The Mirror Thief(196)

No no no, the guy says. You keep talking about the Point. Like, the cardcounters hit the Point. You wanted to get a job at the Point. I don’t know what that means.

The Spectacular, Curtis says. The Spectacular is the Point. The name’s got an exclamation mark after it. In its logo. The official name. Exclamation point, I mean to say. Before they even opened, this story went around—I don’t know if it’s true—that a PR guy got fired because he forgot to put the explanation point, the exclamation point, on the end of the name. People working there started calling it the Point. As a joke. And it spread. Most people who say it now, they don’t even know how it got started. But that’s how I heard it from Damon.

Okay, the guy says. Got it.

His pen scratches across the little notebook; Curtis reads upsidedown. POINT = SPECTACULAR, the guy writes.

Later he holds a cup of water for Curtis; Curtis sips, keeps talking. As he gets tired and hurts worse he starts to explain things that probably don’t matter, to repeat whatever details stick in his brain. The ripped-up faxes on SPECTACULAR! letterhead. The machinegun in Albedo’s car. The cellphone Damon gave him. The calls he made from the visitor center at the state park. The cufflink torn from Damon’s sleeve. Jay Leno in the hotel lobby. The Mirror Thief left in the Quicksilver suite. Did anybody pick that book up? Curtis asks. Somebody should go over there and pick that book up.

By now the agent has all but stopped scribbling; the look on his face says he’s waiting for something. Curtis tries to think of what that might be, to think of questions he’s been ready for that the guy hasn’t asked yet. He comes up with quite a few. One big one. Where’s Damon now? Curtis says.

The agent doesn’t answer. He leans back slowly in the steel-tube chair, retracts the point of his rollerball with a soft click.

You don’t know, Curtis says.

The guy smiles. It’s not a happy smile. For the first time Curtis can tell that he’s operating on not much sleep. Do you have any thoughts, the agent says, as to where we might find him?

Curtis squints, shakes his head. Shaking it makes him dizzy. I figured NJSP’d have him by now, he says.

The guy stares evenly, his eyes expressionless. Monday afternoon, he says, two NJSP detectives met Damon at his townhouse. Follow-up visit. They’d interviewed him before; he’d been cooperative. Damon invited them in, put on some coffee, shot them both in the face. One died at the scene, the other’s on life-support. Probably not coming off it. Local uniformed patrol found them within the half-hour—somebody must have known something was wrong—but by then Damon had already cleared out.

Curtis tries to take a deep breath but chokes on it, and for a second he’s afraid he’ll puke. The room spins, like the restaurant at the Stratosphere, and he shuts his eyes to make it stop. He’s thinking back, trying to recall: what time he phoned his dad, what time Damon’s last fax came. What he might have caused, or failed to stop.

Damon hadn’t shown up for work that day, the agent says. Risk Management conducted a search of his office. The story is, they found nothing on his computer but porn videos, and nothing in his filing cabinets except dirty cartoons. Pretty disturbing stuff, from what I hear. People are wondering why it took so long to realize he was a problem. He must be a real charming guy.

Curtis hears a rustle as the agent flips through his notebook, maybe looking over what he’s just written. Do you have any thoughts, he says again, as to where we might find him?

Curtis keeps his eyes shut, steadies his breath.

I have to say, the agent goes on, he picked a pretty good time to be a fugitive. As of Monday night, law enforcement nationwide is on orange alert. That’s because of the war. With everybody on defensive footing, investigations are going to slow down. An elevated alert can make it harder to hide a vehicle, though. Damon probably knew that. His Audi turned up a few hours ago, at a park-and-ride in Maryland.

Curtis opens his eyes. Maryland where? he says.

College Park. We’ve got CCTV of Damon boarding the inbound Green Line. I know what you’re thinking, and don’t worry: your dad and his wife are safe. We’ve got them in a hotel. Their home is under surveillance. If Damon shows up there—

He won’t, Curtis says. He’s gone. If Damon went to D.C., it was to get help traveling. Visas, passports. People there would do that for him.

The agent doesn’t like that answer: he looks irritated, confused. He opens his mouth, but Curtis cuts him off. You understand who we’re talking about here, right? Have you pulled his DD 214?

His what?

His service record. You ought to look at that. Look at what he’s done, where he’s been. He’s not in D.C., man. He went to BWI, or to National. He got on a plane. He could be anywhere by now. South America. Asia.

The guy is about to argue the point, but then gives up, deflates. His mouth hangs open for a second; he shuts it, rubs his face. Curtis feels bad for him, feels bad generally. He doesn’t want to believe what he’s just heard—habit works his brain hard, plugging in scenarios and explanations that put Damon in a better light—but he knows it’s true. His whole life he’s never understood anybody, not even himself. Himself maybe least of all. He wants to go to back to sleep, to slip out of a world where shit like this can happen.

Wait a minute, Curtis says. What about Stanley Glass?

The agent’s eyes open; his inkstick clicks again. Stanley Glass, he says.