Читать книгу The Orchid Hunter - Sandra Moore K. - Страница 8

On the northern ridge of Mount Aiome, not far from the highest point in Papua New Guinea, just inside the province of Madang, a broad stone ledge juts out from a sheer cliff. Carpeted with lichen, the ledge overlooks a handful of majestic emergent hardwoods poking out from the dense canopy of the rain forest below, hardwoods similar to the one a tomboyish woman like me might choose as her vantage point for keeping watch.

She’d be high enough on this ledge and in this tree that on a clear, predawn morning she could see in the far distance, just over the coastal ridge that hid the swamps, the Bismarck Sea’s great darkness. If she waited long enough, the sun would rise over the water and the archipelago islands would gleam like emeralds on a silky topaz bed. The howling nocturnal cacophony would steadily give way to the brighter tones of the dawn chorus. The light mist fingering the treetops would scatter and disappear beneath the sun’s abrupt heat, and the woman might wish she’d worn a lighter-weight pair of canvas pants.

She might also wish she’d used a wider strap to fashion her climbing harness because her ass was, quite literally, in a sling and gone dead as a doornail. After another twenty minutes, she’d wonder if there was any good reason for suspending herself here like bear bait, her backpack full of carefully packed rare plant specimens. A little while later, she’d start wondering if there might be a better way for a woman of her talents to make a living, since she was bored as hell now and her butt was starting to tingle.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The truth is I’d been up in the tree for a good hour because Lawrence Daley, my one serious plant-collecting rival, had been tracking me all yesterday and last night. For us, it’s an old game: me racing to get out of the jungle with my orchids, him racing to catch me and steal what I’ve got in my backpack. We’d pretty much been enemies since grad school, when Daley’s idea of a good time had been trying to one-up me with graduate advisors and on lab projects, generally making a nuisance of himself. He craved competition. I craved adventure. I guess that’s why we both gravitated to exotic-plant collecting, the only adventurous, competitive niche in the otherwise ho-hum world of botany.

So I was stuck there, roughly ninety feet up in the canopy in the predawn darkness, my butt starting to tingle. I could have tried climbing down the ledge in the dark, but the nocturnal jungle is far more dangerous than the daylight one, and I’ve had one too many run-ins with boa constrictors, poisonous ants and loose rock to be cavalier about it. Back in the golden age of orchid hunting, the Victorian era, hunters died of dysentery or malaria, or disappeared without a trace, or killed each other over a plant. The killing part had slacked off some, but the rest of the experience was intact. Stay sharp or get dead. I tried to stay sharp.

My plan from here on out was simple. If Daley didn’t show by first light, I’d drop from the canopy and head down the ledge. From there, it was twenty miles to the airstrip where a decrepit Douglas Dakota and a genuine muscle-bound Aussie bush pilot waited for me.

Looking down through a break in the midstory’s dense leaves at the string of utterly silent Maisin natives filing along the path below, I noted with some satisfaction that my efforts had not been wasted, because there, in the back as always, was a white man wearing a ridiculous Australian bush hat, the left brim tacked up in rakish style. I cursed the selfish bastard for abandoning me in Sierra Leone last year after stealing my prize orchid, the luscious Cymbidium archinopsis (or at least what he thought was a prize orchid; I’d actually switched it for the rather pedestrian Cymbidium parthenonae), and my passport (okay, the passport was fake but he didn’t know that, did he? and okay, I’d been wearing my real passport taped to my back but it’d still been tight threading through the paramilitaries and diamond smugglers to get outta there), and then how dare he pretend nothing had happened when I saw him in Stockholm at a private black-tie orchid party two weeks later?

It was enough to make even a well-bred girl want to hock a lugie down on his arrogant head.

This well-bred girl didn’t, though. Instead, I checked my gear.

The rope tied to my climbing harness ran up over an evergreen branch. It came back down where it ran through a stainless steel figure eight at my stomach, and then around my waist to run through a carabiner at the small of my back. It finally got tied to itself in a slipknot at my left side. The remaining rope wound in a loose coil at my belt. I held the business end of the coiled rope in my left hand, and my right hand—the braking hand—tucked comfortably around the rope behind my back. Hanging here all morning wasn’t a problem. Except for the butt-going-to-sleep part.

Now I just needed Daley and his pals to move on down the ridge, discover there wasn’t an easy way off the ledge, and then go back to wherever they had come from. After that, I’d ease down and be on my way, straight down that lovely ledge—the shortest distance from Point A to Point B.

I was still daydreaming about the muscle-bound Aussie pilot when the Maisin spotted me.

Daley barked a sic’em order. The natives swarmed up tree trunks, climbing bare-handed, barefoot, toward me. Daley leaned back to look up.

“Jessica!” he called. “Come on down, luv, and give us the pretty plants.”

I can tolerate almost anything about Lawrence Daley except that affected English accent. Why did a guy from Baltimore feel the need to pretend he was from Blackpool?

“Up yours,” I called down.

“From this angle, it looks more like up yours, luv.” He laughed, hands on his hips. “And a very nice yours it is. What has von Brutten sent you after this time?”

I shrugged, one eye on the natives. “Same old, same old.”

“Cattleya astronomis, perhaps? Dendrobium peristansis?”

“Rudbeckia hirta,” I called back. Wildflower. Black-eyed Susan, to be precise.

“Don’t be a smartass, dahling. We could be a great team—”

“Right, like in Sierra Leone. You nearly got me killed!”

“You’re far too resourceful for that. And look what’s happened since. You’ve been so intent on beating me to the good plants that you leave a trail a mile wide. I can track you anywhere.”

“Correction. The natives can track me anywhere. You can’t find your own ass with both hands and a flashlight.”

“I hear von Brutten’s got a bug in his ear.”

“What? Have you been begging for your old job back? You should know by now that I keep my employer’s little green thumb very happy.”

Daley’s sneer echoed in his cocked hip. “Getting fired by Linus von Brutten was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Sounds like sour grapes. Everybody on the planet knows he’s been the best orchid breeder for decades. Maybe you should have spent more time in grad school thinking about your future instead of how fast and how bad you could screw me over. Speaking of, did you ever get your degree?”

The stiff got even stiffer. “Paper means nothing these days, dahling.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I kinda like having a degree. Keeps my employment options open. How many botanical gardens passed on your résumé, dahling?”

His snort was audible from here. “Collecting for an eminent European orchid breeder is employment enough.”

It should be. Constance Thurston-Fitzhugh had money to burn and an ax to grind with von Brutten. Von Brutten, thanks to my fieldwork and his own high-tech knack for hybridization, had swept top honors at the World Orchid Conference two years running and dumped Thurston-Fitzhugh from her orchid-breeding throne directly onto her glamorous tush. Daley and I were just the latest weapons in a dirty little two-decade war going on underneath the glitz and highbrow of more-money-than-God orchid collecting.

I glanced over. The natives were about halfway up, rustling leaves and scraping bark with bare feet that must have been just as rough. Thank God for Rockports. Watching the climbers made my arches itch.

Daley wasn’t done taunting me yet. “I’m surprised von Brutten hasn’t told you about his heart’s latest desire.”

I waited for him to tell me his rumor about my employer. He always seemed to think that keeping me waiting would make me wet my pants in anticipation. He never learned.

He gave in. “The Death Orchid.”

I burst out laughing. The natives froze and looked at each other, apparently debating the sanity of a white woman, suspended by a rope in the rain forest, cackling her ass off.

The Death Orchid? It was beyond legend. It was myth.

“Debunked!” I shouted down.

Daley’s hat twisted as he shook his head. “O ye of little faith.”

“I’m a scientist. Discredited jungle native accounts of miracle cures do not constitute a clue.”

“Harrison was wrong when he published that report!” Daley shouted.

No way. Terence Harrison was a taxonomic god, my dissertation advisor and mentor my entire grad school career. The man always knew exactly what he was doing. If he said the Death Orchid didn’t exist, it didn’t.

“Harrison proved everyone in the orchid-collecting community was nuts,” I shouted back. “Except me. I didn’t believe those rumors were true. That supposed Death Orchid he tested wasn’t some kind of miracle cure and he proved it. Scientifically. In a lab!”

Daley stamped a few steps away, then back. “Harrison lied!”

“Willful ignorance is the last bastion of the faithful. Harrison’s too straitlaced to lie and you know it. Do the facts confuse you? Or does Mrs. Thurston-Fitzhugh just hate losing to my boss so much she’s convinced you this crap is true?”

“Connie has reason to believe—”

Connie? I laughed, interrupting him. “On a first name basis with your employer?”

Daley stopped pacing and shoved his hat back from his forehead. I couldn’t see the grin, but I could the signs of one in his cocky stance. “I’m doing rather well in the bedroom, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The Maisin were close enough now to distinguish as individuals. Time to think about leaving.

“You’re all talk, Larry.” I unhooked the coil of rope at my belt and held it loose in one hand, ready. “Do you suppose she fakes it like your girlfriends in school?”

“You little—” The rest was incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter because anger made him boring. And predictable. And American.

A rail-thin native, a jet-black adolescent wearing fierce ocher and white face paint, a necklace made of oyster shells, and a pair of department-store shorts, grasped the branch below my dangling feet. I raised one boot as his chin came level with the branch. He looked at the beefy no-nonsense sole, then at me. I shook my head at him. Behind me, the others scrambled across narrow branches. They were closing in and I really didn’t want to break this young man’s nose. His deep brown eyes—I’m a sucker for brown eyes—widened.

I glanced down. Daley waited. Alone.

Dumbass.

I released the slipknot and plummeted. The rope sang through my gloved fingers. Vines and branches whipped my legs as I dropped through the midstory leaves. Above me, the natives fell into the sky. Below me, Daley’s mouth hung open in his usual expression of slack-jawed surprise. I gradually tightened my grip over the last twenty feet, slowing. My boots thumped into the thick forest floor, raising the rich, heady scent of moist earth. The backpack whacked my rump as it caught up. I quickly hauled the remaining rope up and over the branch, then stepped back to let the bitter end slap the ground like a whip.

“Leave me the hell alone,” I grated at Daley, rapidly coiling the rope over my bent arm.

His hat had fallen back on his neck, the leather strap tight on his throat. His sweaty face was more tan than I remembered, and his blue eyes shone with anger.

“You’d better be careful,” he said. “There are other collectors far more ruthless than I.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at the natives struggling to hurry down without killing themselves. “That’s why we’re more successful than you.”

“Give it to me.” He made a grab at my backpack’s left shoulder strap.

Hopping back out of reach, I slapped his hand away. “Why don’t you dig your own orchids for a change instead of trying to steal mine? It didn’t work at school and it hasn’t worked since.”

I strode to the ledge and quickly fed my climbing rope around the stout and stubby palm tree I’d scoped earlier. I backed over the edge. Just as I started seeing rock instead of foliage, I heard the first of the Maisin hitting the forest floor. Their feet pattered on lichen. Broad brown faces peered over the edge.

Kicking off from the cliff, I touched the rock here and there. It was a long way down to the lowland rain forest but there was no need to hurry.

“Come on, luv!”

The warning tone in Daley’s voice made me look up. He lay facedown on the ledge, arms extended, pistol aiming. “Get back up here!”

Would he shoot me? I doubted it, but I shortened my strides anyway, darting back and forth in an irregular pattern while letting miles of rope slide through my fists. Daley’s shooting sucked but I’d made him mad, and some people’s aim got better when they were pissed. Tree branches raced toward me. I couldn’t see the ground. There was only the dark, mottled green of trees waking up as I crashed through the canopy on the lower ridge.

Several more feet, and the end of climbing rope not tied to my harness slipped through my braking right hand. I clamped down hard on the bitter end with my left hand, nearly yanking my arm out of its socket. Two hundred feet of rope and it was too short. Way too short. Dangling like bait on a hook, I glanced up through the leaves. The more intrepid Maisin pursuers leaned far over the cliff, looking for handholds. One had pulled his machete and was hacking away at my climbing rope. Daley took aim. Doing a buttplant on the forest floor didn’t sound like much fun but, as I reflected before letting go, it might be something I could tell my grandkids.

Two branches clipped my shoulder, then I broke through leaves like an airplane descending through clouds. Almost immediately my feet hit thick moss and I rolled hard for some distance. Either I’d fallen the last couple of dozen feet really fast or, more likely, I’d fallen five feet through the leaves of a short but elegant ficus. As I was still conscious enough to register landing pain in my shins, I gathered it was the latter.

I sat up. No nausea, no concussion. Not yet, anyway. With any luck, the rare orchids in my pack weren’t concussed, either.

A whistling hiss warned me to scoot to my right. The climbing rope shot down through the midstory, undeterred by the branches, and slapped the ground a foot away, raising a huge cloud of murky dust that danced in the filtered sunlight. I looked around to make sure the hissing I’d heard had merely been the rope. Nothing slithered.

Ignoring the days-old stink of rotting mammal from somewhere nearby, I tested fingers, toes, arms, legs and shoulders. All good. All ready to go, if a little sore. I coiled the rope and tied it off. The high-speed drops and the machete action had rendered it unsafe, but I live by a simple rule: pack in, pack out.

As I threw the coil over my head and shoulder, I spotted the remains of what looked like a canopy-dwelling spider monkey, its neck definitely broken. I preferred to think of it as a “lesson” rather than as a “warning.” Thank you, God.

Above, I could hear Daley shouting instructions at the Maisin. It sounded like they were fed up and ready to go home. If Daley had a map, he might be able to find his way to the airstrip. I didn’t need a map. And from my survey of the area, I knew it’d take him four hours to get down to me by way of the southwestern trail. Unless he wanted to free-climb down the sheer cliff face.

If I knew Daley, he didn’t and wouldn’t.

“Up. Freaking. Yours!” I shouted to him, and headed north-north-east for the airstrip and my muscle-bound Aussie.

Had my great-uncle Scooter ever bothered to put any money into it, the Slapdash Bar and Grill could have been a full step above the average East Texas honky-tonk it was. The dilapidated front porch showed Scooter’s optimistic view that a good time didn’t mean you couldn’t navigate three tilting steps down to the parking lot. These same steps seemed, as I put my pickup’s nose to the hitching rail out front, to be complicating the efforts of a drummer hoisting his gear onto the porch. His next obstacle was the life-size, paint-flaked wooden palomino pony just outside the front door. And I’m sure there’s some law against having an attached firing range, but the local sheriff hadn’t yet seen fit to enforce any regulations and in fact he was knocking back a Bud by the jukebox when I threaded past the sweating drummer and stepped inside.

“Jessie!” Hank boomed, standing to bear hug the air out of me. What little breath I had left at the end got hijacked by his aftershave. “About time you came home.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said.

He slammed his beer bottle down on the worn oak table and looked at me, his gray eyes warm with affection. “It’s good to see you again, little girl.”

I set my brown paper bag, containing a glad-to-see-you present for Scooter, on the floor. “I haven’t been gone that long.”

“Been over six weeks.” A frown’s shadow crossed his tanned forehead but disappeared almost immediately. “What’d you do to your hair?”

I guiltily ran a hand through it. “Long and red didn’t suit me. Shorter and brown’s better for my line of work.”

“Didn’t suit you, my ass.”

“I’d shave it all off if I had the nerve.”

Hank grinned. He knew I wouldn’t, but it’d give him something to rib me about later.

“Scooter around?” I asked.

“Don’t you go nowhere. I’ll fetch him.” He stalked his broad frame up to the bar where Marian, the homely blond barkeep, did her best not to pass out from lust. The fact Hank was pushing fifty didn’t seem to bother her twenty-something hormones. But, as Scooter liked to say, every pot has a lid.

What he meant was, every pot except the ones he used in the back to cook up his four-alarm chili. Hell, if he had more than a ladle and six spoons in the kitchen I’d be surprised. He’d probably worn his trademark black-iron pot down to tinfoil thickness by now.

And he wouldn’t let me replace the damn thing with a new one. A stickler about borrowing, he’d nearly had a heart attack when I’d told him I was going to get a student loan to pay for school. Hank and I had a tough row to hoe when we talked him out of selling the Slapdash to pay for my education. Hell, it wouldn’t have covered much more than tuition and books for the first two years, anyway. The money I’d made working for von Brutten let me pay off the entire loan in a year and two months.

Hank cracked the kitchen door and shouted, “Scooter! Your lady friend’s home!”

Looking around at the clean, well-worn tables, the gleaming bar, the glittering beer mugs, and the black-and-white photos of who knows whom on the walls, I felt the first thrill of seeing him again. This place was so like him—beat-up and characterful and comforting—where you could go and feel at ease and let the world slip by outside.

Being with Scooter always felt safe. When I first came to live with him after my parents died, he made me feel like I belonged here. Even though he didn’t have kids of his own, Scooter somehow knew how to guide me through my parents’ deaths in that car accident. It felt like he’d always be here, always just through the kitchen door, no matter what else was going on in my life.

I guess I was about nine when he blindfolded me and took me into the middle of a neighbor’s cornfield. He set me down between two rows and told me to count to a thousand, then take off my blindfold and come home. Maybe I counted to a thousand or maybe not, but I remember pulling off that navy-blue bandanna, squinting into the bright noon sky, surrounded by the smell of hot corn leaves going dry with summer sun, and thinking, “I better go that way.” Thirty minutes later, I was back at the Slapdash, not knowing how I’d known where I was or where I ought to head. I was just glad Scooter was waiting for me on the front porch with a glass of cold grape Kool-Aid and a hug. He’d patted my head and chuckled, then bragged about how sharp and capable I was to all his friends that night as they sat around the gleaming mahogany bar.

Now, beside the bar, Hank swung the kitchen door wider and Scooter barreled through, shoving his walker out in front of him like a battering ram. Two shuffling steps, shove. Two shuffling steps, shove. I noticed immediately the hair sticking out from under the baseball cap had silvered a lot. His face, a dull gray under a surface flush of either excitement or freshly chopped jalapeños, broke into the broad, toothy grin I remembered from the day I came to live with him. I’d been seven then and the teeth had been real.

When he cleared the door, I went to him and hugged him over the walker, feeling his loose-skinned old-man shoulders through his plaid cotton shirt. Two-day stubble scratched my ear and his arms tightened shakily around my back as he said, “Well, well. How ’bout that.” He smelled like garlic and mothballs and spearmint. If I could bottle that scent I’d remember him forever.

“Hello, old man,” I said.

“’Bout time you came back. I thought you’d done forgot me.” He winked one watery hazel eye to show me he didn’t mean it. “Marian! Bring my girl a beer.”

“What’ll you have?” she called.

“Saint Arnold.”

“You want a mug?”

“Nah.”

Scooter gestured to a table close to the kitchen. “You tell me where you’ve been this time.” He let Hank guide him into a wide-backed chair sporting a seat cushion. So Scooter had finally broken down and set himself up a receiving table. Hank settled in at Scooter’s right hand.

“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”

Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.

“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”

“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”

“Pollinator?”

“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”

“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”

“Timing is everything,” I admitted.

“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”

“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.

“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple of moths?”

“You know I don’t do moths. I’m only licensed for plants.”

He nodded. “Appendix One?”

He was referring to the CITES, pronounced sigh-tees, regulations about transporting animal and plant products across international borders. Had I been caught in customs with Scooter’s little Phalaenopsis, I’d be in jail and facing a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. It would have been fun because I’d had four of them packed in my luggage at the time.

I shrugged, noncommittal. Best I not admit to anything in front of Hank, who was, after all, the law. Better for Scooter, too. U.S. Fish and Wildlife raids on orchid growers, even here in the free United States of America, weren’t unknown. Heck, a well-respected Florida botanical garden got nailed a few years ago because they neglected to tell Fish and Wildlife they were preparing to formally register the previously undiscovered Phragmipedium kovachii.

Abruptly, Scooter smiled. “Good girl,” he murmured.

I swigged my ice-cold Saint Arnold while my gut warmed with pleasure. Getting rare orchids into the States under the noses of customs and wildlife agents satisfied us both—me because of the challenge and ultimate monetary payoff from von Brutten, and Scooter because he was a true conservationist.

Scooter had explained to me how the CITES rules worked when I first decided at the ripe old age of ten I wanted to find orchids for a living. It’s simple. You can’t take a plant listed in CITES Appendix One out of its country of origin. It doesn’t matter whether you want to conserve it, study it or clone it. It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows that same country of origin is about to bulldoze the last one under to build a road. That plant can be the only one in existence, and CITES won’t let someone like me save it by taking it out of the country. It’s just one of those things: good intentions gone bad.

Scooter got me started on orchids with his collecting hobby, but I’ve never had the love of the things he does. I like the grittier side. Ever since he told me the horror stories about the Victorian hunters—Roezl losing his arm but tramping across the Americas for the sake of a single orchid, the intrepid von Warscewicz hunkering down in the wildest Colombian floods with his foul-smelling guide—I’ve wanted to be a field collector. For me, it’s the chase, the challenge. If I have only the foggiest idea of what I’m looking for, nothing grabs my gut more than trying to track it down in the middle of a choking jungle. And the tougher the job, the better.

“What else you got for me, Ladybug?” he asked.

I spread five plastic sleeves across the table like a winning flush. As I named the powdery seeds inside them, Scooter’s smile got wider and wider until I thought his jaw must hurt.

“Marian!” he called. “Take these into the greenhouse office for me.”

“The plant, too?” she asked, sweeping up the sleeves.

“No.” He caressed the orchid’s pot with a tremorless hand. “I wanna look at it for a while.” He raised his liquid gaze to my face. “I’m glad you came to see me, Ladybug.”

“Me, too, Scooter.”

An hour later, I watched Scooter row himself to the office for his late-afternoon nap. Marian hovered over him like a hummingbird, carrying his orchid.

“His Parkinson’s is getting worse,” I said to Hank, “and his color’s bad. His skin’s gone gray. He was barely stage three when I left and now he seems like he’s gone all the way to stage four. Have you talked him into seeing the specialist yet?”

Hank tapped his beer bottle on its coaster. “You managed to do that your last visit.” He took a deep breath, his barrel chest broadening under a short beard just starting to grizzle, his craggy face grim.

“Thank God. One more trip to that witch doctor and I thought he’d start howling at the moon.”

“He’s dyin’, Jess.”

I waited a few seconds for him to add just kiddin’. Or to say that we’re all dying and Scooter is seventy-four, after all, so he’s just a little ahead of the game.

But when he continued, Hank said, “The doctors gave him a cocktail that was supposed to help the Parkinson’s, but it’s damaged his heart.”

“Okay, so they can fix that—”

“It’s irreversible.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. “Is that what the cardiovascular surgeon said?”

“It’s what a team of specialists—heart surgeons and neurologists—said.”

“They took an oath,” I protested. “What happened to ‘do no harm’?”

“They did their best.”

“No, they didn’t. They broke him.” My gut tightened. I knew the question to ask, but waited until I wouldn’t cry when I asked it. “How long?” I said finally.

“A month at the outside.”

After the next wave of pain passed, I asked, “What are they going to do?”

Hank shook his head, squeezing my hand once before letting go. “Nothin’. He’s too old.” Before I could get up a good head of steam, he added, “He wouldn’t let ’em do anything about it now even if they wanted to. You know him.”

“Yeah, I do. He’d rather waste his time and money carrying around rabbit’s feet and drinking herbal concoctions Old Lady Fenster cooked up in her backyard than take a vitamin.” I shoved away from the table and stood. “I need to have a talk with that old bat.”

Hank grabbed my arm. “Don’t, Jess. There’s nothin’ wrong with what she was doing. It may not have helped him, but it didn’t hurt him none, neither.”

“Didn’t hurt him? You mean when he didn’t go to the doctor early enough to get help or when she gave him false hope that she could stop the Parkinson’s?”

“It’s Scooter’s choice. It always has been.”

His grip felt like iron, completely unlike Scooter’s feeble grasp earlier. The contrast made my throat ache. “She had no right filling his head with that crap,” I said. “If he’d listened to me years ago and gone to a doctor then, they could have prescribed L-dopa to slow the symptoms.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Hank replied, his voice soft. He let go of me as I sat back down to listen. “This drug treatment they gave him is in trials.”

I stared at him for a moment while my brain struggled to work. “He let them experiment on him?”

“Only because he’s already so far gone. But now they know more about the side effects—”

“Let me get this straight,” I snapped. “The doctors turned a non-life-threatening disease into a death sentence because they wanted to test a cocktail that hasn’t seen FDA approval yet. And when that clinical trial failed, they decided to wash their hands of him and let him die because he’s old. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Hank’s shuttered expression told me I was wasting my breath. He was a bottom-line kind of guy, but I guess the bottom line I’d reached didn’t sit well with him.

“Look,” I argued, “I just wanted him to see if anything could be done. Not to throw himself into a bad science experiment.”

Hank nodded thoughtfully with the air of a parent letting his ten-year-old finish up a tantrum. It pissed me off. I clutched my sweat-slick beer bottle as he said, “He’s a grown man, Jessie. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. It’s not up to you to go tearing up Old Lady Fenster or parade over to San Antone to yell at the doctors. Especially since he’s been workin’ with ’em ever since you left.”

My radar went off. San Antonio wasn’t the Parkinson’s capital of Texas. Houston was.

“Talk to me about San Antone,” I said, shedding my anger a hair. “Why’d he go there?”

Hank toyed with a coaster. I knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of his mouth. “Your great-uncle decided last year he’d check into a cure on his own. He found a lab that was workin’ on one and talked to ’em.”

My heart sank. “Don’t tell me. They agreed to make him a guinea pig.” At his nod, I added, “And he chose them because they’re using an extract of some damned insect saliva in the formula.”

Hank looked at his hands as he said, “They’re still workin’ on the cure. The head guy at the lab, Dr. Thompson, he said the drug had been tested on mice okay. The San Antone fellas just need a little more time.”

I got mad all over again. “It doesn’t sound like they have time. What’s this outfit called?”

“Cradion Pharmaceutical.”

“And they’re hooked up to Scooter’s regular doctors how?” I demanded.

“They offered the trial drug and assigned Dr. Thompson to his case. His G.P. just oversees his checkups.”

“Did his insurance pick up the cost?”

“Not much of it. The Slapdash is mortgaged up to its neck.”

I bit my lip. Damned old fool and his damned fool ideas. “He should’ve paid a hit man. It would’ve been cheaper and faster.”

“Ever’body did their level best, Jessie. Sometimes it just don’t work out.”

“I should have tried harder.”

“We all could have.”

“No. I mean I should have gone to court, got him declared incompetent, and then put him in decent care when he was first diagnosed. I should have been here to make sure the doctors were going to help him, not hurt him.”

Hank stared at me, mouth tightening with what might have been anger. “He’d never forgive you for doing that to him. You got no call to be trying to run his life when he’s still kickin’ around like a mean old hoss.” His bearded chin stuck out a little as he said, “He wouldn’t have tried to tell you what to do.”

I waited for Hank to finish. Behind him, the band’s guitar player slipped the strap over his head and twanged a string, prompting a pretty brunette in tight jeans and boots to drag her man onto the scraped-up dance floor. A group of cowboys in the corner laughed over a hand of cards.

When Hank ran out of things to say, I stood. “See you around.” I headed for the door.

“Jessie,” he warned.

“It’s okay. I won’t bother anybody.” I threw a few bucks on the bar for Marian on my way out.

On the porch, cool wind brushed my cheeks. Only then did I feel the sticky wetness of tears. The man I knew as a father was dying because he was too stubborn to do anything else. A homeopath had given him false hope and some bogus pharmaceutical company had made him a guinea pig and thanked him for it by killing him.

But I was the one who hadn’t been here. I hadn’t done what needed to be done.

If anybody had put the first nail in Scooter’s coffin, it was me.