Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘Something’s missing here. You ended up in the hospital.’

‘I just remember bits and pieces about that. I was in a maid’s cart... two black guys were dumping me in an alley... When I woke up in the hospital, Hal was there. I told him about Terminous and the phone number. Seeing me all beat up must have made him change his mind about Mather, made him decide to go kill both him and Nisa. If I hadn’t told him where they were—’

‘Did you ever think that maybe Jaeger wanted you to get that phone number? Two black guys dumped you in the alley. Two black guys were with Jaeger in the Delta. Maybe he wanted Hal to go there so that he and his men could kill him.’

‘They were there to kill Hal?’ Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘Not to save Nisa and Damon?’

‘That’s one of the things I need to find out.’

‘Hal is dead. Nisa is dead. Damon is dead. Even Jaeger is dead. There’s nobody left to ask.’

‘There’s the two black guys. I think they’re from LA. If I could get down there without Hatfield spotting me...’

For the first time, she smiled. ‘I can do that for you.’

On Friday morning, five bikes drove south through the pre-dawn darkness from their rendezvous at Whiskey River. All of that wild-and-free-on-your-chopper stuff was, well, just stuff. Motorcycles at best have five-gallon tanks. You might stretch it to two hundred miles with a tailwind, but you’d be bone dry. Then there were breakfast and lunch stops, bathroom and coffee breaks.

Leading them was burly, bearded Worf the Klingon, riding a 1998 Harley Dyna Wide Glide with a customized paint job, ape-hanger handlebars and lots of chrome. With his bandanna under his neo-Nazi pot, and a bunch of decals sewn onto his leather vest, he was the sort of outlaw who was a magnet for law enforcement. Just what Janet needed to avoid, but she hadn’t said that to Worf. Because the others, despite wrap-around shades, leathers, and American flags on their backs, were nine-to-fivers. The black-leathered mamas up behind them on their bikes were their wives. None of their bikes smacked of the outlaw chopper: two customs, a standard, and Janet’s thumper. Multipurpose bikes, good for a round-trip to the high Sierra or to commute to work on Monday. Law-enforcement wouldn’t waste time on them.

With his uncut, unkempt hair, and a good start on a beard, Thorne, up behind Janet on the Suzuki, fit right in. Their first chance to talk, besides shouted comments over the thunder of the engines, came as they ate hot dogs and guzzled non-alcoholic beer at a rest-stop south of Fresno.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Janet around a big bite of hot dog. ‘We’re after an LA pimp named Sharkey who used to supply Jaeger with whores. Just how do we go about finding him?’

‘We don’t. We let him find us.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We make him tell us what really happened in the Delta.’

That’s when Worf bellowed, ‘Let’s saddle up.’

Ninety-nine cut over to 1–5, which took them up over the Grapevine and down into the LA basin. At Santa Clarita the others cut off west on Cal 126 toward the Los Padres National Forest for their weekend encampment. Janet and Thorne kept on toward LA. They would rendezvous with the others on Sunday for the ride back up to Oakdale.

The Gaylord Arms was a shabby hot-sheet motel on Santa Ana near the Watts Towers. Thorne took two rooms on the first floor with separate entrances and separate room numbers but with a connecting door in between, giving the check-in clerk too much money and hinting at a weekend drug buy or a bootleg porn shoot. Janet didn’t register.

‘What makes you think Sharkey will show?’

‘Putting out Jaeger’s name with the low-life element will make him come to us. Maybe tomorrow.’

She almost hoped Sharkey wouldn’t come. What might a man like Thorne do to make him talk?

‘Mind if I take the bike while you’re spreading the word?’

‘It’s all yours.’

Thorne hit three pick-up bars and two strip-joints, leaving the same message everywhere: ‘A man named Jaeger told me to see a man named Sharkey to get me some girls for a beat-up-your-ho video I’m making. My name is Thompson and I’m in room 121 at the Gaylord Arms.’

Bread upon the waters. But finally it was too much for him, and he returned to the motel. Janet was not back yet. An hour later, someone playing rap music on his cellphone paused outside the door. Thorne stood on a chair to peer down through the slats of the window blind without being seen himself. The man was black, 30, shaven-headed, wearing a yellow FUBU shirt with a pimp’s gold rings on his fingers and in his ears, and a pimp’s gold chains around his neck. Sharkey? This soon?

Seemed like it was. He called softly through the door. ‘Yo, I be Sharkey. Lookin fo a man calls hisself Thompson.’

Thorne returned the chair to its place, opened the door, and stepped back so the man and his rap music could come in. Something struck him very hard on the back of his head. Going down into the twilight zone, he thought in disgust:

rap music coming through the door to cover Sharkey himself coming in from the connecting room... thought Sharkey’d want to talk first... stupid... stupid... stu-p-i-d...

A voice said, as through gauze, ‘Me’n Horace gonna hurt you bad, sucker. I likes to hurt ’em, mos surely do. Dudes or bitches, don’t make no mind...’

Thorne was gone from there.

Janet rode north, then west on Century Boulevard to the vast sprawl of LAX, twice around oval World Way past the endless array of passenger terminals, then back east to Century again. Approach avoidance. She finally stopped at an all-night cafe for a bowl of chili and countless cups of coffee.

She couldn’t be part of this. Because of Thorne, the Feds were looking for her. Thorne had killed Hal, now planned to torture Sharkey to find out what the man knew. She stopped with her cup halfway to her lips. She had lousy taste in men.

Arnie McCue, her one-time boyfriend in Reno, had wanted to make her into a prostitute. To get away from him, she had gone off with Hal Corwin, a man old enough to be her father. Who had Hal been, really? A mercenary. A man who murdered his own daughter and desecrated her body. At her urging, at least the killing part of it. Now she had gone off with Thorne — after trying to kill him because he had killed Hal.

This was not who she was, urging a man to kill people, trying to kill someone herself. Hal and Thorne had infected her, the pair of them, with their own madness. She had to let go of both of them.

The time had come for her to build a real life for herself. Start by embracing the racial heritage she had always rejected because her father had been an abusive drunk, and go deal blackjack at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Build on that. Yes! She smiled to herself. For once she was making the right decision.

But when she turned the bike back into the Gaylord Arms parking lot, her light swept across two black men supporting a stumbling, head-lolling Thorne. Without thought or hesitation, she goosed the bike. The man in front, a deer in the headlights, skittered. Bad choice. The bike hit him in the chest. He flew backwards into a parked car.

The roar of the bike got through the haze in Thorne’s head. Then the sound of impact. Janet! Saving his ass! Even as he thought it, he was falling backwards and flailing his legs. Woozily, not with his usual snap, but doing it just the same. His foot whapped the gun out of Sharkey’s hand, his leg took out Sharkey’s knees. He rolled over, gave Sharkey an elbow to the throat that had just enough on it.

‘The street,’ he croaked to Janet, tossing her the car keys Horace had dropped.

He leaned against a car for a moment. He couldn’t have done it alone, but he was coming out of it fast, now. He dragged Sharkey into the room and dumped him on the floor. No door opened, no head was thrust out. Three rooms that were lit went dark. A $50,000 black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Janet sprung the trunk. Together, they dumped Horace in and slammed the lid.