The Texas Twist (17 page)

Radar finally snatched the bottle away from Boy and flipped it across the room. Boy scampered after it and pounced on it with ungainly zeal. The crackle of flexing PET reverberated through the room.

“Hey Radar,” said Vic, “I just had a funny idea. What if—?” He bit off the rest of the sentence.

“What if what?”

Radar could hear the stumble in Vic's voice. “What if Boy chews up that thing and swallows it whole?” But even as he said this, Vic sent Radar a text,
What if this place is bugged?

Well, what if it is?
Radar texted back. He knew it was possible. Sarah'd had plenty of access.

Do you think we ought to bug back?

“No chance,” said Radar. “He's too smart for that.”

While meanwhile texting back,
Why not?

Upon later discussion, outside the apartment, Allie felt it was a bridge too far. After all, if they were smart enough to stay mum in their flat, then Ames and Sarah would likely be likewise. According to Vic, however, “When chasing wild geese, leave no stone unturned,” so he headed up to the Spy Exchange on North Burnet to check out the latest advances in hooded surveillance.

The pretty little salesclerk
(writes Vic) catches my eye like a touchdown pass. Hook 'em Horns. She presents as an erratic anarchist, serially pierced and tattooed, yes, wearing a
fuck authority
T-shirt, yes, but also sporting rhinestone cowboy boots, spray-on jeans, and a sassy Stetson. Spend any time at all in this town and you come to recognize the look: cowpunk chic, favorite of UT coeds and girl roadies. She greets my request for covert gear with amoral authority, and I can guess that here in the international house of spies she's sold enough lock picks, handcuffs, bogus badges, and blackjacks to become numb to their purpose or use. She directs me to the smallest mic in the house, no bigger than the watch battery that powers it, and covered in a mouse-brown powdercoat that'll blend it right in in a flower pot or china hutch. I also buy a snooper sweeper for counter surveillance. We transact. She throws in a link to a black-ops app store, where I can download YvesDropp, a highly programmable, highly illegal bug-management app. She tells me she's a whiz with these things if I need a consultant. Even as I tell her I can find my way around a tablet, I get a bright idea. I show her a digital picture of Adam Ames. It's a
longshot but also a freeroll, because I'm really just sizing her up. I think I like the cut of her jib.

I find her jib shapely.

“So,” I say, “you seen this mister?”

She gives me a sigh like the weight of the world and says in a syrupy Austin drawl, “Y'all know I can't tell you that.”

“Could you tell me if I were a cop?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“'Cause I don't talk to cops.”

“Good answer. What if I were a cop that controlled petty cash?”

“How petty?”

“At least a Big Ben.”

“That's not much.”

“Not bad for a first consulting gig.”

She looks around furtively, as empty a gesture as any you could think of in a spy shop, and says, “If I had a name I could look it up. Customer database.”

“Now we're talking,” say I. “Now we are having a conversation.”

I write the name on a piece of paper and slide it across the counter, along with a tightly folded C-note. She makes the cash vanish, then does a quick keyboard dance. In a minute, she's writing on the same piece of paper, which she slides back to me, which I pocket. She's fast, this one. In this game, fast is good. “The name's Mirplo,” I say. “And you are…?”

She doesn't give me her name. Instead she just asks, “What's a Mirplo?”

“That question's too big to answer all at once,” I say.
“Unknown stranger, is this your only job?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, it's only part-time. I'm in school at UT.”

“Hook 'em Horns,” I say. She does not say Hook 'em Horns back. Interesting. She's against everything she stands for, and that's just how I like 'em. “I might have something for you,” I say. “Can you hang loose?”

“Like Mother Goose.”

“Good,” say I. “That's good.…” I open another space where she might place her name.

This time she does. “Kadyn.”

“Kaden with an e?”

“No.”

“I?”

“Nope.”

“Y?”

She gives me this devilish
you got it
smirk, and I decide I definitely like this pert little cowpunk.

I think I might write her right in.

B
y Allie's reckoning, the first of March marked her eighth week. Dreams and food were bending her mind now, and they went hand in glove, like this one dream of waffles that got her up before dawn because,
waffles, what a good idea!
And then when she was done making them, she threw them away. She couldn't stomach eating them.

She still had no bulge to speak of, but a snug waistband here and a taut bra there told her that the change train was coming to town. This put her in a giddy mood, even though she knew that her moods were not her own. She pictured the peanut down in her womb throwing open her hormone valves, releasin' the relaxin. She had trouble visualizing a girl fetus making such mischief, no matter what Radar said.
A boy,
she vibed.
Definitely having a boy.

In the end it was Allie who planted the bug in Sarah's apartment. They had become coffee-break buddies, as per
Radar's plan to have Allie normalize relations with Sarah and try to discover where the truth of her lay. In this she had been largely thwarted, for it seemed like when she scratched the surface of Sarah all she got was…more surface. But was it surface or artifice? Allie couldn't tell, and when the needle of doubt wouldn't budge either way, she decided to go along with the listening in.
Make the latest possible decision based on the best available information,
right? So one morning at Sarah's, while she was off in the kitchen on her phone, Allie upended an ottoman, used a ballpoint pen to punch a tiny hole in its underlining, and popped the bug inside. By the time Sarah returned to the room, Allie was reading a magazine with her feet up.

“That was Adam,” bubbled Sarah. “He's decided he needs a foundation.”

“A foundation?”

“To start the brain center. An organization that can cut through red tape and write grants and stuff. He called it a… five oh something something?”

“A 501(c)?”

“That's it. Adam says with a foundation he can fund feasibility studies, see what research has promise. Oh, I hope he finds something. You know, I hadn't realized what a pity party I was on. When Jonah was sick? I saw prions eating away at his brain and all I could think was, oh poor me, you know? I forgot that life is a gift, and you have to make the most of it, especially my boy, with his time so short. Now that it's not short, well, now I know how big a gift I got. And then Adam comes along and he gives and gives and gives and now that Jason's okay, I feel like I want to do that too, you
know? Don't you? Feel like you want to give back?”

“Now that Jason's okay?”

“Huh?”

“Your son. You called him Jason.”

“No I didn't.”

“Yeah, you kind of did.”

“Really?” Sarah rolled her eyes comically. “Woo-hoo, guess who else better get her prions checked, huh?” A cloud passed over Sarah's eyes, and to Allie it registered as a glimpse of some other level of her. Sarah must have noticed it, too, for she said, “To tell you the truth, I'm actually feeling a little lightheaded. Would you mind going now? I think I'd like to lie down.”

“Of course not. Feel better.”

Later that day, Allie and the boys bundled Boy into the back of the Staccato and headed out to a local dog park, privately sponsored by Paws That Refreshes brand dog water. The trip may have been unnecessary in terms of grift hygiene, since a sweep of their flat had turned up no hidden ears, but the day was warm and it felt good to be outside, especially for Allie, who lifted her shirt to expose her belly to the sun. Radar, still spouting the derived wisdom of his baby books, had predicted that at this point in her pregnancy she would start to become flighty and distracted. She supposed that thinking of her belly as a solar panel might qualify as that. Boy didn't care. He had butts to sniff and exotic balls to chomp. Humans never quite recognize it, but dog parks are an orgy of almost unbearable sensation to most dogs.

The three of them sat on a concrete bench, dissecting Sarah's gaffe. Allie thought that since Sarah changed her son's
name from time to time and scam to scam, on this occasion she might have conflated her Jason and Jonah. Vic took it as a sign that Sarah was losing what limited cheese she had. Radar was more interested in Adam's new foundation. “He must know,” said Radar, “that a 501(c) will be of interest to people like us.”

“‘People like us,'” agreed Vic, “would see it as a license to print money.”

“Is it bait?” asked Allie. “Or are we just intended to see it as such?”

Before Radar could speculate, Mirplo's Rabota made a sound like a Chinese gong. “This might shed a light,” said Vic. I programmed the YvesDropp app to voice activate.”

“You can do that?” asked Allie.

“Dr. Mirplo can do anything,” said Radar.

“And don't you forget it.” Vic touched the tablet screen twice and put it on speaker, though what they heard from the apartment was primarily TV, some reality show, probably that new one,
Nudity Island,
that's getting all the talk. Adam and Sarah had mild words about it, but this was just couple stuff; if you were listening in on anyone else, you'd think it was cute.

Eventually, Radar said, “This is starting to creep me out. Can you refine the voice activation on that thing?”

“What, like, train it with keywords?”

“Exactly. So we don't have to be bored and…creepy.”

“I wouldn't have expected this reaction from you, Radar.”

“I wouldn't have expected it from me, either. But, God, they sound so normal.”

“So boring,” said Vic.

“So maybe they're wary like we're wary,” said Radar, “and they only speak freely outside the home.”

“Or he's still gaming her.”

“Or she's gaming him.”

“Gosh,” said Allie drily, “who'd have ever thought that a bug would clarify things
so
much?” Radar gave her the benefit of a grin, but they all knew that in any case Vic's trip to the surveillance supermarket had not been in vain, for his hundo had bought the information that Ames now owned a blank-firing Walther P22. Radar cast a glance at Allie sunning her belly and loved his unborn child with all his goofy heart. The thought of a gun in the picture, even a blank gun, made his cortisol jump. Meanwhile, infuriatingly, Radar still felt the need to keep letting Ames call the shots. This was Adam's script, his scam, and Radar wouldn't know how to break it until further pieces of the puzzle were revealed. But it galled him just the same. No grifter likes to ride another man's script, especially when he doesn't know where it's headed.

Not that he wasn't devising scripts of his own.

The next day Ames texted Radar and Vic and asked them to meet him at the Yoghurt Yurt on Guadalupe Street across from the UT campus. Yogurt and niceties later, he led them down Guadalupe to a door between two stores, where a flight of stairs rose to a small second-floor business suite overlooking the street and the UT campus beyond. The suite had a tiny reception area, an open administrative/work space, and one private office. Exposed brick walls and weary secondhand furniture gave the place an austere feel.

“Well?” asked Ames after they'd looked around. “What do you think? Not too lavish, right?”

“No,” said Radar, “I wouldn't call it lavish.”

“Because this is one foundation that's going to be run lean and mean, and Radar, that means I'm counting on you for your…what shall I call it?…gift of gab. I don't want you going out and all wining and dining potential donors. If you can't sell the Wilson Center on its merits, then I don't want you selling it at all.”