Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

And it worked better than he could ever have hoped. Hal Corwin not only had been passed-out drunk and couldn’t remember anything, he had ended up with retrograde amnesia from a concussion. Or was it just Wallberg’s good luck? Thorne wished he’d asked Spencer if the blow to Corwin’s head could have been deliberate, not just from accidentally striking the windshield. When Hal was arrested for vehicular manslaughter he didn’t fight it. He accepted that he must have killed the girl.

The mayor knew what his son had done. Knew that Heidi was carrying Gus’s baby. He not only paid for Heidi’s funeral and memorial service, he bought her family off with a new, prosperous farm so they would agree to Heidi being cremated, along with the fetus she was carrying. It would have been the mayor, also, who made sure Corwin got a chance to choose Vietnam over jail. They wanted him in a war zone where he would probably get killed.

But Corwin wasn’t killed in Vietnam. He thrived. Became a hero. Later, became a mercenary. But then his wife Terry was killed by a drunk driver — just as he believed that he, drunk and in a stolen car, had killed Heidi. All he could do was retreat to a hermit’s life in the big woods.

Meanwhile, for the Wallbergs, him becoming a mercenary was almost as good as him becoming dead. He would never return to Rochester, would be as absent from Gus Wallberg’s life as Heidi was. Here was where, to Thorne, it got grotesque. After he became governor of Minnesota, Wallberg initiated a long-term affair with Hal Corwin’s daughter. Physical infatuation? Love? Or a subconcious further destruction of Corwin?

Thirty-nine years later, Wallberg got presidential ambitions and broke it off with Nisa. But that wasn’t enough. What if Corwin’s memory returned? What if Corwin realized his buddy Gus had made a girl pregnant, had murdered her in a panic, then had set up his best friend Hal to take the rap for it?

Wallberg voiced his fears aloud, mostly to himself, just once. But Damon Mather, with his ambitions, was there to hear it. The wheel started to turn. Mather tried to kill Corwin.

Now they all were dead. Gus Wallberg was safe. He was President of the United States. If Thorne went to the media, the administration’s spin doctors would get going. It’s all lies. It didn’t really happen that way. Where is your proof?

His proof was cremated in Rochester. His proof was dead on a mountain in Montana. Thorne couldn’t touch Wallberg.

But Terrill Hatfield didn’t know that, and Hatfield was Thorne’s real target. He could be manipulated through his own ambitions. It would be enough. It would have to be enough.

One more debt to pay. Thorne called Whitby Hernild’s clinic in Portage. Hernild himself answered the phone.

‘Clinic.’

‘This is Thorne. Hal Corwin is dead.’

There was a long, unexpected pause, then Hernild blurted, ‘My God! That’s terrible! When? How?’

‘When he killed Kurt Jaeger.’

Still strangely subdued, almost detached, Hernild said, ‘I was... afraid it might be Hal behind the gun.’

‘I shot him just as he took his own shot. But even so he hit who he aimed at. He wanted to avenge his daughter’s murder. He was no psycho. But he should have been after Wallberg, too.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say. I don’t understand.’

‘Because I’ve pieced together what Wallberg did to Hal on New Year’s Eve forty years ago.’

‘Hal had amnesia. He could never remember that night...’

Thorne told him. All of it. Hernild was almost wistful.

‘Is there anything you can do about it?’

‘No. Even if Hal was still alive, he couldn’t do anything. There’s no proof for any of it. So Wallberg gets away with it.’

Thorne hung up feeling, not purged as he had expected, but oddly unsettled. But he had done what he considered his duty to the man he had been manipulated into killing. He had cleared Corwin’s name with those who mattered — his best friend, and the woman who had thought of him as a surrogate father.

Except that Janet was still a prisoner.

Jennifer Maplewood was fifty-eight years old and lived in a gated community with armed guards. But she was sure she was going to be murdered in her bed by rapists. After one of Jennifer’s thrice-weekly sessions, Sharon Dorst always badly needed her twenty-minutes downtime before her next patient.

She wasn’t going to get it this day. She had just closed the outer door behind Jennifer when it opened again to admit someone else. She turned, irritated.

‘I see patients only by appointment...’ She ran down. It was Thorne. She grabbed him and hugged him, then stepped back, red-faced. ‘I was... ever since you...’

‘Me too.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘I know you felt you let me down when Hatfield got hold of your session notes. You didn’t. We’re square. But I need a favor from you.’

‘Anything.’

‘Hatfield is doing to another woman what he threatened to do to you. I need his home address. You have FBI connections. Can you help me?’

‘Give me two hours,’ Sharon said. Her face tightened. ‘And call me when... when you’ve made her safe.’

Because she knew that then she would make more phone calls to her FBI contacts. Calls she should have made weeks ago.

Driving home to his temporarily empty house well after dark, Terrill Hatfield was a happy man. His imminent accession to power had turned his wife on in ways he hadn’t dreamed possible. Yesterday Cora had read coy remarks in a Washington Post column to the effect that Terrill Hatfield would be announced as the new Director of the FBI in the President’s Fourth of July speech. Last night she had given him the best sex of his life. This morning she had packed her bags and had flown down to Atlanta to lord it over her mother and two sisters.

The best of both worlds. Great sex, and now she wasn’t here to start nagging at him as usual. Life was sweet.

He parked his Crown Vic in the driveway, went in the front door, deactivated the alarm, and turned on the single dim light over the wet bar in one corner of the living room. It was soothing after the fluorescent glare of his office. He poured three fingers of Wild Turkey into a squat heavy cut-glass tumbler and added a single ice cube.

Standing at the picture window and looking out, he thought, Cora was right. This place is too small for us. We need to be further out, with at least an acre. Room for a horse. Room for two horses. We can ride together on Sunday mornings. After Wallberg’s announcement of my appointment as Director of the FBI on the Fourth of July, we’ll go house-hunting...

That’s when a hand came over his head from behind, curved fingers hooked into his nostrils and jerked his head back. An icy point of steel touched his throat. He could feel a drop of his own blood running down from the broken skin as he was duck-walked awkwardly backward into the room, away from the window.

He had been trained for situations like this. He would...

‘Reach across your body, nice and slow, take out your Glock with two fingers, and drop it on the floor.’

Thorne! Alive! All of Hatfield’s training deserted him. He could barely breathe, he felt like he might pass out. He dropped his Glock on the floor as directed.

The fingers on his face went away. A hand touched his ankles, checking for a backup piece, went away also.

Hatfield turned, warily. Thorne was leaning against the sideboard Cora had bought last fall during their swing through the New England antique shoppes, his arms crossed so Hatfield’s own Glock pointed up at an angle toward the ceiling. Like the Sean Connery pose in those old James Bond movie posters. The pose was deliberate, Hatfield was sure.

‘How...’ His voice came out in a croak. He hated this display of weakness in himself. ‘How did you know where I...’