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:
‘Mind if I take the bike while you’re spreading the word?’
‘It’s all yours.’
Thorne hit three pick-up bars and two strip-joints, leaving the same message everywhere: ‘A man named Jaeger told me to see a man named Sharkey to get me some girls for a beat-up-your-ho video I’m making. My name is Thompson and I’m in room 121 at the Gaylord Arms.’
Bread upon the waters. But finally it was too much for him, and he returned to the motel. Janet was not back yet. An hour later, someone playing rap music on his cellphone paused outside the door. Thorne stood on a chair to peer down through the slats of the window blind without being seen himself. The man was black, 30, shaven-headed, wearing a yellow FUBU shirt with a pimp’s gold rings on his fingers and in his ears, and a pimp’s gold chains around his neck. Sharkey? This soon?
Seemed like it was. He called softly through the door. ‘Yo, I be Sharkey. Lookin fo a man calls hisself Thompson.’
Thorne returned the chair to its place, opened the door, and stepped back so the man and his rap music could come in. Something struck him very hard on the back of his head. Going down into the twilight zone, he thought in disgust:
rap music coming through the door to cover Sharkey himself coming in from the connecting room... thought Sharkey’d want to talk first... stupid... stupid... stu-p-i-d...
A voice said, as through gauze, ‘Me’n Horace gonna hurt you bad, sucker. I likes to hurt ’em, mos surely do. Dudes or bitches, don’t make no mind...’
Thorne was gone from there.
Janet rode north, then west on Century Boulevard to the vast sprawl of LAX, twice around oval World Way past the endless array of passenger terminals, then back east to Century again. Approach avoidance. She finally stopped at an all-night cafe for a bowl of chili and countless cups of coffee.
She couldn’t be part of this. Because of Thorne, the Feds were looking for her. Thorne had killed Hal, now planned to torture Sharkey to find out what the man knew. She stopped with her cup halfway to her lips. She had lousy taste in men.
Arnie McCue, her one-time boyfriend in Reno, had wanted to make her into a prostitute. To get away from him, she had gone off with Hal Corwin, a man old enough to be her father. Who had Hal been, really? A mercenary. A man who murdered his own daughter and desecrated her body. At her urging, at least the killing part of it. Now she had gone off with Thorne — after trying to kill him because he had killed Hal.
This was not who she was, urging a man to kill people, trying to kill someone herself. Hal and Thorne had infected her, the pair of them, with their own madness. She had to let go of both of them.
The time had come for her to build a real life for herself. Start by embracing the racial heritage she had always rejected because her father had been an abusive drunk, and go deal blackjack at the Sho-Ka-Wah Casino. Build on that. Yes! She smiled to herself. For once she was making the right decision.
But when she turned the bike back into the Gaylord Arms parking lot, her light swept across two black men supporting a stumbling, head-lolling Thorne. Without thought or hesitation, she goosed the bike. The man in front, a deer in the headlights, skittered. Bad choice. The bike hit him in the chest. He flew backwards into a parked car.
The roar of the bike got through the haze in Thorne’s head. Then the sound of impact. Janet! Saving his ass! Even as he thought it, he was falling backwards and flailing his legs. Woozily, not with his usual snap, but doing it just the same. His foot whapped the gun out of Sharkey’s hand, his leg took out Sharkey’s knees. He rolled over, gave Sharkey an elbow to the throat that had just enough on it.
‘The street,’ he croaked to Janet, tossing her the car keys Horace had dropped.
He leaned against a car for a moment. He couldn’t have done it alone, but he was coming out of it fast, now. He dragged Sharkey into the room and dumped him on the floor. No door opened, no head was thrust out. Three rooms that were lit went dark. A $50,000 black Lincoln Town Car pulled up. Janet sprung the trunk. Together, they dumped Horace in and slammed the lid.
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.’