The Texas Twist (4 page)

“Do you live here in Texas?” she asked.

“New England,” he said. “But I've been all over the world with this.”

“What do you mean?”

“When they told me Dylan had Karn's, I thought, ‘Okay, let's give him drugs. Let's get this over with.' But you know as well as anybody that there are no drugs, no ‘over with.'” Sarah nodded. “I thought that was impossible. I thought modern medicine studied everything, cured everything. I thought there must be some way to fix it.” Again he brought his eyes to hers, and this time she saw fierceness there. “And
you know what? There could be, if someone would just damn look. But Karn's is too rare. There's no money in curing it. Have you heard what they call it?” Sarah shook her head. “An orphan disease. I find that ironic, don't you?”

Sarah said nothing, but her heart went out to Ames. She spontaneously reached out and patted his hand.

“We got six months,” said Adam quietly. “I don't count the last two. By then he was on machines, and—” Sarah blanched. “Oh, I'm so sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean—” She thought he was going to cry. It wouldn't have been unmanly, just rue for the pain he'd provoked, pain they both could well understand. There was an awkward pause, which he finally filled with, “Of course my lady friend left. I don't blame her. What I was going through, she didn't need to be burdened with that.” Sarah found that attitude admirably compassionate. She hadn't been nearly so charitable toward Jonah's absentee dad, who in all of this had proven as useful as a chocolate teapot.

“Plus, I wasn't at my best,” Adam continued. “I was angry.”

“Angry?”

“At medicine. God. Angry at me. I was vile. No fun to be around.”

Sarah sighed. “I can relate.”

His voice softened. It almost caressed her. “I really wish you couldn't,” he said. “Anyway, in the end I was just drained, you know? Numb. I might have stayed that way forever. I wanted to. But then I got a phone call.” He scratched his left eyebrow. “This was about a month after the funeral. It was a Swiss pathologist. He'd been trying to get in touch with
me. He'd heard about Dylan and had a promising therapy he wanted to try. But of course he was too late.

“A thing you'll learn about me,” said Adam, “I'm like a dog with a bone sometimes. Stubborn. When you call a boy untreatable, when you condemn him like that…no. No, that I can't accept. I understood that Dylan was gone, but I had to know if he could've been saved. I can't explain it. I just had to know. So I went to see this man. And I learned the truth about orphan drugs.”

“Which is what?” asked Sarah.

“Okay, in civilized places, let's say here, Europe, a few other spots, sometimes there actually is help for orphans. Radically reduced testing-pool parameters.” He saw that he almost lost her on that one, so he backed up a bit. “With most diseases, when they do clinical trials, there's lots of subjects to test on. But with Karn's…we're not statistically significant. So how do you test? Well, you test fewer people and hope for the best. You also fast-track approval for some of these drugs, and give the developers extended patents or market monopolies, incentive to do the research. But here's the thing. Only big pharma scores. They're in bed with the FDA or its overseas counterparts. The little guy never has a chance, especially if the little guy is studying something as rare as Karn's.

“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.”

T
his 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.”