The Mirror Thief(106)
The waitress comes back. Kagami waves away his change. He puts his elbows on the table, looks out the window.
How did he do it? Curtis says.
What do you mean?
I mean, what was the trick?
Kagami gives Curtis a smug smile, lowers his voice, leans closer. The trick was, he says, there was no trick. Stanley saw where the ball was going to go.
Curtis blinks. How is that possible? he says.
With an open-palmed shrug, Kagami sags back into his chair. All Stanley’s abracadabra gobbledygook, he says. I used to think it was misdirection. Then I thought, maybe it’s real magic—like he was trying to make impossible things happen. Now I think it’s something else. Impossible stuff happens in Stanley’s world all the time. It’s no big deal to him. I think the magic is him trying to make sense of his world. Which is a very different place from the world you and I live in. And which is maybe some pretty lonely territory for a sick old man.
Curtis nods, then knocks back the last of his ginger ale. The combo is back on: Sleepy John Estes, barely recognizable. Lord, I never will forget that floating bridge. The piano and the bass are barely playing, setting soft suspended sevenths adrift over the clatter and murmur of the tabletops. They tell me five minutes’ time underwater I was hid. Beneath the music, the big windows shiver with a distant afterburner growl.
It’s getting late, Kagami says. Let me give you a lift back to your hotel.
38
Curtis’s sleep feels nothing like sleep, only a rapid and jittery dream-ridden wakefulness. He’s on a narrow cobblestone street, moonlit and shadowed, Stanley at one end, Damon at the other. There’s an explosion, a pillow-muffled boom, and Curtis is in midair, suspended like one of the fake-fresco angels on the ceiling of the hotel lobby, jumping in front of the bullet. He jolts awake before it hits, not sure if he got to it in time, not sure who was shooting whom.
Still dark outside. He’s pressed every button on the bedside clock-radio before he recognizes the sound of his cellphone. Throwing off the tangled sheets, he reaches for the little well of pale blue light on the dresser, picks it up before the voicemail kicks in, glances at the display—Whistler—and answers. Yeah, he says.
Good morning, Curtis. Hope I didn’t wake you.
Curtis unplugs the charger, stumbles to the wall, finds a lightswitch. Rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. What’s up? he says.
I want to meet.
When?
Right now. I’m in the parking garage at the Flamingo. The sixth floor. I’m sitting in a Fortune Cab. The guy’s got the meter running, so I’m not gonna stick around long. You better get it in gear.
Curtis looks again at the clock, lying where he left it, upsidedown on the mattress: 4:31. Yeah, he says. Okay. I’ll be right—
Listen, Curtis. Don’t call anybody, and don’t bring anybody with you. If you’re bringing somebody else, go ahead and dial 9-1-1 before you come, because I’m gonna shoot you and everybody else I see, and I am not bullshitting about that. Also, bring cash. At least a couple hundred dollars. Because this is going to be an expensive conversation. Got all that?
Yeah. I got it.
Say it back to me.
Curtis takes a breath. Flamingo parking lot, he says. Sixth floor. Fortune Cab. Two hundred dollars. Just me. Nobody else.
The call ends with a soft electric pop. Argos, Curtis thinks. Graham Argos. He’s not calling from any cab; he wouldn’t have said all that shooting-spree shit in front of a cabbie. This is some kind of setup.
He stands with the dead phone against his ear, eyeballing his reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Stubbly scalp, twisted-around skivvies. Not too suave. He takes a long moment to sort his dreams from his memories, to remember what he knows, where he stands. Stanley has left town, or so Walter says. It sounds like Damon at this point is basically toast. People have turned up dead back in AC; Argos was involved somehow. Curtis has nothing to gain by meeting with him. This thought is like a weight coming off, a light from a familiar doorway: nothing to gain.
Curtis gets dressed, clips on his pistol, drops the speedloader in his jacket pocket and hits the door in a hurry, pressing the elevator callbutton in the hallway. Back in high school the coaches would rarely play him until the bleachers were emptying and the outcome of a game was no longer in doubt; it was embarrassing at first, but in time he developed a taste for it. It made everything purer, and gave him a kind of ownership of his efforts that the first-stringers could never claim. He catches something like that fourth-quarter feeling now as he waits by the sliding copper doors, tired and giddy and sure of himself. Today he is going to figure some shit out.
When the elevator hits bottom, Curtis detours to the cage on the gaming floor to cash more traveler’s checks: five hundred, just to be safe. He puts the envelope of bills in his inside pocket, heads for the galleria. Along the way he passes a silent caravan of security officers moving from table to table, harvesting the drop. Something in their attitude—smooth blank faces, sharp efficient eyes—has the joyless finality of a toe-tag. None of the strung-out gamblers in the big room looks at them; they just stare at their cards like they’ve been enchanted, turned to stone, as their money walks slowly away.
Curtis hops a taxi in the porte-cochère and tells the cabbie to step on it; they make the Flamingo garage inside of three minutes. Curtis hands over a bill, gets out on the ground floor, and walks to the opposite end of the building to take the stairs.