by Joe Gores
‘So she traveled with Corwin. Corwin is dead and gone. Thorne is our priority here.’
‘Frankly, Mr. President, we want the Kestrel woman because Thorne was looking for her. Since we can’t ask Thorne himself, it’s vital to catch her and find out what he wanted from her.’
‘Can’t ask Thorne himself,’ snapped Wallberg. ‘Say what you mean, man. That you can’t find Thorne.’
‘Can’t ask him, Mr. President,’ Hatfield persisted. ‘We have every reason to believe that Thorne is dead.’
Wallberg kept his face and voice impassive. ‘Indeed?’
Hatfield spun his tale. Thorne exchanging fire with him, and, wounded, trying to escape down the Tuolemne. Water-logged rowboat, wreckage, life jacket. Absolutely nothing since.
Hope leaped up in Wallberg’s chest. ‘I find it symbolic,’ he intoned sententiously when Hatfield was finished, ‘that both Thorne and Corwin found their quietus in icy, rushing water, as if trying to cleanse themselves of their sins.’ He stood up. ‘Good work, Terrill. But find this Kestrel woman. Confirm that Thorne is dead. I need closure in this matter so I can get on with the business of running this great country of ours.’
‘Closure you will get, Mr. President.’
Alone, Wallberg felt a rising excitement. Corwin was dead, Thorne was probably dead, no longer able to pick at certain forty-year-old knots in the fabric of his life before the presidency. Hatfield would find Kestrel, extract whatever information she had, tell it only to him. The man was proving his dedication to the Presidency – and to Hatfield’s own ambition: to become the Director of the FBI. As Edith had said on New Year’s Eve, no one could stop Gus Wallberg now.
Walking the perimeter of the Whiskey River lot, Thorne felt surprisingly good. The vet had done his job. No real pain. In front of the bar, no vehicles. In the dirt parking lot out behind, no bikes. In the wall he faced, no windows. A good place for a talk. Or a take-down.
He drifted the door open. Smells of beer and booze; this being California, none of cigarettes. Janet was sitting at a small round table across the dance floor, nothing in her hands, a bottle of whiskey and two thick-bottom shot glasses in front of her. He slid the deadbolt shut, sat down across from her.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘now tell me about Hal.’ Her eyes were hot, intense on his face.
‘I’d better tell you about me, first. It’s relevant. I grew up in Alaska, did a lot of hunting and trapping. I joined the Rangers, when I became an ex-Ranger, the CIA hired me as a contract sniper for a CIA front in Panama. Seven years ago I lost my wife and infant child, about Lindy’s age, to a drunk driver. I vowed to my wife’s memory I would never kill again, and became a camp guard in Kenya at a fancy tourist lodge. Any of this sound familiar? Like a parallel to Hal’s life? Anyway, Hatfield framed me so I would be deported back to the States.’
‘Sure, I see the parallel. But I think I hear violins.’
‘This isn’t a sob story. Hatfield framed me to get me back here to hunt down Corwin for the president.’ He outlined for her the presidential pressure to find Corwin, the way he had done it, the cat-and-mouse with Corwin, blind chess – in Minnesota, in the Bitterroot Mountains.
‘So you’re saying Hal shot at Wallberg and hit Jaeger.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. From twelve-hundred yards out.’
‘That’s what I can’t believe. Hal wouldn’t miss. Not even from twelve-hundred yards.’ Her eyes were chips of blue ice, glacier-cold. ‘I think he meant to hit Jaeger, and that’s enough bullshit about how and why. I want to know where. Goddamn you – where is Hal Corwin?’
Thorne’s own personal Rubicon. ‘Dead. I killed him. I know it’s not worth anything, but I’m sorry he’s—’
She came across the table at Thorne, knocking him backward out of his chair, landing on top of him. Her left hand was a claw that scored his face with long bloody parallel grooves. Her right hand was jerking the knife from her boot. She stabbed downward at his throat. He knocked the blade aside. The knife buried itself two inches deep in the hardwood floor.
Thorne swung an elbow against the corner of her jaw. She sagged. He threw the knife away. It hit the bandstand with a clang. He got up, panting, righted his chair, retrieved the bottle and unbroken glasses. He sat down heavily, hunched over with pain from his ribs, watching her like a hungry hawk.
Her eyelids fluttered. She moved her head, pressed a hand against the side of her jaw, yelped. Her eyes opened, filled with malice. She measured the distance between them.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.
After a full minute, she sighed and got to her feet and went around him to her chair and sat down. She poured herself a drink, held up the bottle. He nodded. They drank, set the glasses down. He resumed as if she hadn’t tried to kill him.
Their stalk of each other down the mountain. Firing at the same time Corwin fired. Corwin’s crawl to the stream. She didn’t interrupt, just kept her eyes on his face.
‘I told Corwin, “You missed.” He said, “Did I?” and rolled over into the water and was dead and gone forever.’
To his surprise, the story seemed to calm rather than incense her further. She just said, ‘I repeat: he must have meant to shoot Jaeger instead of President Wallberg.’
‘I thought of that. But he had a history with Wallberg, none with Jaeger. It just doesn’t make sense, unless you know things I don’t. You can see why I had to find you, why I hope we can work together to find out the truth. What were you to Hal? Lover? Co-conspirator? How did you two meet? What did he tell you about him and Jaeger? Him and Wallberg?’
‘If I said he told me nothing about anything, then what?’
‘If that’s the truth, then we’re both screwed. Hatfield isn’t going to stop. I thought he just wanted me in a Kenya jail. Instead he tried to kill me. If I was dead, I couldn’t tell Wallberg that it was I who saved him, not Hatfield. So now he has to kill me. It’s not urgent with you, but he thinks you might have some knowledge he wants. He’ll get you, then he’ll stick you away somewhere until he has your story.’
She poured them each one more shot, as if needing the time to make her decision. They sipped, then she sighed and said, ‘First, you have to tell me about that night in the Delta.’
‘Everything? You won’t like it.’
‘I have to know. Tell me anyway, even if some of it’s… awful.’ He did. She blanched fish-belly white at the state of Nisa’s body, but didn’t stop him. When he was finished, she said, ‘I spurred Hal on. I said that if I was his daughter, I’d kill my husband for trying to kill him.’
‘So you knew his story. How did—’
‘We met in Reno. He saved me from a beating by a guy who wanted to turn me out with him as my pimp. Hal and I left that night and traveled the west together. There was never anything sexual between us. He became the father I wished I’d had, I became the daughter he wished he’d had. When we heard on the TV that Wallberg would be at the Grand Canyon, I told Hal he had to talk with Nisa because I knew it was chewing at him, what she did. She told him that Damon shot him for Wallberg. He didn’t believe it, because Wallberg had once been his best friend.’
‘So why did Nisa yell for security?’
‘What she said made him so angry that he said he was going after Damon. She panicked. But then she just said he had tried to snatch her purse, to give him time to get away.’
‘Were you there, too?’
‘Outside. I was dressed up like a squaw girl to be inconspicuous. But Jaeger saw me and came on to me. He told me they’d be at the Desert Palms Resort in California later that month, and wanted me to meet him there. Said he’d show me a good time. Instead, I told Hal about the Desert Palms, and talked him into going over the wall to find Damon Mather. I waited for Hal in the 4-Runner. But neither Damon nor Nisa was there. Hal saw Wallberg alone in the mineral pool and tried to get the truth out of him. He got nothing except shot at.’
‘So he didn’t go there to kill Wallberg.�
��
‘He didn’t even go there to kill Damon Mather, though I thought he did. He just was going to get the truth out of him. That night the two of us ended up in a little desert motel halfway back to LA, drunk. I was in a rage at what all of those people had done to him, and that’s when he said it was Mather who pulled the trigger and that he didn’t care any more, he was going to quit, get on with his life.’ Her eyes were miserable. ‘I left while he was asleep. I abandoned him.’
‘Not much else you could do at that point,’ said Thorne.
‘I should have stuck with him. When I read in the LA newspapers that Wallberg would be at a Beverly Hills hotel for the election, I saw a way to make up for it. I conned my way into Jaeger’s room as the stupid little squaw girl from El Tovar, and saw Nisa’s name and a phone number and ‘Terminous’ on the pad by his phone. I pretended I hadn’t.’
‘Something’s missing here. You ended up in the hospital.’
‘I just remember bits and pieces about that. I was in a maid’s cart… two black guys were dumping me in an alley… When I woke up in the hospital, Hal was there. I told him about Terminous and the phone number. Seeing me all beat up must have made him change his mind about Mather, made him decide to go kill both him and Nisa. If I hadn’t told him where they were—’
‘Did you ever think that maybe Jaeger wanted you to get that phone number? Two black guys dumped you in the alley. Two black guys were with Jaeger in the Delta. Maybe he wanted Hal to go there so that he and his men could kill him.’
‘They were there to kill Hal?’ Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘Not to save Nisa and Damon?’
‘That’s one of the things I need to find out.’
‘Hal is dead. Nisa is dead. Damon is dead. Even Jaeger is dead. There’s nobody left to ask.’
‘There’s the two black guys. I think they’re from LA. If I could get down there without Hatfield spotting me…’
For the first time, she smiled. ‘I can do that for you.’
38
On Friday morning, five bikes drove south through the pre-dawn darkness from their rendezvous at Whiskey River. All of that wild-and-free-on-your-chopper stuff was, well, just stuff. Motorcycles at best have five-gallon tanks. You might stretch it to two hundred miles with a tailwind, but you’d be bone dry. Then there were breakfast and lunch stops, bathroom and coffee breaks.
Leading them was burly, bearded Worf the Klingon, riding a 1998 Harley Dyna Wide Glide with a customized paint job, ape-hanger handlebars and lots of chrome. With his bandanna under his neo-Nazi pot, and a bunch of decals sewn onto his leather vest, he was the sort of outlaw who was a magnet for law enforcement. Just what Janet needed to avoid, but she hadn’t said that to Worf. Because the others, despite wrap-around shades, leathers, and American flags on their backs, were nine-to-fivers. The black-leathered mamas up behind them on their bikes were their wives. None of their bikes smacked of the outlaw chopper: two customs, a standard, and Janet’s thumper. Multipurpose bikes, good for a round-trip to the high Sierra or to commute to work on Monday. Law-enforcement wouldn’t waste time on them.
With his uncut, unkempt hair, and a good start on a beard, Thorne, up behind Janet on the Suzuki, fit right in. Their first chance to talk, besides shouted comments over the thunder of the engines, came as they ate hot dogs and guzzled non-alcoholic beer at a rest-stop south of Fresno.
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Janet around a big bite of hot dog. ‘We’re after an LA pimp named Sharkey who used to supply Jaeger with whores. Just how do we go about finding him?’
‘We don’t. We let him find us.’
‘Then what do we do?’
‘We make him tell us what really happened in the Delta.’
That’s when Worf bellowed, ‘Let’s saddle up.’
Ninety-nine cut over to 1-5, which took them up over the Grapevine and down into the LA basin. At Santa Clarita the others cut off west on Cal 126 toward the Los Padres National Forest for their weekend encampment. Janet and Thorne kept on toward LA. They would rendezvous with the others on Sunday for the ride back up to Oakdale.
The Gaylord Arms was a shabby hot-sheet motel on Santa Ana near the Watts Towers. Thorne took two rooms on the first floor with separate entrances and separate room numbers but with a connecting door in between, giving the check-in clerk too much money and hinting at a weekend drug buy or a bootleg porn shoot. Janet didn’t register.
‘What makes you think Sharkey will show?’
‘Putting out Jaeger’s name with the low-life element will make him come to us. Maybe tomorrow.’
She almost hoped Sharkey wouldn’t come. What might a man like Thorne do to make him talk?
‘Mind if I take the bike while you’re spreading the word?’
‘It’s all yours.’
Thorne hit three pick-up bars and two strip-joints, leaving the same message everywhere: ‘A man named Jaeger told me to see a man named Sharkey to get me some girls for a beat-up-your-ho video I’m making. My name is Thompson and I’m in room 121 at the Gaylord Arms.’
Bread upon the waters. But finally it was too much for him, and he returned to the motel. Janet was not back yet. An hour later, someone playing rap music on his cellphone paused outside the door. Thorne stood on a chair to peer down through the slats of the window blind without being seen himself. The man was black, 30, shaven-headed, wearing a yellow FUBU shirt with a pimp’s gold rings on his fingers and in his ears, and a pimp’s gold chains around his neck. Sharkey? This soon?
Seemed like it was. He called softly through the door. ‘Yo, I be Sharkey. Lookin fo a man calls hisself Thompson.’
Thorne returned the chair to its place, opened the door, and stepped back so the man and his rap music could come in. Something struck him very hard on the back of his head. Going down into the twilight zone, he thought in disgust:
rap music coming through the door to cover Sharkey himself coming in from the connecting room… thought Sharkey’d want to talk first… stupid… stupid… stu-p-i-d…
A voice said, as through gauze, ‘Me’n Horace gonna hurt you bad, sucker. I likes to hurt ’em, mos surely do. Dudes or bitches, don’t make no mind…’
Thorne was gone from there.
Janet rode north, then west on Century Boulevard to the vast sprawl of LAX, twice around oval World Way past the endless array of passenger terminals, then back east to Century again. Approach avoidance. She finally stopped at an all-night cafe for a bowl of chili and countless cups of coffee.
She couldn’t be part of this. Because of Thorne, the Feds were looking for her. Thorne had killed Hal, now planned to torture Sharkey to find out what the man knew. She stopped with her cup halfway to her lips. She had lousy taste in men.
Arnie McCue, her one-time boyfriend in Reno, had wanted to make her into a prostitute. To get away from him, she had gone off with Hal Corwin, a man old enough to be her father. Who had Hal been, really? A mercenary. A man who murdered his own daughter and desecrated her body. At her urging, at least the killing part of it. Now she had gone off with Thorne – after trying to kill him because he had killed Hal.
This was not who she was, urging a man to kill people, trying to kill someone herself. Hal and Thorne had infected her, the pair of them, with their own madness. She had to let go of both of them.
The time had come for her to build a real life for herself. Start by embracing the racial heritage she had always rejected because her father had been an abusive drunk, and go deal blackjack at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Build on that. Yes! She smiled to herself. For once she was making the right decision.
But when she turned the bike back into the Gaylord Arms parking lot, her light swept across two black men supporting a stumbling, head-lolling Thorne. Without thought or hesitation, she goosed the bike. The man in front, a deer in the headlights, skittered. Bad choice. The bike hit him in the chest. He flew backwards into a parked car.
The roar of the bike got through the haze in Thorne’s head. Then th
e sound of impact. Janet! Saving his ass! Even as he thought it, he was falling backwards and flailing his legs. Woozily, not with his usual snap, but doing it just the same. His foot whapped the gun out of Sharkey’s hand, his leg took out Sharkey’s knees. He rolled over, gave Sharkey an elbow to the throat that had just enough on it.
‘The street,’ he croaked to Janet, tossing her the car keys Horace had dropped.
He leaned against a car for a moment. He couldn’t have done it alone, but he was coming out of it fast, now. He dragged Sharkey into the room and dumped him on the floor. No door opened, no head was thrust out. Three rooms that were lit went dark. A $50,000 black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Janet sprung the trunk. Together, they dumped Horace in and slammed the lid.
Sharkey was tied with wet towels to a chair in the middle of the room. Sweat gleamed on his shaven head, there was drool at the corner of his mouth. Thorne sat in front of him, monotonously slapping his face with a wet wash cloth. Then Thorne took out his Randall Survivor. The blade gleamed.
‘C’mon, Sharkey. Wake up. Pain time.’ He tipped Janet a quick wink that she didn’t catch. ‘Turn on the TV and wait in the other room, honey. I know you don’t like to see blood.’
Leaving, she hit the remote. It was an old movie. The Dirty Dozen. Before she could get the connecting door shut, she heard Thorne say, ‘First a finger, then an ear…’
As the door closed behind Janet, a memory from the Rangers overwhelmed Thorne’s mind. Victor had been ambushed by a rebel patrol in Colombia. They’d cut off his pinkie finger before Thorne could get there. Victor hadn’t even groaned. Thorne had killed three rebels with his Randall Survivor, the others had fled. He’d carried Victor over his shoulder five miles through the nighttime jungle back to base. Later they got very drunk and laughed about it.
He had known then that he could never be a torturer. But Sharkey didn’t know that.
Thorne snapped him contemptuously under the nose with his middle finger, very hard.
