The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  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.

  On each floor he steps out of the stairwell, looking around before continuing up. The first two levels are valet spaces, mostly vacant. People and vehicles are moving on the next two decks, but they thin out as he gets higher. When he comes to Six he skips it, walking up one more floor to the roof: aside from a primer-gray Impala with a herring gull perched on its hood, it’s empty. The full moon, huge and waxy, sinks toward the mountains, and the leafy Flamingo courtyard is shadowed by hotel towers. Its broad blue pool glows beneath the fronds and branches, and Curtis thinks of the display of his cellphone as it rang on the dresser. He should’ve called Danielle last night; he doesn’t know why he didn’t. He wishes he had. The gull tracks him as he passes, nervously stamping a webbed foot.

  He walks down the ramp to the sixth level. It’s nearly as empty as the roof: a couple of sedans, an SUV parked by the stairwell. No cabs. Curtis’s attention goes to the SUV; he creeps toward it, his hand on his pistolgrip, and crouches to scan its tinted windows against the fluorescents overhead. So far as he can tell, it’s clear.

  A squeal of tires below. Curtis straightens his jacket, steps between the SUV and the stairwell. Ready to move in either direction. Bleary-eyed and unshowered, he feels sharp, but he can’t tell if it’s genuine-sharp or the kind of sharp you feel after a couple of beers. He checks his watch. 4:43.

  Headlights. It’s a cab: white, with black skirting and magenta fenders. It slows as it turns off the ramp, moving steadily ahead. Nobody but the cabbie is aboard that he can see. As it approaches, it angles broadside, rolls to a stop. Its flashing dorsal LED screen tells him that the NCAA first-round pairings have been announced. Its back door says FORTUNE CAB.

  A quiet drone: the driver’s-side window coming down. Hey, man, the cabbie says. You Curtis?

  Yeah, Curtis says. Where’s your fare?

  You’re my fare, man.

  Okay. Where am I going?

  The cabbie—dreadlocked hair gray at the temples, creased and sagging nut-brown skin—gives Curtis a slow once-over. I’m gonna tell you how it is, he says. And then you can decide if you want to ride or not. See, I’m not supposed to tell you where you’re going. I’m supposed to take your phone away, and I’m not supposed to talk to you once you’re in the cab. How’s that sound?

  Curtis thinks about it. Can you tell me how long the ride’s gonna be? he says.

  I’ll tell you what it’s gonna cost. One-sixty. I take that up front.

  Hundred sixty? Curtis says. That’s a long ride. We crossing any state lines?

  The cabbie gives him a thin crooked smile. What’s it gonna be, man? he says.

  Curtis peels eight twenties from the envelope in his jacket pocket and hands them over. Then he gives the cabbie his cell. The cabbie powers it down as Curtis opens the back door and sits.

  They wind their way to the garage exit and turn south, passing the flashing hyperboloid of the Barbary Coast on their way to the interstate. As the cab descends the entrance ramp and merges into traffic, the driver speaks again. May as well settle in, he says. You’re looking at an hour and a half, maybe an hour forty-five.

  Curtis furrows his brow, calculating distance and time. Drawing blanks. We going to Indian Springs? he says.

  The cabbie doesn’t reply. Curtis shifts in his seat, adjusts his gun, looks out the window. Still a lot of cars on the road: after the expressway they thin out, and more vanish into North Las Vegas. The cab stays on the interstate. Soon they’re passing the speed
way, the airbase. The quiet radio plays Anita Baker. Hey, Curtis says. You know what’s going on with the war?

  The cabbie takes a long time to answer. I don’t know anything, man, he says.

  How about finding me some news?

  The guy cranks the volume a little and punches a button until an NPR station pops up. The Morning Edition billboard is just starting. The U.S. has told UN inspectors to start leaving Baghdad; France says it’ll veto any authorization of the war; Bush says he’ll act no matter what; Americans support an invasion by a ratio of two to one.

  By the time Bob Edwards comes on, Curtis has tuned the radio out. He meant to check in this morning with the concierge, try to get online, get some news from AC. If what Kagami said about the missing dealer from the Point is true, it’ll be in the papers by now. He should have checked last night, should have made some calls, but he was too tired, too distracted. That would be some good dope to have for this meeting with Argos, who was right in the middle of whatever went down, or wants Curtis to think he was. I know what happened in Atlantic City. I’m the guy you’re really looking for.

  The radio fizzles as they climb into the mountains. The highway angles east; the horizon is watery blue, with a gathering band of white. The desert materializes: jagged rocks, clumped white bursage and creosote-bush, the odd scarecrow silhouette of a joshua tree. Sometimes the headlights catch skunks and cottontails, soft flashes by the roadside.

  When they pass a brown FHWA sign for Valley of Fire State Park the cab’s turn signal clicks on. Curtis checks the exit number and the time: they’re maybe thirty-five miles outside the city, still forty-five minutes from their ETA. The cabbie pulls folded sheets of paper off his dashboard and flattens them against the wheel: printed directions. Curtis can’t make them out. After a few seconds, the cabbie folds them again.

  The two-lane blacktop turns south, then east. The edge of the sun peeks at them between jagged ridges until they turn south again. There’s nothing else on the road. By the time they hit the park boundary the radio’s getting only gales of static, occasional stuttering voices: multilateral support … respiratory syndrome … Irish-American … uncertain whether … winning the peace. Instead of turning it off, the cabbie absently sings a Bob Marley tune over it, humming when he forgets the words, always looping back to the first lines, about being robbed and sold to slavers after emerging from a bottomless pit. The cabbie has a pretty good voice. Curtis likes the song, but he can’t remember the words either.

  Away from the road the ground is steep and broken, crowded with wind-scoured monoliths of deep orange that cast long shadows in the oblique light. The cab drives on, winding past campsites and picnic areas, past a visitor center—Curtis checks his watch again—and through the state park’s exit, into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

  The blacktop soon ends in a T-intersection: another two-lane road, this one running north-south, parallel to the lakeshore. The cabbie brakes to a gentle stop, reaches for his directions again, studies them for a long time. We lost? Curtis says.

  The cabbie shuffles the pages. A whine of static comes from the stereo speakers, pulsing with the rhythms of human speech, but no speech comes through. The sun is well above the rocks now. Through the window Curtis sees blue and yellow flowers between the bursage clumps, coming up everywhere there’s dirt. The cab’s engine shifts into idle. No cars pull up behind them. Nothing passes on the other road.

  The cabbie slides the pages back onto his dashboard, lifts his foot, and rolls straight across the intersection to the opposite side, off the blacktop and onto a dirt road that Curtis couldn’t see before. When the speedometer hits about twenty the cab starts to shudder, Curtis’s molars clack together, and the cabbie slows down. A cloud of pink dust rises behind them, spread by a stiff breeze. They won’t be surprising anyone.

  They’re on the dirt road for about three miles. It ends at the lake, or a steep drop where the lake used to be. The cabbie stops. This is it, man, he says.

  Curtis straightens in his seat, looks back and forth. There’s a port-a-john, a wide spot to turn a car around, and not much else. Wind is coming off the lake, whipping the flowerheads and the sagebrush stems. Great, Curtis says.

  He gets out of the car, leans back in. Did the guy say where he’d meet me?

  You know as much as I do, the cabbie says. More, probably.

  Can I have my phone back?

  The cabbie gives him his phone. Curtis turns it on as the cab pulls away under the dustcloud it made. The phone can’t get a signal. Curtis switches it off again.

  From here he can see the water, its surface aflame with reflected light. Big birds—gulls or ducks—float across its surface like sunspots. Still a long way off. Just ahead the earth slopes down steeply; a gray stain of riversilt shows where the water used to come. It looks like it hasn’t been anywhere near here in a while. There’s been a long drought; Curtis remembers hearing about it. He shades his face with a cupped right hand and scans the flat expanse between the base of the slope and the waterline, but against the glare he can’t make anything out.

  The wind whips his ears. He turns, then turns again. Never so mindful of the limits of his vision as when he’s out in the open, exposed. He draws his revolver—self-conscious, like he’s just dropped trou in public—and clears the Port-a-Can with a rough yank on the door. It’s empty, immaculate, reeking of solvents and perfumes.

  He’s beginning to worry about how he’ll get back to the Strip when something catches his eye down by the water. A flash to the south. Regular, but not machine-regular. A signal. Curtis grunts, remembering the little mirror the Whistler used in the casino, and starts walking.

  He has to poke around the edge of the bluff for a while before he finds a good route to the bottom, a downgrade gentle enough to avoid slips. Once the surface levels out, the trail is pretty clear. Curtis used to be good at eyeballing distances; since his accident he’s not so sure. He figures the flash for two klicks away.

  The lakebed is a good five degrees warmer than the bluff. Shrubs and grasses cover most of it, along with scaly saltcedars tall enough to reduce visibility. A few low spots are muddy; elsewhere the ground has cracked into irregular dinnerplate-size tiles, some unsteady under Curtis’s feet. The fissures between them are sometimes better than an inch across, deeper than he can see. A crunch announces his every step: a pale layer of rough alkaline crystals left by evaporated water. The trail branches, then branches again. Each time he thinks he’s lost, the strobe of the little mirror comes over the brush to guide him. It’s getting hot. He owns clothes that would be worse for this hike than what he’s wearing, but not many. His shoelaces bristle with needle-sharp burrs.

  In time he comes upon a broad trail with no grass on it, no plants at all. So straight it could have been plotted by a surveyor. The flash comes from the end of the trail: a broad clearing there, what looks like a flat boulder. The reflected light is low to the ground, always in Curtis’s eyes. If Argos wanted to shoot him he’d be shot by now. Curtis approaches slowly, his palms open, his arms out.

  He notices something in the grass to his right: a hollow column of bricks, like a chimney, not quite knee-high. As he draws closer, turning his face from the mirror’s glare, he sees that it is in fact the base of a chimney: part of the brick-edged foundation of what was once a small building. Soon he’s able to recognize more ruins nearby: mud-crusted slabs, silted-up wells, splintered beams ghost-white with residue. This must’ve been a town back before they built the dam and made the lake. Underwater for decades. The drought has uncovered what’s left.

  Argos’s voice, the whistle harmonizing with the wind: Keep coming, Curtis! he says. That’s good, what you’re doing with your hands. Keep ’em out, just like that.

  He’s seated in what looks like a cheap plastic lawnchair next to a parked dirtbike. A second chair is about ten feet in front of him. Unless somebody else is coming, Curtis figures that for his seat. Both rest on the smooth concrete foundation of an ol
d building long since gone, rotted or floated away by rising water. Aside from a few chipped corners where rebar peeks through, the slab looks ready to build on. Curtis can barely see Argos. Beneath the blazing mirror in his upraised left hand, he’s no more than a shade.

  Hey, Curtis calls, Could you maybe knock that shit off?

  Argos doesn’t answer, and the mirror doesn’t go away. Curtis takes another few paces forward. Slow and deliberate. Squinting. When he’s an arm’s-length from the empty chair, the light disappears, and Argos’s other hand comes up.

  There’s a gun in it: a matte-black semiautomatic pistol. Argos holds it like he’s watched a lot of movies. It makes Curtis nervous, but not too nervous. He’s figured on this, more or less.

  Come toward me, Argos says. Keep your arms out. Closer. Now turn around, put your hands on your head. Spread your legs. Good.

  Curtis steps onto the slab and does as he’s told, letting Argos take away his pistol and ineptly pat him down. Curtis takes off his jacket, hangs it on the back of the empty chair, and sits.

  Argos wears white-framed sunglasses with blue lenses, iridescent and opaque. He’s dressed in a sleek padded motocross outfit, so spotless it looks like he changed into it after he got here. He sinks into his own seat, setting the two guns beside him on the closed lid of a Styrofoam cooler. Curtis can see what Veronica meant: the guy’s face is totally unremarkable. He’s white, but not just white. Part Asian, probably, though he could just as easily pass for Hispanic, or Middle Eastern. Staring hard, trying to see around the sunglasses to what’s underneath, Curtis thinks of an illustration from an Intro Psych textbook he had at Cal Lutheran: a blurry picture of a man’s face, made up of the superimposed images of dozens of faces. Curtis can’t remember what the picture was supposed to be illustrating, but that’s what Argos looks like, right down to the blur.