Glass Tiger
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 978-1-84724-072-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Glass Tiger». Краткое содержание книги:
A whore. ‘Gone where?’
‘Doan know, doan care. Maybe Edie, she know. But Edie, she gone too.’ His belligerence returned. Obviously his green card was in order. ‘She lef’ cause of FBI, now wha’ the FBI gonna do to get her back for me?’
‘We’re not going to do anything,’ said Hatfield. He handed Melendez a card. ‘But if your wife gets in touch with you, or her sister does, you call this number, pronto. Or you’ll be back in Mexico so fast your fucking huaraches will be smoking.’
31
There were twelve of them waiting for the bus at Groveland, an old goldrush town in the Sierra foothills on the way to Yosemite National Park. It was their first river raft trip, and they were charged up. The bus pulled up. They filed aboard. The driver stood in the front, counting noses.
‘It’s about a fifteen-twenty minute ride to Casa Loma,’ he said. ‘Then five miles of really bad road to the Put-In Spot on the Tuolemne River. I’m glad to see you’re wearing warm clothes. This early in May, the river is still pretty darn cold.’
A slender woman with streaked blond hair and smile lines at the sides of her mouth gestured at the equally slender fifteen-year-old boy beside her.
‘Can Jimmy sit up front behind you?’
The boy looked embarrassed. The bus driver chuckled.
‘Sure can. He’ll like that ride down the hill. By the way, in case any of you are worried, the rafts almost never get tipped over. Even if one of ’em got holed by a sharp rock, there’s no life-threatening danger. But just to be on the safe side, AQUA River Tours furnishes wet suits, life jackets and helmets to all our clients.’
He didn’t add that anyone going into the river would get bruised and scraped, maybe get a cracked rib or two, because that’s not what the clients were paying to hear. Instead, he fired up the bus. Snorting diesel fumes, it lurched forward.
At just eleven a.m., they were at the water’s edge, where four guides were holding three rubber rafts in place against the steep earth bank. The clients crawled enthusiastically to their places, and were pushed out into the swirling current.
Thorne had driven hard well into the night, had checked into the Groveland Hotel, an 1849 adobe wedded to a 1914 Queen Anne Victorian. Two story, white with red-brown trim, with pillars all the way around. While he was checking out in the morning, he asked where the post office was. The clerk, a middle-aged man with silvery hair, faraway blue eyes, and turtle-wrinkles in his thin neck, smelled faintly of mothballs.
He nodded with little jerks of his head. ‘Street behind the hotel, up the hill. Along there a ways.’
Groveland had a population of 1,500, which doubled on the weekends during the summer months. The AAA Tour Book said the town’s main recreational activity was white-water rafting on the Tuolemne River a few miles distant.
Thorne found the post office easily, an ugly modern brown building with what looked like a corrugated iron roof and inset doorways and a somehow incongruous blue mailbox at the foot of the gleaming concrete front steps. Inside, behind the counter, was a round, rosy-faced woman in a blue uniform with a nametag, ROSIE, pinned to the front of her shirt.
‘A few months back I sent a package from LA to a Janet Roanhorse at General Delivery,’ Thorne beamed. ‘I was wondering if you have any record that she ever received it?’
Rosie didn’t have to look anything up. ‘Sure did. Roanhorse, that was her daddy’s name. Her folks had a little cabin in the woods a few miles out of town. They died a few years back. She came back to take the place over, and calls herself Janet Kestrel now.’
‘I’m just in town for the day, and I was really hoping I’d get a chance to see her...’
Rosie shook her head, making her curls dance, and beamed confidentially at him. ‘We can’t give out folk’s home addresses. But you can catch her at work, AQUA River Tours, at a little spot called Casa Loma. Right on highway 120 north, you can’t miss it. The only building there is called the River Store. It’s set back on a little knoll. There’s a cutout of a big blue coffee cup on top of it.’
He thanked her and left. It was just nine a.m.
Janet loved it on the river, narrow, twisting, fast, here dark and deep and swirling, there white and shallow and boisterous, throwing up spume and leaping over sharp half-submerged rocks with joyful exuberance. It took great skill to keep the rafts from hitting anything.
But the letter had come from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Today was her last ride down the river as a guide. Tomorrow, she would catch a bus to Hopland and find a place to live and start work at the casino as a blackjack dealer. She felt a sadness at leaving the river-rafting she knew and loved for an indoor casino job dealing blackjack, something she also knew but had never loved. But it paid better than rafting, and she had to start building a new life. At least this would be at a casino run by her own people. And she might never get that call on her cellphone from Hal to go retrieve her 4-Runner.
They stopped for lunch at one p.m. at a pre-arranged spot that in another month would be sun-washed and toasty. No more snow lingered in the steep mixed oak and pine forests flanking the river, but in here under the trees it was still chilly. They lit fires and ate their sandwiches around them.
Jimmy, the fifteen-year-old boy who couldn’t get enough river lore, attached himself to Janet. As they ate, he kept plying her with questions about rafting and about what seemed to him the wilderness they were passing through. He ate quickly, so after they finished, she walked him around, naming the various trees and bushes. He reached out for a red-leafed vine curled around one of the oak trees, and she grabbed his arm.
‘That’s not sumac, Jimmy. It’s poison oak.’
He jerked his hand back. ‘That stuff gives you a rash.’
‘I’ll tell you a secret.’ She picked one of the leaves. ‘There’s a way you can develop immunity for it.’ She ate the leaf. ‘You do that for a while, carefully, and pretty soon—’
‘Oh wow! That’s way cool.’
‘But don’t you try it,’ she cautioned. She suddenly giggled, in the boy’s world. ‘Your mom would hunt me down and kill me dead if you did.’
Thorne parked the 4-Runner on the blacktop in front of the River Store and checked out the other vehicles: a white van with a big metal luggage rack on the roof, and a pale green camper with a dark green plywood box on top to hold belongings. There was also a three-year-old Suzuki and a ’94 Chevy Astrovan. Inside, he was greeted by the rich smell of espresso and a big old man with a grey handlebar mustache and a long grey ponytail.
‘Sam Arness,’ said the man. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘A cup of coffee for starters. Is Janet Kestrel working today?’
‘Yep, and nope. She’s working, but she ain’t here.’ Arness gestured down the store to a door in the back wall. ‘AQUA Tours. She’s a damn good white-water rafting river guide for them, one of the best. AQUA does class four trips — toughest is class five. They’re off down the river on a one day trip and’ll be back after dark.’ He squinted at the store’s electric clock. ‘Might catch ’em at the Put-In Spot down on the river, but I doubt it, they’re usually on the water by eleven.’
‘I’ll drive on down. I’m just waiting for Janet anyway.’
‘Hope you got four-wheel, road’s mean as a damn snake.’
Sam Arness was right. Thorne needed the four-wheel all right on the incredible five-mile dirt track to the river thousands of feet below, a narrow slanting cut down the steep side of an immense brown tree-covered slope. The hillside rose on one side, fell away into infinity on the other. Roll your vehicle here, and you’d still be rolling at sundown.