Glass Tiger (26 page)

That was when the pain started. Good. Pain meant he might not go into shock. But he had at least one broken rib, maybe two. Did he have bone splinters driven into his lungs? In his head, he heard Hernild’s voice:

The bullet entered and exited at an angle… fragmented the seventh rib… glanced off rather than penetrated… rib bone driven into the chest cavity but
not into the lungs themselves… crawled a thousand feet to his cabin… saved his own life…

Hit as Corwin had been hit. Now he was going to have to save his own life, also as Corwin had done. Using all his woodcraft, he managed a silent crawl to the side of the thicket away from the searchers. Somehow found his feet, his balance, staggered away. Hatfield must have planned to kill him all along. So why the ticket to Kenya, why the elaborate charade? None of it made any sense…

He fell down. Had let his mind wander. Forget Hatfield for now. Just keep ahead of him. He struggled to his feet, went on. From lodgepole pine to lodgepole pine, from subalpine fir to subalpine fir, from white spruce to white spruce. Finally into a stand of poplars where the going was faster. Plenty of tree trunks to hang on to as he lurched along, and they grew thickly, almost like bamboo, so it would be harder for anyone to see him moving through the grove.

Just before moonset, he looked back the way he had come. No blood trail. He was going to make it! He was going to beat that bastard Hatfield at his own game. Whatever that game was.

His whole life had been fight or flight. Usually fight, but now, flight. Flight where? And just like that it came to him, the whole thing. The Loma Vista store. Call it two miles. Food. Clean water. AQUA River Tours. Medical supplies. Antibiotics. Hope someone on an overnight camping trip had left a vehicle parked there. Surely he could jump the ignition and get it going. He was a Ranger wasn’t he? Well, ex-Ranger…

He jerked his mind back. He had wandered out onto Highway 120. He got back onto the shoulder. Bent to pick up a fallen branch for a walking stick, and fell down again. Idiot! Keep the head higher than the heart or he’d end up as dead as Corwin.

Corwin! That was it! Hatfield wanted him dead because he, not Hatfield, had killed Corwin and thus had saved Wallberg’s life. If Thorne was alive, even in a Kenya jailhouse, he could keep telling people all about it. Eventually, someone might listen. And talk. Talk to important people who might believe, and talk also, and Wallberg might hear about it… Far better for Hatfield if Thorne were dead.

Ahead, in the just beginning pre-dawn, he saw the Casa Loma store. And the ’94 Chev Astro minivan that had been parked there yesterday morning. Detach the wires under the dash to bypass the ignition switch… And what? Drive as far and fast as he could? Hope he got to Oakdale and Whiskey River and Janet Kestrel before Hatfield caught up with him?

To his wandering mind, Janet seemed to have all the answers he needed. She’d give him two or three days before she moved on. He would have to get to Whiskey River before then. He’d have to tell her that Corwin was dead – and that Thorne was the one who had killed him. Then somehow, despite all that, get her to work with him on finding the answers he sought.

But first things first. He needed food, water, antibiotics to stave off incipient infection. Already he was getting feverish. If he went goofy, he was lost indeed.

He threw a rock through the store window.

As the sun began to shine through the notch of the Tioga Pass beyond Yosemite, Hatfield had to admit that Thorne was gone. Or that his men had missed the body. They should be expanding the perimeter of the search, but they didn’t have the manpower for it. He was operating outside the FBI action structure, and at this point, he couldn’t call in the cops or the sheriffs. Because if Thorne was found alive, he knew Thorne would talk.

The girl hadn’t shown, either. His search engines had been useless: he’d been looking for Amore or Roanhorse, not Kestrel.

He ransacked her cabin. What looked like all her clothes were there, and her personal papers. Missing were her i.d. and purse and money and car keys, but she would have needed those…

Car keys!

He checked his watch. Eight a.m. He didn’t remember Sammy as a workaholic, but he called the LA FO and asked for AIC Spaulding. Sammy was in!

‘Terrill! I couldn’t sleep all night. How much trouble am I in with the big boys back in Washington because of you?’

‘None. We missed our man. But I need you to run a Janet Kestrel, that’s K-E-S-T-R-E-L, for a California driver’s license, any vehicles registered to her, any wants and warrants.’

‘That sound you hear is my sigh of relief. Okay, Kestrel. I’m feeding her into the computer right now. Anything else?’

Hatfield paused, could see no downside to going ahead.

‘Yeah. Put out a Seeking Information Alert on her.’

‘An SIA? That’s terrorist shit, Terrill.’

‘I keep telling you this is coming from far up the food chain. I need to ask her about a possible associate.’

‘Got you. Ah hah! Janet Kestrel. Valid California driver’s license and a valid Nevada driver’s license. She holds legal title to a 1990 Toyota 4-Runner, dark green, Calif Five, C-W-D, Zero-Four-Six. Registration and insurance are current, no wants or warrants. I’ll keep digging, but—’

‘Put out a BOLO on the 4-Runner as well.’

He hung up, elated. They didn’t have Thorne – yet.
But he’d soon have the girl. Had she and Thorne ever hooked up? Did she connect with Corwin in any way? Was that why Thorne was looking for her? He’d wring her dry, then decide whether he had to keep her on ice, probably in the FBI’s secret detention cells at the Federal Building in Westwood. The post-9/11 anti-terrorist laws gave him plenty of authority to do that.

With the BOLO out on her 4-Runner, and the SIA out on her, it was just a matter of hours until he had her in custody.

Janet was already in Oakdale with the 4-Runner stashed in Kate Wayne’s garage before Hatfield got out his BOLO. Kate had been a fellow blackjack dealer with her in Reno, but three years before had married a biker who was part-owner of Whiskey River. They had a daughter, now aged two, and a good marriage until he was killed in a motorcycle crash. Kate took over his share of Whiskey River, and now worked there as night bartender.

Janet got Kate’s spare key from the fake rock beside the front door, looked in on Lindy, Kate’s two-year-old sleeping daughter, and fell into bed in the made-up spare room of her modest California bungalow two blocks from Whiskey River. She went to sleep, hard, without even remembering to wonder whether Thorne was dead or alive.

Alive. Sort of.

A half-feverish Thorne drank water and ate trailmix, then treated his gunshot wound with antibiotics taken from one of the AQUA Tours first-aid kits. He bandaged it and wrapped the bandage in plastic bags for waterproofing, and stole a life jacket. Before staggering out to hotwire the Chevy Astro, he left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter by the cash register.

This night drive down the tortuous dirt road to the Tuolemne River – the track Arness had called mean as a snake – seemed much more dire than his drive down the morning before. It was just a blur of never-ending twists and turns ahead of his high-beams, no barriers to a precipitous tumble to the valley floor and the ribbon of river, more daunting because imagined rather than seen in the obscurity of night.

When the track finally leveled out by the Tuolemne, he stopped the car and rolled down his window to hear the rushing water. It was not a soothing sound. Even through his medicated haze, he shivered slightly.

He put on the life jacket, and half-slid down the grassy bank to the leaky old boat hidden in the bushes. With his last strength, he wrested it from its bed of weeds, shoved it into the water and crawled in. Bent over and clutching the gunnels, he worked his way forward to the bow of the boat. The stern lifted, slowly swung around.

Facing forward, he watched the water seep up between
the boat’s dried-out planks, chills running through him even as sweat stood on his face. He let the river take him.

Kate Wayne looked more like a cowgirl than she did a biker. She rolled her own cigarettes and wore plaid shirts with leather loop ties, tight faded jeans and embossed high-heeled cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat over her streaked-blond hair.

Right now she was pouring coffee, her shrewd brown eyes, set in a lean fox face, examining Janet seated across the kitchen table from her.

‘Don’t try to bullshit me, lollypop. You only act this way when you’re scared shitless. Remember, I knew you when.’

Janet chuckled and bit into her third toasted English muffin slathered in butter.

‘You’re right, I’m in trouble. Because of Arnie. You remember I worked in Reno last summer to pay for a new roof for the cabin. Anyway, mid-July, Arnie and I were in the Golden Horseshoe after my shift. I was trying to watch Wallberg accept the Democratic Presidential nomination on TV, Arnie as usual was trying to turn me out, with him to protect me – and I got pissed off. So I started flirting with this old dude on the next stool. Then Arnie got pissed and slapped my face, really hard.’

‘Arnie was always good at that. Why you let that turd—’

‘Next thing I know, he and the old guy are taking the place apart. Arnie had a knife, the old guy a bottle. The cops came in the front while I was dragging the old guy out the back. I got him into the 4-Runner and started driving. I figured Reno’d had enough of me for a while. His name was Hal. We traveled together ’til November. The best four months of my life.’

‘That’s the goddamndest story I’ve ever heard.’

‘He got me away from Arnie. He… valued me. Made me value myself. We never made love. I tried, at first, but he couldn’t do it. His wife had been killed by a drunk driver years before, and he still felt guilty about it.’

Kate asked, ‘It’s because of him that you’re in trouble?’

‘Yeah. Him and Arnie. The FBI is looking for me.’

‘What the fuck did you do?’

‘Nothing. I lent Hal the 4-Runner in January and haven’t seen him since. A man named Thorne showed up at AQUA Tours last night, driving it. Said the federales were after me.’

‘How did he get it?’

‘I don’t know. But he was right – the FBI was waiting at my cabin. Thorne held them up so I could get away. I told him to meet me here, but then I heard shooting at the cabin. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I have to know.’ She smiled wanly. ‘And I have to ditch the 4-Runner. So you’ve got a built-in babysitter for the next few days.’

‘What I’ve got is a lot of trouble right here in River City.’ Kate was on her feet, a glint in her eye. ‘You can trade Fat-Arms LeDoux pink-slips, even-up, your 4-Runner for one of those Harley clones he always has around.’

Still no sign of Kestrel or the 4-Runner. Ray Franklin had gone through her place again, and had torn it apart looking for a paper trail. He found one item: a letter from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino north of Santa Rosa, offering her a job dealing blackjack.

‘You think that’s where she went?’ Ray demanded eagerly.

‘We’ll check with them, but I doubt it. I think she
heard the gunfire by her cabin, and drove hard all night to get away. She could have been in Mexico before we got out the BOLO. Easy for an Indian to hide in Mexico. I’ll ask Spaulding to see if her 4-Runner was logged through the border near Tijuana.’

‘Why is she so important?’

‘Because she was important to Thorne.’

An hour later, the Seeking Information Alert for Kestrel under any of her names came up with something. Kestrel – under the name Amore – had, for the past three years during the winter months, been a licensed dealer at one of the casinos in Reno. No negatives on her from the casino or the cheap rooming house on South Virginia Street where she lived.

She had also worked in Reno for part of the previous summer, and in July was ‘present’ at a bar brawl in a joint called The Golden Horseshoe. A hardnose named Arnie McCue had been beating her up and some old guy rescued her. Both she and the old guy had disappeared, presumably in tandem, just as the cops arrived, and hadn’t been seen since.

On the surface, nothing. But McCue’s interview was provocative: ‘He was just an old fart, drunk at the bar. Had a limp, but he sure could move quick. Quicker than me.’

Old guy. A limp. Moved quick. Corwin. Had to be.

Hatfield had his connection. Amore had been running with Corwin from July until the Delta murders in November. No wonder she had changed her name to Kestrel. Somehow Thorne had found out about her, and had gone looking.

None of it helped much. He didn’t know where Kestrel was. He didn’t know where Thorne was. Or even IF Thorne was.

—

Thorne was. Barely. He had never been so cold and wet as he was right then, shooting the Tuolemne in a disintegrating rowboat without any oars. Not even as a kid when he and his best friend Wally would shoot the Chino River in a rubber raft when the ice went out in the spring and took all of the Fairbanks bridges with it.

The rowboat kept riding lower and lower in the water, until just the gunnels were out, but it was keeping afloat. Then the sodden craft hit a jagged rock broadside and flipped over. Thorne got ten minutes out of clinging to the largest piece of wreckage before he was knocked loose. It was like getting caught in the surf in Panama; he didn’t know which way was up, tried to grab breaths when his face broke water, kept curled up like a shrimp to avoid shattering his limbs on the rocks.

One foot struck gravel. He tried to bury his fingers in the shifting bottom, but was ripped away again. More rocks. More foaming white water. Pebbles! He bellyflopped into foot-deep water on a sloping stony bottom. Crawled up a few feet onto the beach where the eddy had thrust him. There, the rushing river couldn’t catch his legs and drag him back again.

The sunlight through pine boughs felt warm on his back. His clothes started to steam. He shut his eyes. He slept.

Walt Greene burst in. ‘Old guy runs the Casa Loma store had a break-in last night. Also at the AQUA River Tours facility in the same building. The perp stole dried food and water and first-aid stuff. He also stole a car an overnight camper had left parked by the store.’