“You saved her…” Melissa wept, her voice a shredded, broken rattle from the depths of an open grave:
“I kicked your seat for two hours… I insulted you in front of this entire plane… I threatened your job… and you drove a three-inch needle into my daughter’s chest to save her life…”
She looked up at me through a mask of smeared mascara and wet dust, her hands clawing at her designer slacks:
“Why?! Why didn’t you let her die?! My family was trying to steal your grandfather’s life!”
“Because I am a Mercer, Melissa,” I answered softly, my voice carrying forty decibels of compressed, sub-zero polar diamond that made the six surrounding rows of passengers sit in absolute, breathless silence:
“And a Mercer does not balance a family ledger on the corpse of an innocent child.”
Outside the thick acrylic cabin windows, the darkness of the high-altitude troposphere was shattered by two blinding plumes of incandescent amber afterburner thrust!
