Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  ‘I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.’

  ‘You’re not like those regular FBI fucks. You and me, we can do a trade: what I know for what you know.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Thorne instantly, ‘what do you know?’

  Escobar grinned, stuck with it. ‘Yeah. Well, me and my partner got the call-out at two-thirty a.m. Lots of fog. Jaeger had two plainclothes black security guys with him, said the suspect started shooting as they approached the houseboat. His guys returned fire – Jaeger didn’t have a weapon. No shots were fired at us. We worked the bullhorn, no response, so we put in teargas, went in. Two dead vics. White male, mid-thirties. White female, late twenties. Multiple gunshots. A Python .357 Magnum was on the floor near the bodies. Empty. I presume it was the murder weapon. I was afraid the civilians might corrupt my crime scene, so I took blood and fluid and tissue samples before I went back up on the levee to call it in.’

  ‘Presume? What about ballistics?’

  ‘Before I could call SIU, two carloads of feds showed up. I told them the perp must have slithered off the stern of the houseboat while Jaeger’s guys were shooting the shit out of the front of it. Told ’em he’d be bottled up in the slough – his car was half a mile away at the levee gate.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘That’s when the Big G. dropped the hammer on us.’

  ‘Do you think the perp was wounded?’

  ‘There was a blood trail to the stern, but was it his blood? We never even got a courtesy call afterwards. Never got any DNA, never saw the results of the autopsies or tox screens, never were given any possible i.d. of the suspect, never learned the names of the vics. Never learned why a guy like Jaeger was out there. Never learned if the Magnum was the murder weapon or who it was registered to. All we got was a big load of national security bullshit. I’ve got the blood and fluid samples I didn’t tell the Feebs about, and nothing to compare ’em with.’

  ‘Victims, Nisa and Damon Mather,’ said Thorne. ‘Husband and wife. They’d been staffers on Wallberg’s election campaign until they quit and hid out here in the Delta because they were being stalked by someone. Wallberg’s people didn’t know anything about it until Jaeger got a phone call from Nisa on election evening. That’s why the FBI is on it instead of the Secret Service – the vics were no longer on Wallberg’s staff.’ Thorne told his lie smoothly. ‘The perp’s name died with the victims.’

  Escobar nodded. ‘Thanks for telling me. I’ll drive you to the scene and bring you back afterwards.’ At his Crown Vic, he paused, then handed Thorne a three-ring binder from the back seat. ‘I always keep a personal Murder Book. Better read it on the way. Whoever the perp is, he’s one sick son of a bitch.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Thorne, surprised.

  ‘Just read the Murder Book.’

  As they went east on gun-barrel Cal 12, Thorne read. Damon Mather was found lying on his back in the middle of the room in the classic death pose, arms and legs splayed. Loosened bowels and bladder. A single shot to the chest with a heavy-caliber slug consistent with the .357 Magnum on the scene.

  Escobar slowed the Crown Vic, put on his right blinker.

  ‘It’s a half-mile walk from the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road to where their houseboat was moored on Disappointment Slough. We can climb over the gate.’ Nisa had been pounded up against the bulkhead by the other five rounds. Unlike Damon, she had fought for her life: broken nails, dermis under two of them, head at an angle, eyes open and glazing, tongue out one corner of her mouth. Blouse ripped down.

  Contact wounds, powder burns around each of them. One in the stomach, one into each breast, the final two rounds into her mons veneris. Her clothing was soaked in blood and urine. And something else. Corwin had masturbated on her body after he had killed her. The first, heaviest spurt into her face, the rest onto her bared breasts like some obscene pornographic film.

  His own daughter. Thorne felt a wave of nausea. Nisa was long dead, but he still wanted to protect her from Corwin.

  ‘One sick son of a bitch,’ he agreed.

  They walked along the raised levee road. Grass grew between the ruts. To their left was Disappointment Slough. To their right, sunken stubble fields waited for spring planting. A jackrabbit hopped up on the levee in front of them, afternoon sunshine turning his long erect ears red, almost translucent.

  ‘When you see a rabbit with light shining through his ears, you’ve entered the land of enchantment,’ said Thorne.

  ‘I could use a little enchantment.’

  A cold breeze had risen, rustling the thistles flanking the track.

  Herring-bone clouds stretched across the sky. A brace of mallard whistled by overhead. Across the channel was a brushy oval uninhabited land mass called King Island. Escobar stopped beside a knee-high thick-stemmed bush with a single white four-petal flower.

  ‘I used this bush as a landmark to come back after the feds left.’ He gave an embarrassed chuckle. ‘I was really pissed.’

  ‘You find anything?’

  ‘No place to hide with searchers just minutes behind you.’

  Across the channel a two-trunked dead tree lifted stark, naked arms to the sky as if in prayer. For the souls of the dead Nisa and Damon?

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Thorne. ‘Nothing to find. I’m through here.’

  7

  Sharon Dorst entered the Department of Commerce building from 15th Street. An American flag hung over the entrance. She was wearing her black power suit with a string of pearls around her neck and a small gold American flag pinned to her lapel. Without government i.d. she was meat for the scanner, her purse and briefcase meat for the x-ray machine. Nothing beeped.

  In the echoing, nearly-deserted basement cafeteria, she doctored decaf with Equal and milk, paid the cashier, and carried her coffee out to the south-side courtyard. She sat down at a wrought-iron table near the big stone fountain. Right on time. Hatfield wasn’t, but she was glad of the time alone.

  She had done three evaluations for him before Thorne’s, but when he had said he wanted to meet her here, all her alarm bells had gone off. Why here? She could give him her evaluation, all that he was entitled to by law, in her office. Did he want her out of the way so he could send in a black-bag team to rifle her files for her private session notes on Thorne? She knew the FBI sometimes did things like that. So, at the last minute, she stuck the sessions notes in her briefcase. She was being irrational, but she felt better having them safely out of the office.

  When a scowling Hatfield finally arrived, twenty minutes late, he plunked down across the little table from her. He wore the standard FBI uniform: white shirt, Brooks Brothers suit, dull tie. He slammed his cup of coffee down in front of him, slopping some into the saucer. She tried to read his face. Had he searched her office or not?

  ‘Okay, let’s have it.’ She stared at him in astonishment. He snapped his fingers. ‘Your evaluation. Of Thorne. Let’s have it. I’m on a tight schedule here and I’m running late.’

  She ostentatiously checked her watch. ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Don’t give me any crap, lady.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Okay, we’ll play it your way. What did the tests suggest about Thorne’s mental and emotional states?’

  ‘I didn’t run any tests. We just talked.’

  ‘Talked? Jesus H. Christ, get serious.’

  She took a sip of coffee, trying to mask her dismay. She hadn’t run the standard neurological and psychological tests on Thorne because they had been run several times before, by the Army and then by the CIA, and the results had been consistent every time. She didn’t need a battery of tests to tell her who Thorne was, psychologically.

  But she couldn’t say that to Hatfield. She had been commissioned to run the tests, and she hadn’t run them. She had made herself vulnerable.

  ‘I felt the standard battery of tests would be counterproductive with this subject. He’s been down that road before.’

  ‘Is he a burned-out case or what?’

>   She groped for something that would not betray confidentiality, and remembered Thorne talking about tigers with hearts of glass. And her calling them glass tigers.

  ‘It’s not that easy. He used an analogy. In captivity, tigers often have hearts of glass. Under pressure, they can shatter. The deaths of the innocent woman and child in Panama put such pressure on him that I think of him as a glass tiger.’

  Hatfield was staring at her, rage suffusing his features.

  ‘A glass tiger? Are you nuts? He’s a fucking assassin, the sort of bastard our Hostage Rescue/Sniper teams are supposed to put down. Now, goddammit, what made him run off to Africa?’

  This was a disaster. But she found a calm, steady voice to say, ‘I’ve told you as much as I’m at liberty to discuss.’

  ‘Fuck that, lady! I need your session notes on him.’

  Her heart was pounding, but her face was icy and aloof.

  ‘By contract, I’m not required to show you anything.’

  ‘Shit, lady, you broke the contract when you didn’t run the tests. Under the Patriot Act I can have you stuck in a mental institution for a couple of months as a possible security risk – and justify it with paperwork.’

  She stared at him, loathing him, fearing him, knowing he could make good on his illegal National Security threat. But she said, ‘The client–doctor privilege protects therapists and their patients from people like you.’

  He might not have heard her.

  ‘Your notes weren’t at your office, my people looked. So give them to me now or suffer the consequences.’

  Her hand automatically went to the briefcase beside her chair. How had she been so stupid as to bring the folder with her? But if she’d left it at her office…

  Her gesture was enough for him. His hand shot out, grabbed the briefcase. She tried to jerk it back, but he fended her off with an elbow while rifling through it. She grabbed again, her nails scored long red lines down the back of his hand.

  He half-raised the hand as if to strike her, but then, a triumphant look on his face, held up her session notes on Thorne with his other hand.

  ‘You’ll have these back first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I’m going to report you to—’

  But he was already gone, crossing the courtyard with long strides. She stared after him, numb, on the edge of tears. All she could do was leave a cryptic warning message for Thorne at the Mayflower Hotel, and hope he called in to get it. And that he would understand it.

  The little general store was white clapboard, two-story, raised six feet above the ground on pillars against the Delta’s winter floods. Out behind, two house trailers were settled down comfortably on their blocks like regulars on their barstools. A battered white TERMINOUS MARKET sign creaked on guy-wires from the store’s old-fashioned false front.

  Thorne sat in his car next to a new red Beetle convertible, rereading the FBI file. The investigation had been incredibly sloppy, or else Hatfield had deleted anything useful. But Nisa’s phone call had been traced to the payphone here at this run-down market he had barely noted when he had passed it on his way to Tower Park Marina.

  Inside it was cluttered and comfortable, with fishing lures and candy bars and postcards and cold beer and sodas and bottled water. It smelled of live bait and microwaved burritos. The proprietor was in his late sixties, with a lot of white tousled hair and a tobacco-stained gunfighter’s mustache. He nodded twice to himself when Thorne showed his FBI credentials, like a robin checking out worm-sounds.

  ‘Wondered when you guys would be around again.’

  ‘Well, the phone company records show the woman who was killed made a call from your payphone here that afternoon.’

  ‘Yep. Reco’nized her right off from the pichurs they showed me.’ He looked as if he wanted to spit the juice from his chaw of tobacco into the spitoon, but instead just worked his jaw around. ‘Her and her husband bought supplies here, said they was on vacation in a rented houseboat. Damn shame, I say. She was a mighty nice lady. Pretty, too. Got to know her, her coming in to get them calls every Tuesday an’ Thursday, two ’clock, straight up, reg’lar as clockwork.’

  Nothing in the file about her receiving a series of calls.

  ‘Ah… know who they were from?’

  ‘Nope. But they was all of ’em long-distance calls.’ He chuckled. ‘Now I think of it, most anywhere you’d call from here would be long-distance, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Sure would. Could you hear her end of things?’

  He winked at Thorne. ‘Little place like this, couldn’t help hearing, could I?’ His face fell. ‘All she ever said was something like, “Everything’s fine” and “Thanks” and she’d hang up.’ Then he brightened again. ‘Got one two hours early on ’lection day, ’bout noon, thereabouts, an’ it shook her up real good. Soon’s she heard the voice, she yelled, “You!” an slammed down the receiver. Then she made a buncha calls of her own.’

  Got an unexpected call that panicked her, started trying to reach Jaeger. She finally did, but too late to save them. Had this all been deleted from the file? Or had the FBI just never found out about all of those calls? The old man was going on.

  ‘Waitin’ for them Tuesday an’ Thursday calls, she’d listen to my tales ’bout the old days when Terminous was the railhead for produce comin’ out of the Delta. A real nice lady.’

  The Delta. A synapse fired in Thorne’s brain. Below that dead tree reaching imploring arms to the sky had been a messy waist-high mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds some eight feet in diameter. He checked his watch. He was in a sudden hurry to get out of there. Dusk would soon fall.

  ‘You got any of that black electrician’s tape for sale?’

  The old man cackled. ‘Course I do! It’s a damn general store, ain’t it?’

  At the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road, Thorne wrapped his flashlight with electrician’s tape and rummaged through his suitcase for a heavy turtleneck sweater. The sun was low, a cold wind had kicked up, swirling dust. The rabbit was gone. No enchantment this time around. Just icy water and a half-assed idea.

  Across the channel, a sentry muskrat, its segmented rat-like tail wound around behind it, was sitting on top of the messy mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds Thorne belatedly had recognized as a muskrat house. He had also remembered a Michael Gilbert story that mentioned ancient Britons hiding in underground burrows called dene holes to let the Saxon invaders overrun their positions. Hide in plain sight.

  He stripped naked, leaving his clothes folded in the track like a suicide going to drown himself. Flashlight in hand, he slid down the steep side of the levee to the water. A lesser grebe popped up in mid-channel, swam for a moment, dove under again. Thorne shivered in the cold wind. He was at least as tough as a helldiver, wasn’t he?

  As he dove in himself, the sentry scrambled off the muskrat house. Thorne swam underwater as long as he could, surfaced a few feet from the house, numb with cold. He was used to African waters, warm and sunlit. And full of parasitic bilharzia worms. And hippos. And crocodiles.

  Corwin, a generation older and a sicko at that, had been doing this in November. If he could take it, by God so could Thorne. On his next dive, he used his temporarily waterproofed flashlight to find the underwater entrance. Fighting irrational fears of an icy tomb with his face buried in mud, he rammed and wiggled his way up through glutinous mud and water and rotted reeds to burst into air rank with the smell of rodents.

  He rested there inside the house, panting, just his eyes and nose above water. No muskrats. His light died, but not before he had seen the proof he sought: a partially obliterated handprint next to his own in the mud beside the entry hole.

  Corwin must have been able to disappear into himself as Morengaru could, so animals no longer sensed his presence. Because according to the FBI file, a sentry muskrat had been sitting on top of the house that morning until scared off by two searchers who sat down to smoke a cigarette.

  W
as he Corwin’s equal? Thorne remembered laying his hand on Bwana Kifaru’s warm flank in the African moonlight. Damn right he was Corwin’s equal.

  He surfaced outside the muskrat house, crossed the channel. Now the water felt warm, but the wind was numbing on the levee. He pulled on the heavy sweater, jogged back to the car carrying his other clothes in one hand, his shoes and socks in the other.

  He had passed a motel off the cloverleaf where east-west 12 intersected with north-south 1-5. Microtec Inn and Suites. This time of year they’d have plenty of vacancies. And across the interchange, Rocky’s Restaurant. Check in, grab a hot shower and something to eat, try to sleep, in the morning call the Mayflower just in case they had found Corwin and he could quit looking.

  Who was he kidding? He was hooked on the hunt.

  8

  Dorst walked the 45-year-old Library of Congress research librarian to the door. Her husband had dumped her for a twenty-something grad student. Dorst’s phone, turned down during sessions, started clicking. She caught Thorne in mid-sentence.

  ‘… got your message, I’ll try again in an hour—’

  She picked up quickly. ‘Thanks for calling back.’ She felt like crying. It had been so easy to assure him that his deepest secrets were safe with her. ‘Hatfield… grabbed my session notes right out of my briefcase. He threatened me with National Security if I said anything. I… I caved in.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, Doc. You done fine. You called it right. He went after you because he’s afraid to go after me.’ Thorne chuckled. ‘No glass tiger problems. Right now I’m in California, on my way to King’s Canyon. My hunt is starting to feel like German intelligence chess during World War Two. A three-dimensional board, players unknown – and everybody blindfolded.’

  Seth Parker ambled over, wiping his hands on his apron. His rolled-up sleeves showed the crude prison tats on his forearms. The deeply tanned, compact man who had taken the Parkers’ last unrented cabin the night before was sitting at the bar under the mounted elk’s head. He moved his own head slightly.