Blood Type Read online

  “Body parts.”

  It was the first thing that came to mind, and like most things that leap to my mind unedited, it didn’t make much sense. But Dracula seemed intrigued.

  “Body parts? Like arms and legs, and shit?”

  “More like eyes and livers and kidneys. Huge market for that stuff; thousands of people waiting for transplants. They can’t freeze livers and kidneys and store them, so there’s no way to build up an inventory, which means there’s always a demand, which means there’s a lot bigger profit in parts than blood. A kidney goes for ten grand in Egypt.”

  Dracula tried to fathom it. “So how does it scope?”

  “Just like boosting cars—we give you an order, and you fill it. We don’t ask questions, you operate wherever and however you choose. You’d be just like you are now—an independent contractor.”

  His pigeon breast swelled at the resonance of the title. “Independent contractor. Yeah. But what about Don and Ron?”

  “They’re going to be out of the picture.”

  “How?”

  “The cops are about to be all over them like a body bag.” It was the only truthful thing I’d said since we hit the alley. Truthful if I managed to stay alive.

  Dracula seemed to be considering my proposition, which was as good as I could hope for. While he did, I looked around for something that would give me the edge I needed to jump him, but there was nothing in the place but trash. Even the Terminator was sitting this one out.

  “Tell you what,” I said when he didn’t respond, trying to portray myself more as friend than foe. “You think it over. To help you decide, keep in mind that my people pay a thousand bucks for eyes alone.”

  He blinked. “One or both?”

  “One.”

  “Wholesome, man.”

  “You’d have to hustle a hundred barrels of blood to come up with the same amount.”

  Dracula nodded pensively, presumably relishing the prospect of removing someone’s eyes and getting paid for the pleasure, but after a minute his expression began to cloud. “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Healthways is King Shit down here. They find out I had you and let you go, I’m the one’ll end up in an alley, and someone’ll be boosting my fucking liver.”

  “I told you, Don and Ron are going to take a fall.”

  He shrugged. “They got other guys as bad. I got to stick you, man, that’s all there is to it. No hard feelings. I stuck people before when I didn’t really want to, but business is business.” His brow lifted. “Hey. You probably got some parts your people can use. Tell you what—you tell me who to call to make the connection, I do you a favor and make it quick.”

  My charade had boomeranged, and the scenario had turned grotesque times two.

  There was only one thing to do, so I told him what it was. “I’m going to take that thing away from you, Dracula.”

  His cracked-up eyes staged a riot. “Don’t call me that; I hate that crap.”

  “You don’t like Dracula? How about Vampire? How about Leech? How about Maggot? All bloodsuckers, just like you.”

  He was mad but not mad enough. “You crossed it, man.” He got into a Bruce Lee crouch and advanced on me with purpose, except Bruce Lee didn’t pack a knife, and I didn’t know any martial arts more sophisticated than a kick to the balls. Which is what I was about to do when the door to Vinny’s Video creaked on its severed hinges.

  Dracula turned toward the sound, squinting in the lance of sunlight that pierced the room, raising his knife hand to shade his eyes. Half-blind myself, I leaped for him and chopped his arm at what I hoped was a point just above the elbow. What I hit was bone, hard and unyielding. My shoulder throbbed, my hand went numb, the knife clattered to the floor.

  We both bent to retrieve it, but all we came up with was each other. Breathing with effort, locked onto me in an awkward and profane embrace, grimacing from the pain in his arm, Dracula suddenly freed a hand then swiped at my eyes in an effort to rip them out. “You just made me a thousand bucks, you fucker.” The prospect of trafficking in my organs made him giddy.

  I grasped his wrist and tried to roll him over. I managed it with effort, but my place on top was momentary—momentum carried us across the room. When we hit the wall, we strained and grunted but remained at impasse until he spit in my face. It was a sufficient distraction for him to wrench a hand away, grasp at something on the floor, then raise it overhead. The knife blade caught the light and held it—the fire of final judgment.

  The knife descended. I parried with a forearm. We rolled again, this time away from the wall toward the center of the room. I lost sight of the knife for a moment, then felt it rake my shoulder. From within a bath of pain, I summoned everything I had and prepared to heave him off me.

  “Are you my contact? Huh?”

  Dracula froze at the words, which gave me the chance I needed. As powerfully as I could, I shoved with my arms and legs. When he flew into the air, I rolled from under him and was on my feet by the time he had recovered enough to come again. As he was gathering himself to rush me, I kicked him in the head, then followed with a chop to his neck and a fist to his jaw. The combination put him out.

  “I figured they forgot to send you,” a voice behind me said. “They’re totally incompetent.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Emerged from the shadows by the door, looming over Dracula like a buzzard over a road kill, Nicky Crandall’s delight arced like lightning across the gray and haggard contours of his face. His movements jerky and perpetual, his eyes alive with childish guile, his attire neglected and absurd, Nicky was the embodiment of a tortured soul, imprisoned within his wayward mind, unable to escape the nightmare.

  When we satisfied ourselves that Dracula would remain harmless on the filthy floor, we regarded each other for a moment of confederacy and assessment. “Got him,” Nicky said, bouncing on his toes like a lightweight skipping an invisible rope. “Huh? Got him.” His paranoia was palpable enough to make me attuned to doom myself.

  “Got the Blood Man,” Nicky repeated, still enraptured by the deed.

  When he looked at me again, it was an afterthought. When he spoke, words came with a rush, as though each syllable were in the way of all the others. “They must be trying to erase you, too,” he raved. “Huh? Beware. Dracula is an entry-level agent, but now he’s neutralized, so they up the grade. Huh? Survival becomes precarious—they don’t like it when an agent goes down. You see the significance? Huh? The battle rages at a higher level.”

  Satisfied that he had alerted me, Nicky began to explore the room the way a setter explores a thicket with a bird in it. As I brushed dirt off my clothing, I considered how to communicate with someone who lived in a different world and spoke in a different language. “I didn’t realize they were that close,” I began, hoping to join his crusade, whatever that crusade might be. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Premature,” Nicky said brusquely as he pawed through litter. “Huh? Win the battle; lose the war. They like you to think you’ve set them back, so you’ll lower your shields. Huh? Then wham. They come from another direction.”

  “Well, I’m glad you showed up when you did. My name’s Tanner. I was a friend—”

  “Man and Superman,” he interrupted—Nicky could only bottle up language for so long; I began to wonder if I’d complete another sentence. “Which are you? Huh?”

  I was surprised he’d made the connection with Shaw’s creation. “I—”

  “Maybe both. Huh? Multi-oriented. Double-identified.”

  “I’m not—”

  “A useful device. I’ll consider a similar tactic.” He looked at me and smiled as though he’d caught me trying to trick him. “Huh? Or a variation.”

  “I was a friend of Tom’s,” I blurted when I had the chance.

  Nicky’s look turned sly. “So was I,” he said. “Until he betrayed me and became my enemy.”

  “Betrayed you how?”

 
Like the offspring of ancient royalty, he gave me a look both lordly and insane. “Tom assisted their design. Huh? He pointed them my way, then aided in invading my essence.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Tom.” But it did sound like Dr. Strangelove.

  “I hoped he would be wise enough to resist. Huh? When I saw he wasn’t, I took pity, but I also took precautions.”

  “By doing what?” I asked, thinking it might have been just that simple after all, that Tom had been killed pursuant to a paranoid fantasy of his brother’s, an agenda no one would ever understand or punish.

  “Putting distance between us,” Nicky was saying. “Huh? Breaking the link; removing the specimen; stunting the research. Huh?” At this point, Nicky’s mood approached the ecstatic.

  “Did you do anything else?”

  He outlined some possibilities. “Dismantle the conduits? Destroy the invasive agents? Disable the hardware? Huh?” He laughed mordantly. “Not yet. But operations are being mounted.”

  “I was wondering if you took any steps against Tom. To keep him from betraying you again.”

  Nicky shook his head. “Negative. He’s my brother. Huh? I’m his keeper. Huh? One day he will see the light.”

  For the moment, it served as a sufficient explanation for both of us, even though it was a reversal of everything I’d heard about the nature of their relationship.

  The one thing I had been certain of was that Nicky knew that Tom was dead. Now even that seemed doubtful. “I’m afraid I have bad news,” I said.

  His mind twitched as rapidly as his limbs. “Good news is no news; bad news is glad news, bought and paid for to deter me. Huh?”

  His jerks and jitters, his puzzling references, his urgent, singsong speech, his guttural punctuation, all were so removed from his brother’s precise nature I had trouble keeping the bond in mind. “Tom is dead,” I said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”

  I don’t know what I expected him to do, but I expected him to do something. Instead, the news, if it was news, hardly seemed to penetrate. “They want me to carry certain concepts so I will oblige them and retreat,” he said blandly, pleased at his insight. “Self-nullification is what they’re after. Huh? I’m surprised you don’t see it. If you are who you say you are,” he added cryptically. “Huh?”

  I didn’t know I’d said I was anybody.

  What I decided was that Nicky knew that Tom was dead, but he didn’t believe it. “Tom was buried last Sunday,” I said, to try to get at least that much through to him.

  “You lack awareness of their reach. Huh? They can fabricate anything—birth, death, health, wealth. A hole is a hole is a hole no matter what they call it. Huh?”

  “What if someone makes it an altar?”

  The reference was to the artifacts Nicky had placed atop Tom’s coffin—I thought it possible that Nicky had both murdered and enshrined his brother—but Nicky’s mind was trained on his enemies. “When it suits my purposes, I play along. Huh? So they won’t know what I know.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked. “Who has all this power? I need to know so I can resist them.”

  His look turned sly once more. “A good question—who’s at the top of the pyramid? Huh?” He looked around the room to make sure we were unobserved. “I trust you know the field operatives.”

  I shook my head.

  My ignorance made him angry. “You haven’t been paying attention. Huh? Each of us has a nemesis. My opposite is Marlin—in deep cover as a physician. Huh? He was assigned to me many years ago; he’s penetrated me several times.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “First my blood, then my life. Huh?”

  “Why do you think he—”

  Before I could complete the sentence, Nicky seemed to hear something somewhere outside the building. He glanced at the window as a mix of glee and cunning warped his face—Nicky was terrified, and he reveled in it.

  After one last look at Dracula, he started toward the door. “They’ve implanted a transmitter on my person,” he said by way of explanation. “Huh? They can triangulate on me in seconds, from receivers on the bridge towers and Mount Sutro. I have to keep moving. Huh?”

  I took a stab at a joint venture. “They’re tracking me, too. Thank God they take Sundays off.”

  Nicky stopped near the door. A long moment went by as I underwent a complex evaluation. I don’t know if I passed or not; all he said was, “Yes.”

  “It helps them to be seen as devout, doesn’t it?” I went on. “Religiosity aids subversion.”

  “You know more than I thought. Huh? We can help each other.”

  But instead of confiding further, he squeezed through the broken door and set off down the alley in a simian shuffle. I started to go after him, then thought of something and returned to Dracula instead. He was starting to regain consciousness by the time I found what I was looking for and put it in my pocket. As his eyelids began to flutter and his throat struggled to form a word, I slipped through the door and ran after Nicky.

  When I reached his side, he didn’t encourage or discourage my presence. We jogged together for a while, a race that put a premium on awkwardness. When we reached the street, he came to a stop. “It will be better if we split up,” he said. “Huh?”

  “We should rendezvous later.”

  “Where and when?”

  I thought about it. “Midnight. Steps of Glide Memorial.”

  “Public place. Huh? Good tactic. The Glide people are secure.” He glanced up and down the street, ready to set out again.

  “One more thing,” I said. “What methods are they using against you? How are they attacking?”

  He frowned dubiously, as if reconsidering his earlier appraisal. “Contamination. Huh?” he pronounced finally.

  “Right. Contamination. I thought so.” I turned in the direction of my car, then looked back. “Your brother wasn’t one of them,” I said. “He was working with me. We had them vulnerable to countermeasures, but he was killed because he knew too much.”

  “Too much is never enough. Huh?”

  Nicholas Crandall looked at me with what appeared to be a mix of skepticism and hope, then ran off into the clutter and clamor of the Tenderloin. As I watched him go, I had no idea what we’d said to each other or if we’d said anything at all. But when I remembered Tom’s final telephone message, I decided Nicky’s obsession wasn’t entirely irrational, that somewhere within those paranoic ramblings lay a core of truth that had triggered his brother’s death.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When I got back to the office, I telephoned Scanlon’s and left a message with Gary the barman for Jan to give me a call as soon as she had a chance. After I gave him my name, he asked if I’d located Nicky Crandall yet. When I told him I had, he asked about the timing of Nicky’s inheritance. I told him that was up to the courts. He didn’t regard it as encouraging.

  My next call was to Clay Oerter. The market was still spiraling upward on the immaculate news from the air war, so he could only give me a second.

  “Nothing in the Healthways pipeline on AIDS, Marsh,” he said quickly. “Not a direct application, at least. There could be fallout from other research, of course, but the specialist didn’t know of anything offhand. You need me to dig deeper?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  The dead end at the brokerage firm left me with another call to make, this time to Dr. Lodge, the man whose wife had been rescued from their crumpled home courtesy of the courage of the late Tom Crandall.

  The doctor got back to me in ten minutes. “I need to know something about blood,” I said when he came on the line. “I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “Does it have to do with Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll tell you whatever I can.” He cleared his throat. “Blood is a fascinating subject: the Egyptians used to bathe in it, the Romans drank it at orgies, and someone had the idea of injecting sheep’s blood into sick people as far back as
1667—transfusions have been a part of medical practice ever since. What is it about the subject that interests you, Mr. Tanner?”

  “The transfusion part. Blood banks, plasma centers, that kind of thing.”

  “The blood supply; is that what we’re talking about?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “What do you want to know about it? That’s a pretty large subject.”

  “First off, what’s the difference between blood banks and the Red Cross and the plasma centers you see around?”

  “Blood banks and the Red Cross are similar—nonprofit organizations that collect whole blood from unpaid volunteers, then sell the blood or its by-products to hospitals for use in transfusions. The Red Cross supplies roughly half of the blood used in this country; the blood banks provide the rest. The Red Cross blood services gross half a billion a year.”

  “But none of these outfits pay their donors?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Back in the early seventies, it began to be felt by hospitals and others that the accumulation of a blood supply that relied on people who sell their blood introduced too much risk into the system. The fear was that poor people who needed money would lie about their health status in order to pass the screening procedures, and the supply would become contaminated. Although this view was a bit alarmist in my judgement, most hospitals stopped buying paid-for blood, which forced the Red Cross and the blood banks to rely on voluntary donation only. Then when AIDS came along, California made it illegal to transfuse paid-for blood and blood products.”

  “But not plasma.”

  “Transfusing paid-for plasma is prohibited in California as well, but there are still collection centers that pay the donors and ship the product out of state.”

  “What is plasma, exactly?”

  “More than fifty percent of the volume of whole blood is plasma. The other primary components are red cells and platelets, which are collected and sold separately as well. The basic approach is for plasma to be collected at plasmapheresis centers, then broken down by pharmaceutical companies through a process called fractionation into plasma derivatives such as albumin and immunoglobins and the factor VIII clotting agent and the like. Frequently what is commonly called a blood transfusion is in reality the transfusion of one of these derivatives rather than whole blood. In current practice, whole-blood transfusions constitute fewer than ten percent of all transfusions.”