Herbie's Game by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: caper, detective, mystery, humor
ISBN: 9781616954307
Google: YGahAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2014-07-15T21:50:50.133000+00:00

What I didn’t want taken away from me was my sense of who Herbie was, who Herbie had been. It felt as though a big part of my life, the part of me that had chosen and then played Herbie’s Game, had been built on my sense of who Herbie was; by choosing Herbie’s Game I’d locked myself out of several alternative lives. I protected myself against what DiGaudio had said, for the time being, by surrendering to the beating Ting Ting had given me. First I stopped at Doc’s and had him improvise a long wire scratcher for the inside of the cast, which had been driving me crazy. He’d tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t even hold up my end of the conversation. Then, after half an hour of directionless driving, every possible direction feeling equally meaningless, I went to Bitsy’s Bird’s Nest, stamping extra hard on the stairs that chirped, took off most of my clothes, ate six aspirin, turned off my phone, and got into bed.

When I woke up, the rectangle of the world framed by the window was dark. Ronnie was sitting on the peacock-print couch, reading something.

“What’s that?” I said. My voice felt unused, like it had been folded too long in a drawer. I cleared my throat.

She held the book up. The title was The Deceived. “A thriller,” she said. “A guy named Brett Battles. He’s terrific.”

“What a masculine name,” I said. “Wonder what he’d be writing if his parents had called him Merle.”

“Not to mention Bender.” She dog-eared the page while I tried not to wince. “Means gay in British slang, did you know that? So your name is, basically, Young Gay.”

I said, “It’s been brought to my attention.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Terrible.”

“That kid would have beaten you up no matter what your name was. You could have been Biff Hardcase and you’d still be lying here, swelling.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “Well, okay, it is that. But it’s also what Sartre might have called malaise, and I call the heebie-jeebies.”

She put the book aside and got up, and I had the pleasure of watching five feet six inches of immaculately assembled womanhood cross the room, with the added savor of knowing she was heading for me. The pleasure of watching even the most interesting woman cross a room is dampened when they’re heading for someone else. She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up my left hand, which was resting on top of the covers, and began to massage as much of the hand as she could reach, given the plaster cast, focusing most of her attention on my fingers: taking them one at a time, smoothing them out, lengthening them, giving the tip a sharp tug and then moving on to the next. “Why do you have the heebie-jeebies?”

“Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m chasing my tail.”

She bent back my thumb and little fingers to open my palm and began to rub it deeply with both of her thumbs.

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