Last Shot (2006) (18 page)

When he turned, her head was rolled away, her eyes on the window and the gray-blue sky beyond.

Chapter
25

This time, despite the broken latch, Walker knocked on the back sliding door.

"Come in!"

Sam sat in the living room plugged in to a PlayStation, his legs frogged out. He took no note of Walker's entrance.

"Where's Kaitlin?"

"Work." Sam's eyes didn't leave the game. He took his simulated motorcycle down a fire escape, ran over a bystander, and blazed through a police station.

Walker headed back to Tess's room. The laminated Vector visitor's pass still hung on her closet doorknob. He lifted it and walked out, wrapping the lanyard around his hand like a rosary. Sam continued zooming and blasting away on the TV. Walker was halfway out the sliding glass door when Sam said, "I have a bad gene."

Walker stopped. Regarded the back of Sam's head. "How do you know?"

"I just do." The motorcycle reared up, jumping over a carload of baddies. "I'm gonna die, prob'ly."

Walker took a half step back from the threshold. "Me, too."

"I mean, soon."

"Thems the breaks."

"I'm never even gonna have a girlfriend first."

"Girls don't like you?"

Sam's head swiveled at last. He granted Walker a slack-jawed glance that acknowledged the stupidity of the question and said flatly, "I have yellow eyes." He turned back to the game.

For the first time, Walker bothered to take Sam in. Jaundiced skin. Swollen legs folded back under him. Mussed hair. A series of bruises dotting his forearm. He scratched at his shoulder; his skin was bothering him. Walker could barely make out his face in the reflection of the screen.

"Why you taking Mom's card?"

Observant little fucker. "I need it."

"For what?"

"A job. It's for your mother."

"Can I help?"

"No."

"It's not your card."

"You'll have it back when I'm done."

"Done what?" Sam's hands were a flurry of movement around the controller. Levers, dials, and about ten action buttons sprouted from the calculator-size unit, spread along the top, sides, and bottom. Walker recalled his own first video-game experience--Space Invaders, joystick, one red button. He marveled at the kid's hand-eye coordination; he would've put Sam on loader duty in a Bradley before half the shaved-scalp jackasses he'd served with.

Walker said, "What are those marks on your forearm?"

"I bruise easy."

"And."

"This one kid, he hits me in the arm. To watch the bruise. He started a competition at the park. Like who could spray the best graffiti. He calls me Piss-Eyes. I don't tell Kaitlin. She's got enough to worry about. I make things hard. Or my gene does. The one I don't have. I don't wanna wear her out like I did Mom." Sam scratched his head, then his arm, then his head. His sleeve stayed hiked up, revealing a Magic Markered yin above his right biceps.

"The hell is that?"

Sam's eyes clicked over, noting Walker's focus on his fake prison tattoo. He worked at his thigh for a moment with his fingernails but didn't answer.

"Wash it off," Walker said. "It makes you look stupid."

Sam skidded out, his fallen motorcycle throwing up a beautifully animated shower of sparks. In seconds he was reset on a new bike, revving up an alley.

"It used to make her sad. Mom. She'd cry sometimes when we left the hospital. She'd turn her head toward the window so I wouldn't see, but I could still hear her." Sam's voice remained as matter-of-fact as always. "Mom changed my name back, just before she, ya know. I guess she was mad at my dad for not helping. I was Sam Hardy. Now I'm Sam Jameson, just like you."

Walker became acutely aware of his breathing as he did just before a fight. "Don't make me into something I'm not."

"Whatever. I'm just telling you my name."

"Your mother bought me a cross one time, made out of titanium. You know what that is?"

"Like the strongest metal ever."

"She said she had to get it for me in titanium because I break everything."

"Do you?"

"I've ruined my share of stuff, yeah. Didn't stick around to put it back together."

"She should talk."

Walker crossed the room in a single giant stride. Sam yelped, and the controller hit the carpet. "Your mother was a saint."

"You're hurting my arm."

"She raised me."

Sam jerked his bruised arm free. "Wish she stuck around to raise me, too." He picked up the controller, checked it for damage, and started a new game.

Walker went outside and got halfway across the patio before he stopped. His head tilted back, mouth set with frustration. Deep breath. He cursed to himself and returned to the living room. He'd grown accustomed to talking to Sam's back and shoulders. "You want a job?" The amplified roar of the motorcycle was the only reply. "Here. Put this in the coffee tin." Walker peeled two hundred-dollar bills from the roll in his pocket and set them on the coffee table next to the label maker, still sporting the red bow. "Don't tell Kaitlin."

Sam glanced at the bills solemnly, twirled a finger in the air in mock excitement, then turned to the game again. "You gonna come back?"

"Why would I come back?" The sound of burning rubber and screeching brakes followed Walker's exit.

Chapter
26

An attractive redhead sat behind a curved shield of a reception booth, elevated as if on a captain's chair, punching phone buttons and speaking silkily into her headset. A frosted-glass sign stood out from the anodized aluminum frame of the console, exhibiting the company logo--a V with an arrow rising from the second upstroke.

Feeling stiff in his father's old suit, Walker flashed Tess's laminated visitor card. Workers streamed past--lunch break in full swing.

"I'm slotted for the investors' twelve o'clock walk-through," Walker said. Five bucks at an Internet cafe had bought him enough buzzwords from Vector's Web site to bluff and jive. "Running late--we sat on the tarmac for a good half hour."

The receptionist tipped down the phone mouthpiece and whispered over her call, "Straight back. Go catch the group."

Walker waited for the electronic click, then moved forward through the doors. A fresh-faced researcher in a white lab coat stood before a door at the end of the corridor, her bearing that of a Disney attraction guide. As Walker neared enough to hear velvety voice-over murmuring within, she leaned forward and mouthed, "Here for the tour?"

At his nod she opened the door. Walker brushed past, surreptitiously lifting the access card clipped to her coat pocket. The rows of mesh swivel chairs in the auditorium were curved to face a projection screen descended from the ceiling. Walker saw now that the room, which could have accommodated a couple hundred people, ran the length of the corridor he'd just passed--a big space that came out of nowhere, like a hotel ballroom. The narrow casement windows set high in either corner of the east wall were cracked for air, but the room smelled of paint and upholstery, and the pale outside light that the tinted panes allowed through was barely enough to dent the darkness.

The thirty or so people inside were captivated by the video. Surround-sound speakers poured the Vector spokesman's voice into the room: "...the leading genetic cause of liver transplants in children. It's also a leading cause of death. Why?"

Walker slid into a chair by the aisle, upsetting the carefully placed stack of glossy corporate literature.

"Because children are born without a proper gene. It's a horrible--but now treatable--disorder." Accompanied by funereal music, a montage of children waxed and waned on-screen, each ethnicity represented by a model specimen--large sad eyes, smooth skin, hair mussed just so. Like Sam looked in the photo-booth pictures, before his condition worsened. "How does it harm the liver? Well, the faulty gene produces abnormal proteins that amass in the liver, a process called 'pathological polymerization.'" It dawned on Walker that his GED might not have armed him with enough arrows in this particular quiver, but he did his best to follow along. "These variant proteins get trapped in the liver, and eventually--tragically--impede its functioning."

Walker scooped a brochure from the floor, titled Xedral to the Rescue! As he tried to make sense of the bullet points, the omnipresent voice asked, "What are viral vectors? They're the vehicles used in gene therapy to transfer the gene of interest to the target cells, which will then go on to express the therapeutic protein encoded by the transgene."

The folks at Vector seemed awfully fond of answering their own questions.

Taking advantage of the darkness, Walker removed a digital scanner, about the size of a cigarette holder, from his pocket. Inserting in the slot the stolen access-control card, he activated the reader, setting the miniaturized row of lights blinking. Then he refocused on the screen.

"--freeze-dried storage in five-millimeter vials. And there's no need for IV infusion or any fancy procedures or surgeries. A few drops of sterile water reconstitute Xedral to a solution, and it can be injected into the arm like a basic vaccine." Jerky 1950s newsreel footage of kids hopping onto exam tables and baring their arms elicited a few titters from the viewers. A musical theme, five upbeat chimes of a xylophone, punctuated a pan across a community of children, gathered together now and apparently happy at their prospects. "A lifetime of change..."--the image pulled to the northwest quadrant of the TV, the other sections depicting Vector's high-tech labs and scientists in industrious motion--"...in a simple shot." A distinguished pause and then a smoothly cadenced afterthought: "Vector Biogenics. The human touch."

When the lights came up, the presenter thanked Walker for joining the group and made a few closing remarks about Xedral's market potential, his voice echoing off the high ceiling. Walker perused the other tour members, guessing most of them to be scientists, graduate students, or heavy-hitter investors. An Asian doctor entered and tugged importantly at the sleeves of his white coat.

The presenter smiled at the group. "I'm delighted to see that Dr. Huang, our study director, can join us for a few minutes of our laboratory tour."

Hanging to the rear of the group, Walker shuffled out behind two bearded men discussing commodities futures. At the doorway Walker smiled at the researcher, letting her access card drop secretly down the side of his leg. It was important that she find her card and not report it missing.

Fielding questions magnanimously, Huang led them up a corridor that ran alongside the laboratory's various suites, generous windows affording aquarium vantages. Walker jogged his dated tie and listened to a few of the grad students natter on about some famous gene-therapy trial where the subjects came down with leukemia.

Huang fielded each question magnanimously, playing the old pro by catching the nonscientists up. "We've got that covered three ways." Point number one bent back his thumb: "We've engineered Xedral to insert into a nonfunctioning section of DNA." Index finger: "We've flanked our transgene with starting and stopping codons so it won't disrupt neighboring genes." And the fuck-you finger: "We've employed a temporary model that eliminates long-term complications by requiring a booster every month to keep transgene expression active."

They moved along the corridor, spying in on a room walled with vast, glass-fronted refrigerators filled with Xedral vials. A scientist unpacked jars from an ice-packed Styrofoam shipping cooler, taking no note of the observers.

One of the investor types, a wizened man in a leisure suit, chimed in, "Aren't you worried about using a deadly virus to carry this new gene?"

"Push up your sleeve, sir," Huang said. "No, your left. That's it. Your smallpox vaccination scar. We use an attenuated strain of poxvirus, like the one you had injected there. It can't cause infection."

They passed one end of the test-subject suite, the tour-group participants cooing cloyingly and waving at the monkeys. A woman with jangly earrings proudly claimed, "I have issues with animal cruelty," in a voice not quite loud enough to draw a remark from Huang.

Walker fell even farther back from the crowd, and when the group passed around the corner, he held the digital scanner to an access pad beside a metal door, testing if it had captured the frequency from the card. A low-register hum and the door came uneven from the wall. Walker pulled it open and peered down another hall, this one appearing to house executive offices. The sound of an argument carried to him.

"Of course not, Dolan. You read the preclinical reports--it just wasn't working." A beat. "Why would you even say that? What are you insinuating?"

Another male voice answered, glumly. "Nothing. I just want to see all the raw data, and I'm not waiting until--"

Walker slipped into the hall, shoes silent on the expensive carpet. He followed the raised voices. A door opened behind him, and he froze, but the two young executives headed in the opposite direction, cuffing their sleeves, not seeing him.

"You going tonight?" one asked.

"Bel Air? I'd go just to see the mansion."