Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘Okay. In English this time, how bad was the knee wound?’

‘Bad enough. It was a long process. We put a drain in Hal’s leg, and removed it gradually as the tissue knit and the possibility of infection lessened. Because the head of the fibula was fractured, we had to insert the tendon just below the damaged area. Which means Hal now walks with a limp — his left leg is slightly shorter.’

Ingrid thrust in her blonde head.

‘Whit, you’ve got patients waiting...’

‘Just one little minute more,’ said Thorne quickly. She made a face at him and withdrew. ‘And the chest wound?’

‘Ah, the chest wound.’ Hernild didn’t seem worried about waiting patients. ‘The bullet fragmented the seventh rib, but glanced off rather than penetrated. Before the cold stopped it, couple of hundred cc’s of bleeding, mostly internal. He had an open fracture, with splintered ends of rib bone driven out through the skin and also into the chest cavity.’

‘But not into the lungs themselves?’

Hernild gave him a sharp, appraising look.

‘No, but Hal was afraid that a cough, even a deep breath, could collapse his lungs by compressing them with outside air being drawn in through the open chest wound.’

Thorne mused, ‘He needed a compress, a bandage, something to make the chest reasonably airtight...’

‘One of his mittens, fastened with his belt.’ Thorne realized he had gotten Hernild’s attention with his informed musings. ‘Crawled a thousand feet to his cabin, crawled inside, used his bow — he’d been bow-hunting a big whitetail buck when he was hit — to knock the phone to the floor. He dialled 911.’

‘He saved his own life,’ said Thorne, almost in admiration.

Again, that look. Hernild said, ‘It healed clean, without infection, but it left him with what we call “splinting.” The inability to take a really deep breath because of pain in the chest wall.’

‘How do I get to Corwin’s cabin and why didn’t you—’

‘I’ve got patients waiting. If you have some more questions, come back at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’

Corwin hiked back toward his cabin, his rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm, muzzle angled up and away from him. He was ready. He paused, went into an awkward half-crouch over a dug-up meat cache beside the trail. A fox, for sure.

He had a sudden vivid memory of the first time Nisa had visited him at the cabin after Hernild had released him from the clinic. He had taken her tramping through the still snowy woods to show her the first fox she had ever seen in the wild. The memory of that moment was filled with incredible sweetness, like biting into a honeycomb.

Then, too, he had squatted beside the path, pointing out the tracks. A gray: thicker tail, smaller pads but bigger toes than a red. Then he took her to the fox’s den in the base of a dead oak tree, showed her the tuft of reddish-gray fox fur caught on a bit of protruding bark at the mouth of the hole. Pointed out scattered bits of bone, a patch of down-soft rabbit fur, three bright wood duck feathers.

Then he put his lips against the back of his hand and sucked sharply to mimic the thin squeaking of a mouse. A sharp nose was suddenly raised against the leafless hardwood boles on a small rise at the far end of the burn. The fox, lying up on his backtrail, gray brush over paws, all senses alert.

And Nisa, eyes shining, hair sleek and shiny as the fox’s pelt, exclaimed in sheer delight, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’

Nisa. Dead. The thought thumped his chest like a heart attack. What had he done? He tried to cling to the fox memory. Couldn’t. He virtually fled back up the burn to the cabin, cleaned his rifle, added a log to the embers of the fire, and fired up his laptop to send Hernild the message that he would be leaving in two days. But waiting was an e-mail from Hernild:

Another one. Different from the others. This one is good.

He wants to see the cabin. I stalled him until morning, but he is watching me.

It just hurried Corwin’s departure by a day. He sent:

Thanks. Forewarned is forearmed. I’m off tomorrow..

He ate, then stowed everything he would need in Janet’s 1990 4-Runner, hid it three miles away in a thick stand of spruce on the other side of the creek. He would leave before dawn.

A fingernail crescent of new moon gave scant light, but he knew every tree, every bush, every turn in the trail on the way back. This cabin, before he was shot, had been his home since Terry’s senseless death. He had come back to it after King’s Canyon because they had already searched for him here. Walking softly through the dark-shadowed woods, hearing the questing whoo, whoo, whoo-whoo of a great horned owl, he found himself intensely curious about the new FBI man.

Different from the others. This one is good.

Who was he? How old? What did he look like? How did he move? How clever in the woods? How observant of sign? No man could match Corwin here on his home ground, no matter how good he was, but still... was this the questing beast of his nightmares?

At 7:45 in the morning, even fortified with eggs and bacon and hashbrowns and toast, Thorne yawned as he pushed the buzzer on the door of Hernild’s clinic. He had been in his car a half mile down the road until three a.m. Hernild had gone nowhere. Thorne hadn’t really expected him to, but he had learned to be methodical and cover all contingencies when on the hunt.

Hernild opened the door himself, crisp in his doctor’s whites, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand. Ingrid was not in evidence. Hernild raised the cup in a question.

‘No thanks. I just had breakfast.’

Hernild nodded and leaned his butt against the edge of the reception desk. He extended a sheet of paper.

‘I drew you a map of the way to Hal’s cabin. In winter you’d need four-wheel, but this time of year you can make it.’

Thorne studied the sketch. Corwin’s cabin, deep in the woods, was a simple rectangle. A dotted line marked the logging-trace in to it from the quarter-section gravel road.

‘Isolated.’

‘Hal built it himself. Cut down the trees, peeled the logs — therapy after Terry’s death. He sliced his leg with an axe and drove to my clinic one-handed, holding it closed with the other hand so he wouldn’t bleed to death. That’s how we met.’

‘How did he make a living during his years here?’

‘Trapping, hunting — after the shooting all that stopped.’

‘Why didn’t you transfer the title to yourself after you paid Corwin for the cabin?’

‘He needed money to get away from all of the associations this area evoked after he was wounded.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘Hal Corwin is my best friend. If he ever wants the cabin back, it’s here for him. Meanwhile, I rent it out to cover the taxes. There’s someone living there now, in fact. I hope you won’t bother him unduly.’

Thorne nodded. ‘Sure not. Are you in touch with Corwin?’

Hernild hulked over him, suddenly hostile. ‘What do you idiots think Hal has done?’ It was a good intimidation tactic, just being used on the wrong man: Thorne never backed down from anyone. ‘Why can’t you leave the poor bastard in peace?’

Thorne thought: Because the poor bastard is planning to assassinate the president of the United States. He said: ‘You know Corwin spent several years as a paid mercenary in some of the world’s nastiest civil wars...’

‘Maybe. But whatever Hal did before Terry was killed, he left it all behind when he came up here. After he was shot he couldn’t even kill animals any more.’

‘Still,’ said Thorne, deliberately provocative, ‘there are some questions about the deaths of his daughter and her husband we believe he could help us with.’