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:
Janet got Kate’s spare key from the fake rock beside the front door, looked in on Lindy, Kate’s two-year-old sleeping daughter, and fell into bed in the made-up spare room of her modest California bungalow two blocks from Whiskey River. She went to sleep, hard, without even remembering to wonder whether Thorne was dead or alive.
35
Alive. Sort of.
A half-feverish Thorne drank water and ate trailmix, then treated his gunshot wound with antibiotics taken from one of the AQUA Tours first-aid kits. He bandaged it and wrapped the bandage in plastic bags for waterproofing, and stole a life jacket. Before staggering out to hotwire the Chevy Astro, he left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter by the cash register.
This night drive down the tortuous dirt road to the Tuolemne River — the track Arness had called mean as a snake — seemed much more dire than his drive down the morning before. It was just a blur of never-ending twists and turns ahead of his high-beams, no barriers to a precipitous tumble to the valley floor and the ribbon of river, more daunting because imagined rather than seen in the obscurity of night.
When the track finally leveled out by the Tuolemne, he stopped the car and rolled down his window to hear the rushing water. It was not a soothing sound. Even through his medicated haze, he shivered slightly.
He put on the life jacket, and half-slid down the grassy bank to the leaky old boat hidden in the bushes. With his last strength, he wrested it from its bed of weeds, shoved it into the water and crawled in. Bent over and clutching the gunnels, he worked his way forward to the bow of the boat. The stern lifted, slowly swung around.
Facing forward, he watched the water seep up between the boat’s dried-out planks, chills running through him even as sweat stood on his face. He let the river take him.
Kate Wayne looked more like a cowgirl than she did a biker. She rolled her own cigarettes and wore plaid shirts with leather loop ties, tight faded jeans and embossed high-heeled cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat over her streaked-blond hair.
Right now she was pouring coffee, her shrewd brown eyes, set in a lean fox face, examining Janet seated across the kitchen table from her.
‘Don’t try to bullshit me, lollypop. You only act this way when you’re scared shitless. Remember, I knew you when.’
Janet chuckled and bit into her third toasted English muffin slathered in butter.
‘You’re right, I’m in trouble. Because of Arnie. You remember I worked in Reno last summer to pay for a new roof for the cabin. Anyway, mid-July, Arnie and I were in the Golden Horseshoe after my shift. I was trying to watch Wallberg accept the Democratic Presidential nomination on TV, Arnie as usual was trying to turn me out, with him to protect me — and I got pissed off. So I started flirting with this old dude on the next stool. Then Arnie got pissed and slapped my face, really hard.’
‘Arnie was always good at that. Why you let that turd—’
‘Next thing I know, he and the old guy are taking the place apart. Arnie had a knife, the old guy a bottle. The cops came in the front while I was dragging the old guy out the back. I got him into the 4-Runner and started driving. I figured Reno’d had enough of me for a while. His name was Hal. We traveled together ’til November. The best four months of my life.’
‘That’s the goddamndest story I’ve ever heard.’
‘He got me away from Arnie. He... valued me. Made me value myself. We never made love. I tried, at first, but he couldn’t do it. His wife had been killed by a drunk driver years before, and he still felt guilty about it.’
Kate asked, ‘It’s because of him that you’re in trouble?’
‘Yeah. Him and Arnie. The FBI is looking for me.’
‘What the fuck did you do?’
‘Nothing. I lent Hal the 4-Runner in January and haven’t seen him since. A man named Thorne showed up at AQUA Tours last night, driving it. Said the federales were after me.’
‘How did he get it?’
‘I don’t know. But he was right — the FBI was waiting at my cabin. Thorne held them up so I could get away. I told him to meet me here, but then I heard shooting at the cabin. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I have to know.’ She smiled wanly. ‘And I have to ditch the 4-Runner. So you’ve got a built-in babysitter for the next few days.’
‘What I’ve got is a lot of trouble right here in River City.’ Kate was on her feet, a glint in her eye. ‘You can trade Fat-Arms LeDoux pink-slips, even-up, your 4-Runner for one of those Harley clones he always has around.’
Still no sign of Kestrel or the 4-Runner. Ray Franklin had gone through her place again, and had torn it apart looking for a paper trail. He found one item: a letter from the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino north of Santa Rosa, offering her a job dealing blackjack.
‘You think that’s where she went?’ Ray demanded eagerly.
‘We’ll check with them, but I doubt it. I think she heard the gunfire by her cabin, and drove hard all night to get away. She could have been in Mexico before we got out the BOLO. Easy for an Indian to hide in Mexico. I’ll ask Spaulding to see if her 4-Runner was logged through the border near Tijuana.’
‘Why is she so important?’
‘Because she was important to Thorne.’
An hour later, the Seeking Information Alert for Kestrel under any of her names came up with something. Kestrel — under the name Amore — had, for the past three years during the winter months, been a licensed dealer at one of the casinos in Reno. No negatives on her from the casino or the cheap rooming house on South Virginia Street where she lived.
She had also worked in Reno for part of the previous summer, and in July was ‘present’ at a bar brawl in a joint called The Golden Horseshoe. A hardnose named Arnie McCue had been beating her up and some old guy rescued her. Both she and the old guy had disappeared, presumably in tandem, just as the cops arrived, and hadn’t been seen since.
On the surface, nothing. But McCue’s interview was provocative: ‘He was just an old fart, drunk at the bar. Had a limp, but he sure could move quick. Quicker than me.’
Old guy. A limp. Moved quick. Corwin. Had to be.
Hatfield had his connection. Amore had been running with Corwin from July until the Delta murders in November. No wonder she had changed her name to Kestrel. Somehow Thorne had found out about her, and had gone looking.
None of it helped much. He didn’t know where Kestrel was. He didn’t know where Thorne was. Or even IF Thorne was.
Thorne was. Barely. He had never been so cold and wet as he was right then, shooting the Tuolemne in a disintegrating rowboat without any oars. Not even as a kid when he and his best friend Wally would shoot the Chino River in a rubber raft when the ice went out in the spring and took all of the Fairbanks bridges with it.
The rowboat kept riding lower and lower in the water, until just the gunnels were out, but it was keeping afloat. Then the sodden craft hit a jagged rock broadside and flipped over. Thorne got ten minutes out of clinging to the largest piece of wreckage before he was knocked loose. It was like getting caught in the surf in Panama; he didn’t know which way was up, tried to grab breaths when his face broke water, kept curled up like a shrimp to avoid shattering his limbs on the rocks.
One foot struck gravel. He tried to bury his fingers in the shifting bottom, but was ripped away again. More rocks. More foaming white water. Pebbles! He bellyflopped into foot-deep water on a sloping stony bottom. Crawled up a few feet onto the beach where the eddy had thrust him. There, the rushing river couldn’t catch his legs and drag him back again.