Free Herbie's Game by Timothy Hallinan Page A

does Monty live?”
    She shook her head, her lower lip poked out. “Uh-uh,” she said. She dropped her cigarette to the pavement, leaned over it, and spat on it to put it out. When she straightened up, she had the little gun in her hand, aimed at the pocket of my T-shirt. “For that, I think I need to check you with Louie.”
    Three glasses of lemonade later, the last two of them enlivened with a moderate shot of vodka, I was back in the car, which was pulled to the curb about two miles from Dippy’s house. The last hour or so of our conversation had been a lot more relaxed than the first one. Through my windshield the houses’ shadows stretched into the middle of the street, so with Daylight Savings Time in effect, it was getting late, a little after seven. I had the address where Dippy had left the envelope for MontyCarlo—she claimed they hadn’t actually met this time—and the note that had been in Dippy’s envelope, which contained the phone number she had used to reach Monty.
    The day felt twenty-four hours long, even though it had only been eight hours since Wattles had barged into Ronnie’s and my room, interrupting what had looked like a very promising day. Since then, I’d driven probably sixty miles and found my adoptive father dead.
    Marking, I supposed, the end of one phase of my life.
    I was on a street only a few blocks away from Kathy and Rina’s house—once mine, too. If this was an appropriate time to think about the phases of my life, I was in an appropriate place to do it, because that house, so close and so unrecoverable, encapsulated one phase, maybe the happiest. The way I saw it, sitting there, my life had gone through four phases, with the fifth beginning with the discovery of Herbie’s body: first, a generic childhood, just freckles and stepping barefoot on sharp stuff, like everyone else; second, the development of my career, when I broke into the house next door and later met Herbie and began to get good at Herbie’s Game; third, the years when Kathy and I were in love and trying to make it work—she trying harder than I, I’m afraid—culminating in Rina’s birth and the first ten years of her life, the only perfect thing I ever had a part in. Fourth, the Unhappily Solo Years, after Kathy and I gave up in despair. That period finally culminated in my shuttling from one temporary uncomfortable bed to another, recently while holding hands with Ronnie; and now, the Post-Herbie period, which had dawned, as far as I was aware, a little after one that afternoon.
    Even though I hadn’t seen much of Herbie lately—an omission that sat on my conscience like a weight—life without him was feeling pretty damn empty. It felt empty enough to draw me close to Kathy’s house because I derived a kind of dull comfortfrom being in the neighborhood, even if I couldn’t actually see her and Rina. So it was almost a woo-woo moment when the phone rang and the display said RINA .
    “Hi, Daddy,” she said as my heart filled with helium and floated to the top of my chest. “Can you come by? Some messenger just dropped something off for you.”

Kathy had met me at the door, taken one look at me, and said, “What’s wrong?” and I’d told her, and she’d thrown her arms around me and said, “Come in, come in. You poor thing.”
    I’d underestimated her again.
    Now I was in the living room—a room I hadn’t sat in since the day I toted my suitcase to the car—and Rina was at the other end of the couch, her hands clasped, palm to palm, between her knees, a glass in front of her. To my amazement, I’d been invited to dinner. Kathy was rattling things in the kitchen, refusing offers of help so Rina could work her magic on me, and I’d already blinked away tears twice.
    “Aren’t you going to open it?” Rina said. In front of me, on the marble-topped coffee table, was a thick envelope made of a heavy, creamy paper so swell that trees probably competed to be pulped for it. The upper