Free Glass Tiger by Joe Gores Page B

other gents came looking. Said they were his friends. Remember any of them?’
    Seth remembered all of them. Because he was always curious about things, he had been around the corner from three murders during his years in stir. Because he was also always cautious, he was alive today. But because of those prison years, Mae hated him getting involved in anything beyond running the resort. He reluctantly snapped the bill away with his forefinger. It landed in the puddle left by Thorne’s bottle. Thorne shook his head.
    ‘I’m on expenses, you aren’t. Start at the beginning.’
    What the hell, Mae was off doing up the cabins. So he told Thorne about the lanky fiftyish hard-bitten man who had walked into his not-yet-open resort at noon on mid-March day…
    ‘Walked.’ A statement from Thorne, not a question.
    ‘With his camping gear. Reckon he come on the Greyhound stops at Cedarbrook, some miles down the canyon, walked from there. Stocked up on camp grub real good. Knew just what he wanted.’ He shut an eye fora moment, recollecting. ‘A dozen Cup of Noodles for soup, freeze-dried veggies, big block of sharp cheddar, instant coffee, Granola bars, trail mix. Beef jerky.’
    ‘Anything strike you as odd? Out of proportion?’
    ‘Way too much beef jerky.’ Contempt entered his voice. ‘Hell, them guys claiming they was his friends never even picked up on that. I think they was Feds, after him. Had his pichur.’
    ‘This one?’
    Seth bent to look at the photo Thorne laid on the bar.
    ‘Yep. Reco’nized him right off, acted like I wasn’t sure.’
    Thorne put the photo away. ‘Tell ’em where he was camped?’
    ‘Just said up on the ridge trail. Guess they didn’t find ’im – I ain’t heard nothing more about none of them since.’
    From the FBI report, Thorne knew Ray and Johnny had missed Corwin by only twenty minutes: they scared up a flock of crows when they burst into the clearing, and the embers of the campfire were still warm. He slid off his stool, leaving the $100-bill.
    ‘How about you sell me way too much beef jerky?’
    Meanwhile, up in Minnesota, Corwin had gone ninety feet in thirty minutes in his totally silent stalk across a wet, crackly surface. Up by his cabin, three miles away, the snow was gone except under the densest stands of pine and there was the constant tinkling of ice-melt. Down here in the silent river bottom, receding floodwaters had laid down a springy foot-deep bed of driftwood under the leafless hardwoods.
    Three yards away, oblivious to his presence, a sly-faced red fox nosed at something on the ground. Twenty feet above his head, a brilliantly-colored wood duck saton a limb of a leafing oak that until the week before had been standing in flood water.
    Corwin crackled driftwood, the duck shot indignantly away, jinking through the branches like a maneuvering jet fighter. The fox fled. Corwin went to see what it had been sniffing. A snowy owl and another wood duck, both dead. He gingerly picked up the owl: still warm. The duck came with it, clutched in the spasmodic death grip of the owl’s curved, needle-sharp talons.
    He stood holding the two dead birds for a full minute, motionless except for almost minuscule movements of his eyes. The owl was big – four-foot wingspan, weight about five pounds, grey-brown banding in her feathers. A female. In Alaska he had seen a female hit a man who threatened her nest so hard she had knocked him right off his feet. So what could have killed this one? Not the fox: snowies often hunted foxes for food.
    He looked up. Directly overhead was a high-tension electric line strung through openings cut in the branches by the power company. The duck waddling around on the driftwood, the owl’s sudden swoop – snowies hunted both day and night. Wings beating, she rose through the trees – and hit the power line rubbed bare of insulation. Instant electrocution for them both.
    Corwin laid the dead birds back on the driftwood for the fox to feed