The Texas Twist Read online

  “Sarah, you don’t know me. I’m just a guy you met on the street. But I’m one in a million who knows what you’re going through, and I know something you don’t: This doctor’s therapy would’ve worked. I’m sure of it. I’ve seen his studies.” He squeezed her hand urgently. “I’ve seen his subjects.”

  “Subjects?”

  “Chimps. Bonobos. He gives them Karn’s, then he cures them.”

  “How?”

  Adam laughed self-consciously. “You’re asking me? I’m not a scientist. To me, Karn’s was this acid dissolving my baby’s brain.”

  “I see it as PAC-MAN.”

  He smiled wanly. “Prions. Misfolded proteins. What’s that?”

  “I know, huh?”

  “But this man, this Dr. Gauch, he’s found some way to fold them back.”

  “You mean—?”

  “That’s right, Sarah. A cure. And when I found that out, well, I just had to find someone, anyone, I could help. I had to make Dylan’s death be not in vain.”

  “And your nurse friend?”

  “I have a lot of ‘friends’ like that,” he admitted. “People on the lookout for, well, for people like you.” He ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture that seemed to sum up all his struggles. “I’m not a rich man. Caring for Dylan really spent me down. But I’ve put a fair amount of money into this, into tracking folks down. I’ve come to understand that it’s my mission. I’m here to help you, Sarah.”

  He embraced her with his eyes and she felt her heart melt. “Sarah,” he said, “your son doesn’t have to die.”

  Magic Bullet

  This money is a problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Radar looked down at the stacks of cash in the blue case on the coffee table. It wasn’t an overwhelming take, but on top of all the other money they’d made recently.… “We might have too much.”

  This comment surprised both his girlfriend, Allie Quinn, who stood with her arm around his waist, and his best friend, Vic Mirplo, sprawled on the rented leather couch in the Austin apartment they now shared. They both knew what kind of a roll they’d been on, a roll that had begun with the Albuquerque Turkey, an elegant performance-art fraud they had helped Radar’s dad perpetrate against a Las Vegas hard guy named Wolfredian. It had netted them substantial fresh green and ended with Vic faking his own death, which he had found fun.

  They weren’t surprised to find themselves well bankrolled, just that Radar should find it a problem somehow.

  Mirplo asked, “Too much money, Radar? How does that work?”

  Of course they couldn’t remain in Vegas after they’d buttoned up the mark—finished the con in con-speak—so they smudged their identity trails and resurfaced here in a low-rise condominium complex in Austin’s lakeside Doke neighborhood, from which beige base they had spent the end of the old year and the start of the new quite successfully prospecting America’s heartland for unprotected pockets of liquidity like Sterling Holton’s. Their dockets these days were one-offs, purpose-built for each snuke, or scam. Some relationships, however, naturally recurred. The fake fury generated by Allie and Radar, for example, always worked a treat to put marks on the wobble, especially the ones who thought they might have a shot with her. Allie was a fading fan of the play. She hated arguing with Radar, even in the world of make-believe. After all they’d been through, from the crosses and double-crosses that first forged their bond through the tests they’d faced as two lifelong dissemblers struggling to build a bridge of honesty between them, they had arrived at last at a certain casual intimacy. We two are one, thought Allie, and any grifter’s script that moved them off their unity seemed strange to her, even undesirable now. Especially now, thought Allie with a secret smile. But if that was Radar’s problem, too, she couldn’t quite see the connection. So she waited for him to finish speaking his mind. That’s one thing she loved about him: He always spoke his mind.

  “It just sits there,” said Radar. “It’s starting to weigh us down.”

  “I am so not tracking your target,” said Vic. Of the three, he was the least experienced in the art of the con. No rookie for sure, but he’d been the worst sort of grunt-level grifter, unschooled and unskilled, till Radar came along and raised him up from the short cons and street gags that had been his clownishly unproductive stock in trade. While Vic had grown quite a lot in the years of their association—he’d had plenty of headroom in that area—he remained intensely loyal to his friend, and admired the devious dodges and elegantly executed scripts that Radar cooked up.

  “I’m just thinking, we’re plenty well rolled now. There’s not much point in more of the same. After a while, the money just piles up.”

  “Which is exactly what it wants to do,” said Mirplo. “Money loves company. It likes nothing better than to pile up around other money.” He thought for a moment, then added, “But, hey, look, if you’ve got a debt wish, I’ll be happy to make yours ameliorate.”

  “I’m not sure that word means what you think it means,” said Allie, who was well used to Vic’s verbal assaults on the English language. These were often synapse accidents, but equally often intentional linguistic mangles that Vic treated as twisted points of pride.

  “Sure it does,” said Vic. “Vanish or disappear, like Amelia Earhart.”

  Allie chuckled. When she buried her knuckle into Radar’s shoulder blade, he leaked an aah at the sweet pain she produced. “What’s really up, bub?” she asked.

  “How many perpetual motion machines can we invent?” he replied. “Do it long enough, we just become hacks.”

  “Yeah,” said Vic. “Rich hacks.” He shook his head with exaggerated sadness. “Lamentable.”

  “What do you want to do instead?” asked Allie. “Something bigger?”

  “I don’t know,” said Radar. “Bigger…different.…” The thought settled on him like a cloud, but he shook it off, for Radar Hoverlander did not dwell in clouds. He dealt in logic, practical aspects, cool analyses of best paths. Balance was a strength of his game. It’s what made him a top grifter and the three of them a top team. But there was so much more to him than that. His talents, like his interests, ran off in all directions, from reading lips (in several languages) to rebuilding engines, from free climbing to BASE jumping to that ancient mariner’s art of knot tying, macramé. He could pitch a tent in the dark, land a plane in a pinch, and, if he had a decent manual to work from, probably perform surgery. A polymath, they’d called him as a kid, and they imagined that he didn’t know what that meant. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

  For a week now Allie had been looking for a certain opening, and when she saw this one, she took it. “I know something you can think about.”

  “Oh,” said Vic, affecting a bored tone, “I already know this.”

  Allie’s eyes went wide. “You do?”

  “My driving never made you sick before. You got the flu?”

  “No.”

  “Eat some bad clams?”

  “No.”

  “Then…” Vic got up from the couch, throwing a whole-body shrug at Allie. “Tell ’im.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Allie clasped her hands around Radar’s neck. “I’m knocked up, lover. What do you think about that?”

  A grin split Radar’s face. “I think that’s great, amazing!” He kissed her hard. Utterly without affectation, he said, “I am going to be the best dad ever.”

  “And there you go, Radar,” said Mirplo. “All the more reason to keep up your game.”

  “Nope. All the more reason to do something better. Be an example for the kid.”

  “It’s the goodness virus is what it is,” said Vic. “I always knew you had it in you.” He jabbed an accusing finger. “You’ve shown flashes.”

  “Vic, trust me: My morality is as frankly self-interested as ever.”

  “Whatever you say…Daddy.”

  Just then a dog ambled into the room, and this would be Boy, Radar and
Allie’s unlovely but deeply loving big pooch of mixed provenance. Last year, using nothing more than sleight-of-mind and the power of persuasion, Radar had rescued Boy from the hands of a tweaking, violent meth head. This may have been an outbreak of the goodness virus Vic named, for grifters, peripatetic by nature, generally avoid the canine encumbrance, but in this case Radar embraced it. He loved his ragged old hound, missing ear and all. Behind Boy came Emily, a feisty toy spaniel playfully hectoring his back legs, an assault she seemed to have been at long enough to prompt Boy’s strategic advance into the room with the people in it; perhaps Emily would attack a lap instead.

  “When’s Em going home?” asked Radar. “She’s driving Boy crazy.”

  “Sarah said they’d be back by now. Maybe the appointment ran late.”

  “And how is it exactly that we became the neighborhood dog sitters?” asked Vic.

  “Emily’s cute,” said Allie. “Boy likes her.”

  “Boy wants to stomp her,” said Radar. “She won’t let him nap.”

  “Well, there you go. She’s keeping him fit.”

  The doorbell rang. Vic flipped down the lid on the clamshell case and slid it under the couch. Allie kissed Radar’s cheek. “You’re taking this pretty calmly, big guy. You know it’s gonna put you through changes.”

  “Change is good,” said Radar. “Change is growth.” He turned to Vic and stage-whispered, “Don’t worry, I’ll freak out later.”

  Allie opened the door for Sarah and her son and immediately noticed the sparkle in her neighbor’s eyes. “Well, you look happy, Sarah. Good news from the docs?”

  “No,” said Sarah, “same news from the docs.” Then she added explosively, “But Allie, I found a cure!”

  “What?”

  “I mean, not me, I didn’t find it, but this fellow did, this man I met.”

  As she blurted the detailed tale of Adam Ames, Radar and Vic were soon exchanging looks. Allie intercepted these and said sternly, “It doesn’t have to be that.”

  “It’s that,” said Radar.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” she repeated, though with less conviction. To Sarah she said, “You’d better come in.” She got Jonah a snack and settled him down with the dogs—dog fur still soothed him. He disappeared back into his music as Radar led Sarah to the couch.

  It turns out there really is such a thing as snake oil. It’s a homeopathic cure, made from Chinese water snakes and traditionally used to relieve pain because Chinese water snake fat is just dripping with—here comes the big word—eicoapentaenoic acid, which may or may not, you know, relieve pain. Nineteenth-century railroad coolies brought it to the Old West, where it met modern commerce and morphed into what we now know it to be: patent medicine; placebo-effect drugs pimped by fictive testimonials.

  Snake oil. It’s the first thing you see on display in the Quackery Hall of Fame.

  One thing, though: With snake oil, at least there’s a product. Radar surmised that this Ames was selling nothing to Sarah but Sarah’s own hope. According to the script for this snuke, she would soon be touched up for front money, and if she proved promising, they would settle in and just milk her. They? Of course they. You don’t run this scam on your own. There was Adam’s nurse friend for starters, plus other friends like her, bird dogs ensconced in medical suites far and wide. These could be honest people even, except that they took cash to steer potential victims Ames’s way. Eventually, if needed, there would be the Swiss pathologist, armed with ironclad proof of a cure just a few tantalizing dollars away. It was a pretty straightforward snuke, one of many designed to strip-mine a desperate and vulnerable mother. In scam circles it was called the Magic Bullet.

  A shiver ran through Radar. Have I done things like that?

  I have done things like that.

  Radar studied Sarah. She’d moved into the complex a few months ago, shortly after they had. She was relentlessly peppy, despite her son’s condition, and always had a cheery greeting when they met in the elevator or laundry room, or in the parking lot beside the building. Then their pets became playmates—whether Boy liked it or not—and she became a fixture among them. Radar had been leery at first, for it was ever his policy to hold citizens at arm’s length. But Sarah and Allie had a relaxing, chatty gal-pal friendship of a type Radar had never known Allie to have before, and for that alone he was willing to make room for Sarah in their lives. For his part, Radar found Sarah’s fluffy nature soothing, like dog fur in its way.

  Now she’s facing a Magic Bullet, and how do you break that bad news? “This Adam Ames,” he began, “don’t you think it’s a pretty big coincidence that his son had your son’s same rare disease?”

  “But he explained that,” said Sarah. “He’s been looking for people like me.”

  “He’s always looking for people like you,” said Radar. “He knows how desperate you are.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Vic cut bluntly to the chase. “Sister, he’s a con artist. He doesn’t have a cure. He’ll let you believe he does, and make you pay for your belief. Has he asked you for money?”

  “No.”

  “He will.”

  Sarah’s mouth formed a small o as the allegation sank in. “But that’s horrible,” she said. “Who would do a thing like that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Radar a bit too quickly. “The important thing is to cut him off right away. Don’t initiate contact. If he contacts you, tell him you’ve lost interest. You can’t let him get his hooks in.”

  “But what if he really does have a cure?”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We…” said Allie, “we know people like this.”

  “You associate?” With a word, Sarah conveyed her shocked contempt.

  “Hey, now,” said Vic, but with a look from Radar he put his affront back in his pocket.

  “Sarah, I’m sorry,” said Allie. “He’s selling smoke.”

  “But what if he’s not? I can’t leave this stone unturned. I can’t leave any.”

  “Sarah.…”Allie reached out a hand.

  Sarah practically slapped it away. “No. No, I have to know.”

  “You’ll just be wasting your money.”

  “So? I’d spend every cent I had to save Jonah. Wouldn’t you if it were your son?”

  Radar and Allie exchanged looks. For the first time in their lives, such a question was not rhetorical. Nevertheless, “That’s the attitude they want,” said Radar. “It’s what they feed on.”

  “Feed on? You make him sound like a vulture.”

  “He is.”

  “No, he’s not. I know he’s not. I looked him in the eye.”

  “So he’s a skilled vulture,” said Vic.

  Tears welled up in Sarah’s pale blue eyes. “I don’t understand why you want to hurt me like this.”

  “Honey,” said Allie, “we’re not trying to hurt you.”

  Sarah angrily rose to her feet and brought Jonah out of his iPod. “Come on, Jonah, let’s go.”

  Radar knew that this friendship hung in the balance. Under other circumstances, he’d have cut ties without a single backward glance. But this was different. If they didn’t act, she’d be hurt, badly hurt, not in just her wallet but her soul.

  Is it the goodness virus?

  What the hell, she’s a friend.

  Radar said suddenly, “We’ll meet him.”

  Sarah sniffed. “What?”

  “If he contacts you again. We’ll be your well-meaning friends. The skeptics, you know? If he’s in the game, he’ll expect skeptics and have a script for them.”

  “Script?”

  “A set of steps to get your money.”

  “And you’ll recognize this…script?” Radar nodded. Said Sarah, “What kind of people are you?”

  Allie said, “Not the kind you think.”

  Sarah sagged. “An hour ago I was so happy.” Allie crossed to her and held her in an embrace. Sarah pulled back and l
ooked in her eyes. “Is there any chance you’re wrong?”

  “There’s always a chance,” said Allie.

  “That’s all I need,” said Sarah. “All I need is a chance.”

  Mirplovian Logic

  Quick in, quick out,” said Radar. “We get next to this guy, move him off Sarah, move on with our lives.”

  Radar, Vic, and Allie had gone out to a nearby Rudi’s Eatateria for a skull session and some awesome chili pot pie. Under the table, Radar’s hand kept creeping up Allie’s leg. It couldn’t help itself, that hand. It felt giddy. “What’s our script?” asked Allie, not so much ignoring his hand as refusing to dignify it with a response.

  “Just like I said. Skeptical friends. Our Sarah blew in all bubbly; we just want to make sure the bubbles are justified.”

  “This Adam Ames,” said Mirplo, “shouldn’t we Google him first?”

  “Already have,” said Radar. “He returns exactly as Sarah saw him. Citizen, widowed father.…”

  “Wait, widowed?” asked Allie. “Sarah said he was divorced.”

  “Maybe she misremembered,” said Radar.

  “True,” intoned Vic. “Witness memory is crap, this we know.” He cocked his head at his own thought, then pulled from his hip pocket a small Hello Kitty notebook and a pen, and laboriously inscribed, Witness memory is crap, this we know.

  “What are you doing?” asked Radar.

  “Starting my book.”

  “You’re writing a book?” asked Allie. “About what?”

  “This. Us. Life on the razzle. How grifters roll.”