Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

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 speedway, 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.