Herbie's Game (39 page)

Whatever I’d expected, this wasn’t it, and before I could stop myself, I’d said automatically, “I think it’s nice.”

Something odd happened to Bones’s mouth: the corners pulled outward, as though he was going bare his teeth, but then it went back to normal. It might have been meant as a smile. He said, focused again on the bag, “Thank you.”

“Really,” I said helplessly, locked in my mother’s
polite
mode. “I like it. Carpeting’s great.”

“I can fall down,” he said, “without breaking anything.”

“See?” I was desperate. “Umm, form follows function and all that. So, not to change the subject, you don’t like kids, but the kids outside, they—”

“
Los Niños
,” he said. The smile, if that was what it had been, was gone. “I pay them. They like money.”

“So if you hate kids so much, why did you shoot at the adults first, last night?”

“Bigger,” he said. “Easier to hit. And I figured you had the guns. Thought I could put you down and come in close to get the kids.” He must have seen something in my eyes because he gave a rigid little shrug and said, “Hey. You asked.”

I had to look away. I was examining the rest of the room, bubble-wrap taped to every corner, waiting for my heartbeat to
slow. He swallowed loudly enough for me to hear him, and I realized I had picked up the gun in my lap.

As long as I was holding it, I let the barrel drift toward him. When I met his gaze he closed his eyes.

“Was it Wattles who sent you?”

Now he crossed his arms. With his eyes squeezed shut, he said, “Please don’t hit me. Don’t shoot me.”

“Why would Wattles send you?”

Nothing.

“
Did
Wattles send you?”

He ducked his head, giving me a look at hair that looked like fat could be squeezed from it. “I can’t tell you.”

Putting the gun back in my lap, I picked up the bag and shook it. The rattling sound opened his eyes.

“Wattles,” I said, but I might as well not have been there. As far as he was concerned, the bag was floating in mid-air all by itself. I opened it and pulled out the white plastic container.

His jaw dropped. He leaned forward with a grunt, spine rigid, and said, “That’s ‘bows.”

“Rainbows it is,” I said. I gave the container a quick little up-and-down for the sound effect.

“A
whole jar
?” he said in the voice of someone who has just recognized the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.

“Yeah. Hundred of them.”

“I’ve never—” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, his eyes not leaving the container. “I’ve never seen a whole jar before.”

“Wattles,” I said.

“Rainbows,” he said.

I fumbled with the adult-proof cap while Bones fidgeted. By the time I had it off, only to confront an internal seal of that odd aluminum foil that’s elastic enough to push to the bottom of the
bottle without its breaking, he was muttering. I used my teeth on the foil like I always do, and shook some into the palm of my hand: at a glance, a dozen. “How many of these have you taken at once?”

“Twelve?” he said, looking at my hand.

I dropped three on the table and handed him the rest. He was swallowing by the time I said, “Water?”

He swallowed again, as though one of the gelcaps had stuck in his throat, emitted a sort of
kack
sound to clear it, swallowed again, and released a tremendous sigh. Then he sat back, and said, “Wattles.”

“Why did he send you?” I asked again.

Bones had closed his eyes again, very, very slowly, and I had the feeling he was preparing himself for the gradual change in climate, the very beginning of the capsules’ effect sliding in, like a cooling trend, beneath the heat and chatter in his mind. I was about to ask again when he said, “Wanted them dead.”

“Why?”

His eyes opened halfway and went to the pill container. “Scared. Thought someone would …”

“Would.”

“… would come up the chain. Kill him.”

“Who? Who would come up the chain?”

“Up the chain,” he said. “People who were pissed about the hit.”

“Me, too? He wanted me dead?”

He did that tortuous head-shake, the shoulders moving with it, and I realized that at some point in his past, his upper vertebrae had been fused. “Didn’t know you’d be there.”

“Who else does he want dead?”

He pressed his lips together like a child with a secret he won’t tell.

“Tell me, or I’m leaving. With all the rainbows.”

He looked at the three capsules on the table, orange on one end, blue on the other, a dirty purple where they overlapped in the middle. I had to admit they were kind of pretty, although I doubted they looked as good to me as they did to Bones. I pushed them toward him, and he tossed them back like jelly beans and dry-swallowed them.

“Kill everybody,” he said. “Everybody in the chain.”

“But not me?”

He shook his head again. “He didn’t say you. He said he was—” He closed his eyes. “
Disappointed
in you. That’s why he came back. ’Cause you didn’t fix it.”

“What about Janice?”

“He didn’t say a name like Janice.” He scratched the heavy, oily hair, licked his lips, and looked at the container. “I really took twenty. Before, I mean.”

I pulled the container closer. I wanted him unconscious when I left, but not dead. Too loaded to use the phone, too straight to die. “And have you? Killed the other people in the chain, I mean?”

“No. You guys were first.”

“And you missed us.”

He said again, “My hand shook.”

We sat and looked at each other, or rather I looked at him and he looked past me as though I were a pile of dirty clothes. He said, softly, “Ohhhhhhhhh,” and his eyes widened in what looked like appreciation. “Fast,” he said. “Haven’t eaten.”

“Since when?”

He looked at me as though I’d asked him a trick question. “Yesterday?”

“You really did twenty before?”

“Thirty,” he said, the lie as thin and transparent as air.

Someone knocked on the door.

I pulled the Glock out again and used it to wave him down although he’d made no move to get up. His eyes were on the white plastic pill container. I picked it up and went to the door, pills in one hand and gun in the other.

“Who’s there?”

A high voice said, “Me.”

I looked back at Bones and his mouth widened again. “Behave,” I said to him. I put the pills in my pocket, shifted my gun into my left hand, undid the chain, and opened the door.

The tallest of the girls stood there, backed up by three boys and the littlest kid, the one who had called Bones
El Monstro
. They all looked pretty jacked up, wide-eyed and skittish, but they were there, bless them, knocking on the door that had closed behind God-knew-who so he could do God-knew-what to their money source.

I said, “Hey,” and they said nothing. “We’re just talking, just friends,
amigos
, huh?” I pulled the door further open so they could see Bones on the couch. “See? Say ‘Hi,’ Bones.”

Bones raised one hand and waved slowly, as though he was under water.

I had a sudden idea. “Do you guys know he’s not eating?” I asked them.

The second-larger boy said, “He don’ eat never,” in accented English.

“Well, he needs to eat. Once in a while, bring him something if you’ve got extra, okay?”

“Did you?” This was the big girl, and her tone was accusing. “Did you bring him something?”

“Yes,” I said. “A bag of candy. You bring him something later, okay?”

She looked from Bones to me and back again. “Okay,” she said. She added, meaningfully, “We’ll come back.” She turned to
go and the others trotted behind in a herd, the setting sun gleaming off the dark hair on their round heads.

I closed the door. “When you were little, how did the kids at school know you were sick?”

“Because of these,” he said, pointing an index finger in the general direction of his eyes. “And because I moved so careful. Anybody could tell.”

“The blue in the eyes—is that the disease?”

“Sure.”

“Must have been tough.”

“Not after I got the knife. And then the gun.”

His speech was a little on the furry side, and he was sitting about ten degrees left of vertical, so the pills were obviously making themselves at home. I sat down again, opened the jar, and shook out eight more. “You said twenty, right?”

“Thirty,” he said. He looked at the pill bottle and said, “A jar, a jar is one hundred. Enough to take them all the way out. I never had enough to take them all the way out.”

“Well, we’ll see how good you are,” I said. “Maybe this will be Christmas.” I put the eight capsules on the table, and he snatched them up and popped them with surprising precision. I said, “You didn’t kill anyone else.”

“Killed a lot of people,” he said.

“But not this week.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Not anyone in Malibu.”

He stuck his tongue out to reveal two capsules glued to it. He pulled them off between his fingers and then separated the two shells of one capsule and poured the white powder onto his tongue. He was popping open the other one when I repeated, “Not anyone in Malibu.”

“No,” he said, his mouth white at the corners.

“You ever hear of a guy named Herbie Mott?”

“Don’t know.” He let his head loll back against the wall. “Not good with names.”

“Handkerchief Harrison?”

He laughed exactly once, a low sound like “Hungh,” and said, “Funny name.”

“He was a funny guy,” I said. Bones’s eyes drifted closed.

“When did Wattles tell you to kill the people in the chain?”

Bones said, “Huh?”

I reached over and patted the back of his skeletal wrist, and he snatched his hands back and his eyes snapped open, although they were trained on a spot four or five feet above my head. I raised a hand and brought it down slowly, and his eyes followed it. When he was looking approximately at me, I repeated the question.

“Today?” he said.

“You shot at us last night.”

“Then,” he said, and his eyes started to close again, but he fought them open again. “Then yesterday.” He squinted at me and shook his head as much as his fused neck would allow, and said, “You leaving the ’bows?”

“Yes.”

“ ’Kay. ’At’s good.”

“Did he call you? Wattles, did he call you?”

“No.” He started to slide slowly to the left.

“Then how did he tell you—”

“His house,” Bones said. He was lying on his left side now, both feet still on the floor. “Girl called me. Said to go to his house.” His eyes closed so heavily I knew he wouldn’t open them again for quite a while.

The girl, I thought, was my sweetheart Janice. I sat there for about ten minutes, listening to him snore. He hiccupped a couple of times, and I waited to see whether anything would
come up, but his system seemed to be accepting the shovelful of Tuinal. I got up and went into his kitchen.

I was standing there, trying to choose a course of action, when he said, quite clearly, “Brazil.” I jumped a little and looked over at him, wondering what fragment of Brazil his consciousness had snagged on, and kind of hoping it was magazine-bright, warm, full of color, and child-free. His mouth was wide open and he was snoring again. One stiff arm had slid off the couch, and his hand was palm-up on the soft carpet, open and vulnerable.

What to do? I worked myself through several theoretical ethical positions quite quickly and when I was finished, I couldn’t think of a single really serious objection to letting him kill himself. He’d said himself that he’d like to take the rainbows
all the way out
, and if that meant what I thought it meant, I didn’t see many reasons to interfere. It wasn’t like he was doing anything except killing people and poisoning himself.

And then there were the
other
people to think about, the unknown others he’d kill if I took the rainbows with me and left him there to sleep it off. Keeping them in mind, I went to the sink and took some paper towels off the roll that was standing beside it. I wrapped my right hand in them, and used that hand to turn on the water. With my left, I grabbed another wad of towels, got them wet, and squeezed out the excess moisture. Then I toured the apartment, wet-wiping everything I had touched, and by the time I’d finished doing that, I’d decided on a course of action.

I wiped the bottle of Tuinal and shoved it into the pocket of Bones’s awful black pants, where he’d feel it as soon as he was sentient, or close to sentient. I gave it a farewell pat and picked up the paper bag, into which I jammed all the paper towels I’d used. Covering my hand with my shirt, I turned on every light in the apartment.

When I pulled up the lid of Bones’s right eye, the eyeball barely moved. But he kept snoring and his pulse was strong, so I tucked the gun inside my shirt, unlocked the front door, and left it wide open behind me, carrying the full paper bag exactly as I’d carried it in. If anyone was looking, I’d arrived with something and now I was leaving with it. It was dusk outside, shading into dark, and the bright rectangle of Bones’s open door plus their promise to bring him food would, I was pretty sure, draw the kids, and they’d find Bones alive, or at least today’s version of alive. He’d probably kill himself in the next twenty-four hours, but not right after five children saw me go into his apartment.

Even as I struggled with the emotional aftermath of my decision, that seemed to have quite a bit to recommend it.