Free Glass Tiger by Joe Gores

had been traced to the payphone here at this run-down market he had barely noted when he had passed it on his way to Tower Park Marina.
    Inside it was cluttered and comfortable, with fishing lures and candy bars and postcards and cold beer and sodas and bottled water. It smelled of live bait and microwaved burritos. The proprietor was in his late sixties, with a lot of white tousled hair and a tobacco-stained gunfighter’s mustache. He nodded twice to himself when Thorne showed his FBI credentials, like a robin checking out worm-sounds.
    ‘Wondered when you guys would be around again.’
    ‘Well, the phone company records show the woman who was killed made a call from your payphone here that afternoon.’
    ‘Yep. Reco’nized her right off from the pichurs theyshowed me.’ He looked as if he wanted to spit the juice from his chaw of tobacco into the spitoon, but instead just worked his jaw around. ‘Her and her husband bought supplies here, said they was on vacation in a rented houseboat. Damn shame, I say. She was a mighty nice lady. Pretty, too. Got to know her, her coming in to get them calls every Tuesday an’ Thursday, two ’clock, straight up, reg’lar as clockwork.’
    Nothing in the file about her receiving a series of calls.
    ‘Ah… know who they were from?’
    ‘Nope. But they was all of ’em long-distance calls.’ He chuckled. ‘Now I think of it, most anywhere you’d call from here would be long-distance, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Sure would. Could you hear her end of things?’
    He winked at Thorne. ‘Little place like this, couldn’t help hearing, could I?’ His face fell. ‘All she ever said was something like, “Everything’s fine” and “Thanks” and she’d hang up.’ Then he brightened again. ‘Got one two hours early on ’lection day, ’bout noon, thereabouts, an’ it shook her up real good. Soon’s she heard the voice, she yelled, “You!” an slammed down the receiver. Then she made a buncha calls of her own.’
    Got an unexpected call that panicked her, started trying to reach Jaeger. She finally did, but too late to save them. Had this all been deleted from the file? Or had the FBI just never found out about all of those calls? The old man was going on.
    ‘Waitin’ for them Tuesday an’ Thursday calls, she’d listen to my tales ’bout the old days when Terminous was the railhead for produce comin’ out of the Delta. A real nice lady.’
    The Delta. A synapse fired in Thorne’s brain. Below that dead tree reaching imploring arms to the sky had been a messy waist-high mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds some eight feet in diameter. Hechecked his watch. He was in a sudden hurry to get out of there. Dusk would soon fall.
    ‘You got any of that black electrician’s tape for sale?’
    The old man cackled. ‘Course I do! It’s a damn general store, ain’t it?’
    At the White Slough Wildlife Area gate on Guard Road, Thorne wrapped his flashlight with electrician’s tape and rummaged through his suitcase for a heavy turtleneck sweater. The sun was low, a cold wind had kicked up, swirling dust. The rabbit was gone. No enchantment this time around. Just icy water and a half-assed idea.
    Across the channel, a sentry muskrat, its segmented rat-like tail wound around behind it, was sitting on top of the messy mound of interwoven twigs and branches and reeds Thorne belatedly had recognized as a muskrat house. He had also remembered a Michael Gilbert story that mentioned ancient Britons hiding in underground burrows called dene holes to let the Saxon invaders overrun their positions. Hide in plain sight.
    He stripped naked, leaving his clothes folded in the track like a suicide going to drown himself. Flashlight in hand, he slid down the steep side of the levee to the water. A lesser grebe popped up in mid-channel, swam for a moment, dove under again. Thorne shivered in the cold wind. He was at least as tough as a helldiver, wasn’t he?
    As he dove in himself, the