Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

He lay back down on the bed in a totally different mood. Tomorrow he would reserve his D.C. flight; they hadn’t bothered to include a reservation for that. Fine by him. Gave him time to maybe get down to Fort Benning for a quick goodbye meeting with Victor Blackburn. In D.C., he could see Sharon Dorst and tell her how it had all worked out.

Because he wasn’t planning to ever return to the States from Tsavo. Tsavo! The nightmares would gradually slack off as they had done seven years ago, his life would resume as he had wanted it to.

Then why did going back feel like some sort of defeat?

At midnight, a yawning Thorne turned into North First. He’d overpoured, as airline stewardesses used to say when they’d had too much to drink. He wished it had been Tusker beer — or better yet, pombe, home-made from maize, that packed a kick like a mule. But Miller had done the job: it had made him realize that even though he had his life back, he didn’t really care.

Did anybody? Hey! Squealer Kemoli, the magistrate who had been so reluctant to sign his deportation papers, he cared. Morengaru, he cared. Thorne checked his watch. Mid-morning in Nairobi. He found a payphone beside a closed gas station, and used the phonecard he had bought when he’d realized his motel room phone was bugged. Squealer Kemoli himself answered his office phone on its second ring.

‘Arthur Kemoli.’

‘Squealer! I’m flying to Nairobi in a few days and—’

‘No. You are not.’ Kemoli switched abruptly to Swahili. ‘They will be at the airport waiting for the rhinohorn poacher.’

Thorne went into his room without bothering to check for intruders. In a way, they were already inside. It was over. He was out of options. He stripped, took a long hot shower, ended with cold, as cold as he could stand it, then sat down to stare out at the parking lot.

Then he got it. Hatfield had put out the word. They were just waiting for him to go back to Nairobi, where he would be arrested, convicted, and jailed on the phony charges Hatfield had set up. In an African jail, he’d have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. He would never get a chance to change his mind and tell anyone he had killed Corwin and saved the president. Neat and nasty.

What if he didn’t go back? Then they would gather him up and fold him away in some terrorist-detention cell of Hatfield’s choosing in the sacred name of National Security. Or worse yet, stick him in some mental institution.

He got into bed, still maybe a little drunk. His eyes drifted shut. Against their lids, Tsavo’s old bull elephants browsed and trumpeted. Morengaru squatted by a trail, grinning as he pointed out a shifta’s footprint in the dust.

A cammo-clad drug dealer lay face-down on a jungle path in Panama, blood pooling around her. He turned her over. She was Alison. Dead. Underneath her was Eden. Dead.

He looked down at the dying man and said, ‘You missed.’

Corwin’s teeth were a warlock’s, outlined in blood. He asked, ‘Did I?’

Thorne came bursting up from sleep yelling, ‘DID YOU?’

He sat on the edge of the bed, panting, shivering even though sweat was pouring off him. His only defense was to find out what Corwin’s last words had meant. Who had Corwin been? Not what some file said, but who had he been? Why had he done what he did, why had the president’s men from the git-go so desperately wanted him dead?

Where to start? Easy. Find the motel where Corwin had been staying. There were just a few little towns in the semi-wilderness country on the Idaho side of Trapper’s Peak. Corwin would have written down his vehicle description and license for the clerk. A vehicle he would have hidden for a quick getaway somewhere within, say, a five-mile radius of the valley up which he had gone to kill Wallberg. The car would still be there. If Thorne could find it, maybe something in it would point to the truth about who Corwin really had been.

Some knowledge that might give Thorne a razor-thin edge.

Lemhu. Tendoy. Baker. Salmon. Shoup. North Fork. Gibbonsville. Tiny Idaho towns within striking distance for Corwin. But only Salmon had any accommodations listed with Triple-A. Of Salmon’s three choices, the Motel Deluxe, the cheapest of them, was downtown, with access to cafes and shops.

If Thorne’s motel-room phone was bugged, anything not currently on his person by now would have miniaturized transmitters planted in it also. The Cherokee was transmitting its location constantly. If Thorne removed the equipment they would know it. But during his stroll downtown yesterday, he had noted an old clapboard house with its garage converted into a one-man auto-repair shop. Just the kind of place he needed.

Today, he took half an hour to wander those few blocks, using store windows to check his backtrail. Nobody behind him. Parked in the driveway was a new Chevy Silverado with a pair of deer rifles on the rear-window rack. Inside the garage, a husky blond kid in his mid-twenties pulled a grease-smeared face out from under the open hood of an ’02 Ford F-150 pickup.

‘I need transportation,’ said Thorne. ‘Something four-wheel and off-road.’

‘They got a Hertz and an Avis here in town.’

‘I don’t like car rental outfits. I don’t like credit cards. I like cash.’ Thorne took out his roll. ‘Like this.’

Up close, the kid smelled of sweat and motor oil and cigarette smoke. He kept wiping his hands on a greasy red rag he took from the back pocket of his coveralls, over and over again, staring at Thorne’s roll as if mesmerized by it.

‘I’ve got a ’94 Dodge Dakota four-wheel out back. Thirty-a-day, $500 security deposit, pay for your own gas.’

‘Five hundred? A ninety-four?’

The blond kid grinned. ‘Three-fifty.’ He paused. ‘Back country. Off-road. It ain’t hunting season, and some terrorist fuck took a shot at the President of the United States down by the Bitterroot ridge a couple of days ago. Wouldn’t be that you’re some sort of journalist, would it?’

‘Wouldn’t be.’

The kid stuck out a hand. ‘Andy Farrell.’

‘Brendan Thorne. I’ll tell you tonight whether I’ll need your Dakota tomorrow too.’

‘I usually eat dinner at The Spice of Life on Second Street. You can get me there. They close up at nine o’clock.’

Thorne turned in at the Motel Deluxe on Salmon’s Church Street. He flashed his badge and commission card with the FBI seal on it at the dark chunky woman behind the desk. Although they now were outlawed, his ‘creds’ worked like a dream. He asked the woman about any man who had stayed there for a week or so, maybe left before dawn two days ago.

She already had the old-fashioned sign-in register open flat on the desk and was turning pages. ‘You got a name?’

‘Hal Corwin?’

‘No Corwin. We did have a guy reserved for two weeks, then checked out early.’ She turned the register, pointed to an entry. ‘Hal Fletcher. As in arrow-maker. My people know about fletching arrows. He the loony tried to shoot the President?’

‘A person of interest,’ said Thorne.

‘He sure wasn’t any sort of an Ay-rab. He seemed a nice guy, too. In his fifties, lean, sorta tall, looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. Had a limp.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘He played catch with our son in the parking lot every evening.’

‘What was he driving?’

She checked the register again. ‘Nineteen-ninety 4-Runner. California license 5-C-W-D-0-4-6. I ’member it as dark green.’

Andy Farrell was having a beer at a table by the window when Thorne got to The Spice of Life. The blond hair had been washed, he’d switched to slacks and a sport shirt and a windbreaker and was having a cheeseburger and fries and a Caesar salad. A skinny twenty-year-old waitress with hair dyed bright scarlet and a ring through her lower lip was flirting with him. Thorne slid into the chair across the table from him.