She took me by the elbow and guided me a few steps away.
I smiled and whispered, “Look, I know. Why don’t you make your excuse, I’ll get him on his plane and-”
She dug into her purse, doubtless searching for her car keys. “Neal, sweetie,” she said, pressing a twenty into my palm, “can I treat you to a movie or something?”
I slipped the bill back to her.
“Save your money.”
She looked at me with those big blue eyes.
She must have been something, I thought. In fact, she was not at all unattractive now. And there were still a couple of hours before the flight, the airport was close and I could still get Nathan back to Palm Desert tonight.
“You know how it is,” she said.
Yeah, I thought. I was young once myself.
Chapter 3
Las Vegas is the weirdest place in the world.
I’ve been to some pretty weird places. Hell, I grew up-or failed to, depending on your perspective-in New York City. Weird. I’ve worked cases in San Francisco (weird), London (weird) and Hollywood (very weird). I even spent three months as a prisoner of sorts in a Buddhist monastery in the remote mountains of western Sichuan in China (very, very weird).
But on the general scale of weird, Las Vegas has all these places beat hands-down, so to speak.
I think it’s what happens when you have a combination of unlimited space and unlimited money unconstrained by common sense or good taste. Things can get pretty weird.
I mean here in a state run by Mormons you have a town founded by a Jewish gangster whose nickname was Bugsy. He gets the weird ball rolling when he builds the first casino and calls it what? The Flamingo.
In a desert.
A big pink bird that lives in the water.
In Africa.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m standing in the middle of a Nevada desert, one of the first things I think of is not an African bird that stands around with one leg in the water.