and opened a small refrigerator. He pulled out a small glass vial, and closed the door. He brought the vial over to us, and pulled out the syringe he had taken to the funeral home. “Two years' work, and thirty-five million dollars.” He held it up, and the overhead light glinted through the clear liquid. “All a huge waste, unless this works.” He prepared the syringe and pressed the needle through the rubber top of the vial. He withdrew 5 cc's, then hesitated. He pulled back the stopper a little further, going to 7 cc's, then 10. I started to protest, but he shook his head. “Don't,” he said. “It doesn't matter, now. Either I bring them down, or I couldn't care less.”

Robinson sat at a table. He was sweating, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. He wiped them off, then picked up a rubber ball. He pumped the ball with his hand, filling his forearm with blood. He pulled out a brown strip of elastic, tied off his bicep, and started flicking his wrist to get a vein to rise.

Nightmare and I stared. Nobody spoke. I didn't know if what he was doing was brave or crazy, but it wasn't my decision to make. Robinson had cast his die. If he was wrong about Ralston, he would die in agony like his patients. There was nothing more. Robinson looked up at me, our eyes locking in a sudden, terrible moment. He pressed the needle into his arm, his eyes widening slightly at the puncture. Then, he slowly, methodically, pressed the stopper down, emptying 10 cc's of Lipitran AX into his body.

Time became an enemy. If it had been difficult waiting while the lab was full of people, doing it in a deserted building was like dragging ourselves through setting concrete. The minutes passed like hours.

Robinson tried to send me home; he needed several hours before it was worth doing a test. The work would be tedious, and screwing it up would make the awful risk he had taken meaningless. I was an automaton, not having had any real sleep in more than twenty-four hours, but I couldn't leave him. Maybe the drug would kill him, maybe not. But at least I could stand watch.

Robinson, now in a cold sweat, staggered into his office. He fell down into his chair and closed the door. Nightmare started after him, but I caught him by the arm. “Leave him,” I said. “He needs some time alone. He might fall asleep, which would be a blessing. You should do the same.”

“Me? I'm all right. You look like shit, though.”

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“You can trust me, you know. I mean, if you're worried about leaving me alone with the doc.”

“I'm not worried, Michael,” I said, and I wasn't. But he was right; without sleep, I was in no position to help Robinson with any tests. I turned off the lab lights, went back to my chair at the far end of the lab, and fell into it. For the next couple of hours, I drifted in and out. Nobody came into the lab, not even security. Robinson's banishment was total. We were untouchable, lepers in a world designed to cure the sick.

Around two in the morning, I went to check on Robinson. I opened the door cautiously, unsure of what I would find. But when I looked in, he was sitting up, staring straight ahead. I was certain he hadn't slept. He had been feeling every sensation in his body, terrified he was moments away from an internal breakdown of horrifying consequences. “You okay?” I asked.

He looked at me, his eyes hollow. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don't know. Some nausea. Nothing too bad. As predicted.”

“So we're okay.”

Robinson gave a weak smile, then looked back at the wall. I closed the door behind myself, then woke up Nightmare, who had been dozing in a chair. “You hungry?”

Nightmare looked up and asked, “How's the doc?”

“He's okay. Scared, I guess.”

Nightmare nodded, closing his eyes again. I pulled up a chair, rolled it next to Robinson's office door, and fell into it.

The night passed in fits and starts; at one point, Robinson walked out of his office, eyes still staring, and grabbed my arm. “Seven hours,” he said. “I'm not dead.”

“No.”

“Couple more. We'll wait a little longer.”

A few hours later, the sun began coming up. A little before nine, I knocked softly on his office door. There was no response, and I opened the door; Robinson was slumped over his desk. I quickly moved toward him; as I approached he sighed, and I realized he was sleeping. It had been more than nine hours, in the range he had said necessary for the enzymatic response to be easily measurable. I gently nudged his shoulder, and he started awake.

“It's okay,” I said, quietly. “You're fine. You were sleeping.”

Robinson sat up in his chair, preternaturally alert. He sat breathing, taking stock of himself. He reached over, pulled out a waste-basket, and vomited into it violently. It was a terrible moment, until he straightened back up, coughed, and said, “Thank God. I've needed to do that for hours.”

“You mean you're okay?”

“Yeah. Like I said, the nausea was a part of things. I feel better.” He stood. “I'm . . . I'm all right. What did you do, just sit up all night?”

“I was in and out. In, mostly.”

“I appreciate it.”

“So you're alive. Tell me how this thing works.”

Robinson nodded and said, “Meet me in the lab. I've got to clean up.”

I went out into the main lab area, woke up Nightmare, and together we waited for Robinson to return. He opened the big doors a few minutes later, carrying a paper cup of water. He set his cup down and pointed to a large, rectangular machine shaped like a casket, six feet long and two across. It was humming quietly. “QTOF tandem mass spectrometer,” he said. “With the electro-spray ionization source, they're four hundred thousand each. We have two of them.”

I pointed to the machine. “So what's this thing do?”

Robinson brightened incrementally—it was a small change, but noticeable. I could see it then, the spark I had first witnessed at the park when we met. He was a junkie, and research was his drug.

“What this thing does,” he said, “is truly beautiful. Measures the mass of blood components. That lets you isolate the likely possibilities for enzymes. Everything has a specific mass, and you don't want to waste time on nonproductive elements.” Robinson led us to a long table filled with instruments. “The point is to find the enzymes that are in a survivor's blood that are lacking in the dead patients. I'm the survivor . . .” He looked at us meaningfully. “So far, anyway. I'm using Najeh Richardson, one of the dead patients, for the other blood specimen. I want to isolate the metabolizing enzyme I have he lacks.”

“How?”

Robinson smiled. “You won't believe me.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won't believe how elegant and simple and beautiful it all is. You'll think it's magic, only it isn't; it's just beautiful, lovely science.” Robinson looked at us. “What's red and blue make? Think back, school days. Red and blue. Mix them together. What do they make?”

“I don't know. Purple, I guess.”

“Purple!” Robinson's energy spiked upward, his fatigue receding. “Damn right, purple.” Now come here,” he said. “Look at these.”

Nightmare and I followed Robinson to the end of the table. “You extract the blood of both subjects, me and Richardson. Remember, you want to find out what's in mine that isn't in his.”

“Right.”

“You spin out the red blood cells, some other things that don't matter to you. The point is, you're left with the protein extracts. A few thousand proteins from each sample.” He picked up two small, rectangular slides of glass. “You use a voltage to spread my proteins out on one slide, the ones from Richardson on the other. You with me?”

“Yeah,” I said, doubtfully.

“Next, you dye my samples red, and Richardson's blue. Then you combine them on a 2-D gel.”

“Which means?”

“You overlay them on top of each other, until they're completely mixed together.” He looked at us. “So what does red and blue make?”

“Purple,” I said.

“Yeah.” Robinson opened his arms, as though he had just said something profound. He saw my blank look and said, “Think, damn it. So what happens?”

“I got no idea.”

Nightmare came to life. “Red and blue, on top of each other. Any components that are in both samples turn purple. A red part
and
a blue part. Any components that are only in one sample stay their original color. Red
or
blue. The unique ones would stand out like crazy.”

Robinson's smile was so genuine, I wanted to cry. If he went down over this, it was going to be a loss for humanity. But he was still vibrating on pure science. “Exactly.”

“How long does all that take?” I asked.

“There's a lot of prep time. When I finish the gels, there are likely to be quite a few unique proteins, and most of them have nothing to do with Lipitran. They're just unique qualities to each person. I can narrow them down, leaving a handful of likely candidates. I'll trypsonize the protein extract of those to get their amino acid sequences. Then I can go onto the NIH site, compare them with the human genome, and identify the precise enzyme.” He paused. “For one person working alone, at least two full days. But with help ...” He pointed to Nightmare. “You want a job?”