The Mirror Thief(195)

His throat tightens. He clears it, then leans forward to blow out the candle on the bedpost. The second bell moves across the city, measuring the sun’s retreat; the gaps between the shutters have gone black. Crivano draws a steady breath and tries, as sweetly as he is able, to sing.





The Shroudy Stranger’s reft of realms.

Abhorred he sits upon the city dump.

His broken heart’s a bag of shit.

The vast rainfall, an empty mirror.



—ALLEN GINSBERG, “The Shrouded Stranger”





60


Curtis wakes to white light, black dark, a cop’s voice. It’s Coach Banner’s voice from high school, Colonel Gandy’s from Kosovo; he can’t understand anything it says, but he knows exactly what it’s saying. You did okay, Stone, but you screwed up, too. Curtis doesn’t need to be told. His eyes roll back; he’s out again.

Time passes: a slideshow flashed on a flapping white sheet. Doctors and nurses in masks and gowns. The bright OR; the dim recovery room. Interchangeable LVMPD badges. At first there’s no sequence—everything happening all at once—but then events line up, and Curtis starts to make memories again. Albedo rode in the ambulance with him, he’s pretty sure of that, but never made it to the ICU.

Curtis wakes again, realizing that he’s already awake. Taking inventory. Adding up limbs, losing count. He feels like something’s missing, or something extra’s been added. He must’ve twisted left when he the headlights came at him: his right wrist is in a cast. A figure-eight sling pins his shoulders back; that means collarbone. Foam boots on both feet, pendent weights hung from the bed’s edge: traction to keep his legs straight. That means both hips broken.

Curtis takes a breath, lets it out. His throat hurts; his arm itches where the IV needle’s taped. He’s going to bounce back from this. Probably not all the way back, and that’s fine. Nobody ever bounces all the way back. Not from anything. That’s the way it goes, bouncing.

He’s on a bunch of pretty heavy drugs. Even as he thinks this, he can feel them fade: a cold dead tide going out. That’s probably why his eyes are open. Somebody must want to talk to him.

Mister Stone?

A tall thin Hispanic guy, in a steel-tube chair beside Curtis’s motorized rack. Curtis’s age, or a little younger. Patient. Not fed up, or put-upon. Not like most cops Curtis has known. Federal, probably. Somebody in Jersey got his message.

Curtis? the guy says, like he’s trying different frequencies. Mister Stone? Master Sergeant Stone?

Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here.

His own voice sounds harsh and loud, although he knows it can’t really be loud. His throat feels like it’s tearing. He clears it, coughs. His right side aches.

The Hispanic guy gives Curtis his name—Agent Something—then starts with the customary spiel. LVMPD wants to bring serious charges against you, Mister Stone, he says. I asked them for some time with you first. There’s a bigger picture here that I don’t think anybody has seen yet.

Yeah, Curtis says. You got that right.

You want to tell me about it?

Curtis licks his lips. Flecks of dry skin scrape his tongue. There’s a lot of pain inside him someplace; he glimpses it now and again, like a lantern moving through the windows of an old house. The traction on his legs means the docs haven’t cut there yet. Maybe he hasn’t been out so long. I want to talk to my wife, Curtis says.

The agent smiles. Danielle’s on her way, he says. She’s in the air now. Metro’s sending a car for her. Of course, we don’t know yet when they’ll clear you to see her.

I’m under arrest?

You haven’t been arrested. I understand you used to be a military policeman, so you know how this works. I should tell you, though, before we say anything else, that you have the right to remain silent, and to have an attorney present for any discussion with me. You can get an attorney, and I can get a tape-recorder, and we can do this more formally. Do you want to do that, Curtis?

Curtis closes his eyes, toggles his head back and forth. I’m sky-high, man, he says. No judge’ll let you use any of this.

The guy shrugs. He already has an inkstick out; now he flips open a spiral notebook, stuffs his tie in his breast pocket. You want to wait? he says. Sober up?

Curtis shakes his head. No, he says. I want to tell it now.

He tells it as well as he can. It’s hard to keep it all straight. He gets confused, makes mistakes, goes back to correct himself. Even uninjured, unmedicated, he never had a handle on a lot of it. But he does his best.

He tells about the call he got from Damon, about meeting him in Philly at the Penrose Diner, and also about Stanley, and about the cardcounters at the Spectacular. He tells about Albedo, and about Argos, and about the missing dealer, and about what Argos said in the desert, and he tells about the call he had his dad make to the Jersey cops. For the most part he keeps Veronica out of it. He’s not entirely sure why. It’s what Stanley would want him to do, he figures, and she never seemed like that big a part of it anyway. She was about as far outside as Curtis was himself.

Hang on, the Hispanic guy says, scribbling. Wait up a second. What’s the point?

Curtis blinks. Say again? he says. What do you mean, what’s the point? You asked me to tell it, so I’m telling it, goddamnit.