"Las Vegas runs on neon, air conditioning, and the quiet certainty that the house always wins"
Priyanka Iyer, Pree to everyone but her family, has an actuarial-science degree, a job offer that was rescinded in favour of a model licensed from a partner in London, and a thirty-eight-lakh education loan secured on her parents' flat in Chennai. She has a spreadsheet called Grocery List that says card counting can cover six months of payments, and her family believes she is at a conference. After a week she has been backed off at four downtown casinos. So she books six nights at the Neon Bunk Hostel, where there is no blackjack, only fifteen slot machines and a poker table the owner is sort of licensed for, in a social capacity.
The Neon Bunk is run by Rhonda, a six-foot-plus former Folies Bergère showgirl who tips drivers in cookies. Its guests include Linh Tran, fresh from Hanoi, who sleeps in a fourteen-pocket vest and won't go near a locker; Walt, a retired Chicago bus driver who has logged every spin of the same slot machine since the Carter administration and is staying one more week; a jilted Kiwi in a non-refundable Elvis jumpsuit; and the poker regulars. Then Dusty Rhodes pulls into the lot with country music loud enough to rattle the windows, sits down in the empty Seat 3, and hits a royal flush on his first Lucky Round, while the confetti cannon fires straight into a retired orthodontist's face.
Dusty keeps winning, every Lucky Round, and the people across the glass keep losing money they can't afford to lose. Pree, who notices when a shuffle comes out clean as a zip three times running, starts to suspect the table isn't random at all. A block of concrete lands on Dusty's lounger. Kwame Asante arrives to do the comedy, sticks a plaster over the Hub and refuses to let it watch him eat. Pree tells Dusty to go home. Darlin', he says, I am home. Then it's Saturday: a hundred and seventeen degrees, a haboob blowing in off the desert, the All-In Showdown with twenty-five thousand dollars of cash-reveal jackpot in Rhonda's old green safe, and Dusty in Seat 3, where the table always wanted him.
Age: 24
Type: Actuarial-science graduate and card counter
Fatal Flaw: Prices every risk out loud, including yours
Role: Protagonist
Age: Late 30s
Type: Freshly divorced Texan with a Stetson and a truck called Loretta
Fatal Flaw: Thinks a lucky streak is a personality
Role: Victim
Age: 26
Type: Lockpicking volunteer fresh from Hanoi
Fatal Flaw: Has not used a locker since February, and sleeps in the vest
Role: Ally
Age: Late 50s
Type: Former Folies Bergère showgirl and owner
Fatal Flaw: Never hears the first no
Role: Host
Age: —
Type: Retired Chicago bus driver with notebooks going back to 1983
Fatal Flaw: Knows the machine is due
Role: Long-stayer
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Seat Three"
At 3:12 in the morning it was ninety-nine degrees in Las Vegas, and Linh Tran decided that the city was lying to her about everything.
It had lied about the airport first. Harry Reid International had greeted her off the delayed LAX connection with slot machines. Actual slot machines, rows of them, chirping and twinkling at the end of the jet bridge, before baggage claim and before a toilet. A woman in a neck pillow was already playing one with the blank, holy face of someone who had been awake for twenty-two hours. Linh had stood there with her carry-on and thought: oh. It's that kind of place.
Then the rideshare had lied. The driver, a cheerful Ethiopian man named Dawit with a string of prayer beads round the mirror and a phone mount holding two phones, had told her it was "a nice night, not so hot," and then opened the door, and the air had come in like somebody opening an oven to check on a roast. It smelled of hot tarmac and cigarette ash and, very faintly, somewhere underneath, of chlorine and money.
"Nice night," Linh repeated.
"Yesterday was one hundred and sixteen," said Dawit, with pride, as though he had personally achieved it. "Tonight, only ninety-nine. You will see. By Thursday you will be saying, ninety-nine, lovely, I will take a walk."
"I'm from Melbourne," said Linh. "We have four seasons in one day and all of them are rain."
"Then welcome to the opposite," said Dawit, and pulled out onto a road so wide and so empty and so orange under the streetlights that it looked like the surface of a planet that had been built for cars and then abandoned by them.
Linh didn't answer. She had her hand in the left chest pocket of her vest, the one where she kept the pencil case, and she was rolling one of the tension wrenches between her fingers without looking at it. It was a thing she'd started doing in February. Her therapist in Footscray called it "a grounding behaviour" and said it was fine, as long as she didn't do it in airports, where it looked, the therapist said delicately, "like you're about to do a crime."
The vest had fourteen pockets, and everything she needed was in one of them: passport, phone, cash, earplugs, a torch, electrical tape, two muesli bars, the pencil case with her picks in it, and a laminated card that said LOCKPICK VILLAGE · VOLUNTEER · KERNEL PANIC 0x1F. She had not put anything in a locker since Hanoi. She slept in the vest. She had showered in the vest once, by accident, and decided it was fine.
They turned off Las Vegas Boulevard and the city changed its costume. The glass towers dropped away. Here the buildings were low and old and stubborn, sun-bleached stucco and flat roofs and chain-link, a closed tattoo parlour, a twenty-four-hour wedding chapel with a pink Cadillac parked outside it and a sign reading WALK-INS WELCOME · ELVIS ON REQUEST. A block to the south, over the rooftops, something enormous was glowing: a long curved lid of light, hanging in the sky like the belly of a spaceship, rippling with colour.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Neon Bunk Hostel, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Best poker night in Vegas!!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Rhonda is a QUEEN." — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The Lucky Rounds are addictive lol." — FreeToWander guest
☠ "excellent table. every hand is dealt fairly, eventually. variable noted." — @HostelReaper