He leaves Main Street Station with two rolls of quarters in his pocket and catches the trolley to the Stratosphere. Starting his long trek south. He’s making better time, zeroing in on the right people: pit bosses with ten-dollar haircuts, middle-aged bartenders, valets who look him in the eye. Damon’s cash is going fast, but Curtis feels like he’s buying something with it now.
Nobody’s asked him any tough questions, but he runs through his story anyway, rehearsing made-up dialogue as he’s passing between casinos, crossing the boulevard. Thinking back to ten days ago, South Philly, Damon in a booth at the Penrose Diner. Swirling the dregs of his third coffee, brown parabola lapping the bone-white rim. I’m not asking you to lie. Just keep it simple. If anybody presses you, you just tell ’em you’re collecting on a marker. That’s the truth, right? Yellow hair trimmed to a uniform half-inch, longer than Curtis had ever seen it. Beige houndstooth suit wrinkled like it’d been slept in, though Damon clearly hadn’t slept in days. The trick is to have layers. See? You give up a little, they think they got the whole picture. Dark eyes watery but alert, like greased ballbearings. One obsidian cufflink in his black poplin sleeve, a few raveled threads where its mate was torn out. It’s fine to drop my name if you think that’ll help. Nobody’s gonna know what happened in Atlantic City. Or, if they do know, they won’t make any connections. A new mobile phone atop an unmarked #10 envelope. An e-ticket printout inside—UA 2123 dep PHL 07:00 arr LAS 09:36 03/13/2003—wrapped around three packs of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks. What you tell your wife is your business. Look, this is not dangerous. Nobody’s breaking any laws. You find him, and you call me. You do it no later than twelve a.m. next Tuesday night. It’s that simple.
Curtis watched Damon’s Audi pull out of the lot and disappear up the onramp toward the Whitman Bridge. He finished his slice of apple pie along with the chocolate napoleon that Damon had barely touched, ordered himself another coffee, and sat not reading his newspaper until nearly rush hour, when he walked back to the subway. The next morning he awoke at four with Danielle’s alarm, listened as she dressed and left for work, and lay sleepless and staring at the sky through the miniblinds as it went from black to red to yellow to white. Then he rose and cleaned up and caught the bus down to Collingdale, where he bought the gun.
South of Fashion Show Mall the casinos are bigger, busier now that it’s later in the day, and everything takes longer. By eight o’clock he’s past the airport, leapfrogging places that seem unlikely, feeding quarters to the southbound trolley as it carries him from block to block to block. He stops at the buffet at the Tropicana to load up on prime rib and peeled shrimp by the glow of heatlamps and coral-reef aquariums, then sits for an hour above the deserted pool and watches the reflections of palmtrees nod in the wind-purled water. Once his food has settled, he humps it east to the H?tel San Rémo, west to the Orleans, south to the Luxor and Mandalay Bay.
On the long ride back to his own hotel he nods off for a second, then jolts awake, his heart skittering. Outside the streaked bus windows the city seems different, alive in a way that it wasn’t before. There’s steady foot traffic along the boulevard, laughing and shouting and acting out, and the street is full of high-end rental cars, windows down, stereos rattling. Stretch limousines idle at curbside, sly and circumspect, while the sidewalk procession slides backlit across their mute black windshields. Time seems to pass in a hurry. Curtis thinks of bad places he’s been, of nights he’s spent along razor-taped perimeters, eyeing burning wells and distant winks of small-arms fire. Very different from this. But the same nervous thrill, the same sense of something gathered just beyond the lights, waiting for a signal to move. For the first time in a long while Curtis feels as if he’s in the world again—the real world, inhuman and unconstructed—where he can be anybody, or nobody, and where anything is possible.
He’s reached the door to his room, is swiping his keycard, when his cellphone throbs to life. The unfamiliar ringtone startles him; he jumps, the door swings open, and the keycard drops and slides along the tile just inside the jamb. Curtis digs for the phone as he stoops to retrieve it.
A loud voice on the line, not one he can place. Curtis! it says. How you been, man?
I’m good. What’s up?
You know who this is? You recognize my voice? It’s Albedo, man! Remember me? I hear you’re in town!
Curtis doesn’t know anybody named Albedo—or Al Beddow, for that matter. A white guy, probably his own age. Blue Ridge accent: North Carolina, Virginia. Crowd noise in the background. Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here for a few days.
That’s great, man. We gotta hook up, we gotta hang out. What are you doing right now?
I’m—I just got back to my hotel.