Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘You reject his name because he was a drunk? Many of our people despair and become drunkards.’ His swung arm encompassed the casino. ‘Fighting that despair is what this is all about.’

‘When he was drunk he beat on my mom. He was drunk a lot. My sister Edie got out quick and married a Mexican.’

‘You reject your name, now you want to be recognized as a member of the Hopland tribe. And share in our gaming revenues.’

‘Recognized, yes. Revenues, no. But I’m hoping to get a job in the casino. I’ve dealt blackjack in Reno.’

The old man pushed back his chair. ‘We will take up your petition at the next tribal council.’

He stood up, leaving his coffee behind. Janet spooned her chili. Almost cold, but still with some bite to it. Hal had her 4-Runner and was out doing whatever it was he felt he had to do. And she had made her first move to build a real life for herself.

At exactly three-thirty, a cute blonde receptionist with a short nose and big round blue eyes stuck a head full of tight ringlets out of the left-hand door. She was petite and shapely and a dead ringer for randy young bride Ellie in far-off Tsavo.

‘Brendan Thorne?’ she asked with bland neutrality.

He nodded, followed her into a small orderly office, watching her hips work under her tight skirt. She turned and fixed him with an icy stare. Her voice was cold, professional.

‘I am Doctor Sharon Dorst.’

‘I am Mister Brendan Thorne.’

Two leather loungers and a leather couch formed a casual grouping off to one side, but Dorst strode to her desk and sat in the swivel chair behind it. This left him with the straight-backed chair facing her across this bastion. No psychiatrist’s couch for the likes of Brendan Thorne.

He let the silence build. It was her office. She finally asked, ‘What do you see as our main issue here, Mr. Thorne?’

‘That I don’t get to have the shit scared out of me in the waiting room like poor old Mr. Hedges.’

She couldn’t quite hide her smile.

‘That’s because you drew me instead of Dr. Benson.’

‘Benson? And Hedges? You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘Actually, he’s Doctor Martin.’ She checked the wall clock. ‘You have already wasted five of your session minutes, Mr. Thorne. As you have been told, I am a contract therapist for the FBI who will administer certain tests and make certain evaluations of you for the Bureau. They will get my written and verbal reports. No one will ever see my session notes.’

Thorne scrubbed his hands. ‘Then let the healing begin! Word games to probe my vocabulary. Photos of faces and later a whole bunch of new photos to see how many I recognize from the first batch. Identifying the logic of series of symbols. Remembering and repeating lists of things that don’t go together, like clown and broccoli. How many details I can recall from the four quadrants of a scene you show me or from a story you read to me. How fast I can click a key with my forefinger.’

‘You tell me, Mr. Thorne, what should we do with our hour?’

‘Look at ink blots that remind me of naked women?’ Then he held up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay, it’s in the file, but — background. I was an Army Ranger stationed in Panama. Until we handed over the Canal to the locals in 1999, SOUTHCOM — that’s the U.S. Army’s Southern Command — was in charge of security for the Canal. Panama borders on Colombia, and the Colombian government gave control of an area the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — FARC. They were really rebels running drug-manufacturing plants in the area. They supplied seventy percent of the cocaine entering the States.’

‘Your job was... what? To stop them?’

‘Impede would be a better word. We’d go into the jungle for weeks at a time to destroy the manufacturing plants. After the Rangers, I couldn’t settle down into civilian life, so—’

‘Were you using cocaine yourself?’ He answered with a surprised but stony silence. She quickly asked, ‘Why did you resign from the Rangers?’

‘Because killing didn’t bother me, and I felt that it should. But I missed the action in the field. When a CIA front asked me to go back to Panama clandestinely for the same sort of work, their shrinks told me I was in the two percent of military men who can kill repeatedly, without hesitation and without bad dreams afterwards. So I accepted that maybe that’s who I was.’

‘You said to yourself, Okay, I’m an adrenaline freak, an apostle of the gun, seeking the perfect kill-shot, da-dah, da-dah. And shooting at people for the CIA doesn’t bother me.’

‘Right. Only when I missed. I imagine Corwin, the guy I’m supposed to find, was the same way — until his wife died.’

‘So why quit to bury yourself in Kenya?’

‘I killed a woman and her infant by mistake.’

‘I know that’s what the file says, but I don’t buy it.’ She wasn’t a dead ringer for randy young Ellie in Tsavo after all: too damned smart. She added, ‘Collateral damage is always part of warfare.’

‘Not of my kind of warfare. They died, I quit. Finis.’

‘But you just recently killed two men in Kenya.’

‘Somali shifta raiders. Poaching rhino and elephant.’

‘Yet you were deported by the Kenya government for poaching protected animals yourself.’

He said defensively, knowing it sounded lame even as he did, ‘Hatfield set me up as a poacher so Kenya would deport me.’

She said almost derisively, ‘And then asked me to evaluate you as a manhunter for his own Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team?’

‘Yeah! Exactly. After Wallberg took office in January, Jaeger, his Chief of Staff, tasked Hatfield with finding a psycho who is gunning for the president. A computer chose me to do it. The president wants me on board. Hatfield doesn’t.’

‘Why doesn’t he?’

‘You tell me. You work for the FBI. His guys came up short a couple of times, sure, but if I find the stalker, Hatfield’s the guy who’ll nail him. You know him, he’s obviously used your professional services before.’ He waggled his fingers at her. ‘C’mon — what do you think his agenda is?’

‘Asking me that is so far outside the box—’

‘That you’re aching to do it?’

Again, that quick smile she couldn’t quite hide.

‘All right. Just a personal assessment, not professional. Hatfield is ambitious. From your file, killing without hesitation was once easy for you. You were the sort of man he wishes he was. So he’s worried that you’ll find Corwin and just take him out on your own to get the credit for saving Wallberg.’

‘That doesn’t explain the hostility. He can have the glory, believe me.’

‘Maybe I do. But he doesn’t. Which is enough about Hatfield. This is your hour, not his. I can help you, but not if you hold things back. You have to tell me everything.’

He liked her, and she was asking him to trust her. But what if he was wrong? Or what if Hatfield came after her and she caved? Thorne would have to take the hit. Could he? Yeah.

‘I made up the woman and child who got killed in Panama because there was a woman and child who got killed here in the States. Alison and Eden. Nobody knew about them. We weren’t married and Alison hated what I did, but she loved me. She had Eden just after I went back to Panama for the CIA. I wasn’t even around for the birth. I had my fucking mission.’

He stopped for a moment, cleared his throat. It was much harder to talk about it than he had expected.

‘Seven years ago, when Eden was two, we planned to take her to a children’s afternoon New Year’s Eve party. But I got a call to go back to Panama. Alison begged me not to go. We had a big blowup, I stalked out and just — left. Alison took Eden to the party anyway. Driving home at five in the afternoon, her car was hit by a drunk driver and they both were killed. I didn’t hear about it from her folks until a month later. They blamed me for it. Even today her mother won’t tell me where they’re buried.’