Herbie's Game (24 page)

“I don’t know why not. He’s already tried once.”

“I thought he and Ting Ting were a couple.”

I got up, too, although I didn’t know why. “I’m sure they are, in Stinky’s mind. But Ting Ting is a poor, probably
very
poor, Filipino kid who’s suddenly living in a mansion. There could remotely, just possibly, be an element of fiscal calculation in his affection for Stinky. I mean, come on, he’s
Stinky
. The world’s most hydraulically streamlined face, a heart you couldn’t find with an electron microscope, and an endless lust for stuff. One long
gimme gimme gimme
.”

“I’ll bet Ting Ting found his heart.” She effortlessly picked up her purse, which I could hardly lift. “What happens if Stinky tosses him out?”

“I suppose he’ll move in with Eaglet, which should be interesting. Anyway, she can protect him if Stinky gets vindictive and sends someone to—you know. Louie says she’s good with that gun.”

“He could teach martial arts,” she said.

“Well, by now Stinky should be sitting in the living room, tapping his foot and looking at his watch. Hey, you were going to tell me about Trenton.”

“Was I?” She stepped back, putting physical distance between herself and my reminder. “Let’s not just drive,” she said. “Let’s drive to my place. Just in case. I feel like this place is lighted up in fuchsia on Google Maps with the legend
JUNIOR
’
S HERE
.”

“Fine. Go ahead. I’ll, uh, I’ll meet you.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Nothing is less attractive than a moping man.”

“Well, then,” I said energetically, “how about
this
? You drive and I’ll
meet you later
.”

“Much better.” She went to the closet and took out the Glock and slapped it into my hand. “Me and Eaglet,” she said. “Protecting our men.”

“From what?”

She opened the door. “From Trenton.”

We hadn’t been
on the road for more than a minute, she a few car lengths ahead of me in her drab little Esoterica or whatever it was, built by the glum mechanics of the former Soviet bloc, when I remembered that I’d turned my cell phone off when I went to bed, much earlier that day. I powered it on, keeping it low in my lap so as not to attract the attention of a cop eager to write a big fat ticket to help offset the city’s burgeoning deficit. The screen said,
THREE NEW VOICE MESSAGES
, and then the phone rang.

Ronnie said, “So as not to waste the time it takes us to get there, why is this Monty Carlo so important to you?”

“Theoretically, Wattles’s chain ended in the hit man. I’ve followed it from Wattles to Janice to Handkerchief to Dippy Thurston, who has now vanished if she took my advice. Dippy handed
it off to Monty, who in turn either delivered it to the hitperson or to the person who was supposed to deliver it to the hitperson.”

“It’s so low-tech it’s almost endearing.”

The words
low-tech
hung there in the air for a moment, shimmered and then disappeared like a shower of glitter. I said, “Wait a minute.”

“Sure.”

We maintained radio silence for a couple of blocks, and then she said, “You’re somewhere else, aren’t you? What are you thinking about?”

“Low-tech,” I said. “This morning someone got into my car with a jiggered remote and left a note on my windshield with Kathy’s and Rina’s birthdays on it.”

“There are car thieves who use scanners now. They wait in a parking lot until someone boops his car locked, and the scanner records the frequency of the signal, so they can duplicate it on their own remote and open the car.”

“How do you know about this?”

“So soon you forget. Donald, the guy who got me out of either Trenton or Albany and drove me as far west as Chicago, was a car thief. I helped him boost three of the cars we used on that run, and I kind of liked it. It was exciting in a not-very-enlightened way. I keep up with the field, I guess you could say. Anyway, that’s the new thing, the boop scanner, but it’s not exactly low-tech.”

“No,” I said. “And those birth dates, getting those wasn’t low-tech, either.”

“And?”

“And I’ve been knocking on Monty Carlo’s door and he’s been ducking me. I suddenly remember that Dippy said he was some sort of brainiac crook. Maybe a hacker?”

“Could be.”

“And, who knows? Maybe my attempts to get in touch with him have scared him. He’s probably read about Herbie and Handkerchief by now, and Dippy isn’t answering his calls, and maybe he figures
I’m
the one who’s yanking all those links out of the chain, and he’s next. So he’s trying to scare me away.”

“Or maybe he’s the one who killed Herbie and Handkerchief. Maybe he was the hit person at the end of the chain, and since things have gotten out of hand, he’s decided to erase the chain.”

“Could be,” I said.

“But you don’t think so. I can hear it in your voice.”

“No. I think if he were the killer, he’d have arranged to meet me someplace where he could waste me without a lot of effort. Instead, he’s trying to chase me away. And he seems to have a helper who’s a kid, a Hispanic boy. Kids are natural hackers.”

“A kid?”

“Twelve or thirteen, according to the shopkeeper who saw him go into my car. Skinny, dark-skinned, baseball cap.”

“That gets it down to about two and a half million possibilities.”

“I need to make a couple of calls,” I said. “Do you want to pull over or just go ahead and meet me at your place?”

“I’ll stop and pick up some coffee, and replace some of the things that’ll be rancid by now, like milk. See you there.”

She rang off and I pulled over and brought up my voicemail. First was Rina with information about Edward Mott, Herbie’s estranged son, who was currently a salesman at a Toyota dealership in North Hollywood, so who says there aren’t second acts in American lives? He’d gone from Hondas to Toyotas, although he hadn’t been promoted to floor manager or whatever was above
salesman
. She gave me the address and told me she’d emailed me the URL for his Facebook page so I could see what
he looked like, and that I owed her sixty-eight dollars, which seemed high to me.

The second message was DiGaudio, who said, “Your guy will be here tomorrow afternoon at four. Just come in and ask for me.” Then he coughed a few times, said, “Ohhh, shit,” and disconnected.

The third was from Dippy Thurston. “Just seeing how you are,” she said, “and wondering if there was any news.” Even her voice was elfin. “This is a throw-away phone and I’m throwing it away, so don’t call me back. And don’t bother looking for me, either. I’ll call tomorrow.”

Well, at least
someone
was alive, or had been in the last eight hours. My watch volunteered the information that it was 10:44. I called Rina anyway.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just this second fell asleep.”

“If you were asleep, how do you know it was just this second?”

“The same song is on Spotify.”

“What the hell is Spotify? Sounds like an acne treatment.”

“It’s an Internet music channel. I created a bedtime station called
SNOOZE
.”

“Speaking of the Internet, how hard is it to find a hacker?”

“Too many variables for a decent answer,” she said. She yawned. “Is he like a stealth hacker or a showoff? Two completely different types. Stealth hackers are totally hard to trace. They’ve got names behind names and they’re browsing through a whole series of proxies, one proxy strung to another, probably on different continents so they can mimic IP addresses from anywhere in the world.”

“If you say so. You want to give it a try?”

“Sure, it’s money. What have you got?”

“A name, but probably not a real one. Monty Carlo.”

“Gee, you think? Monty with an
e
or a
y
?”

“Y.”

“Very brand-name. What else?”

“He’s got tattoos.”

“Whoa. Maybe you haven’t seen any bare arms lately.”

“I mean, unusual tattoos. Math. Cosines and stuff.”

“Calculus,” she said. “Huh, that’s modestly interesting. The Monte Carlo Method, spelled with an
e
, is a pretty famous piece of calculus. It’s a way of predicting the outcome in a situation with a large number of apparently random variables.”

“Do tell.” If I said something every time she amazed me, she’d become impossible.

“It was invented in the 1940s by a physicist who was sick and couldn’t go to the office, which was like Los Alamos, since he was working on the atomic bomb? Do you remember any of this?”

“The atomic bomb,” I said. “These days it sounds almost quaint.”

“So he was sitting at home, probably in bed, playing solitaire, and he wondered how he might go about predicting the probability of any specific game’s being winnable. What I like about people like this is that he really didn’t care how the game would come out or whether he could win or what the odds were. What he cared about was how he might approach a solution.”

I said, “My turn to say huh.”

“Yeah, huh. So, to continue my story, which I’m pretending interests you, when he got back to the lab, he showed his algorithms to his boss, who named the solution after the famous casino in that little micro-country, and later someone else programmed it into this, like, ice-age computer called ENIAC so he could run it.”

“That’s extremely helpful,” I said. “I wish I’d been making notes.”

“It’s still used for certain kinds of calculations. Monte Carlo,
not ENIAC. ENIAC had about as much power as an alarm clock and it was as big as the Pentagon, and I’m talking about all this because I think I may have heard of this guy, Monty Carlo I mean, not ENIAC. I think he could be right out here somewhere, here in the Valley. Some kid was talking about him.”

“He may work with kids,” I said. “He sent one, I think, to break into my car.”

“Yeah? Scan the frequency on your remote?”

“Why does everyone know about this but me?”

“You know lots of things the rest of us don’t,” she said. My own daughter, soothing my ego. “Really. Lots of things. Lots and lots.” She yawned again, in my ear this time. “Is that it? Can I back go to sleep now?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. “This is gonna cost you.”

She hung up. I sat in my car, running my own probabilities. If I was right, if Monty Carlo had dug up that info to frighten me rather than to threaten me, I could give myself permission to relax, just a little. Of course, I had no way of knowing whether I was right. There could be a bullet streaking for my head at that very moment.

I ducked, just in case, and then started the car back up and headed for West Hollywood and Ronnie.

The last thing my father said to me before he left for good, with his car idling in the driveway, full of his clothes and books, was, “You’ll understand all this when you’ve grown up.”

The last thing I said to Rina before I left her for good, with my car idling in the driveway full of my clothes and books, was, “You’ll see. It’s not going to be so different.”

The last thing Herbie said to me before I left for good, my car idling in his driveway, waiting to take me to whatever long-forgotten thing was more important than spending time with him, was, “See you later, kid.”

We’d all been wrong.

People are wrong so often, and things break so easily.

Leaving for good
. What a concept.

When I asked
at the dealership for Edward Mott, the guy at the front desk said into his microphone, “Eddie, Eddie Mott, come to check-in.”

I said, “Eddie, huh?”

“Eddie here, Eddie probably everywhere in the world,” the desk guy said. His nametag read
MICHAEL
, so he had the credentials to turn up his nose at nicknames.

Behind me, someone said in a reedy tenor, “Help you?”

I turned to see a man who looked like the Herbie I first knew, if he’d been freeze-dried for a couple of decades. He was small, although on him it was the kind of smallness that can seem precise and fussy, while Herbie, once I’d gotten to know him, had always seemed to be about my height, even though he wasn’t. He had the same receding hair, neither red nor brown, and the same four-pound nose, which the rest of his features had gathered to worship. But where Herbie’s eyes had always given me the unsettling impression of being slightly closer to me than the rest of his face, as though he were wearing strong reading glasses, Eddie’s were distant and underpowered, the kind of eyes that didn’t consider anything very closely and probably didn’t remember much of what they’d looked at.

Or they might have been the eyes of someone who just didn’t give a shit.

“Eddie,” I said. “Can I get a minute of your time?”

The left eye tightened for an instant, just a little pull on the muscles beneath the lower lid, and he said, “Maybe trade it to you for your name.”

“Eddie,” the man behind the desk said, “the gentleman is looking for a C-A-R.”

Eddie reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty. He slapped it on the desk and said, “Twenty bucks says you’re wrong. Want to match it?”

I said to the man behind the desk, “Save your money.” To Eddie, I said, “My name is Junior Bender.”