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  GLASS TIGER

  Joe Gores

  AN OTTO PENZLER BOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Quercus

  This edition published in 2007 by

  Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London

  WC1A 2NS

  Copyright © 2006 by Joe Gores

  The moral right of Joe Gores to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 84916 733 8

  Print ISBN 1 84724 072 0

  Print ISBN-13 978 1 84724 072 9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  PRAISE FOR JOE GORES

  ‘An exciting page-turner.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘A masterly piece of work… Gores writes some of the hardest, smoothest, most lucid prose in the field.’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘Gores is dogged and brilliant.’ Donald E. Westlake

  ‘Gores writes beautifully, with never a wasted word and a fine feeling for characterization. He handles violence the way a wise man handles nettles.’

  New York Times

  ‘A master.’ Chicago Sun-Times

  ‘Delightfully dark and devious.’

  Los Angeles Sunday Times

  JOE GORES is one of the legends of US crime and thriller writing and is the winner of three Edgar Allen Poe Awards. His novel Hammet was adapted for the cinema by Wim Wenders and he has written extensively for TV and film. Before starting to write he worked as a San Francisco private detective for 12 years and he also served in the US Army. He lives in California.

  Also by Joe Gores

  A Time of Predators

  Dead Skip

  Full Notice

  Interface

  Hammett

  Gone, No Forwarding

  Come Morning

  Wolf Time

  32 Cadillacs

  Dead Man

  Menaced Assassin

  Contract Null and Void

  Cases

  Stakeout on Page Street: and other DKA Files

  Cons, Scams and Grifts

  For Dori

  The Dream Dreaming Me

  Now and Forever

  Here and Hereafter

  Separation from its fellows appears to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts, exasperated by chronic pain or widowhood, are occasionally found among all the larger carnivores.

  Geoffrey Household

  Rogue Male

  The ferocity is gone. I don’t have it in me any more. I can’t even kill the bugs in my house.

  ‘Iron Mike’ Tyson, ex prize-fighter

  PART ONE

  Corwin

  If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  PROLOGUE

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Tsavo Game Park, Kenya

  The black rhino stopped browsing to throw back its massive head and snort. His scimitar horns, the front one five feet long, gleamed like dull carbon under the gibbous moon. He was big as a boulder, a ton-and-a-half of living fossil plunked down on the wet-season savanna. Since the devastating horn and ivory raids by Somali shifta poachers in the 1970s and ’80s, only this lone bull survived outside the game park’s pitifully small rhino recovery reserve.

  The compact man three feet from the rhino’s left flank froze with one foot raised above the calf-high grass, one arm still outstretched. He was downwind, but his scent must have been carried by a vagrant night breeze. Rhinos’ keen sense of smell, coupled with dim eyesight, made them unpredictable and even deadly if you couldn’t get out of their way in time. The rhino snorted again, satisfied that all was well, and returned to stripping tender twigs and new leaves off the acacia bush with his delicate, beak-like mouth.

  The man lowered his foot, put weight on it gradually so no twig would crackle. He laid his palm on the rhino’s rounded back as gently as a falling leaf. It was his fifth New Year’s Eve to do this, but he was always surprised by the softness and warmth of the hide. Explorers’ tales from previous centuries made rhinos out to be great armored beasts with skin three inches thick, but they were surprisingly vulnerable to ticks and black flies and disease.

  The rhino stopped munching to begin moving his back slightly under the human hand. After five minutes, the man moved silently away, out of the brush and out of danger and into the open veldt.

  As he did each year he whispered, ‘Happy New Year, Bwana Kifaru’ – Swahili for Big Boss Rhinocerous. Getting away unscathed from petting Bwana Kifaru was his New Year’s Eve ritual. Only Morengaru, the other guard at Sikuzuri Safari Camp, understood it as a stab at needed danger. The man started the four-mile trot back to the Galana River’s south bank. Almost forty, five-ten and built like an Olympic gymnast, hard of body, with coal-black hair and bitter-chocolate eyes, he was the only white camp guard in the country. And since big game hunting had been banned in Kenya, the closest to a white hunter the wealthy guests at the luxury resort would ever get. So he was obliged to attend Sikuzuri’s official New Year’s Eve party, even though he only wanted to return to his thatch-roof banda and reread one of the halfdozen paperback mysteries left behind by departing guests.

  When he got to the ford across the Galana, he stopped abruptly, remembering the New Year’s Eve seven years ago, after which everything had gone dead in him. Tonight he felt like a bear coming out of hibernation. What was going on? As he crossed the Galana, he could feel numbness disappearing, feel a return of something like that fierce adrenaline rush he once had lived for as the junkie lives for the needle.

  Not killing. No, never again killing. A quest. A vital, necessary trackdown of… what? Or of whom? For whom?

  —

  Minnetonka, Minnesota

  Sleeves rolled up and tie pulled awry, the former governor of Minnesota stood at his thermopaned study window, drink in hand, looking out over frozen Lake Minnetonka with glacial blue eyes. At fifty-five, he had a strong jaw and good cheekbones and the thick, slightly unruly hair Jack Kennedy had made de rigueur for serious national contenders.

  ‘Thinking of how far you’ve come, darling?’ He turned. After their return from the big New Year’s Eve blast at Olaf Gavle’s multi-million-dollar house, Edith had gone up to bed. Yet here she was back down again, wearing her shapeless flannel nightgown and green chenille robe.

  ‘Thinking of how far I have to go. Can’t sleep?’

  ‘I get lonely when you’re not next to me.’

  Edith was forty-nine, the only wife he’d ever had, short, slightly plump, with the bright inquisitive eyes of a chickadee. He had been unfaithful to her with only one woman, who was now gone, and had never been able to decide whether Edith had known or not.

  Looking down, he told her, not for the first time, ‘If chickadees weighed a pound apiece, they’d rule the world.’ She bumped him with a well-upholstered hip. He added, ‘Twenty days, love. How often have I doubted this time would ever come?’

  ‘I never doubted,’ she said,
suddenly fierce. ‘Never for an instant. You’re a man of destiny. Nothing can stop you now.’

  The Great North Woods

  Outside, it was thirty-six degrees below zero. Winter’s icy hand gripped this northern land by the balls. Inside, the 56-year-old man started up from his sleep with a muffled ‘Whompf!’ The embers of the hearth fire dug harsh shadows into his lean face, seamed and nut-brown from exposure to a lifetime of bad weather.

  He loved it all. Or once had. Now, he leaned against the wall behind his bunk in the one-room log cabin, deep-set hazel eyes staring through the moonlight from the window and into the familiar, already fading image:

  Nisa, pounded back up against the bulkhead beside the houseboat’s couch by the heavy .357 Magnum slugs…

  Two months ago. He had dropped the gun like it was red hot. He had been shot the year before, turning it all sour. And tonight, along with Nisa, was an image from that earlier night:

  Two yards away was a gaunt timberwolf, tongue lolling, ears pricked. Real? Or hallucination? The man had been shot three times from ambush and had to crawl a thousand feet to the cabin and a telephone before he went into shock.

  His racing heart began to slow. The nightsweat of terror began drying on his face. Anger replaced it. Once he had been a trapper and a hunter: now he ate out of cans. Now he had a limp and a damaged lung and missing fingers, and couldn’t even bring himself to bow-hunt whitetails for food.

  And now, a visitation of the Nisa nightmare again, a month since the last one. His nightmares after his wife Terry’s death, of her fleeing him, had prevented him from tracking down the drunken fool who had killed her. The Nisa dreams were different, guilt-filled – what had he done? With tonight, the wolf and a strange, palette-knife swirl of other images. Some stalking beast, dark and lithe and lean and tireless. Stalking him…

  His bitterness became rage: having been made prey, he could no longer be predator. But because of what he had done, the nightmares of his daughter’s death left him no choice. He had to atone, even while telling himself he never really would.

  Never could. But now…

  The gray wolf was easy. Himself, being urged to hunt again. But who – or what – would be hunting him? Easy surface analysis: if he hunted, he would be hunted by his own guilt.

  Deeper analysis: literally hunted?

  ‘Are you good enough?’ he demanded of the faded image.

  Unfairly, he would have to call Janet after convincing himself he would never put her in danger again. Ask her to meet him somewhere, tell her he needed her help, remind her that two months ago she had been urging him to be a predator…

  As he slid back down under the covers, he wondered if she still had old Charlie’s bearskin.

  The Sierra Foothills, Northern California

  The 26-year-old woman stood looking out the open door of her cabin three miles from the Casa Loma general store. Her eyes were a startling blue in a tawny face with a strong nose and high cheekbones; utterly straight raven hair flowed down to the middle of her back. This had been her parents’ cabin under her father’s long-since discarded name of Roanhorse: now it was hers. Pale blue moonlight showed her a muledeer doe and a yearling fawn browsing at the edge of the snow-clad clearing. She raised a steaming cup of coffee to salute them.

  ‘Happy New Year, guys,’ she said aloud. They ignored her, as was right between old and trusted friends.

  Her bare feet were frigid on the pine planks, but she stood there a moment longer, feeling the night. A New Year, a year of change. She would write the letter, first step toward building a new life. After all, there had been nothing from Hal since he had left her hospital room on the eve of the elections. What had he done since? What might he still do?

  She shivered, stepped back, shut the cabin door, and crawled into her bunkbed under the bearskin he had given her.

  Rockville, Maryland

  A cigar smouldered in an ashtray on the bedside table. The motel had a king-size bed and a dirty movie channel on the TV for nine bucks a night. Pale moonlight filtering through gauzy curtains showed a burly bear of a man in his late thirties, sitting on the edge of the bed with his pants off. Dense black hair covered his head, back, chest, belly, groin.

  The platinum-haired black whore crouched between his thighs had long limbs, dangly breasts and very full lips and white teeth. She drew back her head momentarily to speak.

  ‘It’s starting to get there, baby,’ she crooned. ‘Oooh, baby, it’s gonna be sooo good!’

  But it wasn’t. He had thought, after that night two months ago, that this would never happen again. One thing he knew for sure: it was all this ugly black bitch’s fault.

  ‘Aw hell, lady, this ain’t working.’

  He stood. His big fisted right hand struck her in the face, breaking her nose and mashing the suddenly hateful lying red lips flat against her teeth. She scrambled backwards away across the threadbare rug like a frightened spider, platinum wig down over one eye. But he followed, relentless, kicking her in face, belly, breasts.

  Panting, spent, he stared down at the sobbing woman. There would be no repercussions: just in case, he had prepaid Sharkey out in LA enough to assure her silence here in D.C. In just twenty more days he would start to savor the power he had worked so hard to get. Then he wouldn’t need bitches like this one any more.

  He wiped himself with a handful of Kleenex, put on his pants and left.

  Happy New Year.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Happy New Year? The upscale tract house occupied a half-acre of prime real estate on a twisty, winding blacktop road off the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The tall, very fit African-American saw the last of their party guests out into the winter night. When he turned back to ruefully survey the damage, Cora was giving him her patented dissatisfied look.

  ‘We’ll clean this mess up in the morning,’ he told her.

  Cora’s gleaming hair was artfully styled; in her heels, she was just three inches shorter than his six-one. She had cool eyes and the haughty, brown, fine-boned face of that Ethiopian fashion model who had married the rock star a dozen years before.

  ‘We’ll get the cleaning service to do it in the morning.’

  At double or triple rates, of course. He stifled his irritated response. His crack FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper team had been out in the boondocks on special assignment for all of November and December. He seriously needed to get laid. He put an arm around his wife’s waist to guide her toward the stairs.

  ‘Sure thing, baby. But tonight we got some lovin’ to do.’

  She went with him, but might not have heard him.

  ‘Now you’re going to be home more, I think we should start looking for a bigger house, further out.’

  Translation: an acre of land where they could keep a horse and pretend to be landed gentry. Was that any different from ten acres and a mule? Cora didn’t want kids to ruin her figure; she was all about appearances, as ambitious for money and social position as he was for power and political access. Now if something would just happen in the next twenty days to keep him and his team on that same detached duty to the Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future, that would make it a Happy New Year for sure.

  Something did.

  1

  January nineteenth. Hal Corwin crossed the Truckee Post Office parking lot with the slightest of limps, gingerly, as if not sure of his footing on the just-plowed surface. Here, at nearly 6,000 feet of elevation on the Cal-Nev border, the frigid air bit hard at his bullet-damaged lung.

  Janet Kestrel stepped down from the driver’s side of her old dark-green 4-Runner facing out from a far corner of the lot. Its motor was running as if for a quick getaway. Her tawny face was as brown as his, but from genetics, not weather. Today her ebony hair was piled on top of her head under a furlined cap.

  Hal put his left hand on her arm, tenderly. The hand was missing two fingers. ‘Delivery tomorrow morning, guaranteed.’

  ‘Know why that doesn’t make me happy?
Tomorrow afternoon he’ll have all of the world’s resources at his command.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. He has to feel it coming.’

  Before that night last November she had been avid, urging him on. She knew little about the deaths and was afraid to ask. Afraid to know what she might have helped drive him to.

  They hugged. He was a rangy six feet, the top of her head fit just under his chin. Her blue eyes were tight shut. During four months last year, he had become the father she had lost, she had become the daughter he had… oh God, what had he done?

  She had driven up here as he had asked, would go home and wait for his call. But she had written the letter. She stepped back from his embrace, schooling all emotion from her voice.

  ‘Page my cellphone when you need the 4-Runner.’

  ‘I will. Just bring it back here and catch the first bus down the mountain. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.’ He laid a gentle palm on her cheek. ‘I’ll call you afterwards.’

  She climbed into the 4-Runner. He bowed slightly and swept a courtly arm to usher her away. Any chance of seeing her again was probably nil, but setting it up now meant there could be no possible danger to her later.

  Gustave Wallberg didn’t have George W.’s little-boy smiley-eyes, nor Clinton’s testosterone-drenched good-old-boy appeal. Instead, he had the rugged good looks of, say, a retired pro quarterback, just right for this 300-channel sound-bite era.

  Protocol demanded that he wear a diplomat’s gray cutaway, but he had wanted a snap-on bowtie. Emily had insisted on hand-tied. Once in a lifetime, after all.

  He pulled the offending tie apart yet again and said, ‘Dammit anyway,’ without turning from the mirror. Emily appeared behind him in her Bill Blass original.