You haven’t been arrested. I understand you used to be a military policeman, so you know how this works. I should tell you, though, before we say anything else, that you have the right to remain silent, and to have an attorney present for any discussion with me. You can get an attorney, and I can get a tape-recorder, and we can do this more formally. Do you want to do that, Curtis?
Curtis closes his eyes, toggles his head back and forth. I’m sky-high, man, he says. No judge’ll let you use any of this.
The guy shrugs. He already has an inkstick out; now he flips open a spiral notebook, stuffs his tie in his breast pocket. You want to wait? he says. Sober up?
Curtis shakes his head. No, he says. I want to tell it now.
He tells it as well as he can. It’s hard to keep it all straight. He gets confused, makes mistakes, goes back to correct himself. Even uninjured, unmedicated, he never had a handle on a lot of it. But he does his best.
He tells about the call he got from Damon, about meeting him in Philly at the Penrose Diner, and also about Stanley, and about the cardcounters at the Spectacular. He tells about Albedo, and about Argos, and about the missing dealer, and about what Argos said in the desert, and he tells about the call he had his dad make to the Jersey cops. For the most part he keeps Veronica out of it. He’s not entirely sure why. It’s what Stanley would want him to do, he figures, and she never seemed like that big a part of it anyway. She was about as far outside as Curtis was himself.
Hang on, the Hispanic guy says, scribbling. Wait up a second. What’s the point?
Curtis blinks. Say again? he says. What do you mean, what’s the point? You asked me to tell it, so I’m telling it, goddamnit.
No no no, the guy says. You keep talking about the Point. Like, the cardcounters hit the Point. You wanted to get a job at the Point. I don’t know what that means.
The Spectacular, Curtis says. The Spectacular is the Point. The name’s got an exclamation mark after it. In its logo. The official name. Exclamation point, I mean to say. Before they even opened, this story went around—I don’t know if it’s true—that a PR guy got fired because he forgot to put the explanation point, the exclamation point, on the end of the name. People working there started calling it the Point. As a joke. And it spread. Most people who say it now, they don’t even know how it got started. But that’s how I heard it from Damon.
Okay, the guy says. Got it.
His pen scratches across the little notebook; Curtis reads upsidedown. POINT = SPECTACULAR, the guy writes.
Later he holds a cup of water for Curtis; Curtis sips, keeps talking. As he gets tired and hurts worse he starts to explain things that probably don’t matter, to repeat whatever details stick in his brain. The ripped-up faxes on SPECTACULAR! letterhead. The machinegun in Albedo’s car. The cellphone Damon gave him. The calls he made from the visitor center at the state park. The cufflink torn from Damon’s sleeve. Jay Leno in the hotel lobby. The Mirror Thief left in the Quicksilver suite. Did anybody pick that book up? Curtis asks. Somebody should go over there and pick that book up.
By now the agent has all but stopped scribbling; the look on his face says he’s waiting for something. Curtis tries to think of what that might be, to think of questions he’s been ready for that the guy hasn’t asked yet. He comes up with quite a few. One big one. Where’s Damon now? Curtis says.
The agent doesn’t answer. He leans back slowly in the steel-tube chair, retracts the point of his rollerball with a soft click.
You don’t know, Curtis says.
The guy smiles. It’s not a happy smile. For the first time Curtis can tell that he’s operating on not much sleep. Do you have any thoughts, the agent says, as to where we might find him?
Curtis squints, shakes his head. Shaking it makes him dizzy. I figured NJSP’d have him by now, he says.
The guy stares evenly, his eyes expressionless. Monday afternoon, he says, two NJSP detectives met Damon at his townhouse. Follow-up visit. They’d interviewed him before; he’d been cooperative. Damon invited them in, put on some coffee, shot them both in the face. One died at the scene, the other’s on life-support. Probably not coming off it. Local uniformed patrol found them within the half-hour—somebody must have known something was wrong—but by then Damon had already cleared out.
Curtis tries to take a deep breath but chokes on it, and for a second he’s afraid he’ll puke. The room spins, like the restaurant at the Stratosphere, and he shuts his eyes to make it stop. He’s thinking back, trying to recall: what time he phoned his dad, what time Damon’s last fax came. What he might have caused, or failed to stop.
Damon hadn’t shown up for work that day, the agent says. Risk Management conducted a search of his office. The story is, they found nothing on his computer but porn videos, and nothing in his filing cabinets except dirty cartoons. Pretty disturbing stuff, from what I hear. People are wondering why it took so long to realize he was a problem. He must be a real charming guy.
Curtis hears a rustle as the agent flips through his notebook, maybe looking over what he’s just written. Do you have any thoughts, he says again, as to where we might find him?