Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Sharkey was tied with wet towels to a chair in the middle of the room. Sweat gleamed on his shaven head, there was drool at the corner of his mouth. Thorne sat in front of him, monotonously slapping his face with a wet wash cloth. Then Thorne took out his Randall Survivor. The blade gleamed.

‘C’mon, Sharkey. Wake up. Pain time.’ He tipped Janet a quick wink that she didn’t catch. ‘Turn on the TV and wait in the other room, honey. I know you don’t like to see blood.’

Leaving, she hit the remote. It was an old movie. The Dirty Dozen. Before she could get the connecting door shut, she heard Thorne say, ‘First a finger, then an ear...’

As the door closed behind Janet, a memory from the Rangers overwhelmed Thorne’s mind. Victor had been ambushed by a rebel patrol in Colombia. They’d cut off his pinkie finger before Thorne could get there. Victor hadn’t even groaned. Thorne had killed three rebels with his Randall Survivor, the others had fled. He’d carried Victor over his shoulder five miles through the nighttime jungle back to base. Later they got very drunk and laughed about it.

He had known then that he could never be a torturer. But Sharkey didn’t know that.

Thorne snapped him contemptuously under the nose with his middle finger, very hard.

‘I think I’ll start with the nose,’ he said.

Sharkey wet himself.

‘Okay, Sharkey, Horace is already dead,’ said Thorne, ‘but you’ve still got a chance — just one. Why did Jaeger take you and Horace to the Delta on election night?’

Sharkey wanted to lie, but this sucker would off him in a second like he had Horace. It was in his eyes. A life-taker.

‘To take out some dude,’ Sharkey said. ‘Me an Horace, we stayed up on the levee, couple hundred yards off from this houseboat. Jaeger had balls, he went down there alone to check things out, wasn’t even packin’ no heat. It was real foggy, we couldn’t see shit, couldn’t hear shit. After a while, Jaeger, he come back up, say the dude ain’t there yet. Say, when the dude come, you wait an whack him after he goes inside. Not before.’

‘So you waited.’

‘Yeah. After a while, dude show up, tall, kinda old, had a gimp. We move in.’

A gimp. Corwin’s limp.

‘Dude goes aboard, Jaeger yells, ‘Now!’ We start poppin caps at the houseboat, old Jaeger he breaks out his mufuckin cellphone! Starts yellin fo the heat, says we takin fire.’

‘Were you?’

‘Dunno, man. The fuckin fog, we couldn’t see nothin, couldn’t hear nothin, so we was shootin at nothin. The heat comes, Jaeger tells us to cut out. That’s it, man.’

‘Did Jaeger do any shooting himself?’

‘Tole you, man, cat hadn’t got no gun. Anyway, he was a executive type. Never got his mufuckin hands dirty, not that way, anyhow. Now, with some bitch...’

Thorne wasn’t listening, was thinking. Jaeger had gone aboard, had found Nisa and Damon dead. For some reason, maybe something he saw on the houseboat, he figured Corwin would come back. When he did, Sharkey and Horace would kill him just before the sheriff’s men arrived. The lawmen would find just what Jaeger wanted them to find: Corwin and his victims. Three dead bodies. Pretty much as Thorne had thought it must have been.

He groaned his way to his feet. Now all of his ribs were sore, not just the cracked one. His jaw was swollen, one eye was almost shut. His kidneys were a new agony. The best that he could hope for was just to piss blood for a few days.

He threw Sharkey’s car keys on the bed. At the moment, he didn’t know if he was more disgusted with Sharkey or with himself. Sharkey, for who he was. Himself, for who he was in danger of becoming. He said, ‘Horace is in the trunk of your car. Alive. He’ll need patching up.’

Janet was sitting on the side of the bed with her hands knotted in her lap. She had heard nothing from the other room except The Dirty Dozen , Telly Savalas going psycho and getting his. She started to her feet when Thorne came through the connecting door in an agonized shuffle.

‘Is he...’ she began breathlessly. ‘Did you...’

‘Is he what?’ Thorne collapsed into the hard-back chair by the writing table. Then he got it. ‘Is he dead? Christ no. Guy like him, you give him a little nudge, he knows what he’d do to you if he had you tied up. His imagination does the rest.’

‘What does a little nudge mean, exactly?’

‘I snapped him under the nose. Once.’ He demonstrated. ‘Go look. Right now he’s trying to get those towels unknotted. He’ll square it with the night-clerk, get Horace to a doctor — don’t worry about him. He’s a pimp and he kills people.’

‘So do you kill people.’

‘Not for money. And not any more. But maybe I should have messed him up a little. He sure messed me up.’ He groaned his way to his feet. ‘Let’s get out of here. You’re driving.’

She did, Thorne clinging to the back of the Suzuki like a damaged limpet. It was a long ride, north on the 405 to La Cienega and all the way to Sunset. She stopped at an all-night convenience store for a bottle of Ibuprofen, then Thorne checked them into a twin-bedded room under his Benny Schutz identity. It was the same run-down motel below the Strip where he had stayed before he saw Walter Houghton, MD, for the first time.

He ate six pain pills, lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed, to stare at the ceiling. It was after two a.m., so the bar next door was closed. It would open again at four, but for now there was relative silence.

‘We gotta talk while I still can,’ he said. ‘You know, you saved my butt back there. They were going to kill me and dump me off the edge of Mulholland Drive.’

Janet sat on the other bed as she had sat on the bed in Watts, her hands white-knuckled in her lap. She said nothing. Thorne sighed. She wasn’t giving an inch.

‘Okay. It’s just what we thought. Jaeger wanted Hal to kill them both so Sharkey and Horace could shoot him just before the police got there. It would have been a perfect frame, the murderer and his victims, dead together. But Hal got away.’

‘Until you came along,’ she snapped. Then she added, in a softer voice, ‘I’m going to get some coffee. You want any?’ He just shook his head wearily. She nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign when I leave. G’bye, Thorne.’

‘See you in a little while, Janet.’

‘Sure.’

But when he woke in the morning, Janet was gone. She’d left Thorne flat, just as she’d left Corwin. How could he have expected anything else?

She’d also left a note beside his head on the pillow, written on the back of an all-night coffee shop menu.

Thorne:

Sitting in that hotel room last night thinking you were torturing Sharkey, I knew I had to end it. I really didn’t know Hal at all, and I really don’t know you. I need my own life.

Goodbye. Good luck.

Saved his life, then dumped him. He’d thought his capacity for emotion had died with Alison, but reading Janet’s message he’d realized what a given she’d become in his life. He’d started to feel things he hadn’t felt in seven years. How stupid could he be? How could he expect that she could ever forgive him for Hal’s death?

When he woke in the morning, Fat-Arms LeDoux didn’t know where he was. He felt dead. He squinted, realized the stripes down the wall were bars. He was in jail.

He sat hunched up on the edge of the bunk, his head in his hands, trying to remember. He’d finished stripping out Kestrel’s 4-Runner, had ridden up 1–5 to to celebrate and to drink his fill at Chopper’s Roadhouse near Lodi, a biker-friendly and colors-welcome saloon where outlaws of every stripe could hang out.