Chapter Three: Heist

A week later, Verne was committed to trying Juvechrome. His hand twitch had returned twice more, bringing to mind the proud but twitching, slightly-limping Nick Desmond the year he gave his speech. The year before he got his plaque and shat himself in front of everybody at the fundraiser. What's more, once he posted his theory about Juvechrome online, everybody wanted him to try it. A few other of the other NVC sufferers and parents wanted to try it out, too, though most of them couldn't afford it unless the treatment was really worth it... and, even then, it was quite an ask.

V: <I'm going in next week for a tour and a consult, he posted.
V: <I can't quite afford a full regimen of the 'weak sauce' treatment, but I'm going to see if they'll work with me. In either case, I'll report back everything I find. Stay strong and stay positive, everybody!

That cheerful positivity was part of Verne's online persona, a bit of a departure from how he was in person, and a massive departure from how he internally felt. In a way, everybody in the whole world was dying – born to live and destined to die – but with NVC, the timeframe was just long enough to give families the illusion of hope before yanking it away. And, really, that was a pretty good metaphor for the world at large: a trickster who vacillated between casually maliciousness and epic assholery and who dropped people into situations where the light at the end of the tunnel, at one point seemingly obtainable, inevitably receded into infinity.

"You have how much saved up?" Verne's mother asked him.

"Twenty-two thousand," he repeated. "I told you I did the RaiseFund... well, I have that plus some money I saved from work..."

"And what percent of that went to God?" his father butted in.

Verne's parents, Ashley and Vincent 'Vic' Vera, had always been at least moderately religious, but had become more so in the years since Wesley's death. It was a longstanding understanding in the family that the Twin Boughs Methodist Church got their 10% of every penny the Veras made... only Verne was 99% sure God wasn't real, and the 1% that held out some remnant belief was convinced that whatever God existed was an epic asshole. So approximately zero percent of his money had made it to Twin Boughs.

"It's not earnings, it's a medical fund," Verne said.

"It doesn’t matter," Vic Vera said. "You'll put your ten percent in this Sunday. Am I understood?"

"Yes, sir," Verne said. He understood his father perfectly. But he was, of course, going to completely ignore his father's command.

Vic nodded, satisfied, and helped himself to coffee. Both of Verne's parents were in their mid-forties, and you could probably count the number of times either of them had traveled out of state on one hand. They weren't exactly rednecks – those didn't really exist in Palmetto City until you got to the trailer parks beyond the city limits – but they were certainly blue collar. Good people, to be sure, but Verne had a hard time explaining just about any aspect of his daily life to them. They were products of another time, and Verne's life of premarital sex, casual narcotics use, and copious Internet posting was a totally foreign world to them.

"I'm stopping by the Juvechrome clinic after work tomorrow and we'll see what they can do for me."

"Well, I'll pray for you," Ashley said. "Oh, and make sure you get your suit laundered this week..."

"What for?"

Vic cleared his throat. "The Sunday after this coming one is the tenth anniversary," he said. "Be a shame if we didn't look nice for it."

"Right, well I'll get it done..."

Shit. That weekend, he was scheduled to visit Lisa in Knoxville, which would have to be canceled. And he wasn't about to have her travel all the way across the state to help mourn the tenth anniversary of his brother's death. She'd have done it, too, if he asked - but Verne wouldn't ask her to in a million years.

The next day, he walked from Imaging East just north of downtown to the Juvechrome office just south of it. It was a huge cream-white building that looked more like a temple than a medical center. Actually, if Verne recalled correctly, it used to be a headquarters for the Church of Scientology until a few years ago. A Scientologist had once tried to recruit Verne, telling him that 'going clear' would cure his illness... and about five minutes of Internet research had cured him of the temptation to test those waters. But the Juvechrome Wellness Clinic wasn't a church. Its sleek glass and marble entryway was a very high-end waiting room, and the admission desks looked more like the concierge at a 5-star hotel, right down to the bright, alert expressions of the attendants, which gradually faded as the obviously out-of-place Verne approached.

"May I help you, sir?"

Verne was suddenly aware of his clothes. He'd forgot to bring anything to change into after work, and so was wearing his beige scrubs. He didn’t look old enough to pass for a physician, let alone the aging upper-crust clientele that Juvechrome catered to. But his money was still good, wasn't it?

"Um," Verne said. "I've got an appointment for a consult?"

He did, in fact, have an appointment. Verne sat in the reception area for perhaps ten minutes, sipping on the seltzer water that was offered to him and trying to ignore the disdainful glances of the wealthier patrons. They were mostly but not entirely women – perhaps a quarter of the twenty-ish people there were men, two of them in very expensive-looking suits and another one, probably a tech millionaire now creeping into his dreaded forties, in slouch chic. The women had designer wear, expensive purses, and two of them had little dogs in their bags – a chihuahua and a yorkie, respectively. Verne felt very much out of his element.

"Mister Vera?" a man with a clipboard and an earpiece flashed a practiced fake smile. "Right this way, please. Doctor Prowse is looking forward to your consult."

This was, Verne supposed, the sort of thing that rich people liked to hear. Not 'the doctor will see you now', but 'the doctor is eager to see you', like meeting up with an old friend. The man escorted Verne down the hallway and past several security doors. He had the ramrod-straight gait of a maitre d' and a little violet tattoo on his wrist. So had the woman at the front desk, though it had been a different pattern. Strange, that.

"Doctor Prowse?" the man said. He opened a tempered glass door and gestured Verne into a very modern-chic office. "This is Mr. Vera, your four o' clock." Then, before the doctor could acknowledge him, the assistant was zipping back down the hallway.

"Verne, isn't it?" the doctor said. Her smile was sunny and her handshake was warm and firm. Everything about the doctor was sunny. She didn't look a day over thirty – Verne wondered whether she used her own product – tall and fair with golden blonde hair and an attractive face just a bit too studious and serious to be a model's. She tapped on her tablet to bring up his file. "Please, do sit. I see you've submitted all the preliminary paperwork... you're very young to be taking our product... but I also see you've got NVC. I have to admit, I'd never heard of the syndrome until I saw it on your record. This is, I assume, the reason for your wanting to try Juvechrome?"

"It is," Verne admitted. "I thought it might buy me a little extra time... maybe a lot?"

Doctor Prowse nodded gravely. "I'd like to tell you definitively, but I haven't a clue. But there's no harm in trying, I suppose. I'd recommend our Juvechrome Deluxe regimen but, looking at your financials, that's not going to be an option, is it?"

"I suppose not," Verne admitted. "I don't even have enough for the regular. I have twenty-two thousand dollars saved up..."

Doctor Prowse nodded sympathetically. "I understand your... urgency... in seeking out our services. I can offer you a 10% need-based discount on the initial five-treatment regimen, plus a $500 discount for experimental service, as we've never had a client with your issue and I'd like to see how it goes. If I can bring the price down to $22,000, can you place half of that down today?"

"I can," Verne said. He had the twenty-two large sitting in his MyPay account and not doing much of anything. He could plink the whole sum down at a moment's notice. "Where do I sign and when can I start?"

Doctor Prowse checked her tablet again. "How's this afternoon? I've got a suite opening in twenty minutes if you'd like to get started."

Verne did want to get started, and so he had his first and only official Juvechrome session that very afternoon.

+++++

He didn't remember much about the actual Juvechrome procedure. Not much at all. He remembered that the room was warm and clinical and dark, that the nurse found his vein in almost no time at all, and that the 'mild sedative' in the Juvechrome preparation had him completely zonked within a few minutes. He came to about half an hour later, around five o' clock, and the IV was already out of his arm with a little cotton ball and a strip of clinical tape in its place. Where it had taken Verne six weeks to spend the $1,937 of his college fund bumming across the country, he'd managed to waste $5,000 in a neat half hour, and he'd been asleep for most of that time...

But it was hard to argue that the Juvechrome didn't work. The recurrent twitching in his hand disappeared and, though he felt drained for about two days afterward, he felt great for the two days after that. He excitedly posted his findings online, being careful to inject judicious caution into his comments before posting.

V: <It's still too soon to tell anything,> he posted,
V: <but my minor symptoms are completely gone. I slept ten hours a night and felt a bit groggy for the first two days, but after that felt full of energy. Juvechrome is, if nothing else, a hell of a placebo. And it might even be a workable treatment.

B: <That's great news, V!, his online friend 'Ben Keith' responded.
B: <Any chance of them getting cost below $2k? I'd love to try, but that's all I've got...

Verne felt bad about that: there was next to zero chance that Juvechrome was dropping down into the 'mere' hundreds of dollars per session. Ben had tried his own RaiseFund the year before and had garnered all of $1,500, a few hundred of which had come from his mother.

V: <I'll help you start a RaiseFund, show you how to get the word out and drum up enthusiasm, ok? Verne replied.

B: <Ok, thanks a $$ million $$, bud!

Moreover, Verne was convinced that he needed more money, too. If the weak sauce Juvechrome could mask and/or heal his minor symptoms, the good shit might completely reverse the course of NVC... but at six times the cost, of course. And, even if he stuck with the weak sauce, he'd have to pony up for maintenance treatments every six months after the initial regimen. Whatever he did, the costs were going to pile up beyond any RaiseFund he could start. Verne needed money.

"How much you need?" Hector asked him.

Verne shrugged. "Depends. At least ten thousand for this year, and a hundred fifty gees if I can manage it. That's for the good shit."

Hector whistled. "One fifty? My drugs got nothing on that," he said. "Look, I've got all kinds of ways to get a few hundred dollars in not-quite-legal side gigs, but nothing that'll get you close to one fifty, not even in a year. Can I offer a suggestion?"

"Shoot."

"Why not go right to the source? If you're willing to do something illegal... why not just steal some Juvechrome from the fuckers? You know enough medical shit to administer it yourself. And, if I can get my hands on some to sell the stuff? Well, we'll both be in money and you can get your treatments above the board while selling on the side. How's that?"

"And how in the world would I pull that off? I'm not a criminal," Verne said.

"Yeah, but you're a medical professional, right? And guess who gets their uniforms from PWW?"

"Juvechrome?"

Hector snapped his fingers. "Got it on the first try."

++++

On the basis of that plan, Verne snuck into the Juvechrome clinic two days later. Actually, 'snuck' was an unfair word – he walked right through the front entrance, slipped into the restroom, and changed into the baby blue scrubs, crisp lab coat, and pristine white sneakers of the Juvechrome medical staff. Then he waited for Hector's go-ahead and bustled out the restroom door.

The plan was this: Verne would disguise himself as Juvechrome staff, right down to the little wrist tattoo they all seemed to have. Verne's was just a Triforce symbol from Hector's video game-themed childhood stamp set Stamped a few times into a nine-pointed star pattern, but it looked about right if you didn't scrutinize it. Once appropriately disguised, Hector would cause a minor distraction in the lobby to provide cover for Verne going in to nab some Juvechrome. Then Hector would hold back to watch and message Verne if he needed to GTFO in a hurry. It was a pretty basic plan, but that was the point: even a novice like Verne couldn't fuck it up.

Well... maybe he couldn't. Already, Verne was sweating. He wasn't a natural grifter like Hector was, and his nerves quickly got the best of him. He tried to channel that nervous energy into a purposeful stride and a serious expression, but he had no idea if it was working. He passed close enough to overhear Hector for about three seconds:

"Look, I've got the paper right here... exterminator services for a wasp nest on the third floor. I can wait all day, lady, but I'd think you'd want the wasps to be out of your medical suites."

"Sir, please keep your voice down," the attendant said quickly, frantically punching numbers into her computer. "I'll just need to check..."

"Big wasps, they said. Probably the black venomous ones as big as your thumb. Best to get to them quickly, right?" Hector said loudly.

Verne zipped past them, falling into step three paces behind another man in employee scrubs. The man glanced in the direction of Hector's distraction, scanned his card to open the security doors, and shuffled through the doors. Verne slipped in right behind him. Once inside the clinical area of the facility, nobody paid Verne a second glance. A few of them even nodded at him, apparently mistaking him for somebody else. His phone buzzed with a message from Hector:

<Outside and changing into civvies. Will message you if something up.

That calmed Verne a bit, but not much. His hand was shaking, and he wasn't sure whether it was from his NVC or just his nerves going into mega-overdrive. He was worried he was walking too quickly, so he forced himself to slow his breaths and to take three steps with each breath in or out. Was he calming down? It was hard to tell. Was that a guard? That was a guard...

Verne scanned the hallway for somewhere to duck away from the guard and realized he was standing right next to a reinforced door with a security pad. It was the same kind of security pad that Imaging East used for their controlled substances room. To get in, you needed an RFID card, usually an employee ID, and a seven-digit code. In other words, they were theoretically pretty secure. Unlike the security doors into the clinical area, Verne couldn't exactly follow somebody into the drug storage area and still look inconspicuous. He continued down the hallway, the security guard nodding and smiling as he passed.

Verne passed offices – the offices of doctors, PAs, and a few administrators, all of them smaller but similar to Dr. Prowse's office, down to the sleek modern styling and the glass doors with the occupant's name emblazoned in glowing script – doors that provided zero privacy unless the occupant lowered a shade, as a few had done. And, being the observant young man he was, Verne noticed an ID card sitting right on the obsidian-black desktop of a currently-unoccupied office. He checked the door. A currently-unoccupied and currently-unlocked office. He slipped in, wiped his sweaty palms on his lab coat, and then swiped the ID card: Charles Uriah, Ph.D. Hopefully, Charlie had access to the Juvechrome.

He slipped back out into the hallway, made his way to the secure room, and scanned the card. The pad flashed green, which it would do for ten seconds or until the code was entered. Verne entered the code from Imaging East: 4-3-4-9-0-7-7. That was the default code for that model and, if Ram was to be trusted (he usually was), hardly anybody ever bothered to change the factory code. Juvechrome hadn't bothered to, either. The lock clicked open and Verne slipped into the controlled substances room.

The room was dark, its few visible lights the little green and red beacons of LEDs on medical machinery. The whole room hummed with the roar of a dozen –80 C freezers. Verne fumbled for the light switch and, finding none, used his phone to find his way. The room was about fifteen feet square, three quarters of which was filled with three large freezers and a liquid nitrogen cooler. Verne opened one of the freezers at random – a gray –80 with 'Juvechrome B & C' labeled in blocky handwritten letters. He had no idea what B & C were... different formulations, maybe? Verne opened the freezer and found that it was about half-way filled with maybe two dozen little metal thermos-style cannisters. He slipped on insulated gloves from the little counter behind him, grabbed two of the cannisters, and shut the freezer before its alarm could go off. Then he emptied the contents of the little red first aid pack beneath the counter, jammed the cannisters into it, turned his phone lights off, and slipped back out of the room.

"Have you seen my ID anywhere?" a man asked Verne the moment he stepped out of the room. It was Dr. Charles Uriah.

"Um... ID? Like... an ID?" He said. "No?"

The doctor sighed. "Will you scan me in, please? I'd like to look inside."

Verne shrugged. "Sure." Covering the photo on the ID, he scanned the doctor's card against the door and then punched in the code. "There you go, doc. I hope you find it." Then, as Dr. Uriah sighed and strode into the room, and before he could turn the lights on, Verne slid the doctor's card beneath the door for him to find and then made a beeline for the exit.

Hector was in the parking lot with his decade-old Civic's motor already running. Upon spotting Verne, he did a fist pump and pointed to the first-aid bag. Verne nodded and jogged over to Hector's car.

"One for me and one for thee," Verne said. "Let's get some dry ice, pronto. This shit needs to be kept cold."

Hector clapped his hand against Verne's shoulder and laughed. "I knew you could do it, bud! Ready to get the fuck out of here?"

Verne definitely was.