Thorn, startled, tries to wrestle the muzzle of the gun in my direction. But I have one hand on his wrist and the other on the small flat frame of the pistol with his finger trapped inside the trigger guard. He fires another round and the bullet flashes off the concrete just over my head. It is like having a tiger by the tail. If I let loose for an instant, he will draw a bead on me and I will be dead.
He raises one leg and tries to knee me in the groin. Instead he misses and hits my thigh. A rock comes from out of nowhere and hits him squarely on the side of the head. Blood begins to trickle down his temple. Then another rock and another. Most of them hit him in the upper body. He lifts his left hand and tries to fend off the rocks while he holds on to the pistol with his right.
He glances over and looks at Joselyn with fire in his eyes. She unloads on him with a machine-gun barrage of rocks, venting the anger of a decade as she tries to stone him to death. She catches me on the hand with one of them. It stings like hell. But I can’t let go of the pistol.
Thorn lifts his right foot and tries to knee me one more time. As he does it I hook my right foot behind his left ankle and push him away, releasing his wrist and the pistol in the same motion.
His eyes widen with glee as he begins to go over backward, gripping the pistol with both hands to take aim. A green arc lightens up the cavern as six hundred volts and four thousand amps hiss through his body.
Thorn writhes like a snake on the third rail as Joselyn runs into my arms and buries her face in my shoulder.
FIFTY-ONE
The minute Joselyn and I are able to slip away from the police down inside the tunnel we grab a taxi and head for the hospital.
I’ve had no word on Herman since the ambulance took him away that morning. By the time we get there and check in at the front desk, I have to arm-wrestle with one of the nurses to get any information at all. Not being family, the hospital is reluctant to release anything.
The only family Herman has, to my knowledge, is a sister in Detroit, and I don’t have her number. It would be in Herman’s cell phone, which of course the hospital won’t give me.
An hour later Thorpe shows up with an entourage of FBI agents and a million questions. While he wants to closet both Joselyn and myself until he can vacuum our brains for all of the details of Thorn’s dealings, whatever we know of them, he does at least take the time and use his authority to cut through the red tape at the hospital.
On Thorpe’s authority they give me Herman’s cell phone. I call his sister and give her the news. In turn she authorizes the doctors to give me whatever information they have concerning Herman’s condition.
According to the surgeon, it was touch and go when Herman arrived in the ambulance. Following surgery he appears to be out of immediate danger, but the long-term prognosis is guarded and he is not out of the woods.
In any event, it will be at least two days, possibly longer, before anyone will be allowed to see him, let alone talk with him. There is substantial damage to his right lung and the doctors are concerned that any effort on his part to talk or to move could result in a resumption of internal bleeding. For the time being he is recovering in the intensive care unit and is likely to be there for the better part of a week.
With that news, and the knowledge that Joselyn and I are not going anywhere, Thorpe and his agents throw a net over us. They gather our luggage, along with Herman’s, check us out of the Hotel George, and put us up in a penthouse in one of the downtown high-rises near FBI headquarters while they proceed to grill us around the clock.
Thorpe is a little sheepish, and cuts us some slack due to his own failure to take us seriously when I called him from Arizona about Thorn and the plane from the boneyard. We give him the three passports pilfered from Thorn’s luggage along with the small black notebook with the coded phone numbers, and tell him what little we know about Liquida, and that Herman had told me with his last conscious breath that it was the Mexican who’d stabbed him.
Thorpe informs me they already checked the bloody stiletto dropped in the garage for prints and that they found none. They are anxious to talk to Herman to see if they can get a description. But that will have to wait.
The minute Joselyn mentions her communications with Senator Joshua Root, and the fact that she had requested his assistance with the FBI, Thorpe’s antennae goes up. He listens intently to the details of her conversations with Root, and Root’s assurances of help and guarantees that Thorpe and his men were on board.
“Root is dead,” says Thorpe. “According to reports he took his own life about two hours ago. It’s all over the news. I can tell you with certainty that he never contacted us, the cops, or anyone else. The story is still breaking, but according to reports he was in the final stages of terminal cancer. And there’s rumors of serious mental problems. We don’t know all of the details yet.”
I give him a questioning look.
“He was supposed to be taking medication, that’s all we know. Why the leadership in the Senate hadn’t taken steps to ease him out we don’t know, especially given the classified nature of the information handled by his committee. At the moment everybody is running for political cover. But we’ll get to the bottom of it, you can be sure of that.”
That night after Thorpe left us alone, Joselyn showered as I sat in the room and examined the only document I had left from the trove of items Herman and I had taken from Thorn’s luggage. It was my handwritten note jotted down after I had lifted the final invisible note from the back cover of Thorn’s little black book: “Waters of Death, Second Road, Pattaya, Thailand.” There was a phone number along with a note of the instructions that Liquida had been given when Thorn told him to kill Jimmie Snyder, including the kid’s address in Alexandria, Virginia.
I pick up the hotel room phone on the nightstand next to the bed and dial Sarah’s cell phone. It rings several times before she answers.
“Hello.”
“Hi, babe, it’s Dad.”
“Oh, God, I have been so worried. I haven’t heard from you in so long,” she says. “Where are you?”
“In Washington. We’re okay.” I don’t tell her about Herman. That would unravel her. I will wait until he is out of the hospital and back on his feet. “How’s Harry?”
“He’s bored. He has cabin fever. The original grumpy old man. What can I say? When can we go home?”
“Not just yet,” I tell her. “Pretty soon.”
“Did they catch him?” Sarah is talking about Liquida.
“They’ll get him. He can’t get far. How’s life on the farm?” I try to change the subject. We talk for several more minutes. It is strange that after all the tension, there isn’t all that much to say. If I talk too long, sooner or later she is going to ask me about Herman and I will have to lie. So we cut it short.
“See you soon,” I tell her. “I love you.”
“Love you too. How’s Herman?”
I ignore the question. “Say hello to Harry for me. Bye-bye.”
“Call me again soon, please. Bye.” She hangs up.
The moment Sarah hung up she realized-Damn! She’d forgotten to mention the little package he’d sent her or ask him what it was for. It was supposed to be so they could stay in touch. According to the note in the box, he was sending another one to Harry and it was supposed to be a surprise. She wondered for a moment whether she should call him back. She decided against it. She made a mental note to ask him the next time he called.
Liquida gripped the wheel in obvious discomfort as he steered the rental car north up I-70. The doctor who’d stitched him up had done a pretty good job, though he could not guarantee that the feeling in the fingertips of Liquida’s right hand would ever fully recover.