Death On the Flop Read Online Free PDF Page A

passed.
    “Because I won’t let her pierce her belly button or her tongue,” Shana answered matter-of-factly, as if that were the obvious answer. I guess I couldn’t argue—when it came to teenage girls, I was in the dark. Shana had given birth to Aphrodite without benefit of marriage and named her for the goddess of love even though I’d argued at the time that a name predestines us to a certain kind of life. I certainly was a boring Belinda. Shana was a wild Indian flame. And Affie had spent most of her life with her head in the clouds, doing unrealistic things.
    Still, she was my goddaughter and I loved her. “Okay, I’ll pay her ten bucks a day to bring in my mail, water the plants and feed Grog. But tell her if she pierces her hand I will cut her out of the will.”
    “Whoo-whoo.” Shana rolled her eyes. “If you were still about to become Mrs. McKnight, that threat might carry a little more weight.”
    I got no respect. That was going to be goal numero uno when I got to Vegas, to earn some respect. From a bunch of gambling addicts. Great start.
    Ben threw Shana his spare key and hustled me out the front door. And then grabbed my arm. “Last thing, leave your cell phone here. I left mine at home. This is going to be a true vacation. No outside interruptions.”
    “What if there is an emergency?” I asked, handing my phone to Shana with trepidation.
    “With your snake?”
    “I was thinking more about Mom or Dad.” I tried not to roll my eyes. After forty years of self-absorption, Ben wasn’t going to change now.
    “We’ll call with our room number when we get there,” Ben offered generously as he shoved me toward the stairwell, dragging the suitcase along.
    “When are y’all going to be back?” Shana called from the door.
    “When we can afford to,” Ben called as he went around me, jogging down the stairs and out of sight.

Three

    Slot machines greeting us as we exited the con course was a little disconcerting for a girl born and raised in Texas, where dancing is illegal in some counties. The person in the airport women’s room who had a five o’clock shadow and was duct taping something under her hot pink miniskirt was another clue that this Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
    The Twilight Zoneness of it all made those incidents easier to deal with than ordinary people doing bizarre things. After we shared a cab with a married sixty-something couple from Anchorage, I nearly begged Ben to go back to the airport and home. The cabbie was told to drop the wife to meet friends at the David Copperfield show; then after telling her he was going to rest at their hotel room, the husband proceeded to pull out a wad of cash, count out fifty thousand dollars and ask to be dropped off at “the biggest stakes craps table in town.” Nothing like gambling the farm away while Mama watched magic tricks.
    “Aw, Bee,” Ben assured me, patting my hand, “anything goes in Vegas.”
    “That’s what scares me.”
    “Think of it as liberating. What you do here, stays here.”
    “Life is never that easy, Ben.”
    “Oh okay, it is that. Free and easy.” The heavily-accented taxi driver agreed with Ben, nodding and smiling as Ben handed him a sizeable tip along with the fare.
    “See.” Ben gestured to the retreating cabbie. “Vegas is as easy as that.”
    “‘Free and easy’ philosophy by a foreign taxi driver from a country that hasn’t had the same government for more than thirty minutes at a time,” I grumbled as I looked with amazement at the opulence surrounding us. It was a good thing that the airplane magazine had a feature article on what was in store for me or I might have been in shock. Still, the sight was more than I’d expected. The Strip was a five-and-a-half-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard lined with thirty-two casinos. Really, calling them mere casinos did them an injustice, for they were rambling neon, golden, glittering, overdone fantasies, each competing for attention with its