I Don't Like Where This Is Going Read Online Free PDF

so.”
    I took the walkway to Mandalay Bay and passed a heavyset woman in large turquoise hair curlers and gray sweats, dragging her reluctant child by the arm, telling him he was so getting his flippers bleached. I was meeting Bay for a drink at the Border Grill. Suddenly there were fussy and excitable children everywhere, many of them tanned and dressed the way I imagined their parents thought that adults should dress—like characters in movie musicals, not like shoppers at Walmart. I heard a mother say, “Do your duck face, Crystal,” and little Crystal raised her eyebrows and lifted her flamingo-pink lips up and out in a kind of half pout, half pucker. And then I saw the poster that explained it all: the Little Miss and Mr. Nevada Glitz Pageant was going on this week at the resort. It did not, however, explain bleached flippers .
    I was escorted to a table adjacent to one occupied by a boy and girl, each around seven, I guessed, who were obviously pageant contestants and who were dining without parents or chaperones. I ordered a Bloody Mary made with bacon-infused vodka. Baytexted that he was stuck in traffic trying to exit the 15. The girl was blonde, wore a white taffeta dress, and called the boy Colt . She described the cupcake dress she was going to wear in the competition: “Short to here, off the shoulder, sleeveless, beaded organza. It’s lemony yellow,” she said. “I’ll look good enough to eat.”
    Colt told Mylie—I’d been thinking Lindsay —she was a lock to win Grand Supreme. And then there was a snarky exchange about an eight-year-old princess from Longview, Texas, named Evah, who’d won the title last year and the year before that. A woman walked by with her leather purse draped over the stub of her missing forearm. Colt said he would forgo his customary black tux this year in favor of a black-and-white silk cowboy outfit with a thoroughly butch black Stetson. He told the waitress he’d like the rest of his crab nachos boxed, please and thank you.
    Mylie checked her face in her compact mirror, liked what she saw, and asked Colt if he thought the two of them would eventually get married.
    Colt shrugged. “I might end up being the girl that Mom’s always wanted.”
    â€œCool!”
    â€œYou could teach me your sassy walk.”
    I turned to watch Colt and Mylie leave the restaurant and wondered how I would find out tomorrow if they’d won and wondered as well if every pedophile in Clark County would be in the audience at the pageant. When I turned back, Bay was sitting across from me in his blue linen suit and his magnolia-white silk shirt. He was trying to quit smoking but had an electronic cigarette in his hand. He took a puff and put the e-cig in his jacket pocket. He asked me what I was drinking, and I let him have a sip. He nodded his approval. I said the person who came up with the idea to infuse vodka with bacon should win the Nobel Prize.
    Bay said, “They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, a murderer and a war criminal.”
    â€œI mean the James Beard Award.”
    Bay ordered lemonade. He didn’t drink spirits before playing poker. He’d been finding the competition in Vegas more formidable than he’d been used to in South Florida. Everyone plays like they can afford to lose. He was ahead a few thousand, but his game had been inconsistent.
    I told him about the movie shoot I’d happened on. He said it wasn’t a movie. I said I saw it.
    He said, “Two guys in a black Hummer pulled alongside a silver Lexus and opened fire. The passengers in the Lexus returned fire. Both cars then headed north on the Strip at considerable speed. The driver of the Lexus took a bullet, lost control of the car, slammed into a taxi, and then there was a whole chain-reaction pileup. The taxi exploded. Four people dead. The Hummer got away.”
    â€œHow do you know this?”
    â€œIt’s all over