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:
‘Search warrants for the house and bar, arrest warrant for the Wayne woman?’
‘Search warrants, yeah. But don’t execute ’em yet. Don’t get spotted by anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Arrest warrant for Wayne, no. She’s a single mother, we don’t need the grief. When Kestrel shows, notify me and get her on a plane to LA soonest. I’ll meet you at the Federal Building in Westwood.’
‘Thorne?’
‘LeDoux never heard of him. Thorne is off the board.’
Janet waved goodbye to the other bikers and cut off toward Kate’s house. She wanted to take a long hot shower, eat a big bowl of chili, and play with Lindy and Jigger. When Kate got home, Janet would recount her weekend and then hit the sack.
Getting off the bike under the sycamore tree beside Kate’s house, she groaned aloud. Over a thousand miles on that snarly little beast in the last three days. She ached all over.
Whenever she thought of Thorne, tears came to her eyes. For a while she’d started to think they could have some sort of relationship when all of this was finished. But dammit, she’d had to leave when she did. She’d get over it.
She wheeled the bike into the garage next to Kate’s little Toyota Echo. Edged her way back out again, closed and locked the door, turned — and was surrounded by four men in street clothes.
‘We have a warrant for your arrest,’ said one in a cold voice.
Hatfield’s men! How...
Two of them twisted her arms up behind her back, cuffs were going on even as they were herding her around the garage toward the street behind Kate’s where they’d parked their car. She tried to protest.
‘There’s a little girl in there I have to take care of—’
‘We’ve already talked with Mommy,’ said the hardbitten muscular one in a sly, almost insinuating voice. ‘Mommy’s not going to go to work tonight after all.’
40
On Wednesday morning, Thorne was able to get off the bed like a normal human being. His ribs were every color of the rainbow, but finally he looked worse than he felt. He stood under the shower for 45 minutes, hot as his bruised body could take. He hadn’t had anything to eat since Saturday, but he hadn’t been hungry. Had just crawled to and from the bathroom to drink water from the faucet and piss it out again. This morning, for the first time, his urine was clear of blood.
He dressed in his last clean clothes, opened the windows to let out the stench of blood and urine, and left three $20 bills for the maid. After tossing his soiled clothes into the motel dumpster, he went to the coffee shop down the street to order eggs and bacon and sausages and hashbrowns and sourdough toast and orange juice. He planned to drink a gallon of coffee, too.
On the mend, definitely on the mend. But for what? His quest was finished. Sharkey’s story had nailed it all down...
He paused with his first forkful of sausage and egg halfway to his mouth. Sharkey’s story.
Sharkey and Horace started shooting as soon as the mid-fifties limping man went into the houseboat. Jaeger called the cops on his cellphone to say they were taking fire and returning it, so the sheriff’s men would find Corwin dead beside his victims. But had Corwin really returned their fire, or had he just slipped away as Deputy Escobar had speculated?
That’s when Thorne’s forgotten fork spanged off his plate to hit the floor with a metallic clatter.
Returned their fire with what? The Magnum had been emptied into Nisa and Damon, all right. But not by him. He hadn’t been there before. He had just arrived for the first time when Sharkey and Horace opened up at the houseboat. No time to kill and reload, let alone time to befoul Nisa’s body.
Thorne dropped too much money on the table beside his untouched food, gulping half a cup of tepid coffee on his way to the door. He knew what had happened. He just needed to get proof. He owed that to Janet. And much more besides.
Janet remembered the midnight plane flight from Oakdale. She remembered being shoved down a dimly-lit corridor, being stopped in an open doorway while the cuffs were taken off, then being shoved in, hard, before the door slammed shut behind her. She was in a cell. But where was the cell?
It had a head-high window of one-way glass in the door so they could look in but she couldn’t look out. A knee-high bunk was bolted to the floor, with an inch-thick mattress and a single thin gray blanket. A sink and toilet were built into the wall facing it. In one upper corner of the room was a camera lens: they could be taping her even when she went to the bathroom. They fed her at irregular intervals. Bland institutional food.
The interrogations, in a room down the hall with a table and two chairs and the ubiquitous camera behind one-way glass, were always the same. How long had she and Corwin traveled together? What had they done? Where had they gone? She told them only what she was sure they had already learned elsewhere.
Only Hatfield asked what Corwin might have told her. And about Thorne. To him, her replies were unvarying: Corwin had told her nothing. She had never heard of anyone named Thorne.
‘We have recovered your 4-Runner.’
‘I owned it free and clear. I had the right to trade it for a motorcycle if I wanted to.’
‘Not a STOLEN motorcycle,’ Hatfield said in nasty triumph.
And she knew how they had found her. Fat-Arms LeDoux.
Sammy buttonholed Hatfield outside the interrogation room, where he obviously had been waiting. A company man, unlike Terrill. A bureaucrat. Afraid to bend the rules when they needed bending.
‘Ah, Terrill, we’ve gotten whatever we’re going to get from her. What do you want me to do with her?’
‘Let her rot,’ Hatfield said.
‘I read the transcript of LeDoux’s statement. She was driving a hot Suzuki thumper she didn’t know was hot.’
‘Lighten up, Sammy.’ God, what a pussy! Hatfield clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We’re the good guys. Don’t you want to be Assistant Director?’
Sammy sighed. ‘Has the D.A. up in Lodi sprung LeDoux yet?’
‘LeDoux is slime. Let them bury him forever.’
Watching Hatfield strut away down the corridor, Sammy Spaulding saw his old pal in a new light. This wasn’t why he had become an FBI agent. He wanted to catch the bad guys. He didn’t see any bad guy in this scenario. Only a lone, scared woman.
But... Assistant Director. It could be his. With the President behind him, Terrill was going to become Director. He would take Sammy with him up the ladder.
Unless Terrill came up against someone who was even tougher and more driven than he was. Little chance of that.
‘Only Superman can stop a train with his bare hands,’ chuckled Walter Houghton, M.D. ‘Take off your clothes.’
They were in one of the medical examination rooms at Houghton’s office. Thorne said, ‘I’m not that kind of guy. And I didn’t come here for a physical.’
‘You’re getting one. Get naked, my man.’
Thorne stripped. Slowly and carefully. Houghton gave him a routine physicaclass="underline" took his blood pressure and pulse, peered into his eyes with a bright light, hit his knees with a rubber hammer, held a stethoscope to first his back, then his chest, while having Thorne breathe deep. His strong, delicate fingers poked and prodded, getting grunts and one yelp. He re-dressed the gunshot wound, retaped the ribs.
‘Any advice?’ asked Thorne.
‘Eat more.’
‘Thanks for the check-up, but I didn’t come for medical reasons.’
Houghton, watching him get dressed, asked, ‘Then why?’
‘You told me Janet Kestrel was raped, but there was no oral, anal, or vaginal penetration. So what’s the evidence of sexual assault as opposed to just a beating?’