Glass Tiger

Joe Gores

AN OTTO PENZLER BOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Quercus

This edition published in 2007 by

Quercus

21 Bloomsbury Square

London

WC1A
2
NS

Copyright © 2006 by Joe Gores

The moral right of Joe Gores to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 84916 733 8

Print ISBN 1 84724 072 0

Print ISBN-13 978 1 84724 072 9

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

‘An exciting page-turner.’
Daily Telegraph

‘A masterly piece of work… Gores writes some of the hardest, smoothest, most lucid prose in the field.’
New York Times Book Review

‘Gores is dogged and brilliant.’ Donald E. Westlake

‘Gores writes beautifully, with never a wasted word and a fine feeling for characterization. He handles violence the way a wise man handles nettles.’

New York Times

‘A master.’
Chicago Sun-Times

‘Delightfully dark and devious.’

Los Angeles Sunday Times

J
OE
G
ORES
is one of the legends of US crime and thriller writing and is the winner of three Edgar Allen Poe Awards. His novel
Hammet
was adapted for the cinema by Wim Wenders and he has written extensively for TV and film. Before starting to write he worked as a San Francisco private detective for 12 years and he also served in the US Army. He lives in California.

Also by Joe Gores

A Time of Predators

Dead Skip

Full Notice

Interface

Hammett

Gone, No Forwarding

Come Morning

Wolf Time

32 Cadillacs

Dead Man

Menaced Assassin

Contract Null and Void

Cases

Stakeout on Page Street: and other DKA Files

Cons, Scams and Grifts

For Dori
The Dream Dreaming Me
Now and Forever
Here and Hereafter

Separation from its fellows appears to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts, exasperated by chronic pain or widowhood, are occasionally found among all the larger carnivores.

Geoffrey Household

Rogue Male

The ferocity is gone. I don’t have it in me any more. I can’t even kill the bugs in my house.

‘Iron Mike’ Tyson, ex prize-fighter

If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.

Henry Ward Beecher

The black rhino stopped browsing to throw back its massive head and snort. His scimitar horns, the front one five feet long, gleamed like dull carbon under the gibbous moon. He was big as a boulder, a ton-and-a-half of living fossil plunked down on the wet-season savanna. Since the devastating horn and ivory raids by Somali
shifta
poachers in the 1970s and ’80s, only this lone bull survived outside the game park’s pitifully small rhino recovery reserve.

The compact man three feet from the rhino’s left flank froze with one foot raised above the calf-high grass, one arm still outstretched. He was downwind, but his scent must have been carried by a vagrant night breeze. Rhinos’ keen sense of smell, coupled with dim eyesight, made them unpredictable and even deadly if you couldn’t get out of their way in time. The rhino snorted again, satisfied that all was well, and returned to stripping tender twigs and new leaves off the acacia bush with his delicate, beak-like mouth.

The man lowered his foot, put weight on it gradually so no twig would crackle. He laid his palm on the rhino’s rounded back as gently as a falling leaf. It was his fifth New Year’s Eve to do this, but he was always surprised by the softness and warmth of the hide. Explorers’ tales from previous centuries made rhinos out to be great
armored beasts with skin three inches thick, but they were surprisingly vulnerable to ticks and black flies and disease.

The rhino stopped munching to begin moving his back slightly under the human hand. After five minutes, the man moved silently away, out of the brush and out of danger and into the open veldt.

As he did each year he whispered, ‘Happy New Year,
Bwana Kifaru
’ – Swahili for Big Boss Rhinocerous. Getting away unscathed from petting Bwana Kifaru was his New Year’s Eve ritual. Only Morengaru, the other guard at Sikuzuri Safari Camp, understood it as a stab at needed danger. The man started the four-mile trot back to the Galana River’s south bank. Almost forty, five-ten and built like an Olympic gymnast, hard of body, with coal-black hair and bitter-chocolate eyes, he was the only white camp guard in the country. And since big game hunting had been banned in Kenya, the closest to a white hunter the wealthy guests at the luxury resort would ever get. So he was obliged to attend Sikuzuri’s official New Year’s Eve party, even though he only wanted to return to his thatch-roof
banda
and reread one of the halfdozen paperback mysteries left behind by departing guests.

When he got to the ford across the Galana, he stopped abruptly, remembering the New Year’s Eve seven years ago, after which everything had gone dead in him. Tonight he felt like a bear coming out of hibernation. What was going on? As he crossed the Galana, he could feel numbness disappearing, feel a return of something like that fierce adrenaline rush he once had lived for as the junkie lives for the needle.

Not killing. No, never again killing. A quest. A vital, necessary trackdown of… what? Or of whom? For whom?

—

Sleeves rolled up and tie pulled awry, the former governor of Minnesota stood at his thermopaned study window, drink in hand, looking out over frozen Lake Minnetonka with glacial blue eyes. At fifty-five, he had a strong jaw and good cheekbones and the thick, slightly unruly hair Jack Kennedy had made de rigueur for serious national contenders.

‘Thinking of how far you’ve come, darling?’ He turned. After their return from the big New Year’s Eve blast at Olaf Gavle’s multi-million-dollar house, Edith had gone up to bed. Yet here she was back down again, wearing her shapeless flannel nightgown and green chenille robe.

‘Thinking of how far I have to go. Can’t sleep?’

‘I get lonely when you’re not next to me.’

Edith was forty-nine, the only wife he’d ever had, short, slightly plump, with the bright inquisitive eyes of a chickadee. He had been unfaithful to her with only one woman, who was now gone, and had never been able to decide whether Edith had known or not.

Looking down, he told her, not for the first time, ‘If chickadees weighed a pound apiece, they’d rule the world.’ She bumped him with a well-upholstered hip. He added, ‘Twenty days, love. How often have I doubted this time would ever come?’

‘I never doubted,’ she said, suddenly fierce. ‘Never for an instant. You’re a man of destiny. Nothing can stop you now.’

Outside, it was thirty-six degrees below zero. Winter’s icy hand gripped this northern land by the balls. Inside, the
56-year-old man started up from his sleep with a muffled ‘Whompf!’ The embers of the hearth fire dug harsh shadows into his lean face, seamed and nut-brown from exposure to a lifetime of bad weather.

He loved it all. Or once had. Now, he leaned against the wall behind his bunk in the one-room log cabin, deep-set hazel eyes staring through the moonlight from the window and into the familiar, already fading image:

Nisa, pounded back up against the bulkhead beside the houseboat’s couch by the heavy .357 Magnum slugs…

Two months ago. He had dropped the gun like it was red hot. He had been shot the year before, turning it all sour. And tonight, along with Nisa, was an image from that earlier night:

Two yards away was a gaunt timberwolf, tongue lolling, ears pricked. Real? Or hallucination? The man had been shot three times from ambush and had to crawl a thousand feet to the cabin and a telephone before he went into shock.

His racing heart began to slow. The nightsweat of terror began drying on his face. Anger replaced it. Once he had been a trapper and a hunter: now he ate out of cans. Now he had a limp and a damaged lung and missing fingers, and couldn’t even bring himself to bow-hunt whitetails for food.

And now, a visitation of the Nisa nightmare again, a month since the last one. His nightmares after his wife Terry’s death, of her fleeing him, had prevented him from tracking down the drunken fool who had killed her. The Nisa dreams were different, guilt-filled – what had he done? With tonight, the wolf and a strange, palette-knife swirl of other images. Some stalking beast, dark and lithe and lean and tireless. Stalking him…

His bitterness became rage: having been made prey, he could no longer be predator. But because of what he had
done, the nightmares of his daughter’s death left him no choice. He had to atone, even while telling himself he never really would.

Never could. But now…

The gray wolf was easy. Himself, being urged to hunt again. But who – or what – would be hunting him? Easy surface analysis: if he hunted, he would be hunted by his own guilt.

Deeper analysis: literally hunted?

‘Are you good enough?’ he demanded of the faded image.

Unfairly, he would have to call Janet after convincing himself he would never put her in danger again. Ask her to meet him somewhere, tell her he needed her help, remind her that two months ago she had been urging him to be a predator…

As he slid back down under the covers, he wondered if she still had old Charlie’s bearskin.

The 26-year-old woman stood looking out the open door of her cabin three miles from the Casa Loma general store. Her eyes were a startling blue in a tawny face with a strong nose and high cheekbones; utterly straight raven hair flowed down to the middle of her back. This had been her parents’ cabin under her father’s long-since discarded name of Roanhorse: now it was hers. Pale blue moonlight showed her a muledeer doe and a yearling fawn browsing at the edge of the snow-clad clearing. She raised a steaming cup of coffee to salute them.

‘Happy New Year, guys,’ she said aloud. They ignored her, as was right between old and trusted friends.

Her bare feet were frigid on the pine planks, but she stood there a moment longer, feeling the night. A New
Year, a year of change. She would write the letter, first step toward building a new life. After all, there had been nothing from Hal since he had left her hospital room on the eve of the elections. What had he done since? What might he still do?

She shivered, stepped back, shut the cabin door, and crawled into her bunkbed under the bearskin he had given her.

A cigar smouldered in an ashtray on the bedside table. The motel had a king-size bed and a dirty movie channel on the TV for nine bucks a night. Pale moonlight filtering through gauzy curtains showed a burly bear of a man in his late thirties, sitting on the edge of the bed with his pants off. Dense black hair covered his head, back, chest, belly, groin.