The Mirror Thief(21)
Kagami is smiling: a warm smile, with no malice in it, but it could be hiding anything. Well, he says, good luck to you, kid. If I hear anything from Stanley, I’ll tell him to call you up.
I’d appreciate that.
One of the ravens hops onto the rock wall just behind Kagami’s back and preens for a moment, looking satisfied with itself. It caws, and its voice echoes in the darkening valley. Then it launches itself into the air, circling, flying back up to the ridge.
Curtis nods toward it. These guys are a nice touch, he says. How do you get them to stick around?
Stick around? Kagami laughs. Christ, we can’t get rid of ’em. They were here before we laid the foundations. That’s where our logo came from. The owner calls ’em Bill and Melinda. I can’t tell which is which.
Kagami doesn’t look up; his knife and fork snicker quietly on his plate. There was a third one, he says between bites. But he was too aggressive. He liked shiny things, and he’d get right up on your table. Some of these old ladies, you know, they wear some pretty gaudy jewelry. He was a real character. The boss named him Larry Ellison.
What happened to him?
I came up here one morning about dawn with the rearview mirror out of my car and a Remington twelvegauge I borrowed off a buddy of mine. Flash-flash, flash-flash, blam. The head chef made old Larry into a plate of mole enchiladas for me.
Kagami wipes his mouth on his napkin, smiles sadly, shakes his head. Hell of a lot of meat on that bird, he says. Tasted like shit. But what I kill, I always eat.
12
One of the Quicksilver’s shuttlebuses makes an hourly run back to the Strip, and Curtis buys himself a club soda and finds a quiet spot near the bingo room to wait for it.
The rich, spicy food has settled unevenly in his stomach, and he thinks about looking for the head before the bus arrives. He tries to sort through everything Kagami just told him—to line it up against the stories he got from Veronica and from Damon, to spot contradictions and coincidences—but it’s hard to concentrate among the frantic warblings of the casino floor, and eventually he finds himself peeking through the bingo room’s doorway, drawn by the intense calm he senses there.
Maybe twenty old ladies inside. Most playing five or six cards at once, some with fifteen or more, holding them in place with PVP gluesticks or blobs of adhesive putty. The caller is a young white girl with braces and a clear empty voice; her announcements pass through the room like swells. The air seems denser here, the transmissions clearer. The women stoop like oracles, their blue and pink perms intently bobbing. Knotted nimble fingers placing daubs in atavistic patterns. The numbers eclipsed even as they’re revealed. Curtis watches, transfixed, until he has to rush to catch the shuttle.
On the long downhill ride back to the Strip he thinks of Stanley. He thinks of what Kagami said about blackjack—about the illusion of total control—and then he thinks of the bingo ladies in their quiet room, their fierce mastery of cards and daubers. It all begins to make a kind of desperate sense to Curtis, and as the shuttle slows to a stop in front of his hotel, he remembers a late-season football game from his junior year—how he saw the blitz coming well before the snap, saw it in the faces of the Banneker kids, the way they carried themselves. Recalling with his whole body the calm that came upon him then, the clarity. Empty and weightless. Everything moving on rails only he could see. He pivoted away from the defensive end that mirrored him across the line of scrimmage, just letting the guy drop. Shaking himself loose. Backpedaling into the path of the blindside. Arms windmilling. Unpretty. In the way. The cornerback running flat out—helmet down, rocketlike—right over him. Knee dropping on his wrist. The dull crack somehow right, somehow perfect. The sweetness of it. Hammerblow on a box of chalk. The pain transfigured him, lit him from inside. He knew without looking that the pass got off, connected. His cast stayed on until the end of February.
A month after it came off, Reagan got shot coming out of the Washington Hilton, and Curtis knew then exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
The elevator has never seemed so slow, rising balloonlike and unhurried through twenty-eight floors before discharging him. By the time he reaches his door he’s already unbuckled his belt, and he slides his keycard and drops his trousers and tears the paper ring from the sanitized toilet in one smooth motion. He sits for a while in the scented dark—goosepimpled, tasting vitriol, wiping his clammy scalp—before shrugging off his blazer and setting his holstered revolver in the marble sink. The curtains are drawn from the windows at the end of the suite, and a dim wedge of light leaks through the door, multihued and pulsing. Watching it, Curtis thinks of Christmas lights, Christmas trees, and he thinks for probably the twelfth time today that he really ought to call his wife. He thinks about what he’d say, what she’d say, how he’d explain. Imagining her on the phone in the kitchenette. Warming milk, maybe, for hot chocolate. Her short white robe falling open. Fuzzy red socks. Tomorrow’s uniform pressed and laid out on the dresser. Leaning against the fridge with one stiff arm, like she’s holding it shut. Cowrie shells clicking against the handset. Her brow furrowed. The little wrinkle there. That and a couple of rings are all he’s given her.
I’m real sorry, Dani. Hell yes, I miss you. I just can’t talk right now. That’s about it: the extent of what he’s got. Can’t say what the plan is because there is no plan—hasn’t really been one since he got hurt, since he shipped home from Kosovo, since before he met her. Two years adrift, reacting. He’d have to be able to explain it to himself first. He flushes, undresses, showers, lies down on the rack and thinks about it.