The Texas Twist (7 page)

Sarah must have described Radar's appearance—his wiry frame, boyish round face, and unruly mop of brown hair—for Ames seemed to recognize him at once. He stood with a self-conscious smile and extended his hand as Radar approached. They introduced themselves and made a bit of small talk, and then Adam said, “If you're wondering, it's miles.”

“Miles?”

“Airline miles. How I'm able to stay here.” Ames's wave indicated the Hyatt, its pink marble and ash concierge desk, and the entrance to the Marker 10 expense-account restaurant. “I
used to travel a lot, racked up a ton of miles. Finally have something useful to spend them on. Do you want to sit down?” Ames started to sit, then paused, waiting for Radar to take the lead, as if he were not quite sure what was the proper protocol here.

Radar, reading Ames's agitation, asked, “Mr. Ames, am I making you nervous?”

“Adam. Of course you are. I…from the way Sarah talked about you, I was half expecting a hit man.”

“Not seriously.”

“Well, I didn't
really
think so, but still.…” Ames took a breath. “I gather you think I'm some sort of flimflammer. I've never…no one's ever thought of me like that before. I'm having some trouble dealing with it.”

“Then let's slow down,” said Radar. “Are you okay here in the lobby or would you rather we talked in your room?” He asked the question just to see how Ames would react, for con artists had a long tradition of burnishing their scams with appropriately swanky surroundings. It was well within the realm of possibility that this lobby was no more than Adam's office, and that he was no more overnighting at the Hyatt than Radar.

But Ames's reaction was unremarkable. “No, this is fine,” he said, settling back into his chair. “They haven't made up my room yet.” Which, again, told Radar nothing: It was either preplanned bafflegab or a genuine response. Adam gestured Radar into the opposite chair, then picked up his briefcase and set it on the low glass coffee table between them. “So, ‘Radar,'” he said, “that's an unusual name.”

“I get that a lot.”

“As in O'Reilly?”

“As in airborne threat detector, but I get that a lot, too.”

“So what would you name your own kids? Sonar? Loran?” Ames smiled weakly as he essayed the joke, but the fact that Radar had been talking baby names, joke names, with Vic and Allie somehow brought Adam's comment to him at an odd angle and temporarily locked his reaction. It was a tiny stumble on Radar's part and had the effect of leaving Ames floating, momentarily, in a conversational void. After an awkward pause, Ames carried on. “Well, anyway,” he said, “I guess I have some explaining to do.” He opened the briefcase. “Now, I have some reports here, lab findings.…” Ames rummaged inside and withdrew a binder-clipped sheaf. “It's not much. I don't…I'm not great at presentations. You'll get the gist of what Dr. Gauch is driving at. It's pretty straightforward. I really can't add anything to it.”

“I'll take a look at it, Adam, and if I see anything that looks like it'll work for Sarah, we'll be in touch. But that's how I want to leave things today, okay? We'll be in touch with you.”

“Uh-huh. When?”

“I'm not sure you understand.”

“No, I understand, I understand.” Ames leaned back in the round leather chair, frowning. “Guilty until proven innocent.” He interlaced his fingers behind his head. “Wow,” he said. He fell into silence. To Radar it almost seemed as though he was having a conversation with himself. Finally he spoke. “There's something I learned with Dylan,” said Ames. “Something about acceptance. You face a situation, you say, ‘I can resist this or I can embrace it.' I don't mean that I
wanted Dylan to die, but I had to participate in his death as an ally, not an adversary. That I was with my son, really
with
him, while he shed the agony of his broken brain and left this life, well, it's made lots of things easier for me since. I think it saved my sanity.” Ames took a breath. “So now here we are. I'm trying to help Sarah, and I guess you are, too, in your way. If you have a role to play in this, her sentinel or whatever, then I can either resist that or embrace it. I choose to embrace it, and if I have to climb a mountain of your skepticism to do so, so be it. So let's start again. Just tell me what I have to do to prove myself to you.”

“I'm sorry,” said Radar. “I've seen situations like this before.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“Then what do you mean you've seen situations like this before. This is a medical situation.”

“It's also financial.”

Ames asked plaintively, “Am I asking for money? Have I asked anyone for money?”

“Will you?”

“Well, not me, but the clinic. They have to keep the research going. As I told Sarah, they get no support from official channels.”

“I see.” Radar rifled through the documentation he'd been given. Nothing immediately jumped out at him as bogus, but he doubted it would stand up to close scrutiny. “Very well,” he said, standing up. “I'll give these papers all the consideration they deserve.”

Ames leapt to his feet. “Listen, I appreciate that you
think you're looking out for Sarah and Jonah, but remember one thing:
It's not your son who's dying.
” He raised his voice. “For someone looking out for their interest, I think you're overlooking the possibility that this might actually save his fucking life!” He looked around, self-conscious at his language, then engaged Radar with pleading eyes. “Radar, I don't know what makes you such a suspicious person, and I don't know why Sarah gave you the say-so in this, but at least ask me some questions. At least make me feel like you heard me out. The way things are,” Ames pointed to the printouts, “that might as well be toilet paper. It is in your eyes. And I don't understand why you're so prejudiced against me. You don't even know me. If you don't mind my saying so, you're really a closed-minded guy.” That point resonated with Radar, who realized that he was, despite policy, letting himself be guided by untested assumptions. Could he really say, based on what he had seen so far, that the guy was a fake? No, he could not. So he sat back down and gave Ames a chance to tell his tale.

Adam did a comprehensive job, outlining his hunt for breakthrough research on Karn's and, having apparently found it, his equally fervent search for someone in need. Radar heard nothing in the narrative that lifted it above the level of a yarn, yet nothing that manifestly unraveled it, either. It had the ring of, if not truth, verisimilitude; Ames sounded like a normal person recounting normal events—if you bought the central premise that the tragic death of a son could turn a man's life into a crusade, and the secondary premise that a cure for Karn's was out there, undiscovered or at least unexploited by the medical community at large.
Radar could neither buy these premises nor reject them outright. So he shot a couple of questions.

“Sarah says you're divorced.”

“Well, yes. And widowed.”

“Excuse me?”

“My wife died during the separation.”

“I see.” Well, that answered that. Or not. “How? Karn's?”

“No,” said Ames. “Karn's is not hereditary, just an unhappy accident. The wiring in your brain goes bad.”

“Good thing it's rare.”

“I wish it weren't. Then maybe there'd have been a cure for Dylan.”

“Yes, as you told Sarah. Why did you meet her on the street? Why didn't you—”

“What? Email? Text? IM?” Ames looked Radar square in the eye. “What would you do with such correspondence?”

“Trash it.”

“Trash it. Right. Because you'd think it's a scram.”

“Scram?”

“You know, a con.”

“Scam,” corrected Radar.

“Scam, of course. I'm new to this language. I'm…new to the whole idea. I thought if I showed up here, flew to Austin, made the trip, that would make me seem more legitimate somehow. Show my commitment. Now I see that it just shows my, I hate to say, naïveté. Radar, can I ask you a question?” Radar said nothing, just waited for Ames to continue. “If I were who you…I'm trying to think of the right way to put this…someone who you legitimately had to keep out of Sarah's life, what kind of man would I be? I
don't mean the question rhetorically. Who did you fear you would meet?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Some people prey on weakness. I don't like them preying on my friends. Which brings us back to…” Radar stood to go, “don't call us, we'll call you.”

Which, he well knew, they would not.

W
hen the short winter days were mild, Radar, Vic, and Allie would sit out on their balcony to read or work or just mark the sun's march across Lake Austin and over the far hills of Laguna Loma. From here, five floors up in their shoreline condo complex, they could see downriver to the Tom Miller Dam and upriver to nothing in particular. Today they occupied themselves with the paperwork of Adam Ames, looking for what Vic dubbed the smoking gun of hooey. To this point, it remained unfound.

The documents came across as a hasty potpourri of available information, just the sort of found artifacts an earnest, honest-Abe Ames would pull together to mollify the suspicious friend Radar purported to be. There were photocopied research reports, laboratory data sheets with timelines showing Karn's in remission, and a couple of web-press fluff jobs: happy journalism about prospects for a cure to this heartbreaking disease. Regarding the latter, Radar had
planted enough faux news stories in his time to know how easily it was done. For that matter, these could be legitimate articles about legitimate wins against Karn's, and yet be completely unconnected to Ames, apart from the fact that they had passed through his printer.

Ames also provided the mission statement and available financials for the Gauch Institute. The mission statement was a standard medical reacharound about the betterment of mankind, but the financial information gave Radar pause, for it was the practice in scams of this sort to skimp on that, yet here was a deep drill into the clinic's funding sources, research budget, and revenue projections. Radar handed the report to Vic, who skimmed it and passed it on to Allie.

“What do you think?” asked Radar.

“Those are some lily-white numbers,” said Allie.

Vic's fingers danced across the surface of his Rabota, the sexy new Russian tablet computer that everyone seemed to want but only able navigators of the international gray market (such as Vic) could get their hands on. He found and opened the Gauch Institute's own annual report. “And they match the Institute's,” he said.

“Why is he selling the financials so hard?” asked Radar.

“Because he can,” said Allie. “Because they're there.” She added, referencing her own tablet, a next-generation Geoid, “Just like the medicine is there. Radar, this all looks square.”

“So it's a piggyback play,” said Radar. “Ames goes fake middleman between Sarah and them. Leverages their authenticity.”

“Or,” said Allie, “he's exactly who he says he is.”

Radar braked. He looked at Allie. “You don't mean that.”

“Why not?” she asked. She waved her hand at the documentation. “Show me anything here that really proves otherwise.”

“All this could be faked,” said Radar dismissively. “Besides, ‘scram' instead of ‘scam'? That business about the miles? The lengths he went to to meet her? The guy is way overselling his Pollyanna docket.”

“You don't know that. You only feel that.”

“Allie, we've seen this play before. Hell, we've
run
this play before.”

“What Radar's saying,” said Vic, “is if it barks like a duck, it's a duck.”

“Ducks don't—” Allie didn't bother. She merely repeated to Radar, “You don't know that.”

“It's the Samaritan gag, straight out of the playbook. And now that we know it's a piggyback, we can challenge him to liaise with the Institute. When he can't do it, we win.”