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The new school was fine. The work was easy. But I’d never found schoolwork hard.
And the kids were okay.
But I had no idea if Las Vegas was going to stick, so it’s not like I went out of my way to make friends. I was happy enough reading and playing numbers games on my tablet and phone in the pool.
A casino’s odds fascinated me. You don’t beat the house (unless, like me, you can count cards), and even then you’re probably just cutting your losses and getting to hang out at the table a little longer.
For instance, the house edge on a roulette wheel begins at 5.26 percent. And some players are so dim, they look at the wheel and think, “Oh, I bet one number, I have a one in thirty-six chance of winning, because the wheel is numbered one to thirty-six.” Hah! Wheels have a zero, and some have double and triple zeros, so the odds might be one in thirty-nine.
And the longer you play, the more you lose. Even I understood why casinos don’t have windows or clocks.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Betsy
When Tony Lombardo dropped by the Futurium warehouse and gave her the sunglasses and the scarlet T-shirt with the sheep, Betsy had no idea that they were part of Diana’s “look.” She took the single black sheep as a compliment: She was special. She was unique. That night, Frankie gave her a handbag and a scarf and a floral blouse that had nothing at all to do with Diana. He gave Marisa a retro T-shirt for an eighties punk band and a ball cap and a gift card for a low-end jewelry store in a mall near their apartment. Frequently, the Futurium team was descending upon her with presents, because they said they wanted to make Marisa’s and her arrival in Las Vegas as seamless as possible. She thought the gifts were cute and kind, though she did suspect there was more to it than that. After all, these people were either gangsters or were involved with gangsters.
Frankie didn’t suggest that she wear the sheep T-shirt the day they were going to have lunch with Crissy. She only grabbed it because it was still in the gift bag on top of her dresser and the morning was getting away from her. (She was finding as a mother that the mornings often got away from her.) She was in a hurry to get to work and get Marisa out the door and onto the school bus. Same with the sunglasses. She grabbed them without thinking twice; they were new and they were there.
Only on Saturday, when she met her sister and Nigel, did she realize that part of their retreat from the parking lot might have had something to do with the T-shirt. At the time, when her sister and Nigel peeled out, she thought it was madness, and she was mystified. Now, however, the question had changed: why was Futurium using her to push her sister’s buttons for some reason, preying on sibling rivalries they really knew nothing about?
* * *
After Crissy and Nigel had sped away, Rory went home and Betsy and Frankie climbed into his Tesla, but they didn’t head back to the warehouse with the computers. Instead, they drove toward the strip because it was still lunchtime and Frankie knew that she loved looking at the casinos. She was texting with Crissy, and the sisters agreed that they would meet Saturday at some water park with a snack bar for a bite to eat, and Betsy would bring no one but Marisa. Frankie wanted to join them, but she dug in her heels and said no: she didn’t want a rerun of what had just occurred in the chain restaurant’s parking lot.
A few minutes later, as the two of them were driving past Crissy’s casino, they both gazed up at the ever-changing video billboard with, among its other ads, one for her sister’s cabaret: “That Rare Woman the World Will Never Forget: Diana, Candle in the Darkness.”
“They don’t mention your sister’s name,” Frankie observed, speaking for the first time since she had barred him from joining the sisters at the water park.
“So?”
“I’d want my name up there if I were her. But, I guess, Diana’s the draw. Not Crissy.”
“Diana is the draw,” she agreed.
He pulled off his sunglasses and said, “These are a disaster. I managed to get sunblock all over them. I have another pair in the glove compartment. Would you mind getting them for me, please?”
She took his glasses and opened the door to the compartment and saw his pistol was there. She couldn’t recall if he had been carrying it when they had met Crissy and Nigel just now and then he’d tossed it into the glove compartment, or whether it had been there the whole time. She picked it up and made sure the safety was on. The safety was the part of a gun that was stressed most in the firearms course she’d taken as a teen. “If I hadn’t met you in Vermont and spent so much time with you and your family,” she said, “I’d be creeped out by the idea you drive around with a pistol.”
“It’s Nevada.”
“People keep saying that,” she said. “I don’t know what that means and I don’t care. Why in the world do you need a gun with you? Why do Rory and Lara and Damon?”
“And Tony,” he said, chortling.
“Yes, him, too.”
“He heads back to Los Angeles on Sunday night.”
“You’re changing the subject. I want an explanation. Your Futurium folks like guns an awful lot. Why?”
“Too much time around very demanding, very volatile investors. Besides, you had a gun in Vermont.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Still. You learned how to use a hunting rifle. You know what it’s like to fire a gun.”
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “Here are the rules. No guns around Marisa. None. Are we clear?” She handed him his other sunglasses and shut the door of the glove deck.
