Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I’ll call him,” Ruben said, looking at Father Angelis, who nodded. “Maybe go see him, if he sounds okay.”

  “You’d make him happy,” I said. I pulled up Burt’s number on my phone and wrote it down. Ghorbani put it into his shirt pocket, and I heard myself say, “Don’t lose that. He’s a sad old man.”

  “Gotcha,” Ghorbani said.

  I pushed my chair back but stopped without getting up. “Before I go,” I said. “Tell me why you wanted to kill Herbie.”

  “Worst fall I ever took,” Ghorbani said. “It put me away for three years. I got pounded pretty good in the jug, damn near every day, until I beefed up. Worst thing in my life. So anyways, what they got me for, I did it to protect Herbie. And Herbie ratted me to the cops.”

  Ratted is just about the worst word in the crook’s dictionary. Ruben Ghorbani wouldn’t be unique, or even unusual, if he offed someone who sent him up for hard time. I knew half a dozen people who didn’t think of themselves as killers in spite of the fact they’d aced a rat.

  I was listening to Ghorbani’s words ricochet around in my head as I came out of the church, hip-deep in the shadows of the other buildings, the sun well on its way west, plowing its path to the ocean that you couldn’t see from Sylmar. I hit the broken pavement of the parking lot, running a finger along the dust on Ruben’s purple neon and thinking about Herbie, and I almost had my hand on the door of my car before I saw the person in the passenger seat.

  I backed up, reflexively reaching for the gun at the base of my spine, but before I grabbed it the person leaned forward to look at me, and I saw it was a kid in a baseball cap, not more than thirteen or fourteen. He smiled and wiggled four fingers at me in a cheery little wave.

  Before I did anything else, I took a slow, deep-breathing 360-degree turn to survey the lot. No cars other than Ruben’s and mine, no one on the sidewalk, no one lurking in any of the doors to the remaining shops. No one anywhere I could see.

  The kid in the car mimicked me, looking around everywhere, and when he turned his back I saw the long, straight, black pony-tail hanging out of the opening at the back of the cap, saw the bright red ribbon tied around it to hold it in place.

  A girl.

  When she turned back to me and smiled again, I realized she wasn’t Latina. She was Asian, either Chinese or Korean. She had a sharp face, a fox’s face, with a tiny, pointed nose, the nostrils looking almost too narrow to breathe through, the cheekbones swelling above the delicate jaw to create a V-shape that was emphasized by the upward tilt of the eyes. She lifted a hand, palm down, and paddled with her fingers, meaning come on.

  I looked around the parking lot again and then opened the door—which was, of course, unlocked—and got in.

  She said, brightly, “Hi.”

  I said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Anime.”

  “Anna May?”

  “Anime,” she said. “You know, like the Japanese cartoons?”

  “I know what anime is. Anime what?”

  “Anime Wong.”

  I said, “You’re kidding.”

  She drew a question mark in the air, backward, so I could read it. “Why? Why would I be kidding?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Now, beyond the dubious name, who are you?”

  “I’m your guide,” Anime Wong said. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

  “To where?”

  “Shut up and she’ll tell you,” said the man behind me, who had been jammed down between the seats. Something cold parted my hair and touched my skull. “Forget about your gun,” he said, sounding like a hood in a 1930s movie, “and stop looking in the mirror. Just keep both hands on the wheel and go where Anime says. Are you capable of that?”

  I said, “Sounds manageable.”

  “If I have to shoot you,” he said, “she knows how to drive, and she’ll have the wheel before you’ve had time to kiss your ass goodbye.”

  Anime Wong’s eyes widened, apparently at the news that she knew how to drive.

  “I see,” I said. “And how about I jam the accelerator down with both feet and just take us across the center line? She going to whisk you out of the way of the oncoming truck after my spirit has departed?”

  “Monty,” Anime said, with the massive patience only a teenager can pack into a couple of syllables, “just park it, okay? Jeez, look at him. Even you’re scarier than he is.”

  “Give me the gun,” Monty Carlo said.

  I said, “No.”

  Anime Wong snickered.

  Monty Carlo said, “So …” and let it trail off.

  I said, “Is there someplace we really have to go? The tree house or something? If not, do you guys know where there’s some good Mexican food? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  I waited. The guy in the backseat didn’t brush his teeth enough, and he exhaled a kind of mossy vapor. I was analyzing its components when the gun, or whatever it was, stopped prodding my neck, and Anime said, “Out the driveway and make a right.”

  “Where were you going to make me go?” I said, once we were in traffic. There was no reply, and he was still sitting too low in the back for me to see him in the mirror without making a big deal out of it.

  My question was still unanswered three-tenths of a mile later. I said, “Did you actually have anyplace in mind?”

  He said, and he sounded like he was sulking, “I don’t plan on that level.”

  “Really. What level do you plan on?” No response. I might as well have been talking to myself. Anime shot me an amused glance, and then Monty cleared his throat.

  “Subaqueous,” he said.

  I waited for more, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

  Anime said, “Monty doesn’t always speak English”

  I said, “So I gather.”

  About half a mile farther west, Monty said, “Talking is old media.” He sat up a little, and I saw a high forehead with long brown hair pulled tightly back, perhaps in a ponytail. Maybe I was in the clutches of the Ponytail Gang. “Talk is never precise, and when it is precise, it’s usually untrue. Information gets re-prioritized by the brain or muddled by qualifiers or misshapen by emotions when it’s said out loud. Or it’s misheard. Not a problem in coding, not a problem in math. They can still be wrong, but they’re precise. And they’re rarely untrue. Untrue is just one form of wrong, right?”

  “Wrong, right,” Anime parroted. She was poking at numbers on a Samsung smart phone with a screen big enough for Lawrence of Arabia, and she put it to her ear and waited. “Hey,” she said. “Lilli.” Somebody obviously said something on the other end because Anime nodded. “Bonito’s,” she said into the phone. “About five minutes. Tout suite, whatever that means. Okay, we won’t pick you up.” She put the phone in her lap. “Lilli can walk,” she announced.

  I said, “Is that a dramatic development?”

  “No, silly. She just lives close to the restaurant.”

  “How did you guys know I was going to be there today?”

  “When you were here before,” Anime said, “I paid the guy who runs the surplus store fifty bucks to call us if he saw your car again. And to tell you I was a boy. But the real question is how we followed you there the first time.”

  Monte said, “Anime.”

  “But that’ll have to wait,” Anime said promptly, “until we’ve decided how much you can know about us.” She looked at the road ahead and gestured grandly. “Drive on, my good man.”

  Monty Carlo turned out to be almost as short as Anime, who was shorter than Rina, who was agonizingly aware that she was short for her age. Sure enough, his hair was yanked into a painful-looking ponytail, and there were threads of gray in it although I put him in his early thirties. If Anime had a fox’s face, Monty had a possum’s. I don’t mean to suggest it was sleepy-looking: just pale and weak-eyed and sharp-snouted, with a sparse mustache above a straggle of pointed teeth. An ill-advised soul-patch that might have escaped from a saxophonist sat off-center below his lower
lip. He had the furtive edginess of someone who had spent a large part of his life being surprised by everything that happened and had retired to a small dark room to get away from it all.

  As we eased into the booth at Bonito’s, which was clean and smelled promising, I could barely take my eyes off Monty’s arms. Beneath the short sleeves of his polo shirt, circa 1970, with the little alligator and all, they were densely scrawled with symbols, what I thought I remembered as square root signs, lots of Greek Sigmas, parentheses, curves, something that looked like the elongated, sloping “f” that indicates forte in music, and dozens of others, none of which meant anything to me. Sometimes the symbols were integrated with letters and numbers in long horizontal arrangements that looked a little like traditional equations, sometimes they were arranged in blocks. I couldn’t have read them under any circumstances, but in Monty’s case the tattoos spiraled up and down his arms so that only part of each grouping was visible at any time.

  He saw me looking and held up an arm, parallel to the table so I could see it better, making me feel like I’d been caught cheating on a test. “The language of God,” he said. “According to Richard Feynman, anyway.”

  “No wonder my prayers go unanswered.”

  He leaned toward me, and it felt aggressive. “Calculus doesn’t lie. Want to define the atmospheric effects of a sunset or the glinting of light on waves at the beach? This is the only way to do it.”

  “Don’t get him started,” Anime said. Her eyes shifted past me and lit up. “Hey, Lilli.”

  “Hey,” A new girl—new to me, anyway—slid into the booth next to Anime, swinging her hip to bump Anime a few inches farther in. It was a friendly bump, followed by an arm thrown over Anime’s shoulder. “This is him?” she said, sounding disappointed. She was Anime’s opposite, plump, blonde, with rounded features and eyes the bleached blue of a hazy sky. The eyes looked like she hurt easily.

  “I suppose I am,” I said. “You’re Lilli?”

  She gave me a half-second of judgment. When she spoke, there was a coolness in her voice that complemented the warmth in Anime’s tone. “I am. How old are you?”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “We’re fourteen,” she said, apparently meaning her and Anime. Anime confirmed it by nodding, and leaned her head on Lilli’s shoulder. Lilli patted Anime’s cheek and said, “It’s a shitty age.”

  “I’m sorry to report that I haven’t found a really good one yet,” I said. To Monty, I said, “I wasn’t expecting Campfire Girls.”

  “I could out-think you,” Lilli said, “with my frontal lobe running Windows Vista.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that what I have to talk to Monty about is something that people keep getting killed over, and I’m not going to bring you into it.”

  “They’re already in it,” Monty said.

  “Then I’d like to shove your face in,” I said.

  “Do it,” Anime said. “His nose and mouth stick out too far.”

  Monty had lowered his head slightly, and the look he gave me wasn’t the look of someone who would be afraid to emerge from the security of a dark room. “You don’t know anything about us,” he said. “And you’re not going to learn anything. This was a mistake.” He put his hands on the table, getting ready to slide out of the booth. “Move,” he said to me.

  “I’m going to eat, Monty,” Anime said. “And so is Lilli. If you leave, you’ll go crazy worrying about what we told Junior, since we’re just kids and all that and we’re not as smart as you are, which you tell us all the time. Anyway, he’s driving. What’re you gonna do, hitch? Hey, Maria,” she said, looking up.

  “Anime,” the waitress said. “Como estas? Salsa fresca, extra chips, carnitas with corn tortillas for you.” She put a basket of chips and two bowls of salsa on the table, pointed at the one nearer to me, looked at me, and fanned her mouth. “For Lilli, California Vegan burrito and rice, no beans, and for Genius here—” She nodded at Monty. “Carne asada, beans, no rice, sissy watered-down salsa, and for the tall, handsome stranger?”

  “If that’s me,” I said, “what do you like best?”

  “Sopes, we make the best except for my mother. My name is Maria.” She was a very tidy package, if that doesn’t sound too much like objectification, with eyes as black as olives but a lot more expressive.

  “I’m Junior, and the sopes will be great. And, por favor, more of the salsa picosa.”

  “You will remember it forever,” Maria said. “Coke, tamarind juice,” she said, pointing at Anime and Lilliput, “Corona for the genius, and you want?”

  “Black coffee.”

  “Done.” She was gone.

  “Well,” Anime said, packing the syllable pretty full. “No chit-chat. Do you get much of that? I mean, you’re nice-looking, but nothing to cut my wrists over.”

  Lilli said, “Swell talk.”

  “I need to finish what I was saying,” I said. “At least two people have already been killed because of this, and I don’t want to put you kids in the line of fire.”

  Lilli said, “Been killed because of what?”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said. “Do you two know anything about the chain old Monty here is part of?”

  “Yes,” they both said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  “Some crook—” Anime said.

  “—wanted Monty to set up—” Lilli said.

  “—some kind of scam,” Anime finished. “So he passed this envelope along.”

  “It wasn’t a scam,” I said. “It was a hit.”

  “I figured,” Lilli said, “for that much money.”

  “How much?” I asked Monty.

  He wasn’t liking this at all. “Forty-five hundred for me,” he said. “But what’s your interest?”

  “Do you know who the chain started with?”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Anime said.

  “If he did,” Lilli said, “why bother with the chain in the first place?”

  “How many links back do you go?” I asked Monty.

  He didn’t want to answer. He moved his fork around and then shook some salt on the table, pressed his forefinger to it, and licked it off. “Just one. Just Dippy.”

  “And how many after you?”

  He shook his head. “I’m it,” he said. “I’m the delivery boy to the technician.”

  “How do you know?”

  He picked up more salt and put his finger back in his mouth. “Your turn. Who got murdered?”

  “A con man named Handkerchief Harrison, who was link number two, not counting the guy who started the chain. And a burglar named Herbie Mott, who broke into the office of the guy who organized the chain.”

  “To steal what?”

  “A piece of paper with the names of the people in the chain written on it.”

  Lilli looked at Anime, her eyes enormous and her cool forgotten. “Holy shit.”

  “The guy who started this,” Monty began. He licked his lips. “He wrote it down?”

  “He’s getting old.”

  “And someone stole it. Why did he steal it?”

  “My guess? He wanted to know who was in the chain.”

  He looked quickly at Anime and Lilli, who were looking at me. “Did the people who killed him, did they, ummm, did they get the list?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think so, but then Handkerchief got killed.”

  “Why didn’t you think so?”

  “Because—” I looked at the girls, who both had their mouths open. “Because they tortured him but he died of natural causes—a heart attack, I think. They would have killed him. So I think he died before he gave them what they wanted.”

  “Tortured,” Lilli said. “Awesome.”

  “He was a friend of mine,” I said, “and I don’t think it was so fucking awesome.”

  “You’re friends with a burglar?” Lilli looked like I’d just admitted that both of my parents were dog walkers.

&nbs
p; “I’m a burglar,” I said.

  “Old media,” Monty said again. “Burglary is old media.” He looked down at his left arm and used his right index finger to trace one of the problems or equations or whatever they were. Without looking up, he said, “Then that’s why you’re involved? Because of your friend?”

  “I was being paid to figure out who stole the piece of paper,” I said, “until my client, the guy who started the whole thing, disappeared. No, I don’t think he’s dead, but listen to me, especially you two. He’s hiding, and he doesn’t scare easily. His number one back-and-forth, who also doesn’t scare easily, is missing, too. Herbie is dead, Handkerchief is dead, Dippy is hiding, and here you and the girls are sitting in Bonito’s, big as life.”

  “Whoa,” Anime said. “It’s kind of exciting.”

  “Drinks,” Maria said, slapping various things on the table. “You want a shot in the coffee, stranger?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Already in,” she said. She popped my deltoid muscle with a sharp knuckle. “For you, free.”

  “Wow,” Anime said, watching her go. “I hope you’re not married.”

  “We look online for money that isn’t glued down,” Monty said. He was in the front now as I drove, the two girls leaning against each other in the back seat like a couple of puppies. “Then we move it a dozen times in an hour or two until we’ve got it someplace we can put our hands on it without leaving fingerprints.”

  “For example.”

  “You’re going to turn left two streets from now. Example: most states run a fund that holds money from abandoned safety-deposit boxes. Someone dies or moves away and doesn’t keep up payments on the box, and sooner or later, the bank empties the box and holds the stuff for a certain amount of time, according to law, and then they turn it over to the state, which monetizes it—”

  “Monetizes.”

  “Sells it,” he said impatiently. “Turns it into money, you know money?”

  “Money,” I said. “Kind of old-media, isn’t it?”

  “The proceeds sit there in what’s called a suspense account for however many years it is until the state no longer has to accept a claim on the box, and then that money goes into the state’s general fund, so it can be spent on vote-buying and pork projects. A lot of money, some of those funds have hundreds of millions in them. Most states have crappy software. Getting in is as easy as sneaking into a movie.”