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“Your crypto is lost forever.”
“Gone?”
“All gone. Poof,” he said, raising his hands and spreading wide his fingers like a magician.
“Do people ever just memorize their seed phrases?”
“Sure.”
Frankie hadn’t told her how easily crypto could be lost when she’d gotten her first Futurium coin. She’d written down the randomly generated seed phrase, nine of the twelve words meaningless to her and three that were daggers, as if the computer wanted to taunt her: juveniles, ghoul, and delusion. The phrase sat in her dresser with her passport. What if she lost it or it was stolen? The very idea of not being able to retrieve that ever-growing pile of money—okay, it wasn’t really a pile—caused her stomach to lurch, and she stared down at the avocado and cucumber rolls on her plate, and pawed at one with her chopsticks, but she couldn’t bring herself to lift it to her mouth.
“You’re alarmed,” said Tony.
“No,” she lied. “I was just imagining someone misplacing their password. Their seed phrase. Horrible.”
“It happened to a guy I know in L.A. He never got any back,” he told her.
“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not. I was the one who found it,” he said, and everyone at the table but her laughed. She couldn’t decide if this had actually happened or was merely a joke, but she had the sense there was more than a modicum of truth to the story.
After lunch, Frankie’s friends were planning on going their separate ways, and Tony left first because he had booked a massage at the Versailles. When the rest of them were finishing their coffee, Rory swiveled in his seat, and Betsy noticed the gun in his waistband. She asked Damon and Lara if they had pistols with them, too. Damon didn’t answer, but Lara opened her handbag.
“It’s a SIG Sauer P238,” she told Betsy, placing a handgun on the table. “Only weighs fifteen ounces. It’s cute, right? Don’t you love that pink pearl grip? Fits nicely in even my smaller purses.”
“Why do you all carry guns?” she asked.
Lara was the one who chose to answer. “Because we can. I can’t speak for Damon or Rory or Frankie—”
“You have a gun?” she asked Frankie.
“Not on me. I keep one in the car and another in the house.”
“You have two?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you have them in Vermont?”
“I had one.”
She was surprised. She hadn’t known.
“To make all this work, you need two P’s in your pocket: a pistol and the police,” Damon said, smirking. “And we have both.”
“And by this you mean…” Betsy asked.
“What we’re building here in Vegas,” Damon replied, and then he said in a tone that sounded on the surface as if he were making a joke, but anyone listening would understand was the unvarnished truth, “the Mob Two-Point-Oh. And, someday soon, with a senator in our holster.”
Frankie looked at him as if he’d just confessed a crime to a district attorney, his eyes wide and exasperated. Betsy guessed that Damon wasn’t supposed to say that sort of thing around her.
“Damon is exaggerating,” Frankie told her. “We have friends with the LVPD, but it’s not like we have the whole damn force on some gangster-like payroll. I told you: Futurium is mostly above board.”
Frankie’s damage control was ham-handed, and both Rory and Damon stared at him, toying with the idea of contradicting him. Remind him who was really in charge. But, in the end, the two of them swallowed the last of their coffee and remained silent.
Betsy turned to Lara and said, “I had a boyfriend in high school who went deer hunting. His whole family did. So, I took a safety course and learned how to shoot a rifle.”
“What kind of shot are you?” Rory asked.
