Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘I once entertained — and rejected — the idea that if it was a lung shot you might have survived it.’ He waved a hand. ‘I’d already decided that you were just about the toughest goddam guy I’d ever gone up against. If you could avoid hypothermia, maybe the icy water could stop the bleeding like the icy air of the Minnesota winter did after Mathers shot you.’

‘You were right. It could. It did.’

‘But I had to figure, what then? You crawl out of the water, there’s nobody around to help you... So, you die. End of story. So how...’

‘Cellphone,’ said Corwin. ‘In a waterproof case.’

‘A cellphone. Yeah. The missing piece. Of course. You’d need it with you to call Janet as soon as Jaeger was dead, wouldn’t you? So she could tell you where to leave her SUV.’

Astonishment flitted across Corwin’s face before he could quite close it down. ‘How do you know Janet?’

‘I found the 4-Runner, registered to her. So I found her.’ Thorne shrugged. ‘A long story. She can tell it to you herself. At the moment, she’s still mourning you as dead.’

Corwin was silent.

Thorne said, almost musing, ‘But you didn’t call her, you called Hernild. He’s a pilot, he flies out and gets you and flies you back to that private clinic of his without hesitating a second. Then he nurses you back to health again, like he did the last time.’

‘You’ve got that all wrong,’ snapped Corwin, tight-lipped. He half rose. ‘Whitby had nothing to do—’

Thorne waved him back down.

‘Bullshit. He had a mighty strange reaction when I called to tell him that you were dead. Now it makes perfect sense. Hell, he knew that at that very moment, you were right here, safe in your cabin in the woods.’

Corwin settled back down as if exhausted.

‘And here I would have stayed,’ he said, ‘except your phone call laid out exactly what Wallberg did to me all those years ago. It jogged my memory, it all came back. The fucker stole the life of poor sweet romantic little Heidi Johanson, and that of her unborn child — his child, too. To say nothing of what he stole from me.’

‘Your shot at a normal life,’ said Thorne. ‘So you got yourself another rifle, and another scope, and enlisted Hernild as your driver, and...’ Thorne held up a hand. ‘Don’t try to tell me he wasn’t. And then you went hunting.’

‘That’s about it.’ Corwin stood up. ‘I’m through running away and hiding, I’m through killing. I just want to live a hermit’s life. If you’ll let me.’

Thorne was also on his feet. He chuckled.

‘Two burned out cases with all the killing behind them. That’s for younger men...’ and he paraphrased a line he’d read, maybe from Shakespeare, ‘whose consciences have not yet made cowards of them all.’

‘So what happens next?’ asked Corwin.

‘I’d like it if you’d shake my hand,’ said Thorne. ‘Then I’ll be on my way.’ He caught himself using yet another poet’s words. ‘Miles to go before I sleep.’

Corwin stuck out his hand, thought better of it. Instead, he closed his arms around Thorne in a fierce embrace. A warrior’s salute after a long and bitter struggle that had finally come to an end for both of them.

Because the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino was on tribal land, the five-member tribal council of the Hopland band of the Como Indians made all decisions concerning how it was run. They had poker, blackjack, slots, Keno, and single-ball roulette that was really just bingo in formal dress. No craps: it didn’t pay off enough.

Janet Kestrel was on her final break of the day in the cafeteria, drinking coffee, when Herb Runningwolf, head of security for the casino, came in and headed her way.

He was a tough, square-faced, thirty-year-old Indian wearing a blue suit and with his hair in a ponytail. His main job was to stop trouble before it started. Little did. Since there was a $200 table limit, card-counters didn’t come. And since the most a player could make in a day was about $800, few high-rollers bothered, either. Mostly, all he had to deal with was drunks.

Herb laid a hand on Janet’s shoulder.

‘I just wanted you to know that your sister started her training and orientation courses this morning. She’s smart and she’s eager, and I think she’s going to work out just fine.’

‘Thanks, Herb. And thank the council for taking her on.’

‘Blood is blood, sister.’

He patted her shoulder again and moved on.

She returned to the casino proper to replace Charlene at Table Four for her final twenty minute stint. At Sho-Ka-Wah, instead of the shoe, they used a shuffler that handled five decks of cards at a time. The decks lasted six to eight hours, then were retired from rotation. During each of her daily eight-hour shifts, Janet spent twenty, forty, or sixty minutes at a blackjack table, got a twenty-minute break, then moved on to a new table. The short stints discouraged connivance between dealers and gamblers.

Janet was popular with the players because, like them, she was just there for the cards. She dealt ’em, they played ’em. Ten minutes into her shift, a new player sat down at the one empty seat at her table. She seldom looked at faces, just at hands. These newcomer hands put down a stack of chips. She dealt two rounds of cards. The hands flipped up their hole card. It was an ace, as was his up-card.

‘Double-down,’ the owner of the hands said.

The voice jerked her eyes from the cards to his face. Brendan Thorne. He winked at her. She dealt the next round, went busted when she took the dealer’s mandatory card at sixteen. Thorne got blackjack on both hands.

‘You beat the house, sir,’ she said gravely.

‘Calls for a celebration,’ he said.

‘I’m off in eight minutes.’

He nodded and picked up his modest winnings and left the table. As her hands automatically flipped out cards, she could see him making his way toward the front door. Looking good! Recovered. Rested. No thanks to her.

She stopped at the ladies’ room to wash her hands and throw water on her face and run her fingers through her long black hair. Butterflies in the stomach: how was she supposed to act? She had abandoned him to save herself, he had refused to abandon her. But she couldn’t feel just simple gratitude toward him. She had to feel either much more — or much less.

When she came out into the cool, deepening dusk, he was leaning back against the side of a beat-up old Isuzu Trooper with his arms crossed and a bemused expression on his face. Exactly as she had first seen him, only then it was her 4-Runner outside the AQUA Tours office a compressed lifetime ago.

She simply said, ‘Thank you for what you did — however you managed it. And thanks for what you told Kate about Hal. It helped me a lot when... while Hatfield had me.’

He took both her hands in his. His hands were as warm as hers were cold. He looked into her face, very serious.

‘Hal is alive,’ he said.

‘Alive?’ Her eyes got huge.

Even as he said it, he knew that he hoped she wouldn’t want to go to Corwin. It was all jumbled up in his mind. What he saw as his duty to a man he had wronged versus emotions he had thought were forever dead.

Janet rescued her hands from his. She lowered her head so he couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. She realized with a thrill that he was as confused as she was.

‘Hal assassinated President Wallberg, didn’t he?’

‘Executed him,’ said Thorne. ‘Wallberg was a murderer.’

She felt something let go, something composed of unshed tears and loss and loneliness and a longing to find out who she really was. And to make that gradual discovery with someone she could maybe love, someone who could maybe love her.