Herbie's Game Read Free Page B

that part. And no,” I said to Ronnie, “she and I never—”
    “They didn’t,” Wattles said. “Janice has a boyfriend who breaks noses.”
    “And then there was me,” I said, “not chasing her or anything.”
    “Someone was in my office last night,” Wattles said. “Waltzed through my inner locks like they were bobby pins.”
    “What are those?” I said. “A Rabson, a Heilmacher, and—”
    “A Steenburg. And that kind of smart-ass attitude is why I thought of you.”
    “Not the talent?”
    “He didn’t bother to re-lock anything.”
    I said, “Oh,” not liking the feeling in the pit of my stomach.
    “And just in case it
is
you and you’re shitting me,” Wattles said, “there’s Bones out there.”
    “Sort of cut-rate for you, isn’t he?”
    “Don’t take a high IQ to pull a trigger.”
    “At the rate he processes information, I could shoot him five or six times before he remembers where his gun is.”
    “Yeah,” Wattle said, “but he wouldn’t notice.”
    “Well, I didn’t do it. I know that’s a cliché in our trade, but it’s true.”
    “Fine. I believe you. Find out who did.”
    “You believe me?”
    Wattles said, “Who gives a shit? You either took it or you didn’t. I’m offering you money to get it back to me either way.”
    “How much money?”
    “Ten K.”
    “Gimme.”
    Wattles leaned back to get into his pocket, and Ronnie lifted her feet in the air and rolled onto her side, knees drawn up in her favorite sleeping position. My lower chakra gave out a whimper of denial.
    “Here’s five,” Wattles said. “Five more when you deliver it.”
    “You have no idea,” I said, “how reluctant I am to take this.”
    “Yeah, but you’re crossing the room. You got your hand out.”
    “Don’t push it,” I said.
    Ronnie said, “You don’t know what he’s giving up to do this for you.”
    “Maybe not,” Wattles said, “but there’s Bones out there, too. Gotta have some weight in your decision.”
    I took the money from his hand and made a big show ofcounting it. Then I counted it again as Wattles fidgeted. After I’d folded it and put it in my pocket, I said, “What’d they take?”
    Wattles glanced over at Ronnie, who was reading the label on her nail polish bottle, and leaned toward me. In a very low voice, he said, “My disconnects.”
    I said, and I’ll admit it was the stupidest thing I’d said in days, “Disconnects are people. How could—?”
    After two false starts and some lip-licking, Wattles said, “I wrote them down.”
    “You wrote them
down
? Your
disconnects
? On
paper
?” All those italics are justified, because this went to the very heart of what Wattles did. He liked to describe himself as a full-service crook, but what he was, really, was a contractor. He’d arrange anything, from a cautionary faceful of knuckles or a modest supermarket fire all the way up to a whack, for the right fee. The art of what Wattles did was what he called
disconnects
—a chain of intermediaries between him and the crime.
    Let’s say you paid Wattles to hit someone and sponge up afterward. Wattles would put together a chain of disconnects—all crooks of various kinds—and he’d use a go-between, usually, the very Janice we’d just been discussing, to pass a big thick envelope to the first disconnect in the chain, who, having no idea who Janice actually was, didn’t know she’d been sent by Wattles. Disconnect number one would take the money inside and pass a somewhat smaller envelope, still sealed, to the disconnect to whom the envelope was addressed, who hadn’t even seen Janice, so he or she was one more step in the dark from the point of origin. This little relay would continue, a smaller sealed envelope at each link in the chain like Russian nesting dolls, until the smallest one reached the far end of the chain: the talent, who would know nothing about who hired him or why—nothing at all, in fact, but the name of the corpse-in-waiting. Each