Herbie's Game (32 page)

“I suppose that’s encouraging,” Anime said. “I’m not used to being shot at.”

“Well, look. I want you to stay together for the next few days, and keep your eyes open—I mean wide open. Don’t go out any more than you need to. If you see
anything
, anyone who seems to be watching you, anyone who pops up in two or three places, you call me immediately, and I don’t mean in ten minutes or when you get around to it, do you understand?”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Lilli said.

“No, we can’t,” Anime said. “What could you do from wherever you’ll be?”

I said, “Here’s the drill. If you think you see someone, you get into a place with a lot of people in it—a restaurant or a library, someplace where you can sit for a while—and call me. Then just stay there. I’ll call back in a minute or two to tell you who’s coming for you.”

“
Coming
for us? You mean, like a superhero or something?”

“It’ll be a shooter,” I said. “A woman, probably. Or it’ll be me.”

“My, my,” Anime said. She folded her hands in her lap and crossed her ankles, the perfect little lady. “A woman shooter. Life is so interesting.”

“Time is it?” Louie said in the frog-voice of the recently awakened.

“I was going to ask you,” I said.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll call Stinky and ask him. He’ll be real happy to know I’ve got you on the line.”

“Jesus, I forgot about him.” I was on Highland, climbing the gentle hill of the Sepulveda Pass. There was almost no traffic.

“Don’t forget about him again. He’s called me five times today. Where’s Junior, where’s Ting Ting, where’s Ting Ting, where’s Ting Ting, where’s that motherfucker Bender? If I was you, I’d find out where Wattles went, and go stay with him for a while.”

“Stinky’s upset.”

“Crying, a couple of times.”

“Well, shoot. I don’t like Stinky, but that’s not good.”

“Can I make a suggestion? You’re showing pity, and pity says you’re a good guy, but fear will keep a good guy alive. I’d put my energy into fear if I was you.” He put his hand over the phone and said, “It’s just that asshole, Junior.” When he came back, he said, “Alice says hi.”

“Okay, I’m frightened. Do you know where Bones lives?” I checked the mirror for the fifteenth time. Nobody back there.
No transmitter on the car, either. I’d slid beneath it to look just around the corner from Anime’s apartment house.

“Near some cemetery, people say, but there’s a lot of them and I don’t know which one. Must be he likes cemeteries. Quiet neighbors, he likes the view. Like a banker probably likes looking at money.”

“And he can probably hit the dead when he shoots at them.” I told him what had happened.

Louie made the appropriate sympathetic noises and said, “He’s cheap labor, bottom of the barrel. People use him for the first try. If he makes the shot, fine. If he gets killed, fine.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five hundred, a thousand if his stash is low. A hundred if it’s empty.”

“Not thirty thousand.”

“Not.”

“Who would I go to, if I wanted to find him?”

“You would go to me,” Louie said, clipping the words. “And you would go to me at a reasonable hour.”

“How much time would I give you?”

“As long as it took,” Louie said. “But, me being me, it would probably take less than a day.”

“Starting now?”

“Starting after my first cup of coffee, tomorrow around nine. And look out for Stinky. I’m telling you, he’s half crazy.” He disconnected.

I looked at my watch, which I should have done before I called. Time had been compressed since Monty got shot, and I was startled to see it was quarter past one. The moon was now in the final third of its glide, dipping gracefully to the west, the pockmarks on its crescent face unusually sharp-looking through Los Angeles air, and they made me think of Ruben Ghorbani.

Conversion. The fire of God, the pure clean light of heaven, burning out the impurities. The Word blowing through him, the wings wrapped around him, the weight lifted from him. Weight is so often associated with sin. Witches sinking in seventeenth-century ponds, the
Quran’s
ounce of evil, Marley’s chains, devils cast down to the earth and straight through it, angels feather-light on the wind.

I’d never seen sudden redemption up close before. I suppose I wrote it off as spiritual fiction. I’ve always believed that the way people behave over time makes fold-marks on their character, like frequently-creased paper, and even if you can smooth them out temporarily somehow, those fault lines will crumple people back into their old shapes, their old behavior, under pressure. When I’d thought of salvation at all, I’d thought of it as a nightly stage effect mounted under bright light in the sweating tents of false prophets who headed nonprofit religious corporations. The hammer-like touch of God, the fall backwards into the arms of the waiting acolytes, the empty wheelchair, the crutches cast aside, the foresworn evil, the upraised hand of the man in the white suit, proclaiming the presence of the Lord—the only one who gets in free—while he counts the house.

But what had happened to Ruben was, or seemed to be, real.

People change
. Everybody says it but nobody believes it. I think that’s because most of us can’t really imagine other people as being much different from ourselves, and we feel—even after we’ve successfully changed our behavior—that our flaws, our stagnant pools and errant spirits, are still down there, running things. Our behavior is a new overcoat, persuasive, well-fitted, and attractive, but beneath it we believe we’re the same equivocal mess we’ve always been. Why should we think other people are different?

I’d believed most of my life that people’s basic character was
set by the time they were five or six, but I had a feeling Ruben Ghorbani wouldn’t agree with me.

To the extent that we
can
change, I’ve always felt that the best method is to picture ourselves as better in some highly specific way and then try to become that. Acting on it, I punched in a speed-dial number, and when Ronnie answered, I said, “I love you.”

“Careful, big boy,” she said. “You don’t know what’s on the other side of that door.”

“I just want it on the record,” I said. “I don’t want to have to tiptoe around it any more. It’s only a window-breaker the first time you say it, and now that’s over with.”

“Where are you? I can’t have the man who loves me rattling around somewhere, getting into trouble.”

“Ten minutes away.”

“Barring catastrophe.”

“I already got shot at tonight,” I said. “I think I’ve had my taste of catastrophe for the evening.”

“If you’d been hit,
that
would have been a catastrophe. Who did it?”

“Bones, that zombie who came to the door with Wattles.”

Ronnie said, “Oh,” and I could practically hear her thinking. “Do you think this was a forceful way of telling you you’re fired?”

“I think it was an accident that I was there at all. What it looks like to me is a continuing effort to kill everybody in that chain.”

“But Bones is Wattles’s guy, isn’t he?”

“He’s freelance. My feeling is that Wattles might use him as a threat—he has a nice Halloween presence—but I
think
Wattles would trust an actual whack to someone who could hit something. There were four of us there tonight, and Bones
didn’t get a good hit in from point-blank range. Way off-center and way low. Managed to graze one guy’s leg with one shot, and the other somehow missed both me and the girl standing eight inches away from me.”

“Really,” Ronnie said.

“She’s fourteen. She’s a nerd.”

“That was pure habit,” she said. “What I said just then, that was a reflex. I should slap myself. You got shot at and you’re okay. You just told me you love me.”

“I did.”

“Well, come home,” she said. “Let’s see what we can do with that.”

I confess. I accelerated.

Ting Ting blinked into the light, looking like someone who’d just seen the sun for the first time. The sun was, in fact, sitting on my shoulder from his perspective, low in the sky behind me this early in the morning, and I imagined it had been years since he’d been up at this hour. Stinky rarely went to bed before the paper landed on the lawn.

I said, “Hi.”

He screwed up his eyes at me in obvious pain, and then he stood aside and shielded them with his hand and said, “Come in.” As I passed, he said, “Arm better?”

“Miracle drug,” I said.

He pushed the door closed against the sunlight and looked at his watch. “Yipe,” he said, using the rare singular form. “Eaglet, she sleeping.” He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing loose pajama pants, apparently silk, that had slipped low over his nonexistent hips. He seemed to have a surplus of slenderness, if that’s possible, and his skin was the kind of gold that we of English and Irish heritage can get only at the risk of basal cell carcinoma. All in all, I thought as I followed him down the entry hall, once you got past the fact that he could kill you with a blink, he was a positive variant on the usual run of humanity—compact in an environmentally friendly, essentials-only kind of
way, shiny, and graceful. I could see why Stinky wanted him back and Eaglet wanted him here.

The hall had been painted a pale gray to bring out the warmth of the floor, a highly-finished, light-bouncing bamboo. The hallway opened, a few yards down, into a bright living room, obviously full of window, probably looking south to the sea. Eaglet lived in an upper-middle-rank condominium on a palm-lined street in Santa Monica that I figured at a million two if she’d bought it and seven thousand a month if she was renting. Crime in general may not pay, but murder does.

The place was bare in an intentional way; it wasn’t that the people who lived there didn’t have stuff, it was just that they liked space better. In place of the lava lamps and Fillmore West posters Eaglet’s personal style had led me to expect, there were good Japanese woodblock prints, mostly birds and flowers, that were framed in matting of muted colors set inside bamboo frames that picked up the pale hues of the floor. A gorgeous set of cedar
tansu
, matching Japanese chests from the Meiji era, late nineteenth-century—possibly authentic, but if not, extremely good fakes—were stacked to create a ziggurat effect against the right-hand wall, and on each of the horizontal surfaces rested a dark gray clay vase bearing a single tall stalk of tuberose.

“Smells good,” I said.

Ting Ting wrinkled his nose and waved his hand under it as though the fragrance were too heavy for him. “Eaglet like.” he said.

“You don’t?”

“Have too much in Philippines,” he said, pronouncing it
Pilippines
, as he led me into the living room. “My home, Palawan, have too much. Smell, smell, smell, everywhere.”

I sat on a low leather couch, one of a matching pair facing each other over a long table, a four-inch-thick slab of teak, probably ripped illegally from one of the remaining Cambodian
hardwood forests. On the table was yet another vase, this one celadon-green, with two white lilies in it, and at a precisely casual diagonal was a gaily-colored magazine that turned out to be the latest issue of
Guns & Ammo
.

“I need to talk to both of you,” I said.

“She sleeping,” Ting Ting said again, but then he lifted his head and looked past me, and his eyes caught fire.

“I’m up,” Eaglet said, coming into the room. She was holding a floor-length floral wrap closed with her hands, and when she let go of the edges to retrieve the ties, I got a long pale flash of thigh and hip. When I raised my eyes from the leg to her face, she was looking directly at me, hard-eyed as a marketer gauging a product’s impact, and for the first time I felt like I was seeing the person who pulled the trigger.

The recognition passed between us, a snappy little electrical arc in the air, and we were, for an instant, not just Eaglet and Junior, but the only pros in the room. Ting Ting was gaping at her almost as fervently as he had the night they met.

“Doesn’t he blow your mind?” Eaglet said, retreating back to the 1960s. “He’s so cherry it hurts.”

Ting Ting said, “Cherry?”