Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Oh, you picked right up on that, didn’t you? Argos laughs. Pretty sharp. You got that phone from Damon, right?

Curtis blinks. What’s that got to do with anything?

He gave me one, too. Pretty nice phone. Funny thing, though. After I ducked Damon and his triggerman at the Point, for the next couple of days, I kept having these crazy close calls. I’d be sitting at a restaurant or some random place, I’d look up, and there Country Boy would be, looking around with his beady eyes. A couple of places I had to leave through kitchens and windows. But you know what? After I dumped the phone, that shit stopped. Sure, I know what you’re thinking: correlation ain’t causation. But if you’re wondering why I wanted to meet up way out here, well, that’s why.

Curtis shakes his head. You’re one paranoid son of a bitch, he says.

Argos puts his pistol in the saddlebag, along with two bottles of water from the cooler. His crazy grin is back; it seems less affected this time. You think I’m paranoid, huh? he says. Okay. Let’s talk about our pal Damon for a second. What did Damon do after the Gulf War, Curtis? Embassy security. Where? Bolivia. Pakistan. Who hangs out at those embassies? You’re gonna tell me Damon didn’t network with those guys? Damon Blackburn? C’mon, Curtis. This guy knows the secret handshake, okay? He owns the decoder ring.

Curtis laughs at that, shakes his head like it’s ridiculous, but at the same time he’s thinking: how did Albedo find me yesterday at New York?

Argos pulls his binoculars from the saddlebag to scan the rise again. Curtis risks a glance of his own this time. Sure enough, there’s a pink column of dust there, fading in the breeze. He can’t see anything moving on the ground.

A helmet hangs from the dirtbike’s handlebars; Argos pulls it on, fastens the chinstrap. Then he stows the binoculars and shuts the saddlebag. Wait a minute, Curtis says. We’re not done yet.

Oh, I’m afraid we are, my friend.

Curtis forces himself to think quickly, to get back in character. He still doesn’t have what he needs. Not enough. Not yet. You’re full of shit, man, he says. If you expect Damon to make a deal based on what you just told me, then you really are crazy. You’ve got nothing. Go ahead and give that story to NJSP. Damon’ll say you cooked it up. He’ll say you and the dealer put the scam together on your own, and that you whacked the dealer yourself. Anything you claim he did on the inside, he’ll say you could have done yourself from the outside with a little foresight. Who can corroborate?

Argos straddles the bike, tips it, and kicks up the sidestand. Have you guys found Stanley yet? he says. No? I didn’t think so. I guess I’ll see you at the finish-line.

Nobody’s gonna find Stanley, Argos. You know that. He’s not gonna save you. You need some kind of physical evidence against Damon, and you don’t have it. You’re going up against a decorated ex-marine, and you don’t even have a real name. All you’ve got are your paranoid bullshit stories.

I got a number, Argos says.

Say again?

A number. Seventeen ninety-seven.

What the hell are you talking about?

That’s the room at the Point where I met the dealer and Damon’s triggerman. I can’t say for sure, but I got a suspicion the dealer didn’t exit that room under his own power. I just hope for Damon’s sake he didn’t leave all the cleanup to Housekeeping.

Argos turns the bike’s ignition key, shifts to neutral, squeezes the clutch, and presses the starter. The noisy little engine sputters and catches. I’ll be back in touch in a few days! Argos shouts over the buzzsaw drone. You better have some good news!

He rolls forward, angles away, and opens the bike’s throttle, skidding in a long arc along the old drowned road, scattering fine gravel and alkaline dust in a seething cloud. Before Curtis can get his hands up, the brunt of it catches him in the chest and face. It feels a little like being downwind from teargas. He spits and curses. Then he smiles. The whine of the bike’s engine pitch-shifts and fades. Room 1797, Curtis thinks. That’s good. That might do the trick.

The Styrofoam cooler still lies open on the concrete slab. Curtis stumbles to it, reaches inside. Two bottles left. He opens one, removes his glasses, fills his cupped palm, and splashes his face and scalp. He does it again, rubbing his wet hand over his neck, and drinks the rest of the water. Then he wipes his hands on his trouserlegs and puts the bullets back in his gun.

The vehicle on the dirt road must have been the park ranger. Just in case it wasn’t, he’d like to get out of here soon. He ties his jacket around his waist, puts the last waterbottle in its pocket. His left eyesocket stings and tears up: something must’ve gotten into it around the safety glasses’ lenses, or maybe while he was washing his face. He wants to rinse it again but he’s dehydrated already, and can’t spare the second bottle.

A short distance away, behind a waving screen of toothy grass, he spies the unbroken foundation of a house, well-made enough to trap and hold the most recent rains. It could almost be a rectangular pool in a Roman atrium but for the tumbleweeds clustered along its western edge. He makes his way to it in the hope of examining his reflection, but all he can see is the dark outline of his head. Then he kneels and closes his right eye tight, balancing blind as he lifts rainwater to his face.

It doesn’t help. He can’t stick around here any longer. The visitor center is ten miles back at least, part of that over rough ground. Curtis towels off with the upstretched hem of his shirt. The wind dries his scalp as he hikes the rise back to the road.

The clouds he saw east of town yesterday must have had rain in them, because the desert is blooming: yellow flares of sunray coreopsis, blue spires of phacelia and locoweed, pink evening-primrose and golden poppies, and some rangy ocotillo, their coral-red flowerspikes bobbing over the orange dirt like hazard-flares. Curtis trudges past them all, head down, a salty trail on his left cheek.

When he reaches the blacktop it gets warmer, then steeper. He drains the last waterbottle. Brown lizards scurry from his path. Dead animals on the road: snakes, groundsquirrels, a ringtail cat pecked over by ravens. Curtis has a long time to think. Damon’s been using him as his hunting-dog, his pointer, flushing Stanley and Argos so Albedo can shoot. Not even that. A hunting-dog at least knows what it’s doing, knows how it’s being used. Not a decoy, either. Decoys are fraudulent, innocuous. Curtis is more like one of those machines they used to use a hundred years ago to trap songbirds. A flashing whirligig. Wind him up and watch the fun.

Across the state park boundary he finds a turnoff to some campsites and detours to look for a spigot, to drink and to rinse his eyesocket again. Still no good. He finds a restroom and checks the mirror, pulling the lid back. He can’t see anything wrong. When he gets back to the hotel, he’ll have to take it out.

It’s past one o’clock when he comes to the visitor center, a red-brown box skirted by a white sunshade, U.S. and NV flags flapping lazily in the traffic circle out front. The building almost disappears against the smooth elusive shapes in the ruddy sandstone: domes, columns, balanced rocks. Curtis looks up at them while double-checking that his jacket hides his gun. The formations look organic, alive somehow. Curtis sees things in them. Ghost faces. Cloacal openings. Spineless marine creatures. A human figure with a bird’s beaked head. He’s glad Argos wanted to meet early; he wouldn’t want to be out here at night.

He drinks from the waterfountain until he’s afraid he’ll get sick, then refills his bottle. Inside, he bypasses the video monitors and the glass cases of samples and artifacts and heads straight for the payphone. He digs into his wallet — old prepaid calling cards he hasn’t used in months, the name and number of that cabbie who drove him to meet Kagami — and he starts dialing.