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“See?” she asked, after punching in the password. She pointed at the screen. “It isn’t there. You can see how little money is in checking or savings.”
Damon stared closely at the screen and then took a step back. “Frankie, does she have any other accounts? You involved in this?”
“No! Hell, no!”
“You didn’t open up an investment account for her—maybe at your old bank?”
“I did not, I promise you: I did not.”
“Crissy, what about you? Did you and Yevgeny hack in and—”
“We did no such thing,” her sister said. She sounded less staggered. Almost defiant. And then her pitch rose when she continued, “I don’t even understand your bloody crypto. And I am many things, but I am not a hacker.”
Rory took his pistol from his waistband. “Well, this is interesting. Betsy? Where did you hide our crypto?”
“Your crypto? It’s mine!”
“That much coin for doing the little you did? And then fighting us every step of the way out here? You don’t deserve it. No, you don’t get to keep it. Not anymore.”
“Rory,” Frankie pleaded, “c’mon. This has all gone too far.”
She felt a noxious fusion of fury and fear. She couldn’t take her eyes off the weapon in Rory’s hand.
“Don’t do something crazy,” said Damon.
“Listen to him,” Frankie added. “You can’t believe—”
“I’m not sure what I believe. I just know that we gave your girlfriend a lot of coin, and now she’s hidden it.”
“Well, as you said. We gave it to her. So, she can do with it what she wants, right? Right?” Frankie insisted, his voice breaking the second time he asked Right?
Rory aimed the gun squarely at her.
“Rory,” whimpered Marisa. “Betsy didn’t do anything. It was me, I—”
“Shhhh,” Betsy told her, understanding instantly where the coin was. “Don’t speak.”
“Rory, you can’t keep going off script,” said Damon. “You need to put the gun away. If she—”
Which was when Rory fired. But he didn’t shoot her. From the corner of her eye, Betsy saw Lara Kozlov pulling that SIG Sauer with the pink pearl grip from her purse and aiming it at Rory. “Drop it,” she’d said, but those were the last words she ever spoke, because with the speed of a snake Rory pivoted and shot her in the head, the pop and the sudden red splotch where one of her eyes had been happening simultaneously, and the woman’s body tilted onto its side on the leather easy chair, a rag doll, and the gun fell from her hand onto that beautiful hardwood floor.
I had seen a lot of crazy shit. But I’d never seen a person killed.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Crissy
Las Vegas was built in a biosphere largely bereft of water, and the classic casinos of the 1950s suggested this brave new world in the American southwest was an homage to the arid landscape of the Middle East: The Sahara. The Sands. The Dunes. The Desert Inn.
It wasn’t.
It wasn’t a tribute to anything but greed, and the nexus of avarice and chance. The gangsters, hustlers, and self-proclaimed cowboys who invented Las Vegas never had any interest in the natural world. Oh, its creators loved the safe tropes from Egypt or Saudi Arabia. The ones oblivious to religion. So, there was the Aladdin, which was, in some ways, the perfect name for a casino, and then the Luxor.
Remember the very first thing I told you? Las Vegas was built on a bedrock of luck.
But it was bad luck.
For the idea of the city to succeed—what it represented—you had to believe that people always had faith that their luck was about to change. Sure, there would be the whales who could afford to lose hour after hour and day after day, but most of the “guests” who kept feeding the ever-bleating mechanical beasts on the casino floor couldn’t. And yet the Las Vegas forefathers were confident that they would stay there and keep losing.
