Herbie's Game (31 page)

“Sure,” she said. “I’d hate for you to have to get up while you’re not doing anything.”

When he had the pad, Monty wrote a number on it and handed it to me. His numerals were back-slanted, precise, and European, with crossed sevens. “This number is no longer in service,” he said, parroting a phone-company recording. “It was a throw-away phone, probably used only one time, to receive the call from the hitter, and tossed a day or two later. My guess is that the name of the victim and maybe a couple of identifiers were in the voicemail message
that answered the phone. Once it had rung and been answered, it probably got dropped off the end of a pier.”

“So we don’t even know the hitter’s name,” I said. “Much less the victim’s.”

There was no sound except for Lilli’s keyboard. I got up and yawned. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you back to your car.”

“Sort of a letdown, huh?” Anime said.

“Yeah.” I looked down at Monty, who was still tracing invisible digits on his pants. “Unless you’ve got another car here somewhere, you need to get into gear.”

“Thirty thousand,” he said, getting up. “That’s how much the hitter got.”

“Not bad,” I said. “Not absolutely first-rank, but not cut-rate, either.”

“C’mon, Lilli,” Anime said. She reached both arms out and stretched. “Caught your yawn,” she said to me through her own yawn. “This has been kind of exciting.”

Lilli rolled her chair back. “I think we might be able to get past South Dakota’s firewall.”

“Tomorrow,” Monty said. To me, he said, “They’re the wizards. I can find the money and I know how to make it jump around, but I haven’t got the chops to get it away from the states.”

“This is how we found you the first time,” Anime said. “You used your name on your first voice mail to Monte, and Lilli tracked down your address, where you don’t live any more, and found a back door into your Visa card, which you were using at that stupid motel. We also had your license plate, so we picked you up at the motel and followed you from there.”

“I still don’t approve,” I said, knowing how old I sounded and not caring. “These girls shouldn’t be committing felonies.”

Monty said, “Coming from you—”

“I know,” I said, “but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

Lilli got up and joined us at the door, and Monty turned the lights out and leaned down to pull the door up.

“What’s a hobgoblin?” Anime asked. “I mean, how is it different from a regular goblin?”

“If any goblin can be said to be regular,” Lilli said. Then she yawned, too.

“I always heard consistency was the
refuge
of small minds,” Monty said as we stepped out into the darkness. The moon floated in the sky, a little yellow slice of eternity, casting no judgment on the modern ugliness of the street it was decorating.

“Yeah, well people say
gild the lily
, too,” I said, “when it’s actually
paint
the lily.” I heard the door snick its way down behind me, and Anime and Lilli, stepping forward to get out from under it, were suddenly almost touching me.

Anime said, “Shut
up
, it isn’t paint the lily.”

“You two,” I said, hearing the locks snapping into place, “you smell just like my daughter.”

“How’s that?” Lilli asked, sounding suspicious.

“I knew you were married,” Anime said over her. “Poor Maria,” and then someone slammed the cast on my arm with what felt like a bat, and chips flew off it and Lilli said, “No,” and over her I heard the shot and then the second shot, and Monty went down sideways, slamming into Anime and pushing her into me. By then I had the gun out and I was running for the fence, running toward the muzzle-flash as Lilli and Anime began to scream behind me, but I knew I was wasting my time because the fence was going to stop me and he was already on the run and too far away to hit, tall, skeletal, sloping, in that black suit that looked like it had been stolen by an undertaker from a corpse: Wattles’s hitman, Bones.

“He’s going to need some blood,” Doc said, rolling down his sleeves. We were in his upstairs hallway, outside the guest bedroom he used for minor surgical procedures. Wadded up on the hardwood floor, looking like the carpeting in a slaughterhouse, was the shower curtain I’d ripped out of the bathroom in Monty’s office so I could prevent a bunch of incriminating DNA from soaking into the seats of my car.

“Can you get it?”

“I can get anything except type hh,” Doc said. “The Bombay phenotype. Lucky for him he’s not from Bombay. He’d be all alone in the emergency room. Only people with genetic roots in Bombay have hh blood.”

“The things I learn from you,” I said.

“He got off easy. The bullet went through the outer thigh, missed the femoral artery, just nicked the bone. Still got young, pliable bones, almost no splintering. Doesn’t say much for the other guy’s aim. But you have to know, Junior, this is going to cost. I’m going to have to get a blackballed nurse to stay with him all day, the blood’s expensive if you get it the way I have to, and then, of course, there’s me.”

“The kids’ pockets are jammed,” I said. Anime had grabbed
an amazing amount of cash, afraid that someone had called the cops and there might be a search.

Doc gave me a suspicious frown. “Why? How do girls this age come to have so much money on them?”

“They’re hackers,” I said. I flexed my newly naked left arm, still splotchy-white from the plaster of the cast, a sharp, flying piece of which had sliced Lilli. My arm felt cold the same way my jaw had when, long ago, I’d shaved off an ill-advised beard. “And they’re making a fortune.”

Doc said, carefully, “
Hackers
.”

“With computers.”

Doc blew out a lungful of sheer relief. “Glad to hear it.”

“I suppose.” I sounded a little sour, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “I need something else. Tuinal.”

“Rainbows, huh? I used to need them myself. Take enough of them, it was like being run over by a car made of wool. How many?”

“A full jar. A hundred.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Not for anyone I know, I hope.”

“Definitely not. But the guy they’re for, he’ll make good use of them.”

“For the record, I’m morally opposed to this,” Doc said. “And they’re expensive. Maybe twelve hundred bucks.”

“I’ll hit the girls up for it. How long?”

“Tomorrow. Anything else? Raw opium?
Salvia divinorum
? Some of the Oracle of Delphi’s special laurel leaves?”

“No, but thanks. For everything.” I put a hand on his shoulder and took it off again. For all his apparent affability, Doc wasn’t a touch-me guy. “Lilli’s good to go, huh?”

“Three stitches, real pretty ones if I do say so myself, but she’s going to hurt when the Novocain wears off. She’s a tough one. Never cried, didn’t flinch at the needle, watched
me take the stitches like I was sewing a handkerchief. They’re interesting kids.”

“They both break my heart,” I said.

“I’ll go to
Anime’s,” Lilli said from the back seat, where she was lying down. “My mom won’t care.” We were in the parking lot of a 7-11, and Anime was working loudly on a Slurpee. Lilli had a Dove Bar. I could smell the dark chocolate. Except for the scream when she’d been cut, Doc was right about Lilli’s toughness: she’d taken it all silently.

I said, “What are you going to tell her about your arm?”

“A dog bit me.”

“That high?”

“Okay,” Lilli said, as though to a small child. “It was a giraffe. She won’t even notice. I could grow a mustache and she wouldn’t notice.”

Anime, sitting next to me, made a little waving gesture, palm down, meaning,
Leave it alone
.

“So,” Anime said, hardly changing the subject at all, “are you married?”

“Divorced, but, you know, not available.”

Anime slurped, and Lilli cracked through the chocolate coating. With her mouth full, she said, “I liked the woman who loved the tree. It sounded calm.”

“Well, I’m glad you like calm, because you’re going to get a lot of it while Monty gets better. I don’t want you anywhere near the office until this is over. You both have computers at home?”

There was a long pause, which I interpreted as disbelief that I would even have asked the question. Finally, Anime said, “We can’t work from those computers, though. They’re not masked the way the ones in the office are.”

“North Dakota will wait,” I said. “They’re not going to
upgrade their software in the next few days. And I’ll give you something to keep you busy. Lilli, under the seat Anime is sitting in, there’s a black laptop. I want to know what’s on it.”

“Got it,” Lilli said. “So that’s how long you think it will be? Just a few days?”

“Yeah.”

“Until what?” Anime said.

“Until everyone who might hurt you is dead.”

This was a different silence, one that stretched out as I started the car and was broken by Anime saying, “That sounds, you know, definitive.”

“When you finish with that laptop, I need more help. I want you to comb every news source in the country for recent gunshot victims.”

“You’re kidding,” Anime said. “That’s like the population of California.”

“Parameters. Two shots, no more, probably at close range. Within one to two days after Monty dropped off that envelope. Not gang killings or drug killings or crazy guys in movie theaters or any of the trash-opera murders you see on the
Huffington Post
. It’ll almost certainly be one victim, an adult. The cops won’t name any suspects. It’s possible that he or she will have been popped with a small-caliber gun, maybe through the ear or the back of the head. It’ll be somebody interesting, probably someone with vague criminal ties, somebody you have the feeling there are questions about.”

“You want us to go into police databases?”

I said—and it took some effort to believe I was having the conversation—“Not from home.”

“What data do you want on the victim?” Lilli said, sounding a little more energetic.

“Whatever you get. But at a minimum, name, age, occupation,
location, details of the crime, a thumbnail of what’s known about him or her.”

“Picture?”

“If there is one.”

“By when?” Anime asked.

“Get me whatever you’ve developed by tomorrow—do you have school tomorrow?”

“I’ve been
shot
,” Lilli said.

I gunned the engine to make sure I had her attention. “No, you haven’t, and don’t talk like that or you’ll wind up in the center of a circle of cops. Schools have to take that stuff seriously. You were cut and you had stitches.” Suddenly, I felt like Fagin, and then immediately corrected myself: I felt like Herbie, indoctrinating two new apprentices. “Okay,” I said, “I don’t want to encourage you to skip school—”

The girls sighed heavily in unison, the hopeless sigh of adolescents faced with yet another clueless adult.

“—but if you do, give me whatever you’ve got by two tomorrow afternoon and then go back to it. Give me more rather than less. You never know which fact is going to jump out at me.”

“Until everyone who might hurt us is dead, huh?” Lilli said. “That’s cool with me.” She sat up and threw the stick from the Dove bar out the window, and I told myself not to get out and pick it up. “Let’s go home,” she said. “To Anime’s.”

Over the next twenty minutes, Lilli had yielded up a couple of clenched moans as the shots wore off. I had driven north and east from Doc’s house toward the girls’ neighborhood, and we were getting close. “I need you to tell me some stuff,” I said. “You said all the emails were addressed to Monty. Can you think of any way the people in the chain would know about the two of you?”

“No,” Anime said. “Just the email and those envelopes.”

“Did you ever meet anyone? Dippy, for example?”

“Uh-uh. I’ve never even heard her last name. Monty only ever met her like twice.”

“Three times,” Lilli said. She sounded like her teeth were clenched.

“Nobody’s ever been around,” I said. “No one ever came by.”

“Nothing like that,” Lilli said. “No one except us has ever been in the office.”

“Except you,” Anime said, “and the man who shot at us tonight.”

“It was pretty dark,” I said. “I don’t know what he could see. He probably wouldn’t recognize you again, even if he saw you in broad daylight. And I know no one’s been following us since Doc’s because I’ve had an eye on the mirror. So he probably can’t find you even if he’s supposed to.”