Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘His daughter? If I read you right, you bastard, and I think I do, he adored his daughter. For Chrissake, after he was shot, she tried to help him find whoever had done it.’

Which was news to Thorne. He felt as if the trail had just become more twisted, more convoluted: she helped him look, but Corwin still blew her away and beat off on her body. At least he now had a chance to ask the question he’d been leading up to.

‘What if Mather was the one who shot him? Deliberately?’

‘That’s crazy. Crazy! After Hal and Nisa patched things up between them, Damon came up here a time or two with her. That was it. Good God, man, he and Mather barely knew each other...’ He stopped, his long, almost ascetic face totally devoid of emotion. ‘I have to go make house-calls.’

It was a real old-timey log cabin like the maple syrup tins that Vermont Country Store still sold out of its nostalgia catalogue. Peaked roof with hand-hewn shingles, peeled log walls. Built to last, perhaps a lifetime. A lot of effort for a man working alone.

No smoke wisped from the chimney of the hand-laid stone fireplace. The April-wet ground showed a variety of sign: birds, rabbits, squirrels, two, no three different whitetail deer, fox galore, a muddle of porcupine tracks, then a track that sent Thorne’s mind backward in time. A wolverine! He hadn’t seen a wolverine’s spoor in over twenty years.

Plenty of game around here for a man bent on making his living from hunting and trapping. Until getting shot ended it for him. According to Hernild.

Thorne walked boldly up to the door, then checked. He had picked up another Randall Survivor in D.C., but his 9mm Beretta had been left behind at Tsavo. Well, too late now.

‘Talk to me,’ he said aloud to the cabin.

I’m empty. Come in and find what you are looking for.

‘I don’t believe you. I can smell coffee.’

Last night’s.

‘This morning’s.’

The door had a simple push-up latch that would stop no one except porcupines in search of the salt they loved. Porkies after salt once had eaten the handle off an axe his dad had left in the woodpile overnight.

Thorne took a deep breath, pushed up the latch, opened the door a foot, called loudly, ‘Anybody home?’ The coffee smell was stronger with the door open, that was all. ‘Coming in.’

He laid a hand on the big speckled blue and white enamel pot on the kerosene stove, jerked it away again. Still hot. And — a nice touch — there was a clean heavy white ceramic mug on the counter beside it.

He poured, sipped. Good coffee, too. It would be.

An obvious challenge. I was here, I made coffee, I even left some for you. Now I am gone. And I won’t be hiding in plain sight next time. After Thorne had left the clinic yesterday, Whitby Hernild must have warned him of Thorne’s arrival. How? Not the phone. Phones, land or cell, left records. But under the table he found a power-surge strip, the kind you plugged a computer into to protect against burn-outs.

Of course. E-mail. Corwin would have it to check the president’s travel itineraries on the White House website.

Thorne relatched the door behind him. Didn’t want the porkies partying in there, even though Corwin would not be back. But he’d been living here for a month. Hiding in plain sight, but he’d also wanted to be on familiar ground. To train for a presidential assault? If so, Thorne was sure the woods would tell him what sort of assault Corwin was planning.

He started down the burn in front of the cabin, then checked himself once again. He was being observed. Birds and small animals were always intensely interested in anyone invading their domain, but maybe something bigger? Something potentially threatening? A bear? Or a man? If a bear, a mother with cubs.

If a man, Corwin. Thorne went on down the burn.

The coated lenses of Corwin’s binocs reflected no light. No telltale glint to alert his pursuer.

This was no ordinary Feeb. He wasn’t armed. He’d checked out the animal and bird sign around the cabin, circled it in the bush, then went in boldly. Now, starting down the burn, he seemed to sense observation.

Through the intervening foliage, Corwin tracked him with the binoculars. Totally at home in the woods. A man who had never been a desk jockey. A hunter. Highly trained in the same ways Corwin himself had once been trained, then had further trained himself. As Corwin had.

Who was the hunter here, who the prey?

Thorne’s eye was caught by the gnawed ends of toppled finger-thick saplings. A cottontail’s bite, not the single hatchetlike chop of a snowshoe rabbit. Not twenty minutes old. Under the nearest evergreen, a little bundle of concealed fur.

Then a flash of red on a fire-blasted spruce twenty feet away caught his eye. A black bird, the size of a crow, with a prominent red crest and white flashes on the wings and neck. A pileated woodpecker, arrowing away from the far side of the tree with a ringing cyk cuk-cyk of irritation.

The trunk of the dead spruce bore waist-high gouges. Not bullet scars. Knife scars, but not to gouge initials into the trunk: to dig out... what? Rifle slugs? His pulse elevated, he did a slow 360, eyes probing. To the west, beyond an intervening narrow slough, was the crown of a low hill partially screened by the bushes gradually reclaiming the fire-denuded burn.

If a non-hunter, an amateur, was planning to shoot someone — his wife’s father, for example — who habitually walked up a fire-cleared burn on his way to his cabin, what would he have to do before attempting to commit murder?

Sight in his rifle ahead of time, using that lone dead spruce tree as a marker. Maybe from that low hill to the west?

The dead spruce was visible from the hill’s false crown, maybe 150 yards away as the crow flies, five hundred yards laboring up the way Thorne had come: across the strip of marsh, then up the hill through the ash and hickory saplings gradually replacing the oaks and elms logged off many years before.

He began moving out in a slow, ever-widening gyre. An hour later and maybe fifty yards from where he had started, absorbed and eyes searching the ground, he was startled by a pair of pine siskins tit-titting angrily at him as they flew out of a just-flowering dogwood six feet ahead of him.

His eyes automatically followed their flashing flight, passing over cut brush a few yards up the hillside, registering it as the work of cottontails, then snapping back to it.

Behind the brush, half-hidden in the burgeoning squaw grass, was a form never found in nature: a rough platform, six feet long by three feet wide. He squatted beside it. Ash saplings, six inches in diameter, laid out side-by-side. Another sapling, the same size, laid at a right angle across the uphill end of them, lashed into place with thin nylon cord. A larger log, a foot in diameter, lashed in place across the downhill end. Except for the thick undergrowth on the hillside below it, it looked like an impromptu bench-rest laid out for prone shooting.

Thorne laid down on it, facing downhill as if taking up a prone firing position on a rifle range. Now the cut brush that had first caught his eye was in front of him. It formed a perfect keyhole though which he could stare directly down at that dead, distant, knife-gouged spruce tree.

Corwin had been right, everyone else wrong. He had been a tin bird in a shooting gallery, victim of a deliberate, can’t-miss shot by an amateur killer. But after years as a hermit, living off the land, he just would not have been a man to anger anyone, be in anyone’s way, threaten anyone. Not a man anyone could conceivably want dead.

He would have cast about for anyone who might deliberately want to shoot him. And for some unknown reason of his own, he had fixed upon his son-in-law, Damon Mather. Maybe he was wrong, but probably he was right. But even if right, why, when he had killed her husband, had he killed Nisa in such a savage manner?