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.