Glass Tiger (29 page)

‘So you waited.’

‘Yeah. After a while, dude show up, tall, kinda old, had a gimp. We move in.’

A gimp. Corwin’s limp.

‘Dude goes aboard, Jaeger yells, ‘Now!’ We start poppin caps at the houseboat, old Jaeger he breaks out his mufuckin cellphone! Starts yellin fo the heat, says we takin fire.’

‘Were you?’

‘Dunno, man. The fuckin fog, we couldn’t see nothin, couldn’t hear nothin, so we was shootin at nothin. The heat comes, Jaeger tells us to cut out. That’s it, man.’

‘Did Jaeger do any shooting himself?’

‘Tole you, man, cat hadn’t got no gun. Anyway, he was a executive type. Never got his mufuckin hands dirty, not that way, anyhow. Now, with some bitch…’

Thorne wasn’t listening, was thinking. Jaeger had gone aboard, had found Nisa and Damon dead. For some reason, maybe something he saw on the houseboat, he figured Corwin would come back. When he did, Sharkey and Horace would kill him just before the sheriff’s men arrived. The lawmen would find just what Jaeger wanted them to find: Corwin and his victims. Three dead bodies. Pretty much as Thorne had thought it must have been.

He groaned his way to his feet. Now all of his ribs were sore, not just the cracked one. His jaw was swollen, one eye was almost shut. His kidneys were a new agony. The best that he could hope for was just to piss blood for a few days.

He threw Sharkey’s car keys on the bed. At the moment, he didn’t know if he was more disgusted with Sharkey or with himself. Sharkey, for who he was. Himself, for who he was in danger of becoming. He said, ‘Horace is in the trunk of your car. Alive. He’ll need patching up.’

Janet was sitting on the side of the bed with her hands knotted in her lap. She had heard nothing from the other room except
The Dirty Dozen
, Telly Savalas going psycho and getting his. She started to her feet when Thorne came through the connecting door in an agonized shuffle.

‘Is he…’ she began breathlessly. ‘Did you…’

‘Is he what?’ Thorne collapsed into the hard-back chair by the writing table. Then he got it. ‘Is he dead? Christ no. Guy like him, you give him a little nudge, he knows what he’d do to you if he had you tied up. His imagination does the rest.’

‘What does a little nudge mean, exactly?’

‘I snapped him under the nose. Once.’ He demonstrated. ‘Go look. Right now he’s trying to get those towels unknotted. He’ll square it with the night-clerk, get Horace to a doctor – don’t worry about him. He’s a pimp and he kills people.’

‘So do you kill people.’

‘Not for money. And not any more. But maybe I should have messed him up a little. He sure messed me up.’ He groaned his way to his feet. ‘Let’s get out of here. You’re driving.’

She did, Thorne clinging to the back of the Suzuki like a damaged limpet. It was a long ride, north on the 405 to La Cienega and all the way to Sunset. She stopped at an all-night convenience store for a bottle of Ibuprofen, then
Thorne checked them into a twin-bedded room under his Benny Schutz identity. It was the same run-down motel below the Strip where he had stayed before he saw Walter Houghton, MD, for the first time.

He ate six pain pills, lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed, to stare at the ceiling. It was after two a.m., so the bar next door was closed. It would open again at four, but for now there was relative silence.

‘We gotta talk while I still can,’ he said. ‘You know, you saved my butt back there. They were going to kill me and dump me off the edge of Mulholland Drive.’

Janet sat on the other bed as she had sat on the bed in Watts, her hands white-knuckled in her lap. She said nothing. Thorne sighed. She wasn’t giving an inch.

‘Okay. It’s just what we thought. Jaeger wanted Hal to kill them both so Sharkey and Horace could shoot him just before the police got there. It would have been a perfect frame, the murderer and his victims, dead together. But Hal got away.’

‘Until you came along,’ she snapped. Then she added, in a softer voice, ‘I’m going to get some coffee. You want any?’ He just shook his head wearily. She nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign when I leave. G’bye, Thorne.’

‘See you in a little while, Janet.’

‘Sure.’

But when he woke in the morning, Janet was gone. She’d left Thorne flat, just as she’d left Corwin. How could he have expected anything else?

She’d also left a note beside his head on the pillow, written on the back of an all-night coffee shop menu.

Saved his life, then dumped him. He’d thought his capacity for emotion had died with Alison, but reading Janet’s message he’d realized what a given she’d become in his life. He’d started to feel things he hadn’t felt in seven years. How stupid could he be? How could he expect that she could ever forgive him for Hal’s death?

When he woke in the morning, Fat-Arms LeDoux didn’t know where he was. He felt dead. He squinted, realized the stripes down the wall were bars. He was in jail.

He sat hunched up on the edge of the bunk, his head in his hands, trying to remember. He’d finished stripping out Kestrel’s 4-Runner, had ridden up 1-5 to to celebrate and to drink his fill at Chopper’s Roadhouse near Lodi, a biker-friendly and colors-welcome saloon where outlaws of every stripe could hang out.

Which made this the Lodi jail. A line from the old CCR song came back to him: Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.

He’d dropped a lot of crystal meth, so when Dangerous Dan spilled beer on his new Tony Lama ostrich-skin cowboy boots, Fat-Arms called him a peckerwood. Dan went for him. They flailed around on the filthy floor until Dan jumped up and laid a size 12 Timberland against the side of Fat-Arms’ head.

Yeah, he remembered now. Bouncing up himself, jerking his Buck knife from a pocket of his vest, sticking the serrated blade into Dangerous Dan’s gut. Then somebody cold-cocked him.

And here he was, in a cell. Was Dangerous Dan alive or dead? Not that he gave a rat’s ass, but if he was dead,
Fat-Arms was looking at a world of hard time. If Dan made it, Fat-Arms maybe had himself some wiggle room. If he could think of anyone he could sell to the D.A. in return for a plea-bargain.

Then he remembered Janet. Somebody heavy looking for her, not for her 4-Runner. Not cops. Not crooks. Which left…

He went to the front of the cell and yelled for the trustee, Mitch, a skinny con with close-set eyes and a wispy mustache. Fat-Arms was an outlaw biker of the meanest sort, which made him a local jail-house celebrity.

‘Hey, Mitch, how’s Dangerous Dan?’

‘Word is, he’s hangin on. Prolly gonna make it.’

‘Good. Then tell the D.A. I wanna talk to the Feds about a broad owns a dark green 1990 4-Runner.’

When Thorne tried to get up to go to the bathroom, he ended up kneeling on the floor with his upper body on the bed, like a kid saying his nighttime prayers. Slid further, down onto all fours. Tried to pull himself up. Couldn’t.

His bladder let go. Bloody urine all over the floor. He grovelled around in it, finally was able to drag himself back up onto the bed. He lay there on his side, panting. Thank God for DO NOT DISTURB signs. This was the lowest moment of his life, worse than the worst moments in Panama. There, he’d still been in control of his own body. Here, all he could do was wait until his strength came back. Wait. Rest. Maybe pass out again.

At noon on Sunday, a tall, hard-faced, very fit-looking black guy in a white shirt and a Brooks Brothers suit and a dull tie walked into Fat-Arms’ cell in Lodi like he owned the place. Fat-Arms was unfazed: he’d stomped plenty of niggers like him.

Hatfield looked at the disgusting blob of suet on the bunk. He’d put away plenty of redneck peckerwood bikers like him.

‘Hatfield, FBI.’

Fat-Arms’ guts churned. The nigger was The Man! He held all the aces with the joker as his hole card. A tremendous belch burst from Fat-Arms. The Fed laughed in his face.

‘You’ve got three minutes, LeDoux. Then I’m out of here and you’re in here – twenty-to-life, no parole.’

Fat-Arms talked so fast that spittle flew from his lips.

When he was finished, Hatfield went outside to lean against his Crown Vic and call Ray Franklin on his cellphone.

‘Get a flatbed and a warrant for LeDoux’s garage in Manteca. Kestrel traded the 4-Runner for a Suzuki thumper, even up. Gather up all the parts of the 4-Runner and haul them out of there. Impound them. Kestrel doesn’t know it yet, but LeDoux traded her a stolen bike for her vehicle.’

Franklin was gleeful. ‘We got her for receiving stolen property! Any idea where she is now?’

‘Stake out a biker bar called Whiskey River in Oakdale, east of Manteca on highway 120. Also stake out the house of a Kate Wayne. Kestrel went with a bunch of bikers to LA for the weekend, and should show up at one or the other place tonight.’

‘Search warrants for the house and bar, arrest warrant for the Wayne woman?’

‘Search warrants, yeah. But don’t execute ’em yet. Don’t get spotted by anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Arrest warrant for Wayne, no. She’s a single mother, we don’t need the grief. When Kestrel shows, notify me and get her on a plane to LA soonest. I’ll meet you at the Federal Building in Westwood.’

‘Thorne?’

‘LeDoux never heard of him. Thorne is off the board.’

Janet waved goodbye to the other bikers and cut off toward Kate’s house. She wanted to take a long hot shower, eat a big bowl of chili, and play with Lindy and Jigger. When Kate got home, Janet would recount her weekend and then hit the sack.

Getting off the bike under the sycamore tree beside Kate’s house, she groaned aloud. Over a thousand miles on that snarly little beast in the last three days. She ached all over.

Whenever she thought of Thorne, tears came to her eyes. For a while she’d started to think they could have some sort of relationship when all of this was finished. But dammit, she’d had to leave when she did. She’d get over it.

She wheeled the bike into the garage next to Kate’s little Toyota Echo. Edged her way back out again, closed and locked the door, turned – and was surrounded by four men in street clothes.

‘We have a warrant for your arrest,’ said one in a cold voice.

Hatfield’s men! How…

Two of them twisted her arms up behind her back, cuffs were going on even as they were herding her around the garage toward the street behind Kate’s where they’d parked their car. She tried to protest.

‘There’s a little girl in there I have to take care of—’

‘We’ve already talked with Mommy,’ said the hardbitten muscular one in a sly, almost insinuating voice. ‘Mommy’s not going to go to work tonight after all.’

On Wednesday morning, Thorne was able to get off the bed like a normal human being. His ribs were every color of the rainbow, but finally he looked worse than he felt. He stood under the shower for 45 minutes, hot as his bruised body could take. He hadn’t had anything to eat since Saturday, but he hadn’t been hungry. Had just crawled to and from the bathroom to drink water from the faucet and piss it out again. This morning, for the first time, his urine was clear of blood.

He dressed in his last clean clothes, opened the windows to let out the stench of blood and urine, and left three $20 bills for the maid. After tossing his soiled clothes into the motel dumpster, he went to the coffee shop down the street to order eggs and bacon and sausages and hashbrowns and sourdough toast and orange juice. He planned to drink a gallon of coffee, too.

On the mend, definitely on the mend. But for what? His quest was finished. Sharkey’s story had nailed it all down…

He paused with his first forkful of sausage and egg halfway to his mouth. Sharkey’s story.

Sharkey and Horace started shooting as soon as the mid-fifties limping man went into the houseboat. Jaeger called the cops on his cellphone to say they were taking fire and returning it, so the sheriff’s men would find Corwin dead beside his victims. But had Corwin really returned their fire, or had he just slipped away as Deputy Escobar had speculated?

That’s when Thorne’s forgotten fork spanged off his plate to hit the floor with a metallic clatter.

Returned their fire with what? The Magnum had been emptied into Nisa and Damon, all right. But not by him. He hadn’t been there before. He had just arrived for the first time when Sharkey and Horace opened up at the houseboat. No time to kill and reload, let alone time to befoul Nisa’s body.

Thorne dropped too much money on the table beside his untouched food, gulping half a cup of tepid coffee on his way to the door. He knew what had happened. He just needed to get proof. He owed that to Janet. And much more besides.

Janet remembered the midnight plane flight from Oakdale. She remembered being shoved down a dimly-lit corridor, being stopped in an open doorway while the cuffs were taken off, then being shoved in, hard, before the door slammed shut behind her. She was in a cell. But where was the cell?

It had a head-high window of one-way glass in the door so they could look in but she couldn’t look out. A knee-high bunk was bolted to the floor, with an inch-thick mattress and a single thin gray blanket. A sink and toilet were built into the wall facing it. In one upper corner of the room was a camera lens: they could be taping her even when she went to the bathroom. They fed her at irregular intervals. Bland institutional food.

The interrogations, in a room down the hall with a table and two chairs and the ubiquitous camera behind one-way glass, were always the same. How long had she and Corwin traveled together? What had they done? Where had they gone? She told them only what she was sure they had already learned elsewhere.

Only Hatfield asked what Corwin might have told her.
And about Thorne. To him, her replies were unvarying: Corwin had told her nothing. She had never heard of anyone named Thorne.

‘We have recovered your 4-Runner.’

‘I owned it free and clear. I had the right to trade it for a motorcycle if I wanted to.’