Herbie's Game Read Free

a carved wooden bird, clumsily painted red, white, and blue. The whole thing had been glued to a piece of low-budget metal which had, in turn, been glued to a rusty safety pin. The metal of the cage was tarnished and corroded, an uneven spiral that looked like it might have begun life as a watch spring. There was a hair in the glue, and the colors of the paint had faded. Neither the carving nor the painting of the bird was exactly skillful, but it had a certain raw attitude, an improbable vitality.
    She touched the tarnished cage and the bars wobbled. A self-respecting parakeet could have busted out in seconds. “Why would you take this?”
    “They were together in the box. I thought I’d take them together, try to figure it out.”
    “I like it better,” she said. “Want to give me this one?”
    “Would it affect the way we spend the next ninety minutes?”
    “Naw. You’ve been good enough. And, although I’ll deny this if you tell anyone I said it, we women experience the occasionalmeat-dance urge, too, when we’re in the company of a competent but not too dominant male who smells good and has nice manners and a knack for abstract thinking. In a pinch, forget the thinking. Let me look at that for a minute while my nails dry.” She extended her right hand, the one she’d done first, palm up, and I put the handmade birdcage into it. She brought it up close to her face, looking down at it, and said, “The fancy one is pretty. But this one is beautiful.”
    “You’ve got a fine eye.”
    “I already told you I’d honor your ticket.”
    “I need to get someone to look at it. Someone who’s not Stinky.”
    “Oh, just take him some flowers.”
    “He hired a guy to
kill
me.”
    “Orchids, then.”
    Somebody knocked on the motel room door. Not aggressive, but confident. I snatched the homemade brooch from her hand and dropped both of them into the jewelry box, which had a label from a chain of budget stores on it, and motioned to Ronnie to do one more button on her blouse, not because she really needed to, but because I wanted to watch. When the show was over, I went to the closet and got my Glock out of the holster that was dangling from the coat hook on the inside of the door. Then, holding the gun in the hand I kept behind the door, I pulled it open and felt my stomach sink.

“Junior,” Wattles said in that voice of his, a torn speaker at the bottom of the sea. He looked out of place in the sunlight, like an animal that’s been unexpectedly yanked inside-out. What with his bum leg and us being on the third floor, his forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. If the color of his face was an accurate indication of his blood pressure, it was a miracle he hadn’t exploded.
    “Wattles,” I said in welcome. “How the hell did you find me?”
    “Aaahh,” he said. “Lemme in.”
    I stepped aside and he pushed past me, short and tilting left, giving me a birds-eye view of a sparse floss of hair that was no advertisement for his colorist. It was a shade of orange a bee would scorn.
    “Didn’t know you had company,” Wattles said. “Pretty little thing, ain’t you?”
    “Oh, thank you, sir,” Ronnie said, tilting her head to the right and touching an index finger to her cheek,
Sunnybrook Farm
style. Then she put the top on the bottle of nail polish and gave all her attention to screwing it on.
    “Listen, Junior—”
    “As I said, how the hell did you find me?” My monthly motel moves have been keeping me alive for more than a year now,but people have been tracking me down lately with distressing frequency.
    “Junior,” he said. He glanced around the bird-saturated room, and his eyes doubled in size, making him look like a man who had gone to sleep in Pittsburgh and awakened in the Emerald City. “Jeez,” he said. “Does the restaurant serve anything but eggs?”
    Ronnie said, “Restaurant?”
    I said, “How did you—”
    Wattles made a sound I would, if pressed, spell
tchssssss
.