by Martin Seay
Curtis watches the casino floor for twenty minutes, scanning, then drifting, then scanning again. Thinking about Danielle. The strange and vital smell of her, tangled up with sweat and Bactine and isopropyl alcohol. Recalling his forearm tight across her lower back. The weight of her hips. A sound she made.
His phone wriggles to life, and he jumps, looks at the display. A number he doesn’t know, a 609 area code. Damon, maybe. He switches the phone to his right hand, plugs his left ear with a finger.
Hello?
Silence on the other end. He can hear crowds, raised voices, music, electronic murmurings. Another casino. Atlantic City? He holds his breath, listens.
Then a voice. I don’t think she’s coming tonight, pal, it says. I think you scared her off.
Albedo, Curtis thinks at first. But it’s not Albedo. The pitch is too high, and the accent’s wrong: Ohio or Western PA, not Appalachia. Who is this? he says.
This is the guy you’re looking for. Who do you think it is?
Stanley?
Curtis can’t help saying it, although he knows it isn’t Stanley. A younger guy, white, probably on the small side. He whistles a little on his s’s. Curtis tries to listen around his voice for other sounds, clues to where he’s calling from.
Look, the voice says. Spare me the Stanley shit, okay? I’m the guy you’re really looking for.
How’d you get this number?
Are you kidding? C’mon, Curtis. You gave your number to every bartender and blackjack dealer on the Strip.
So the guy’s here in town. Curtis starts running through casinos in his head, thinking of their signature background noise. Nothing falls into place. He needs to buy more time. What do you want, man? he says.
The guy’s voice is tense, coiled and snakelike; he’s fighting hard to sound calm. What I really want, he says, is to talk to Veronica. But it looks like that’s not happening tonight. Thanks to you.
A few feet in front of Curtis, a skinny middle-aged Hispanic woman has just hit the jackpot on a Double Double Diamond machine; she’s hopping up and down, bug-eyed, screaming I won I won I won I won, and Curtis wrinkles his brow and jams his finger farther into his ear before he realizes that he’s hearing her over the phone, too. He jerks in his chair, blinking hard, staring into the huge room.
There’s a slight intake of breath on the other end of the line, barely audible. When the guy speaks again, his voice is steady. Well, he says, at least it’s somebody’s lucky night.
The whistle on somebody is canary-clear. Curtis stands up slowly, trying to be patient and careful. Leaving five unplayed dollars in his machine. Nobody’s watching him that he can see. He needs to get the guy talking again, to look for moving lips. Quit messing with me, man, Curtis says. Tell me where you are.
The guy forces a dry laugh. Where’s your jacket, Curtis? he says. No gun tonight, huh? Probably a good idea. Veronica didn’t like it too well when she saw that jacket last night, did she?
Curtis’s back has been turned to the high-limit slot area, and although there’s no one standing there now, the guy could be hiding inside. Curtis moves, checking all the faces, keeping the round bar on his left. Sure, man, he says. I left the jacket topside tonight. So come on out. Let’s talk.
Curtis steps into the high-limit area, clears it in a couple of seconds—there aren’t many people—and moves back to the casino floor, watching for eye contact or unusual movement, heading toward the food court. His vision scrapes away layers of detail as they emerge from the roiling background.
That is not how it works, Curtis, the guy says. You don’t get to see me. Not yet. Besides, we’re talking now, aren’t we? Is this not good enough for you?
Through the whistle at the end of this, Curtis hears it: a canned recording of a crowd shouting in unison WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE! The sound fades toward the end. The guy’s in the slots, and he’s in motion.
Curtis hangs a sharp left into the path of a cocktail waitress who’s approaching in his blindspot; she slams on the brakes, his extended elbow misses her nose by inches, and three of her drinks—two strawberry daiquiris and a screwdriver—slide from her tray and land on his shoes. She swallows a curse, screws her smile back into place, and starts spitting apologies through clenched teeth. Another waitress and a couple of janitors are already moving in. My fault, my fault, Curtis says, and sidesteps them.
His phone snickers at him. Better watch your step there, it says.
Curtis hoped his sudden turn would spook the guy, make him change position, but nobody’s moving in the slots that he can see. A casino suit is hustling over, concerned and irritated, and Curtis cuts him off before he starts talking. I’m fine, Curtis says. It was my fault. I’m sorry, but I have to take this call.
Listen, the voice on the phone is saying, I’ve obviously caught you at a bad time. I’m going to let you go. But first I’m going to ask a favor. Would you give Damon a message for me? Curtis? Hello?
Curtis puts a hand up in the suit’s face, turns back to the slots. Yeah, he says. Yeah, I’m here.
Would you tell Damon—are you getting this?—would you please tell Damon that I know what happened in Atlantic City? I know what happened, I know why it happened, and I have kept my mouth shut about it. Please tell your boss that I am a professional, that I am willing to deal, but only on my own terms, and only with a reasonable guarantee of my safety. Can you remember all that?
What movie’d you get that from, man? Curtis says. I think I saw that movie.
He’s among the machines now, eyeing the crowd. Three Japanese ladies playing Beverly Hillbillies. A fat guy yelling at his wife, mouth half-full of burrito. A pregnant girl in an Eisenhower Lions T-shirt, sitting alone at a 24 Karat machine. Nobody’s lips sync with the voice he’s hearing. Every sound is swaddled in inane electronic chatter.
On the phone, the guy’s coming unglued. I will contact you soon, he says. I will let you know what my terms are. Until I do that, you lay the fuck off of me. Just stay the fuck away. You may have Stanley and Veronica and Walter Kagami duped, but I know what your game really is, and I am not gonna go quietly. You tell Damon—
At the edge of the machines, about a hundred feet away, there’s a blond kid, a pudgy fratboy type, leaning against an ATM. He’s wearing a ballcap and a Mirage T-shirt; he’s turned away from Curtis, reading a travel guide. And inside the travel guide is a mirror: about four inches by six, catching a little light from the chandelier over Curtis’s head. Curtis freezes, lowers his phone from his ear, takes a couple of quick steps, and the guy’s gone.
The gaming floor is crowded, Curtis is out of shape, and getting there seems to take forever. He’s got the guy in a corner, but it’s a big corner: Curtis hasn’t seen him pop up at the escalators, or at the Noodle Asia, so he figures he must’ve ducked into the sports book area. After quick glances left and right, that’s where he follows him.
It’s darker inside than on the casino floor: most of the light comes from dozens of flickering TVs, and Curtis’s vision takes a moment to adjust. A few Australians are glued to a soccer match; most other screens are recapping NCAA basketball. In a far corner, Curtis can make out a single luminous map of Iraq.
He looks around for a baseball cap, then for blond hair, then for a Mirage T-shirt, but strikes out across the board. Moving into the room, he spots the brim of the guy’s cap sticking out of a wastebasket. He picks it up, and finds the guy’s blond hair sewn neatly inside. As Curtis lifts it to his face, there’s movement somewhere to his left: someone making for the exit.
The guy is light on his feet. Curtis just catches a glimpse of him as he’s rounding the corner up ahead, blackhaired now, an MGM Grand hoodie pulled over his T-shirt. By the time Curtis thinks to look at his shoes, he’s already vanished. Curtis makes the corner not far behind him, feeling winded, and ducks through the first opening to his left.
It’s a little lounge, a salsa band playing to a crowded house. Colored lights sweep the floor; middle-aged white people shuffle an
d grin. Curtis knows right away that it’s over. No telling how many changes of clothes the kid’s got. If only he’d looked at the shoes. He stands there for a moment, fuming, catching his breath. His left foot is cold and sticky where the spilled drinks soaked through. After a while, he steps back onto the gaming floor and dials the number the guy called him from.
No answer, no voicemail set up. After five tries Curtis quits, then takes a moment to save the number in the phone. His fingertip mashes the small buttons. Whistler appears on the LCD screen.
He calls Damon on his way back to the elevators. As before, there’s no greeting, just a beep. Damon, Curtis says. It’s me. You got some explaining to do. I just had a very fucked-up phone conversation with some little freak who’s here in Vegas dialing me from a 609 cell, who wants me to give you some message about how he knows what went down in AC and how he wants you to guarantee his safety, but I’m having a hard time doing that, see, because I don’t know who the fuck he is or what the fuck he’s talking about. All right? Now I am tired of being jerked around by you, motherfucker. You need to call me—on the phone, not any more of this fax machine bullshit—and give me the poop. Until you do that, I am suspending operations, effective immediately. I am sitting by the swimming pool, and I am spending your goddamn dollars. Hear me? You need to be straight with me, man. Because this is fucked up. Later.
The keycard slides; Curtis steps into his room. There’s a rasp along the tile, something stuck to the damp sole of his shoe: a folded-over sheet of hotel stationery. He catches whiffs of rum and orange juice as he stoops to peel it off.
We need to talk
I’m upstairs in 3113
Come by tonight after 11:30
VERONICA
It’s past 11:30 now. Curtis half-turns toward the door, then stops, thinking. Feeling suddenly very happy. Feeling like himself. Things are happening.
He turns, crosses the unlit suite, opens the safe. Checks the revolver’s cylinder—five brass caseheads, a neat gleaming ring—and clips it to his belt. His leather blazer is draped over a chair by the window; Curtis slips it on, smoothes the hem to hide the pistol, turns to check his silhouette in the mirror on the wall.
A second pair of eyes stares back at him. Black eyes in a waxen face.
Reflex puts the pistol back in his hand, but aims it automatically at the image in the glass; Curtis curses, wheels to look over his shoulder. As he moves, the phantom in the mirror wavers and warps—like a TV screen raked by a magnet—and dissolves from sight. Curtis feels the sickening, not-unfamiliar sensation of his brain losing its grip on his body: he sees himself wild-eyed, half-crouched, jabbing the pistol at dark corners, although he knows full well that he’s alone. His eye has tricked him, or his mind has.
He straightens up, holsters the gun. His wrists and jaw quiver a little from adrenaline, and he clears his throat, shakes his head roughly, scowls at his solitary reflection. This has happened before, though not for a long time. When he first returned from the Desert, he saw ghosts often: dead faces, dead bodies or parts of bodies, what remained of the enemy after the daisycutters and FAE clusters fell on them. In Kuwait the dead were an annoyance, something not to step in, but when he shipped home they came to haunt him—charred skulls peeping from car windows, shriveled arms curled in flowerbeds—and bothered him badly for many days, until one day they didn’t anymore. Now it seems they’re back, which doesn’t surprise him. These days it seems like everything is coming back.
What’s strange, though, is that the face in the mirror didn’t look like any memory from the Desert. It was a dead face, that’s for sure, and also a familiar one, but not a face from any battlefield he’s known. It looked like Stanley.
Curtis doesn’t know what to do with that; doesn’t want to think about it. He clears his throat again, rubs his face. Disgusted with himself. Topside, Veronica is waiting.
He pauses in the doorframe on his way out, just long enough to reach and turn on the lights. Checking to see if the room really is empty, which of course it is. Pointless. Curtis’s gaze tracks the tile floor, the mahogany armoire, the wrought-iron divider, the tables and the couches, until it arrives at the windows, which show him the parts of the room he can’t see from where he stands: the big rack, the door to the head, his own small shadow in the corridor. The fancy room reminds him of the waitress who took his order in the Oculus Lounge, and also of some of the nurses at Bethesda: good at what they do, so good that their skill becomes a screen that conceals the fact that they don’t care. It’s a plush room, but it’s not comfy. Nobody’s home.
For an instant—only an instant—Curtis is scared that he might die out here.
The room seems ready for him to leave, so he does. He switches off the light, and the dark comes in behind him.
13
From the way the numbers run on his floor, Curtis can hazard a guess as to where Veronica’s suite is, and he climbs the stairs at the opposite end of the building.
Four flights. Taking his time. The door opens on a hallway identical to the one he just came from. He moves silently down the corridor, past the elevators, counting the numbers down, listening hard as he goes. There’s no sound beyond the drone of air ducts. Curtis is thinking that everyone must be at the tables down below when a door opens ahead, and two women in floorlength fur coats step out. They exchange parting words with a male voice inside, and the door closes behind them. Both women wear shiny red latex gloves; one carries a black attaché case. They smile brightly at they pass. Hi! they say.
When Curtis reaches 3113, he stands outside for a long time. A soft ding comes from down the corridor: the elevator opening for the women. Curtis steps back, listens at the door on the left, at the door on the right, at the door across the hallway. Overhead, the HVAC system switches off. After a while it switches back on.
Curtis knocks. The tiny point of light in the convex peephole goes dark. Then the door clicks, swings open.
Veronica is wearing an ornate gold cat-face mask. Curtis can’t help himself: he gasps when he sees it. She laughs at him, a nervous laugh, and backs into the room. The mask clashes badly with her bare feet and frayed bluejeans and baggy Cypress Bayou sweatshirt. Hey, Curtis, she says. Little jumpy tonight, huh?
You gave me a start there.
Sorry about that. Come on in. Oh—make sure that door pulls shut, okay?
Curtis turns to tug the handle and instantly gets a bad feeling, but it’s already too late; there’s a rustle of fabric, the rapid creak-and-click of a spring and a slide, and her pistol is just behind his ear. Smooth and quick.
Arms up, she says. Spread your legs wide. Toes out. Do it! Now fall forward. Put your hands on the doorframe. Higher! Do not fucking move.
Curtis feels a tremble in his bladder and a few hot drops on his thigh, and he fights hard to keep the rest inside. This is something that has always happened, every time he’s been shot at, or thought he was about to be. It used to shame him badly afterward: the memory of coming out of situations with wet legs and darkened trousers. Now he’s surprised to find that the feeling is almost a comfort. It calms him down, reminds him that he knows what to do.
Curtis? Veronica says. You still with me? You doing okay?
Curtis takes a deep breath, lets it out. I been better, he says.
I’m not gonna shoot you. Okay? I have to pat you down. Do not move at all.
He’s scared she’ll search him with the gun in her hand, but she knows what she’s doing: it goes away, and there’s a swish as she secures it at her waist. She reaches under his arms, unclips his revolver from his belt, sets it on the deck behind her and pushes it away with her foot, off the tile, onto the carpet. Then she works front to back, top to bottom, crushing and twisting each pocket before she reaches into it. She finds the speedloader in his jacket and the wallet in his jeans, and she drops them on the deck by the revolver. Then she pats down his groin, his legs, his ankles. She does all of this while wearing a gold cat-face mask.
She’
s backing off now, collecting his things, retreating farther into the suite. Leaving him there. He wants very badly to open the door, to walk down the hallway, to run. Hey, he calls to her. We finished?
Her voice, muffled a little by the walls: Yeah, she says. Sorry. Come on in. Make yourself at home.
He pushes himself upright, straightens his clothes, turns around. The reflector bulb directly overhead is lit; a table lamp glows at the far end of the room. Aside from that the suite is dark.
He steps forward. Veronica’s suite is a looking-glass version of his own: higher up, maybe a little bigger—she’s got two queens instead of one kingsize rack—but he’s got the nicer view. One of her closet doors is ajar; nothing’s inside. He looks around for luggage, but there isn’t any.
She’s on the couch in the sunken living area, with his gun unloaded on the coffee table before her, speedloader and five loose bullets beside it. Her own pistol—a black SIG, small enough to fit in a purse—is on the cushion next to her, in her shadow, about an inch from her hand.
He pauses on the steps. Her mask glitters in the dim light: gold paint and rhinestones, tufts of peacock-feather at the ears. She’s flipping through his wallet: his VIC, his TRICARE card, his Pennsylvania ID and concealed-carry permit. I thought you were married, she says.
That’s right. I am.
She closes the wallet, holds it out to him. Her eyes, dull amid the filigree, flit between his face and his left hand. No wedding ring, huh? she says. I guess what happens here stays here. Right, cowpoke?
Curtis doesn’t move, doesn’t respond.
Come on, Curtis, Veronica says. Don’t act like you’re upset. What did you expect me to do?
He steps down, retrieves the wallet. Next time you do a body-search, he says, you ought to ask your detainee if they’re carrying any needles or sharp objects.
Hey, that’s great advice. Thanks. You know, I was planning on talking to you about Stanley and Damon, but if you want to turn this into some kind of squarebadge best-practices seminar instead, then that’s just awesome. I’ll take some notes.