Glass Tiger

by Joe Gores

  As he drove, he tried to assess what he had seen. Before speech-day, even though he planned no shot, he had scouted the area as any good sniper should. Apart from his tree, the only site offering a clear shot at the podium was the roof-tower of one of the old stone battalion buildings at Fort Snelling. He had dismissed it out of hand: it was fifteen-hundred yards out. Three-quarters of a mile. There was only one man who could have made such a shot, and that man was dead.

  The rather gaunt, mid-fifties man, unarmed except for a sheath knife, slipped silently through the sunlit early morning forest. He looked like someone recuperating from an illness or a dangerous accident. There was a hesitancy in his movements, a hitch in his step. Still, no twig crackled, no grass swished. He passed out of the trees and into the burn by a fire-blasted spruce, walking so silently under a blood-red cardinal on a branch above that the bird was not even aware of his passage. He still was the ultimate woodsman.

  A voice froze him in mid-step.

  ‘A doctor out in LA recently gave me a physical after I had bled out a bit, and his medical advice was, “Eat More.”’

  The gaunt woodsman looked at the younger man who had appeared out of nowhere, like morning mist through the trees.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of appetite. Some bastard shot me.’

  ‘Guilty,’ said Thorne.

  ‘How did you know I would be…’ Corwin paused, nodded. ‘Of course.

  ‘Where else would I be?’

  ‘Yeah. Still hiding in plain sight.’

  ‘I’d better change my MO.’ He made a slight gesture. ‘There’s fresh coffee back at the cabin. Do we have time to…’

  ‘All the time in the world,’ said Thorne.

  Half an hour later, they were sitting across from each other at the hand-hewn table, at ease in one another’s company. Corwin was right: the coffee was fresh, and damned good. No food; Corwin’s appetite hadn’t returned yet.

  Thorne stood, took a turn around the cabin’s single room.

  ‘I was up a tree twelve-hundred yards out when you took your shot at Wallberg,’ he said. ‘I was there just to watch the bastard and wish there was something I could do to him. But for me, anything beyond about five-hundred yards is pure fantasy. I’ve always been more assassin than sniper.’

  ‘You’re talking about that big oak by the riverbank?’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘Dammit, Corwin, you’re good.’

  ‘I considered it myself, but I knew I wasn’t nimble enough these days to climb down and be away before they came looking.’ Corwin’s craggy face was almost serene. ‘Fort Snelling itself was better by far. There, I could have a car waiting.’

  ‘But – fifteen-hundred yards out.’

  Corwin made a gesture. ‘It was that, or forget about it.’

  ‘A car with a driver,’ said Thorne. Corwin looked at him sharply. Thorne ignored the look. ‘What I want to know is how you survived in the Bitterroot Range. Was it a lung shot?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Corwin. ‘Anything else I would have gone into shock and bled out.’

  Thorne sat down again.

  ‘I once entertained – and rejected – the idea that if it was a lung shot you might have survived it.’ He waved a hand. ‘I’d already decided that you were just about the toughest goddam guy I’d ever gone up against. If you could avoid hypothermia, maybe the icy water could stop the bleeding like the icy air of the Minnesota winter did after Mathers shot you.’

  ‘You were right. It could. It did.’

  ‘But I had to figure, what then? You crawl out of the water, there’s nobody around to help you… So, you die. End of story. So how…’

  ‘Cellphone,’ said Corwin. ‘In a waterproof case.’

  ‘A cellphone. Yeah. The missing piece. Of course. You’d need it with you to call Janet as soon as Jaeger was dead, wouldn’t you? So she could tell you where to leave her SUV.’

  Astonishment flitted across Corwin’s face before he could quite close it down. ‘How do you know Janet?’

  ‘I found the 4-Runner, registered to her. So I found her.’ Thorne shrugged. ‘A long story. She can tell it to you herself. At the moment, she’s still mourning you as dead.’

  Corwin was silent.

  Thorne said, almost musing, ‘But you didn’t call her, you called Hernild. He’s a pilot, he flies out and gets you and flies you back to that private clinic of his without hesitating a second. Then he nurses you back to health again, like he did the last time.’

  ‘You’ve got that all wrong,’ snapped Corwin, tight-lipped. He half rose. ‘Whitby had nothing to do—’

  Thorne waved him back down.

  ‘Bullshit. He had a mighty strange reaction when I called to tell him that you were dead. Now it makes perfect sense. Hell, he knew that at that very moment, you were right here, safe in your cabin in the woods.’

  Corwin settled back down as if exhausted.

  ‘And here I would have stayed,’ he said, ‘except your phone call laid out exactly what Wallberg did to me all those years ago. It jogged my memory, it all came back. The fucker stole the life of poor sweet romantic little Heidi Johanson, and that of her unborn child – his child, too. To say nothing of what he stole from me.’

  ‘Your shot at a normal life,’ said Thorne. ‘So you got yourself another rifle, and another scope, and enlisted Hernild as your driver, and…’ Thorne held up a hand. ‘Don’t try to tell me he wasn’t. And then you went hunting.’

  ‘That’s about it.’ Corwin stood up. ‘I’m through running away and hiding, I’m through killing. I just want to live a hermit’s life. If you’ll let me.’

  Thorne was also on his feet. He chuckled.

  ‘Two burned out cases with all the killing behind them. That’s for younger men…’ and he paraphrased a line he’d read, maybe from Shakespeare, ‘whose consciences have not yet made cowards of them all.’

  ‘So what happens next?’ asked Corwin.

  ‘I’d like it if you’d shake my hand,’ said Thorne. ‘Then I’ll be on my way.’ He caught himself using yet another poet’s words. ‘Miles to go before I sleep.’

  Corwin stuck out his hand, thought better of it. Instead, he closed his arms around Thorne in a fierce embrace. A warrior’s salute after a long and bitter struggle that had finally come to an end for both of them.

  46

  Because the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino was on tribal land, the five-member tribal council of the Hopland band of the Como Indians made all decisions concerning how it was run. They had poker, blackjack, slots, Keno, and single-ball roulette that was really just bingo in formal dress. No craps: it didn’t pay off enough.

  Janet Kestrel was on her final break of the day in the cafeteria, drinking coffee, when Herb Runningwolf, head of security for the casino, came in and headed her way.

  He was a tough, square-faced, thirty-year-old Indian wearing a blue suit and with his hair in a ponytail. His main job was to stop trouble before it started. Little did. Since there was a $200 table limit, card-counters didn’t come. And since the most a player could make in a day was about $800, few high-rollers bothered, either. Mostly, all he had to deal with was drunks.

  Herb laid a hand on Janet’s shoulder.

  ‘I just wanted you to know that your sister started her training and orientation courses this morning. She’s smart and she’s eager, and I think she’s going to work out just fine.’

  ‘Thanks, Herb. And thank the council for taking her on.’

  ‘Blood is blood, sister.’

  He patted her shoulder again and moved on.

  She returned to the casino proper to replace Charlene at Table Four for her final twenty minute stint. At Sho-Ka-Wah, instead of the shoe, they used a shuffler that handled five decks of cards at a time. The decks lasted six to eight hours, then were retired from rotation. During each of her daily eight-hour shifts, Janet spent twenty, forty, or sixty minutes at a blackjack table, got a twenty-minute break, then moved on to a new table. The short stints discouraged conniva
nce between dealers and gamblers.

  Janet was popular with the players because, like them, she was just there for the cards. She dealt ’em, they played ’em. Ten minutes into her shift, a new player sat down at the one empty seat at her table. She seldom looked at faces, just at hands. These newcomer hands put down a stack of chips. She dealt two rounds of cards. The hands flipped up their hole card. It was an ace, as was his up-card.

  ‘Double-down,’ the owner of the hands said.

  The voice jerked her eyes from the cards to his face. Brendan Thorne. He winked at her. She dealt the next round, went busted when she took the dealer’s mandatory card at sixteen. Thorne got blackjack on both hands.

  ‘You beat the house, sir,’ she said gravely.

  ‘Calls for a celebration,’ he said.

  ‘I’m off in eight minutes.’

  He nodded and picked up his modest winnings and left the table. As her hands automatically flipped out cards, she could see him making his way toward the front door. Looking good! Recovered. Rested. No thanks to her.

  She stopped at the ladies’ room to wash her hands and throw water on her face and run her fingers through her long black hair. Butterflies in the stomach: how was she supposed to act? She had abandoned him to save herself, he had refused to abandon her. But she couldn’t feel just simple gratitude toward him. She had to feel either much more – or much less.

  When she came out into the cool, deepening dusk, he was leaning back against the side of a beat-up old Isuzu Trooper with his arms crossed and a bemused expression on his face. Exactly as she had first seen him, only then it was her 4-Runner outside the AQUA Tours office a compressed lifetime ago.

  She simply said, ‘Thank you for what you did – however you managed it. And thanks for what you told Kate about Hal. It helped me a lot when… while Hatfield had me.’

  He took both her hands in his. His hands were as warm as hers were cold. He looked into her face, very serious.

  ‘Hal is alive,’ he said.

  ‘Alive?’ Her eyes got huge.

  Even as he said it, he knew that he hoped she wouldn’t want to go to Corwin. It was all jumbled up in his mind. What he saw as his duty to a man he had wronged versus emotions he had thought were forever dead.

  Janet rescued her hands from his. She lowered her head so he couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. She realized with a thrill that he was as confused as she was.

  ‘Hal assassinated President Wallberg, didn’t he?’

  ‘Executed him,’ said Thorne. ‘Wallberg was a murderer.’

  She felt something let go, something composed of unshed tears and loss and loneliness and a longing to find out who she really was. And to make that gradual discovery with someone she could maybe love, someone who could maybe love her.

  ‘So is Hal,’ she said. ‘You aren’t.’

  With a sort of astonishment, Thorne realized she was right: he had never killed except in self-defense, or as what was his duty. Corwin had been a true mercenary, no matter what he was now. It made a difference somehow.

  They got into the Trooper without speaking further. Neither knew where it was taking them, but they both knew they wanted to go there. To find out. To know.

  The long rains had come at last to East Africa’s vast Serengeti plains, almost a month overdue. Just the day before there had been pitiless sun and choking dust over the red land. Then at dawn the heavy, black-bellied clouds began advancing inexorably across the veldt, dropping their hard, straight, unyielding rain.

  Morengaru sat on top of an isolated termite mound, his tightly-curled hair uncovered to the pouring rain, his meager clothing plastered to his skin, his shotgun slanted up from between his knees and past the side of his head. Champagne corks rescued from the trash bin at Sikuzuri Safari Camp were stuck in both barrels to keep them from getting scaled with rust inside.

  Morengaru walked here every year for the start of the long rains. It was the only miracle he had ever seen and the only one he would ever believe in.

  On the flat plain’s furthest horizon a thin line of green appeared, advancing toward him under the blessing of the rain at about the pace of a man very slowly walking. The grasses were racing through the few short weeks of their cycle: renewal, rebirth, replenishment, before the dry season dropped them back into dormancy again. Within days, they would be knee-high, and millions of migratory grazing animals would be spreading out across the green and verdant plains. Behind the grazers would come the inevitable, necessary predators.

  Morengaru’s remarkable ears picked up automobile sounds. He stubbornly refused to turn his head from his miracle, but he knew that a four-wheel drive vehicle was approaching across the plains behind him. He listened to it the way a classical music lover listens to a Mozart symphony: with his whole being.

  A Land-Rover. He listened even more intently as it drew up behind his anthill. A venerable 1960s Land-Rover, in fact, one of the ancient ones with the canvas top and the short wheelbase. He fought it, but the beginnings of a slow smile made his teeth gleam in his ebony face.

  The Land-Rover stopped. When the engine was cut, the rain made a thrumming sound on its stretched canvas top. The engine kachunk-kachunked two or three times before it died. It needed tuning. Had not been driven in a long time. Several months, in fact. In his pocket was a key to it that he had never used.

  The doors opened, slammed shut. The sounds of two people getting out, swishing through the wet but still dead grass around the termite mound. Two? He almost turned, but disciplined himself. They climbed up and sat down, one on either side of him. Peripheral vision showed him a man and a woman, wazungu, white people, wearing already-soaking safari jackets and wide-brimmed safari hats tipped back off their heads so the rain could pelt their faces as it did his.

  Only then did Morengaru turn from the advancing grasses he had come all this way from Tsavo, afoot, to see. He looked gravely at the woman first. She was in her late twenties, tawny-skinned, shapely, beautiful, with very long gleaming black hair and startling blue eyes. She met his scrutiny unblinking.

  He turned to look at the man. He was forty, also black-haired, dark and quick-looking. But also drawn, as if he had been through many things that had seasoned him. The man hooked two bent fingers toward Morengaru’s eyes, then toward his own.

  ‘Tatuona tena,’ he said solemnly, repeating it from their last meeting. We shall see each other again.

  ‘Ndio,’ replied Morengaru, equally solemn. Yes. Then he added, ‘Uso kwa uso.’ Face to face.

  The woman held out a hand to Morengaru and greeted him. ‘Jambo, bwana.’

  Hello, sir. ‘I am Janet Kestrel.’

  Morengaru took her hand in both of his and bowed very slightly. ‘Memsa’ab.’ Madam. ‘I am Morengaru.’

  Then of one accord, all three of them turned to face the pounding rain and the advancing line of green that they all had come to see. It had deepened, broadened now, from a line on the horizon to cover half the veldt in front of them. For a long time they watched its progress. No one spoke. No one had to.

  When the growing grasses had almost reached their termite mound, soon to surround it and pass on, Morengaru stirred and spoke, without turning his head.

  ‘Since we three landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’

  They laughed, three people lost in the vastness of the Serengeti plains, drenched by East Africa’s life-giving long rains.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, my wife Dori, first in my heart, is first in these acknowledgments. She accompanies me through the endless hours of writing and revision of all of my novels, brilliant and sensitive and tough-minded in her insights and suggestions.

  Otto Penzler, the mystery field’s greatest editor, historian, and publisher, who invited me to join his new mystery list at Harcourt. I find myself a pygmy among giants.

  Henry Morrison, my agent, who over the years has never ceased to amaze me with his wit and intelligence, his editorial and creative suggestions, his understand
ing of the publishing field and its dynamics.

  My foreign agent, Danny Baror, a bulldog in securing foreign sales for his writers, securing excellent advances, and in protecting our rights in other countries.

  Bill Corfitzen, who patiently drove Dori and me all over Washington, D.C. and environs, and gave us an insider’s description of the Department of Commerce cafe and courtyard.

  Jane Lepscky, who took us around the Georgetown docks and marina, and who suggested the Alexandria tour boat as a colorful and tricky way to get my man Thorne to and from Old Town.

  Several old friends from my years in Kenya, especially John Basinger and Edgar Schmidt, who shared many adventures with me. Also the late Neil Macleod, John Allen, Errol Williams, and Joe Stewart, ex-Headmaster at Kakamega Boys Secondary School. Others embedded in my memory are the real Morengaru, Arthur ‘Squealer’ Kemoli, Elijah Muthengi, Mbalilwa, and Prabatsingh M. Mahidi.

  Olga Shezchenko gave me detailed descriptions of the Tuolemne River white-water rafting trips for which she was a singularly skillful guide. Olga also told me the colorful way to build up immunity against poison oak.

  Retired Army Colonel William Wood shared detailed knowledge about military tactics, arms, explosives, what snipers face, and the things they must know for their strange and deadly work.

  Movie producer Paul Sandburg, for his unflagging delight and enthusiasm for all of my projects, his wisdom about the ways of La La Land, and his suggestions about L. A. locations.

  The wonderful staff, especially Theresa McGovern, at the Fairfax Branch of the Marin County Public Library system, for their dedicated pursuit of obscure reference material for me.

  All of the people at the Sho-Ka-Wah Indian Casino in Hopland, California, who gave Dori and me access to their operation. Especially the Hopland Tribal Council; Sho-Ka-Wah’s general manager, Don Trimble; the Sergeant of Security for the day shift, Mike Hatfield; and Herb, the security man who took us around.

  Warf the Klingon, for insider information on outlaw bikers and the Harley cult.