Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

She put her hand on Thorne’s forearm, as if he was an old friend she had known for years. Her face was sad.

‘After we got married, I found out real quick that Carlos, he didn’t want me, he just wanted his green card.’ A sudden spark animated those big, dark eyes, made her momentarily vivacious. ‘Before she left, Janet told me I should leave him, and we’d go to Reno and she’d teach me how to deal blackjack.’

‘Sounds like good advice to me,’ said Thorne.

‘You think?’ she asked seriously. Then she shook her head, as if at an impossible dream. Her face became sad again.

‘The night she left, she got beat up, real bad. The cops found her in an alley behind some fancy hotel in Beverly Hills.’

What had Janet Kestrel seen in the newspaper? What did she feel she had to do? Who had beaten her up? Corwin? Why?

‘The hospital, they called me. My husband says, Wha she doin, guy had to beat her up?’ She was a good mimic. ‘He wouldn’t drive me, so I rode the bus up to see her. The hospital was real fancy, up by Beverly Hills. Cedar’s-Sinai? She looked awful. She couldn’t remember anything about what happened to her.’

‘Did the cops talk to you? Or to her?’

‘Not to me. And I only saw Janet the once. She was asleep from all the pain medication they had her on, but she woke up all of a sudden and told me where she’d parked the 4-Runner. She asked me to get her duffle bag from the truck and give it to a certain nurse. I did, a hefty black lady who was real nice. She said she would smuggle it into one of the hospital lockers for Janet, and put the key in Janet’s clothing.’

She paused and sighed, very expressively.

‘Carlos wouldn’t let me go back up there for three days. When I finally could, Janet was gone.’

Dead end indeed. ‘Ah... when did all of this happen?’

‘It was in November, early — like around election day.’ She put out her hand again, like a trusting child. ‘If you find her, you tell her Edie is ready to go to Reno with her and learn how to deal blackjack. Promise?’

‘I promise,’ said Thorne.

If he found her. But wait a minute. The hospital wouldn’t let her check out without making financial arrangements.

Cedar’s-Sinai was a hulking state-of-the art medical facility on Beverly Boulevard between Robertson and Doheny, across the street from the Beverly Center. Thorne went in after visiting hours: they would be settling into their nighttime routine, maybe they would cut him a little slack.

But he ran up against an iron-faced, iron-haired night supervisor named Marlena Werfel, who took no prisoners.

‘If an ex-patient named Janet Amore is missing, it doesn’t concern this hospital. Or you.’

Regretfully, Thorne shoved his FBI commission card under her nose.

‘Yes it does. I need to know when she checked out, what her financial arrangements were, and the name of her physician.’

She stared at the credentials for a moment, her little pig eyes snapping with indignation.

‘Patient information is confidential. You’ll have to come back tomorrow when the administrator’s office is open. And I’ll be reporting your unprofessional behavior to your superiors.’

If he’d been a real FBI agent, he could have forced her to go into the computer and get him what he wanted. But he didn’t want her to carry out her threat to call the local FBI office. If it got into the system, it would get back to Hatfield.

‘Sorry if I seemed rude, Mrs. Werfel. Just doing my job.’

‘Badly.’

As a frustrated Thorne stalked down the corridor toward the elevators, a rotund African-American nurse carrying a tray full of items covered with a towel fell into step beside him. She spoke out of the side of her mouth without looking at him.

‘Doctor Walter Houghton. You didn’t hear it here.’

She turned in at an open doorway and was gone. Thorne kept on walking without any reaction. But he could feel Werfel’s BB eyes drilling into his back down the length of the corridor.

Hatfield spent the morning at the firing range, focussing on requalifying with the Hostage/Rescue team’s various weapons. He barely qualified because he couldn’t get Thorne out of his head. The man seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Since Corwin couldn’t have come back from the grave to do him in, then just as he’d told the President, it had to be a setup engineered by Thorne himself. But why? Hatfield suddenly cursed aloud in sudden comprehension.

Someone had leaked to Thorne what would be waiting for him when he got back to Kenya. Not any of his men. Even if they’d known exactly what he was planning, they wouldn’t have said anything about it. They were a close-mouthed lot.

So, someone in Nairobi. Maybe one of Muthengi’s men. Or maybe that magistrate, Kemoli. Told Thorne his arrest was planned. That’s why he had disappeared! He was going to try to get to the President in person to tell him who really had stopped Hal Corwin.

Hatfield had to find him first. He went out to his car and from the spare tire well got the throw-down piece he’d taken off a dead bank-robber the year before. It was a World War II Colt .45. Back on the firing range, he fired a clip through it, leaving it uncleaned so ballistics testing would show it had recently been fired. He returned it to the trunk of the car.

When he walked into his office in the Hoover Building, his phone was ringing. He snapped into it, ‘I told you, no calls!’

‘Didn’t tell me,’ said a male voice in a twangy, down-home accent straight out of Maine.

Sammy Spaulding. They’d been classmates at Quantico. Hatfield had qualified for Hostage/Rescue, Sammy had ended up as AIC of the LA Field Office. Adrenaline shot through Hatfield. An hour after he had left the Oval Office, he had e-mailed a BOLO marked HIGHEST PRIORITY to major FBI FOs around the country:

Be on the look-out for any use of temporary credentials issued in the name of Brendan Thorne.

‘Talk to me, Sammy. Tell me you’ve got something I need.’

‘What I’ve got is an irate call this morning from a night administrator at Cedar’s-Sinai Hospital. Seems some guy claiming to be one of our agents interrogated her last night concerning a former patient. She thought the i.d. was fake, so she memorized the number on the commission card. A real pain in the butt.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Hatfield impatiently. ‘Whose credentials were they?’

‘Your buddy’s. Brendan fucking Thorne’s. She shined him on to the day people, but he never showed. You want me to—’

‘No!’ In a quieter voice, Hatfield said, ‘I’m under orders to handle this one personally. I’ll be out there tomorrow a.m.’

‘I’ll lay in some barbecue ribs and grits and water-melon.’

‘Up yours,’ said Hatfield.

Thorne got a room for the night in a run-down motel below the Sunset Strip, next door to a bar that closed at two a.m. and opened again at four. When he did get to sleep, sometime around three a.m., he woke from his already horribly familiar nightmare, drenched in sweat and yelling, ‘You missed,’ with Corwin’s reply, ‘Did I?’ following hard upon it in his memory. He had to stand under a cold shower for twenty minutes before he could face the day.

Walter Houghton, MD, had his practice in a medical office building on Doheny a few blocks from Cedar’s-Sinai. Thorne told the receptionist that his name was Brendan Thorne. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but if the doctor could spare me just two or three minutes...’

But she was already nodding brightly at him through the sliding glass panel separating her from the waiting room.

‘Have a seat, Mr. Thorne. Doctor will see you directly.’

He sat down, alarm bells ringing. Houghton had the sort of upscale practice that usually meant days or weeks before getting an appointment. Had Werfel phoned the doctor an early-morning heads-up? Was the FBI on its way? He had to chance it. He didn’t have anything else.