Herbie's Game Read Online Free PDF

things they hate. My mother workspart-time in a restaurant and hates it. My father—” I stopped talking and rubbed my eyes. The restaurant was too bright.
    “Your father.”
    “My father is a full-time asshole. And he hates that, too. His friends hate what they do, the way they are. They get drunk on the weekend and talk about when they were young and free and then go back to sucking it up on Monday. I’m not going to live that way.” My eyes were still bothering me, and I rubbed them again. “I want to feel alive. It’s like you’ve got the map to a place that’s a long way away from my parents’ world. And you’re offering to guide me, and I’m going to do whatever I have to that will convince you to do that.”
    “Let me tell you something,” Herbie said. “Two somethings. First thing, this can turn into a job, same as anything else. The people who need it to be a thrill for a long time are the people who get caught or killed.” He put both hands flat on the table and raised his eyebrows, waiting until I nodded to confirm that I’d gotten the point. “Second thing, don’t think you know everything about your father. You loved him at one point, I can tell, because you wouldn’t be so angry now if you hadn’t. Well, the father you hate now is the same person as the one you loved. Just don’t—put people in boxes like that. You have no idea whether you really know someone. You got all that?”
    I said I did, although I hadn’t really listened to anything he’d said after the word “father,” and three nights later I served as his lookout again and earned another five bills and the second lecture. Ten days after that he took me into the house of a best-selling female writer with a fondness for expensive costume jewelry and gave me my first lesson in sifting the wheat from the chaff. I picked it up quickly.
    It was years before I got over hating my father. But in the meantime, I had Herbie.

The broken glass door told me everything I didn’t want to know.
    It was a slider, and Herbie, like all good burglars, had put a steel rod in the track on the inside to prevent some amateur from jimmying the lock and trying to slide it open. Like all
very
good burglars, he’d also had the door triple-paned, but that hadn’t worked either. The large landscaping stone in the middle of the dining room floor, maybe 150 pounds’ worth, had gone through the three layers of glass as though they’d been wet Kleenex.
    I knew what I’d find, but I had to go in anyway. I pulled off my shoes and slipped my feet into jumbo-size baggies, put on a pair of disposable food-handling gloves and tucked the Glock into my pants. I barely paid attention to the broken glass beneath my feet until I heard Herbie’s voice in my ear: “Don’t forget, kid, they got that DNA now.”
    Out loud, I said, “Thanks, Herbie.” My voice was hardly shaking at all.
    The glass door was at the back of the unit, where I’d gone when he didn’t answer the bell, and it opened into a dining room with a highly polished bamboo floor, in the center of which, like some interior decorator’s attempt at Zen, was that large smooth stone. At 1:30, the sun was angling in at about seventy degreesto illuminate the floor, and it bounced in bright fragments off the shards of glass to make sharp shapes on the ceiling. My earliest memory is of rainbows on the walls of the room in which I slept, rainbows made by the sun breaking itself into colors through the cut-glass vases and goblets my mother put on shelves just inside the window. The reflections off the broken glass on Herbie’s floor brought that memory back for a moment, but then it was swept away by the smell of blood.
    I stopped dead in the middle of the room, closed my eyes, and did what I should have done first. I listened.
    What you’re listening for in a house when you don’t know whether it’s empty are short-lived or uneven sounds, sounds of irregular volume, sounds that begin and end