The Texas Twist Read online

  Praise for The Texas Twist

  “Superbly splendilicious! No living author reinvents the English language with such conniving wit as John Vorhaus. It’s time to put everything else on hold—the new Radar Hoverlander novel has arrived.”

  —Stephen Jay Schwartz

  L.A. Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat

  Praise for the Radar Hoverlander Novels

  “Grand entertainment … No caper-novel fan should miss this one.”

  —Booklist

  “Pleasantly preposterous…what Radar (and Vorhaus) understand is that every emotional attachment can be exploited for the sake of a scam … A lighthearted caper with psychological insight.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “I loved this comic caper with its twisty pretzel plot, clever invented language, and an attitude that’s Carl Hiaasen channeling Dane Cook.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Vorhaus keeps things moving briskly, and Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen fans should be pleased.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by John Vorhaus

  NONFICTION

  The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not

  Creativity Rules! A Writer’s Workbook

  The Pro Poker Playbook

  Killer Poker: Strategy and Tactics for Winning Poker Play

  Killer Poker Online

  The Killer Poker Hold’em Handbook

  Poker Night

  The Strip Poker Kit

  Killer Poker Online/2

  Killer Poker No Limit!

  Killer Poker Shorthanded (with Tony Guerrera)

  Decide to Play Great Poker (with Annie Duke)

  Decide to Play Drunk Poker

  The Little Book of Sitcom

  How to Write Good

  FICTION

  Under the Gun

  The California Roll

  The Albuquerque Turkey

  World Series of Murder

  Lucy in the Sky

  The

  Texas

  Twist

  A Radar Hoverlander Novel

  by John Vorhaus

  Copyright © 2013 by John Vorhaus

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data on file with the Library of Congress

  For reference only:

  Vorhaus, John, 1955–

  The Texas twist / John Vorhaus

  ISBN 978-1-938849-08-4

  1. Novelists—Fiction. 2. Crime—Fiction. 3. Texas—Fiction

  I. Title

  Published by

  Prospect Park Books

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by

  Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Design by Amy Inouye/Future Studio

  Table of Contents

  1. Olivier de Havilland

  2. The Zizzles

  3. Magic Bullet

  4. Mirplovian Logic

  5. We Smell a Rat

  6. You’d Think It’s a Scram

  7. His Pollyanna Docket

  8. The Gun Smoketh

  9. True Believer

  10. Sweetheart Scam

  11. Cortisol Surge

  12. Backstory Wink

  13. The Texas Twist

  14. The Visine Gag

  15. On Its Way to Pluto

  16. Five Oh Something Something

  17. Leave Wellinov Alone

  18. A Captain Kirk Kiss

  19. The Leveling Game

  20. Collateral Glass

  21. Savransky Cut

  22. The Big Misinformation

  23. Kxx

  24. We Play with Pain

  25. Fools in Motley

  26. Grifter Fill

  27. The Walkaway

  28. The Book of Mirplo

  29. Radar Fucking Hoverlander

  30. Curiosity

  Olivier de Havilland

  A cold wind fell across the face of the west; a scratchy wet towel of a wind that poured down the front range of the Rockies, gathered speed across the prairie, and blasted into Manhattan, Kansas, slamming it sidewise across the north-south artery of Seth Child Road. Rain mixed with sleet rattled the January skeletons of the poplars dotting Kansas State University and thrummed against the casement window of a basement space in a weathered red brick building on the ragged eastern fringe of campus. Inside the lab, a goggle-eyed man in a lab coat with a slight hitch in his giddyup moved frantically—corybantically—from his computer keyboard to his laser array, cold storage units, and test bench equipment. The scientist (well, he looked like a scientist) paused to glance at his watch. He peered out the window, then back at his watch. He looked nervous. He looked nervous even though no one was looking. That’s how good he was, how deep he got into his thing.

  He glanced once more at his watch.

  They were late.

  Back on Seth Child, a boxy black pickup truck roared north. It was a new Song Staccato that, as the driver described it, “handled like an auditorium.” He drove aggressively, power-merging with nary a thought to potential collisions and hitting hit holes in the traffic flow like a running back running scared. At Dickens Avenue he slewed savagely into the right-turn lane, fishtailed in the wet, hopped a chunk of corner curb, jammed onto Dickens, and barreled toward campus. A woman in the back seat moaned softly, fighting down her gorge. She caught the driver glancing at her in the rearview mirror. He may have seen her distress, but his eyes showed no mercy and he continued to drive as though hounds of hell had caught the scent of Pup-Peroni in his pants. Damn it, Mirplo, she thought, learn to freaking drive. Then she reminded herself that he wasn’t Vic Mirplo just now. He was Nick Eintritt, private-equity consultant and angel investor.

  And maniac driver.

  Why couldn’t he leave that out of his docket? wondered Allie Quinn, using common grifter slang for the package of name, personality, backstory, attributes, business cards, websites, phantom friends, bogus bona fides, and ad hoc bafflegab that comprised a con artist’s adopted identity. (Allie’s own current docket identified her conclusively—albeit fully fictively—as Fabrice Traynor, BSc, MBA, PhD, notionally in from Princeton, and here to lend her expertise to the task of vetting the invention they were about to see.) According to Nick, Nick was in business development, specializing in alternative-energy investments. Mostly ag-based, of course—biofuel—here in the nation’s breadbasket, but every now and then something special came along.

  Something for special customers.

  Today’s special customer, one Sterling Holton, sat in the shotgun seat, himself not terribly enthralled with Nick’s driving. Holton was an adult child of prairie privilege with a tycoon scion’s trust fund and a chip on his shoulder you could see from space. He hated his father—“that asshole entrepreneur”—and desperately wanted to beat the old man at his own game. Get there first for once. For once be the one to score the big score. He looked down at the electric blue clamshell case he’d borrowed from Nick to hold his money.

  This might be that once.

  Holton didn’t know, though the two gifted grifters in his company did, that it was his hate, not his money, that made him such a productive lead. Hate caused errors in judgment. Big ones, like bri
nging cash to a product demo. Nick had amplified those errors by applying deft pressure (it’s called rushing the mark), presenting this deal as a hush so hush you couldn’t even pass papers, and with so limited a time to act that Sterling had rashly resolved, I’ll show you, Dad! I’ll show you who’s the genius investor!

  The Staccato bombed on, its onboard navigation system guiding Nick (when you were on the job, you always went by your docket name) through a hashtag of campus access roads to his destination. He seemed not to be paying much attention, for he always took the indicated turn at the last possible second, heaving his passengers back and forth, two unhappy corks bobbing on the sea of the Staccato’s spongy suspension. Fabrice had never been motion sick before but had no trouble recognizing the state. She pushed her cinnamon shag hair off her forehead, letting the sweat there cool. Then she threw up, just a little, in her mouth. At last Nick sprayed the truck into a gravelly parking spot outside the red brick building. He jumped out and stood reveling in the rain; having grown up in the desert southwest, he was still knocked out by the novelty of winter. Holton climbed down from the Chinese behemoth, using the clamshell case as an umbrella. Fabrice staggered out as well, thankful for the feel of solid earth beneath her feet and hopeful that it would settle her stomach.

  Nick walked over to the others and drew them in close, conspiratorial. “Now look,” he said, “this guy’s a little twitchy, right? Off the charts brilliant, but totally paranoid. So be cool with him. He’s taken a lot of heat for his ideas, as you can imagine, and he won’t naturally believe that you trust him.”

  “What makes you think we do?” asked Allie as Fabrice, her adopted voice sounding like honey spiked with bees.

  “You’ve seen the prospectus,” said Nick. “You’ve seen the computer models.”

  “I once saw a monkey play Mozart. Doesn’t mean I’m sending it to Juilliard.”

  Nick put his hand on her shoulder. Holton noticed her muscles clench at his touch. No love lost there, he thought—as he was intended to. “Look, Fabrice,” said Nick, “I don’t blame you for hiring yourself out to my client. Everybody needs an expert. I’ve got no problem with that. But sometimes the real deal is just simply the real deal. So give Dr. de Havilland the benefit of the doubt, okay? He’s a pretty amazing guy.”

  “We’ll see,” said Fabrice.

  “Yes,” said Nick earnestly, “you will.” He led them around to the back of the building. Fabrice lagged behind, and Nick used the opportunity to tell Sterling softly, “I told you to get your own consultant, and okay you got the best, but, sheesh, what a ball buster, huh?”

  “Is she seeing anyone?”

  Nick skipped a beat—a stumble that probably only another con artist would notice—and said, “You know, I don’t know.” But he did. He knew very well.

  They reached the blank face of an emergency exit door. Nick tugged at the door and it came open. With a nod to the patch of duct tape covering the latch, he said, “We’re expected.” Just inside, a flight of galvanized steel stairs led down into a dimly lit corridor dotted with dented filing cabinets and old broken office chairs. Allie’s high heels ticked along the cracked and peeling linoleum floor as she and the others walked the length of the building, past unmarked and unnumbered frosted-glass doors. This was the Christiania of KSU, an academic free state where the school’s scientific minds could hack around on projects of their choosing, unfunded but also unburdened by invasive oversight. KSU had no illusions about itself. It was a practical institution and turned out a decent engineer, but it didn’t have the resources or brainpower for world-class science, and anything on that order springing forth from Manhattan would be a fluke—hence this facility, officially known as the Incubator, in which de Havilland, whose credentials identified him as an adjunct lecturer, had claimed lab space according to the time-honored system for doing so: he just moved in. Behind closed doors he investigated the superconducting properties of amorphous metals and ran arcane experiments in Zwicky box contraptions that generated streams of data—though what that data represented, no one but the admittedly eccentric Dr. de Havilland could say. Were you to ask him, he would merely note that while mankind’s capacity to gather groundbreaking data was increasing exponentially, its ability to interpret such data continued to just plod along.

  It was before de Havilland’s office door that Nick, Fabrice, and Sterling now stood.

  Nick rapped softly on the frosted glass. There was silence from the other side, then a distracted mumble, the sound of unevenly shuffling feet, and the rasp of a sliding dead-bolt. De Havilland opened the door. He looked at Nick for a long moment, as if struggling to place him. Then he muttered, “Eintritt. Good, good.” Leaving the door open, he turned his back on them and limped back to his lab bench. To Holton’s eyes he seemed homuncular, so hunched over and self-absorbed—just how you’d expect an obsessed scientist to look. Fabrice knew that he stood up straighter than that.

  Once they were inside, de Havilland looked balefully at the open door and shot Nick an imperative glare. Nick closed it, first glancing outside to make sure they were alone. Holton was impressed with the air of secrecy. It sent a shiver through him. De Havilland, meanwhile, lost himself in calibrating an apparatus comprising three triangulating lasers aimed at a glass-walled cube that measured about ten inches square. He ignored Nick’s ahems for as long as he could, then said impatiently, “Very well, very well, step over here.”

  Nick ushered the others to the lab bench and introduced them to the scientist, who only reluctantly shook hands with Holton, then wiped his hand briskly on his white lab coat, as if it carried plague. Fabrice he ignored altogether. Said Nick, “Fabrice, Sterling, I give you Dr. Olivier de Havilland.”

  Holton couldn’t help himself. He practically snorted, “Not really?”

  De Havilland looked at him blankly and said, “What?”

  Holton spread his hands. “Like Olivia?”

  De Havilland considered this for a moment, seemed to comprehend nothing of note, and turned his attention to Nick. “You explained about the money?”

  “I did.”

  De Havilland turned back to Holton. “Let me see it.” Holton went to put the clamshell case on the lab bench, and de Havilland practically swatted it to the floor. “Not there, you idiot. These lasers are precisely tuned. The slightest bump or jar and the whole process breaks down.” This drew a thin harrumph from Fabrice, and de Havilland seemed to notice her for the first time. He asked of no one in particular, “Who is this bonbon?”

  “Fabrice Traynor,” she said, visibly bristling at the bonbon tag. “I’m here to validate your findings.” She took a scurrilous beat and continued, “If such a thing is possible.”

  De Havilland became irate. “You know what?” he said, “Get out. All of you. Just leave. There will be no demonstration today.”

  Nick glowered at Fabrice. “Come on, Doc,” he pleaded. “We drove all the way from Tulsa.” He shot a nod at the clamshell case. “And we did bring the money.”

  De Havilland considered this. He templed his fingers at his lips and said, “The money. Yes. It always comes down to Mammon. Well, let’s see it.” He gestured Holton to a scarred steel desk. There Sterling set down his case and opened it to reveal a loose pile of stacked and bundled hundreds. De Havilland thumbed through it approvingly, then shut the lid with a snap. “There was a time, you know, when scientists had patrons. Da Vinci and the Medicis, Galileo and the Catholic Church.”

  “The church didn’t sponsor Galileo,” sniped Fabrice. “They persecuted him. They tried him for heresy. Get your facts straight at least, geez.” She turned to Holton. “Sterling, we have a credibility issue here.”

  Nick placated with his hands. “Let’s just watch the demo, okay?” He turned to de Havilland. “Stick to science, Doc,” he said. “Leave history to the histrionics.”

  They stared at each other for a second. Holton looked on, manifestly vested in having the doctor relent. They had driven all the way from Tul
sa, and he had no mind to make the drive twice, not with Eintritt at the wheel. Besides, this was exciting, all this investigation and discovery, just the sort of hole-in-the-wall gold mine that his father would disdain. The fact that it all looked so slapdash gave it a kind of low-rent authenticity. Clearly this de Havilland wasn’t going out of his way to impress. That said something. It telegraphed integrity.

  Exactly as it was designed to do.

  De Havilland moved back to the lab bench. His fingers danced over the keys of a battered laptop as he initiated a start-up sequence that had the lasers humming and glowing. He opened a freestanding freezer and a white cloud fell out, pooling on the floor until it dissipated. “That’s just a cooling agent,” said de Havilland. “It won’t hurt you.” He grabbed a pair of industrial forceps, reached into the freezer and extracted a small slab of metal, about the size of a deck of cards. “This, though; this would.” He swung it casually past them so that Holton, at least, flinched and backed away. Fabrice stood her ground, her narrow eyes soaking up the detail of the smoking ingot and its vapor trail of dry ice.

  “Superconducting metal?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said de Havilland. “And it would zap you like a downed power line.” He placed the artifact inside the glass box. To Holton’s surprise, it floated there.

  Holton looked at his consultant. “How—?”

  “It’s voltaic,” she said tiredly. “Electromagnets hold it in place.” She whistled a few bars from The Magic Flute.

  “What are you whistling?” demanded de Havilland.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just a little Mozart.”

  De Havilland returned to his laptop and punched another sequence of strokes. The laser lights turned blue—cobalt blue, like the clamshell case that still lay on the doctor’s desk—and the air took on the crackly expectancy of a summer night before a storm. “You’ll smell a little ozone,” said de Havilland. “It can’t be helped. If I had some decent funding I could conduct this operation in a proper vacuum, where it belongs. As things are, we lose…” he paused to calculate “… eleven percent efficiency.”