by Martin Seay
The phone clicks, goes dead. Albedo’s watching him, a furrow deepening on his brow. Curtis lets his focus go soft on the desktop, studies Albedo’s face in his periph. Fumble recovery, he thinks. The ball is lying at his feet.
Sure, Curtis tells the dead phone. I guess that works. What’s the arrival time?
Ghostly clicks from the earpiece, like pebbles dropped in a dry well.
Got it, Curtis says. Look for me at baggage-claim. Don’t leave. I may be a couple minutes late.
He hangs up the phone. Change of plan, he says. Stanley’s flight was delayed. They’re not coming here. I’m supposed to meet them at McCarran.
Albedo stares at him. Then he stands up. How is that gonna work? he says.
Look, man, I didn’t know what else to do.
Albedo still seems dazed, but he’s snapping out of it. How ’bout you get ’em the fuck over here, he says. That’s what. Or you send ’em someplace else. Anyplace else. A goddamn police station’d be an improvement. Jesus, Curtis, the fucking airport? Exactly how many people are you gonna make me have to shoot?
Curtis swallows hard. I think Stanley’s spooked, he says. He knows something’s off. Veronica wasn’t sure where they were going after they picked up his bags. I don’t even know if he’s gonna wait for his bags, man. I think he might bolt.
Albedo’s face clouds; his jaw sets. That’d be kinda bad for you, he says.
Yeah? Curtis says, forcing a panicked shrillness into his voice. So let’s get rolling, all right?
Albedo drops Argos’s pistol back in the coinpail, then tucks Curtis’s revolver into his belt, covering it with his motorcycle jacket. On their way out of the room they both step over The Mirror Thief, a dark window in the neutral beige carpet. Curtis hopes that whoever finds it will know what to do with it. Know better than he did, anyway.
He’s scared the elevator will slide open to reveal Walter’s surprised face—that after their week of butting heads, he and the old man will each wind up being the last thing the other sees—but when the car arrives, it’s empty. They don’t meet him on their way out either, only a prim pink-haired old lady in a gold lamé jacket, balancing on an aluminum-frame walker. Her blue eyes are big and damp; her pupils frosted with blindness. She smiles sweetly as they rush past.
Curtis keeps hoping that Kagami’s gotten wind of what’s up—that he’ll have LVMPD waiting at the exit—but everything looks routine on the gaming floor. On the way to the lobby Curtis spots a couple of security officers among the tables, but none who’s likely to be armed. He doubts Albedo would think twice about shooting in here, so he keeps his eyes forward, doesn’t try anything. He’s still jittery from the gunshots, but his legs are firming up fast, his mind is humming. All week long he’s just been playing around; now he’s in real trouble. It still doesn’t feel real, though. Stanley wouldn’t have put him in this spot unless he was sure Curtis could find a way out. Would he?
G Seventeen, says a clear amplified voice from the bingo room. G Seventeen.
Outside the western sky is dark except for a blue rind at the horizon. The black field is vented all over by starlight, gritty and diamond-hard, except for a few spots where invisible clouds block it. Albedo wraps his parking ticket in a twenty, passes it to the valet, tells the kid to fucking step on it. Then he turns to face the leprechauns. You Irish, sweetheart? he says. You don’t look Irish. But green is definitely your color.
The girl flashes a grin which immediately turns queasy when she notices Albedo’s bloody hands and ripped knees and the dead-fish look in his eyes. She shrinks back, lifts her basket of plastic shamrocks in both hands like a flimsy shield. Her partner—a little older, a little more assured—glances at Curtis. She looks worried, which must mean that Curtis looks scared. What’s wrong? her eyes say. Can I help? Curtis tries to smile.
Soon he hears the monstrous engine of Albedo’s car; he still can’t see it. The valet parking lot is underground, off the building’s north side; Curtis hadn’t noticed it before. The big black Merc makes the corner, rolls up the drive. Its weak yellow headlamps sweep them: searchlights in search of something else. Curtis still doesn’t know how he’s going to sidestep whatever’s coming. Then, suddenly, he does. He knows exactly.
As the car pulls to the curb, Curtis glances through the windows. The usual junk inside—magazines and newspapers, paper bags and plastic cups—plus some interesting new hardware in the backseat: what looks like a tablet PC with a GPS attachment, what looks like a handheld police scanner. Interesting, but not surprising.
The valet opens the Merc’s door, then steps hurriedly aside. His expression is disgusted, freaked-out. Your chariot stands at the ready, my brother, Albedo tells Curtis. You may take up the reins.
Hey, Curtis says. Guess what? I can’t drive.
Albedo gives him a fierce look. Then he steps forward. Hey, he says. Guess what? Fuck you. I known me a whole shitload of one-eyed dudes in my time. All of them motor around just fine.
Too bad none of them are here, Curtis says. Because I don’t.
Albedo has already opened the passenger door. Look, he says. Don’t smartmouth me, Curtis. Get in the fucking car.
Curtis gets in the car. He has to slide the seat forward a good six inches to get his feet comfortable on the accelerator and clutch. The shoulder-straps bolted to the seatback are too high for him; he doesn’t even try to put them on. Something somewhere in the car smells like piss and shit and worse things, and Curtis starts to breathe fast and feel sick. He fastens his lap belt. Then he fusses with the mirrors.
Oh come the fuck on, Albedo says.
You’re gonna have to help me watch to my left, man. I can’t see there at all.
Albedo puts the pail with Argos’s pistol on the Merc’s cluttered floor. Curtis’s revolver is in his right hand. There ain’t nothing to your left, he says. There ain’t nothing nowhere. Now get this bitch in gear and drive.
Curtis puts the car in gear. It rolls gently from the curb. The downgrade carries it past the limestone QUICKSILVER sign to the narrow roadcut of the exit-ramp. Curtis brakes to a stop and sits there for a long time with the Merc’s left-turn indicator clicking and flashing. No traffic comes from either direction. Over the mutter of the big engine, Curtis hears a jet pass overhead.
You’re clear, Curtis, Albedo says. You are completely, totally clear, my man.
Once he’s made the left turn, Curtis eases toward the flashing red light, coasting in neutral as the incline grows steeper, stopping well before the white band painted on the blacktop. It’s easy, driving. He’s not sure why he expected it to be hard.
Okay, Curtis says. You gotta help me out here.
A long line of headlights is coming from the right: cars hung up behind some kind of heavy truck, maybe a dumptruck. Vehicles on the left, too, in the distance: the blurry lump of Curtis’s nose is edged by the glow of approaching halogen. On the other side of the road there’s a wide shoulder and a guardrail, then nothing: the ground plunges away into what must be a deep wash. Traffic on the through-street seems to be doing about fifty as it passes beneath the two flashing yellows. Tilted on the downgrade, the Merc’s weight strains against its brakes.
You can turn now, Albedo says.
This is not gonna work, man.
Quit acting like a little girl, Curtis. You just missed your shot. Ooch up a little so’s I can see, and put your signal on.
Curtis flips on the right-turn signal, eases up very slightly on the brake. The Merc jerks forward a few inches. To the right, the big truck labors on the upgrade; cars cluster impatiently behind it. More vehicles pass from the left, lit by the Merc’s headlamps: an SUV, two sedans. Soft underwater whooshes as they go by. Am I clear? Curtis says.
Not yet, Albedo says, leaning forward in his seat. Almost. Hang on.
The big truck—it’s a cement-mixer—is gathering speed, puffing black smoke from its exhaust. Behind the smoke, the stars and valley lights mute and flicker. Curtis can’t watch it anymore.
He looks ahead, measuring his breaths. The rearview is still tilted wrong, angled so that he sees the stubbly dome of his own head whenever the red light flashes. He’s not sure what he should be thinking right now, what he wants to be thinking. About Danielle, probably. He tries to put his mind on her, but he can’t do it. Instead he just keeps staring at the shape of his skull in the tilted rearview mirror. There I am, he thinks. That’s me.
Two more cars speed by from the left, startling him. Okay, Albedo says. You’re good. Let’s go.
That truck’s over the line, Curtis says. It’s too tight to turn. I can’t see distances, man. I got no depth perception.
Albedo looks to the right. It ain’t over the line, he says. You got scads of room.
I’m gonna wait, Curtis says.
He moves his right hand to six o’clock on the steering wheel, closer to his seatbelt buckle. Then he takes a deep breath, relaxes, and pisses himself.
Look, dumbass, Albedo says, turning to face left again. Next time I tell you to go, you fucking go. See, now you got another bunch of cars—
Curtis releases the buckle, lifts his foot from the brakepedal, pulls the handle to open the door. The Merc lurches forward, rolling into the intersection, under the flashing lights; Curtis’s wet warm boxers scrape his thighs. As his left foot swings over the pavement he hears Albedo’s strangled scream, the squeal of brakes, the low blast of the cement-mixer’s airhorn, and then every sound is swallowed by the roar of the gun. Albedo’s first shot tugs Curtis’s jacket-sleeve and smacks into the door—Curtis hears it ping between layers of steel—and then Curtis slips from the seat onto the moving blacktop, showered by glass as Albedo fires again, bluegreen tesserae pricking his face and hands as he falls, mixing with bits of silver from the exploded side mirror, all lit up by oncoming headlamps and hanging in the dusty air. Curtis slams to the ground, rolls away from the Merc’s rear tire, and is scrambling to his feet—has raised himself to a half-crouch—when an oncoming Toyota truck hits him.
He folds over the hood and slides. Everything is silent. His arms and legs are heavy, stretching in opposite directions, wringing him in the middle like a wet towel. Albedo is still shooting; the air contracts as each bullet passes. The pickup’s windshield spiderwebs under Curtis and he’s in the air again, wobbling like a poorly tossed football. Three shots. Four. Curtis’s left hand closes on something hard and smooth. He comes down in the truck’s bed, slamming into the gate. He caught the last bullet. Everything spins, then settles. Curtis sprawls splaylegged on the polyurethane bedliner, looking at the road. Broken again. Still alive. The blob of lead cooling in his palm.
The screech of metal tearing metal wounds Curtis’s ears, and for an instant the cement truck eclipses his sight. Once it’s passed, the Mercury appears before him, spinning like a dreidel on its front bumper, its tail end bent where the mixer hit it: a dancing questionmark. It rotates slowly, drifting toward the edge of the road; then its deformed trunk falls open and Argos emerges, dead, his bloody plastic shroud unfurling like a scroll as he drops to the pavement. The Merc brushes the guardrail, tips, and now here comes Albedo, sliding turdlike through the shattered windshield, a befuddled expression on his pale torn-up face. The Merc is falling, he’s rolling down the hood like a gymnastic toddler, and as the car vanishes into the wash he slides over the silver V of the hood-ornament and plops onto the blacktop, slumped against the damaged barrier, his legs crossed almost casually atop the roadstripe. His right hand still curls around Curtis’s empty revolver; he’s breathing, but a lot of fluid issues from his ears and nose, and Curtis can tell he’s done.
Curtis doesn’t hear the crash when the car hits the ground, but after a minute black smoke rises from the wash, blotting out the valley, and it’s followed by a few tongues of flame. Curtis tries to shift his weight but can’t move; now he knows that he’s hurt badly, which is fine. He’s on home turf now, for the first time in years. Bones broken. Spine probably okay: he can feel pain coming in a hurry, getting decoded by his brain. It’s going to be bad, but he thinks he can pass out soon. Unconsciousness is teasing him; he tries to remember it like an old phone number.
He caught the last bullet: the one that would’ve been Stanley’s. This is what he wanted. It’s big and glassy in his hand, and he uncurls his fingers to look at it. It hurts to move them, but he does it, slowly, and then he smiles. His own unblinking gray eye stares from the bowl of his palm.
By the time the flames find the Merc’s tank and the orange rose blooms over the desert Curtis isn’t seeing anything anymore, but he feels the heat on his closed eyelids, and he imagines the flower rising, going black. The warmth is a comfort to him. He follows it into sleep.
58
Stanley would like to go back to the boardwalk, to see it one last time before he splits, but he thinks better of it. Cops will still be out in force—hunting for him, cleaning up the mess he made—and he has no special desire to shoot a cop tonight. Besides, in some ways he feels like he’ll know the waterfront better once it’s out of sight for good, once his memory has begun to take it apart.
He heads through the neighborhood, paralleling the shoreline, through the traffic circle and into the streets that he and Welles walked through. Almost no one is afoot, which makes Stanley look suspicious; he zigzags a lot, doubles back often. Somewhere in the city Welles and his wife are seated in a waiting room while some doctor patches Claudio up—or else they’re on their way home by now, headed back to rescue the girl. Stanley has no picture of it; can’t get himself to care. The thought of them won’t stay in his head: it’s shoved out, as if by the wrong pole of a magnet.
Cop cruisers sweep the streets, but plenty of other cars are out too: the traffic on the main thoroughfares and the pattern of one-way streets makes it tough for them to follow a pedestrian. Sometimes squads pass him and U-turn suddenly, or speed up to make a block, but Stanley’s always able to cut across a yard and disappear, or to lie low in a flowerbed while they circle. The bright rows their headlights carve across the wet pavement remind Stanley of the twin furrows of Sonja Heine’s skates in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese.
By the time he’s reached the oilfield and the first of the old canals, his duck-and-cover routine has grown tiresome: he’s feverish again, wracked by chills, ready to get off the street. He crosses his arms, hugs himself, lowers his head and quickens his step, muttering curses through chattering teeth. Cursing himself and the world. Cursing Welles most of all. Maybe you conjured me, Stanley seethes. You ever think of that, you fat son of a bitch? Maybe it was me all along you conjured. Maybe you conjured me.
For a long time he walks without being aware of walking. His mind is elsewhere, or nowhere; his feet advance mechanically, of their own accord. When he snaps back to attention with the sensation of waking up, he’s surprised to find himself still in motion, and uncertain of where he is. He stops by a parked car, puts down his pack, unsheaths the canteen and drinks. The taste of the water is sharp on his tongue, flavored by the old tin; he thinks of his father in Leyte and Okinawa, deadened and enlivened by hours of fighting, tasting the same tinny water. He remembers struggling to lift the fieldpack the day his father gave it to him: it was bigger than he was then. If I don’t get into this war, I’ll go nuts. I don’t understand nothing about peace. That may be fucked up, but it’s true. People don’t want me around, and I don’t want to be around. In peace I’m nobody. I don’t even recognize myself.
The rain has stopped but the clouds are low; they push against the rooftops. Stanley is still among the canals. Mist rises from them like curtains, sealing each block of houses in a gauzy box. Just ahead there’s a bridge; beyond it, a pair of derricks burns off natural gas, their crowns lit by slow-moving pillars of clean flame. Their unsteady lights throw two faint shadows behind every solid thing within reach.
Figures on the bridge: a large man, and a small crawling child. The man leans against the rail; the child huddles at his feet. Both peer at the oily water below. Stan
ley shoulders his pack, moves closer. The child is no child at all, but a stocky dog; Stanley can hear the hoarse rasp of its panting. One of the burning derricks is directly behind the man, and it puts his head in silhouette. Stanley can make out the edge of his face, the tiny flames reiterated in his spectacle lenses. Smoke swirls around his fleshy chin; a pipe dangles from his mouth. He wears a tweed driver’s cap identical to the one that now sits atop Stanley’s head.
It’s Welles and his little dog, out for their nightly walk. It has to be. But then, as Stanley approaches, he sees that it’s not. Exactly what it is about this guy that fails to match with Welles Stanley can’t say, but he’s certain this isn’t Welles at all. Something is off. This guy’s dog looks a little bigger. Or—Stanley draws closer—a little smaller. He still can’t see the man’s face.
Stanley steps onto the bridge. He’s tiptoeing now; he’s not sure why. The low roar of burning gas sounds like flags blown flat and straight by a steady gale. This has got be Welles: it looks just like him. Stanley tries to rationalize it, though he knows it isn’t true. Could he be back already from the hospital? If so, why didn’t he stop at home? Maybe Synnøve drove Claudio to the hospital on her own, and Welles stayed behind. But this is not Welles. It’s definitely not. Could Stanley’s eyes be playing tricks? Could Welles have a twin? Or could this be the real Adrian Welles at last, and the other one—the one Stanley met, the one who signed his book—be the counterfeit?
The figure lowers the briarwood pipe. His hand comes to rest on the railing. Something about the sight of that hand freezes Stanley in his tracks, raises the fine hairs on his neck. It looks just like Welles’s hand: a normal human hand. But it is not.
The dog plants its front paws on the railing’s lower crosspiece. Then it tips back on its hind legs and walks, tottering like a wind-up soldier. It rotates slowly to look at Stanley. The furry bug-eyed face beneath its long velvet ears is human, or not inhuman. It grins at him with drool-glazed rows of white baby-teeth.
