AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
The sun was setting as they drove west from the strip, and the two men in the car were squinting behind their sunglasses. Eventually, there was but a fleeting gold band on the horizon, and Richie Morley, who was behind the wheel of the Jag, observed how the vista never grew old—it was one more reason why he lived here—and then he took off his shades and tossed them into the caddy in the wide vehicle’s door. Behind the car, the first garish lights from the casinos great and small were making their nocturnal birth, a twinkling aureole that indiscriminately beckoned the damaged and the dreamers alike.
Morley never suspected this was a hit until the passenger beside him pulled the gun. The guy told him to slow down and keep both hands on the wheel. Morley watched from the corners of his eyes as the fellow reached into the glove compartment and retrieved the handgun Morley kept there. Richie himself had never killed a man. Once, he’d had a guy on his knees, and he’d stood behind him and pressed his own Beretta into the fellow’s nuchal ridge—the concave space where the occipital knob meets the spine, a bit of anatomy Morley had looked up out of curiosity when he’d gotten home—but he hadn’t killed him. He wasn’t a killer.
He wondered now how he would talk his way out of this, and the wheels were turning. He’d say whatever he had to say to see the sun rise tomorrow, and deal then with whatever compromises he’d made or whatever he’d given away.
When they reached the sightseeing pull-off on the two-lane road, he started haggling. Suggested he could talk to his brother about selling his shares in the casino, the Buckingham Palace. Said he didn’t know how important the casino was to them, and now that he understood, he was happy to make a deal, and he knew his brother, Artie, would be, too. But that ship had sailed. Next, he offered his crypto seed phrase, but the fellow beside him said, “Your password? What makes you think we don’t already have it?”
So, finally, he begged, pleading, while wishing to God he had a wife or kids that he could use as leverage. Please, you gotta spare me: I got two kids. But he didn’t have children. All he had was a brother, and he supposed someone else right now was taking him out, too.
“Richie,” the guy told Morley, “no one is going to kill you because you won’t sell the casino.”
The hit man had selected a pull-off that was paved so he wouldn’t leave footprints when he exited the Jag.
“Then why?” Richie asked, his voice quavering.
“Because you’re a fucking FBI informant. Because, Richie, you’re a rat.”
And there he ended it, putting a bullet into Richie Morley’s temple at point-blank range. He used Morley’s own gun he’d taken from the glove compartment. Then he put on plastic gloves, unbuckled Morley’s seat belt, and wiped off the parts of the car he’d touched while riding beside him. He swabbed off the handles inside and outside the vehicle, as if he were working at a high-end carwash and the detailing mattered. He put Morley’s gun half in the dead man’s hand.
But he didn’t touch the great Rorschach of blood on the headrest or adjust Morley’s skull, which had whipsawed unexpectedly and come to rest against the window. He sent the text—empty air, no words—that signaled it was done and to send the car to retrieve him. In the distance, he heard coyotes howling.
Then he stood by the side of the road and waited, watching the constellations appear in the darkening sky, hoping no other drivers would stop, curious about the Jaguar in the pull-off and whether the driver needed assistance, until after he was gone. None did.
He was back in Las Vegas thirty-five minutes later, and he ordered a steak and wedge salad at the casino that the Morley brothers, one dead, one alive, still owned, and was brought a chunk of iceberg lettuce drowning in blue cheese dressing and topped with fried onion rings from a can. The salad was, he thought to himself, an indication of just what an absolute trash heap the Buckingham Palace had become. If they didn’t have that crazy woman re-creating Lady Di in their showroom? They’d have nothing, nothing at all.
Part One
I’ve seen grown-ups go bitchcakes. Full-on toddler tantrums, screaming and yelling and throwing shit. It’s scary. It’s embarrassing. Who does that when they’re not, like, three years old?
CHAPTER ONE
Crissy
Luck.
It transcends the craps tables and the slots. It’s the fulcrum around which all stories spin: The chap who misses the plane that augers into a mountain because—and it seemed like bad luck at the time—his taxi had a flat on the way to the airport. The aspiring actor with a West End or Broadway belt who shares her chairlift with a casting director one chilly afternoon at a ski resort. The fellow who has what should be the stroke that kills him, but the blood vessel in the deep recesses of his brain happens to burst in a hospital lobby—he’s leaving when it ruptures, he’s on his way to the parking garage—because his mother has just died three floors above him, and so the fact that he is in the O.R. in minutes means that he lives and has a full recovery. Had the tsunami of blood swamped his gray matter ten minutes later, after he had retrieved his vehicle and started back to the hotel where he had been ensconced the previous three days, waiting for his mother to expire, he would have perished in traffic. He might even have taken someone with him to the other side, blacking out and slamming his car into some unlucky pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Las Vegas is a city built on luck. None of us, even when we are breathing our last, understand fully the role that chance will have played in our lives, the ways that what we supposed was good luck prevented us from experiencing better luck, or the ways that a small misfortune saved us from a far worse one.
The truth is, I laugh when someone says about a book, Oh, that’s an unreliable narrator. Aren’t all narrators unreliable? Who in bloody hell remembers anything, much less what people said at a casino at two or three in the morning? The whole idea of a first-person novel makes my head spin. And a memoir? Someone trying to share with you their childhood and regaling you with things their parents said when they were eight years old? That’s barmy.
Because memory is fungible and we lack the omniscience to understand what role chance has played in our lives.
So, let’s begin with this: this story isn’t about my childhood. I don’t want to talk about my childhood.
And I won’t.
Instead I’m going to tell you what happened in Las Vegas, and I’m going to tell you everything as best I can, but my best is hampered by the fact this all occurred when I was doing two shows a night, channeling a dead princess, sleeping until lunchtime, popping a bit too much Adderall and Valium (yes, both), and periodically—like that princess—purging over a jet-black toilet. (Fine, I flirt with an eating disorder, just like that princess, which my therapist says is one of the reasons why I do what I do for a living. I wonder what, pray tell, was her first clue?) It was the late summer of 2022, though late summer means less in Las Vegas than it does in much of the world. Charles was about to become king and Camilla the queen, though if you’d asked me that August whether I thought I’d need to rewrite moments in my show in September because Elizabeth would go the way of all flesh—even a monarch subject to no earthly authority bends her knee to God—I would have said no. The woman, it seemed to some (probably to Charles), was going to outlive us all.
Ukraine had no plans to surrender, though Kharkiv and Mariupol were rubble. As was the ruble. The word oligarch had, with cause, morphed from a straight line about yachts and statuesque hookers to a shorthand for corruption and moral turpitude. The pandemic was endemic. We lived with it the way we lived with the flu, except some nights I would peer into my audience and see more masks than on others. But this was Las Vegas, and so the vaccinated and the unvaccinated mingled and gambled and tried to live in a bubble in which the possible end of the world, triggered either by a virus or a madman in the Kremlin, could be ignored for a couple of hours. A night. A weekend.
Cryptocurrency was exploding from the preferred tool of libertarians and renegades, Bitcoin bros and niche investors, raw meat eaters and dark web madmen, into the next big thing in, it seemed, every blockbuster television commercial and streaming TV series. The bubble had not yet burst, in other words. But the crypto exchange FTX was soon to go belly-up, and Sam Bankman-Fried would be arrested in the Bahamas soon after that.
I had, by then, stopped sleeping with the senator. Some families grew closer in the pandemic, and others, like John Aldred’s, fell apart, people falling away like petals from a dying rose. But the senator and his wife never publicly separated and had, in fact, reconciled about the time they were getting their first booster shots, and I supposed that no one other than the two of us, his key Vegas staffers, his driver, and a few people at the casino—such as the two brothers who owned the place—knew that we had been an item for not quite half a year. (So, I suppose, a lot of people knew. But Las Vegas is a world known both for ostentation and discretion.)
This story is, at its core, a tale of two sisters. The sisters are from Vermont, not an especially diabolical little world, which may explain their naivete. Our naivete. But maybe not. You could argue that grown-ups in their thirties should know better, but how many adults, in the end, only make what we like to call good choices?
