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.