Sammy Keyes and the Showdown in Sin City (6 page)

And hearing about it can get kind of annoying.

But now here they were, shooting down the tracks, trapped inside a cart of gigantic debt, holding on for dear life as they blasted their way toward jail.

Anyway, while I’m taking a little mental ride on the
McKenzes’ roller coaster, wondering if a loop-the-loop was ahead for them or if jail was the end of the ride, Mrs. McKenze misses a driveway and lets out a little curse. And then when traffic pins her in so she has to turn right, she lets out a bigger curse and says, “I do
not
want to be on the Strip!”

“This is the Strip?” I ask, leaning forward between the seats.

“And it’s Friday night of a three-day weekend,” she moans when she sees all the traffic. “We are just stuck.”

When we turn onto the Strip—which the road sign says is actually Las Vegas Boulevard—all I can do is gawk. The emerald building I had seen from the air is on our right, and it’s
huge
. Huge and glowing, with an enormous gold lion in front.

“That’s where we’re staying,” Marissa says, pointing to the green building.

“It is?” I gasp.

“That’s the MGM lion.”

All of a sudden I make a connection. “The one that roars in movies?”

“That’s it!” Then she adds, “Well, not
that
one, but you know.” Then she points across the street to a giant Statue of Liberty standing in front of a hotel that has an
actual
roller coaster going all around it. With people riding it! “That’s New York–New York,” she says, then points behind us. “That castle? That’s Excalibur. And the pyramid next to it? That’s the Luxor. And that big gold building even farther down is Mandalay Bay. It has an awesome beach.”

“A
beach
?”

“Uh-huh. With a gigantic wave pool. It’s like being on Maui!”

“It’s nothing like being on Maui,” Mrs. McKenze grumbles. “And there are never enough loungers.”

I look up and down the Strip and say, “I can’t believe all the
lights
,” and it comes out kind of gaspy because, really, I can’t believe all the lights!

“No energy crisis here,” Mrs. McKenze says. “In the summer they keep the casinos at sixty-five … and they leave the doors open! So you burn up on the Strip, then freeze to death inside.” She slams on the brakes and practically hits the car in front of us. “I hate this place,” she mutters.

So she may be hating it, but I’m just awestruck, soaking in all the buildings and lights and
people
. I’ve never seen so many people on sidewalks. They’re packed together and just moseying, but even so they’re going faster than we are.

“Here,” Mrs. McKenze says, handing over her phone. “Try your mother again.”

So I do, and when I get the “unavailable” message, I hand the phone back and say, “I wonder if her phone’s broken or something.”

“I have never understood her,” Mrs. McKenze says. “She has always been … aloof.”

“Aloof?”

She eyes me. “How about we call it ‘distant.’ I tried to connect with her at school functions when you two were little, but she always seemed like she was … elsewhere. It
was hard to carry on a conversation.” She shrugs. “Maybe it was the age difference. She was a young mom. The rest of us were … older.”

I give a little snort. “Nah. She’s still that way.”

“Well, at least she’s realized her dream.” She glances back at me. “Being on
Lords
is a big deal.”

“Uh … 
was
, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s been canceled.”

She whips around to actually look at me. “
Lords
has?”

“Uh-huh.”

She grips the wheel tighter. “Wow. That’s the end of an era, huh?”

“I guess.”

“I used to watch it when I was in my teens and twenties. I used to
record
it because I didn’t want to miss a thing.”

Marissa stares at her. “Really?”

She tosses a smile at Marissa. “Then I had you and Mikey, and that was the end of the luxury of my soaps!” She looks at me in the mirror. “So what is she going to do now? Does she have something else lined up?”

“For her next act,” I say, sounding all peppy, “she’s going to marry my boyfriend’s father!”

Mrs. McKenze pulls a little face, and I can tell she’s biting her tongue.

Biting it hard.

It takes us at least half an hour to circle the block and get into the MGM Grand’s parking structure. And once the car’s locked up and we’ve collected all our stuff, we
go down an elevator and then walk through ground-level parking to some big glass doors that lead into a wide tunnel of shops. At the end of the shops there’s an escalator, and when we get to the top of that, we turn the corner and wind up in the biggest hotel lobby I’ve ever seen.

Actually, the only other hotel lobby I’ve been in is the Heavenly Hotel’s, right across the street from the Senior Highrise. It’s got ancient furniture and heavy curtains and threadbare carpet.… It’s so old it might actually be kind of cool if it wasn’t for the smell. The place stinks like moldy potatoes.

Or maybe rat pee.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, probably both.

Plus, when you sneeze inside the Heavenly’s lobby, you send up clouds of dust, which, of course, make you sneeze some more. So once you start sneezing, you can get a whole dust storm going. Seriously. It creates an atmospheric
event
. I’m surprised it’s never made the Weather Channel.

But
anyway
, the MGM lobby is nothing like the Heavenly’s. It’s more a huge glistening ballroom with chandeliers and gold sparkling everywhere. On our right there’s a mile-long check-in counter with a whole wall of screens behind it. On our left are shops with lots of glass walls and gold accents, and in the middle is a flower arrangement the size of Grams’ apartment.

“Impressive, huh?” Marissa says, ’cause my jaw is dangling.

“I can’t afford to stay here!” I whisper.

“It’s actually pretty cheap,” she whispers back. “But
don’t worry. I’ll get you in our room. Just go up like you’re checking in, then tell my mom your mom hasn’t arrived yet.”

“I don’t even know
how
to check in! What am I supposed to do?”

“Just go up and act like your mom’s supposed to be here. I’ll keep my mom back. Trust me. This will work.”

There are about twenty check-in lines, so I stand in the one next to Marissa and her mother like I know what I’m doing. And when I get up to the front of the line, I smile at the lady across the counter and say, “I’m meeting my mom here. Her last name is Keyes. Has she checked in already?”

Her fingers fly across her keyboard.
“K-E-Y-S?”
she asks.

“K-E-Y-E-S,”
I tell her. I try to sound calm, but my mouth is dry and I’m feeling really stupid acting like my mom’s here when I know she’s not.

“Could it be under a different name?”

“Uh, Acosta?” I tell her, just putting out another lie.
“A-C-O-S-T-A.”

She ticky-types some more, then says, “Oh, here it is. Two guests?”

The rest of me feels stun-gunned, but my head manages to bob up and down.

“She hasn’t arrived yet.” She checks me over. “And we’ll need a credit card and photo ID, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait until she’s here.”

My head bobs some more and I manage to choke out,
“Thanks,” as I back away from the counter and hurry over to Marissa.

“Well?” Marissa’s mom asks, because they still haven’t made it to the front of their line.

“She hasn’t arrived yet.” I try to sound confident, but I’m feeling really light-headed. Like any minute I might just keel over.

It’s Mrs. McKenze’s turn now, so she goes up to the counter while Marissa hangs back with me and says, “You look really pale.”

“She’s here,” I whisper.

“She
is
?”

“Well, she will be. The reservation’s under ‘Acosta’—for two people.”

Marissa gasps. “There’s a wedding chapel right inside this hotel!”

“There is?”

“Yes! You pass by it on the way to the Lazy River.”

“The Lazy River?”

“The pool!” She points. “It’s that way. Through the casino, past the food court … I bet they’re getting married right here!” She shakes her head. “I cannot believe it. She could have stayed any one of a million places, and she’s staying right here?”

I just stand there blinking like an idiot.

She laughs, then says, “
You’re
the one who should take up gambling. Nobody gets this lucky.”

It did seem incredibly lucky. And maybe for once it was my turn to have a little luck, but I’m not used to it, so it
felt more like a mirage than something real. Like any moment,
poof
, it would disappear.

I tried not to question why I was having good luck instead of bad. I just tried to think about what my next step should be.

And what in the world I would say to my mother.

It didn’t seem to faze Mrs. McKenze much when she found out that my mom hadn’t checked in yet. “Just come with us,” she said, marching across the shiny marble floor. “You two can keep each other company while I figure out what I’m going to do.”

Marissa gave me a little thumbs-up and a grin, but I was too busy with the knot in my stomach to appreciate that we’d just pulled off Step Four.

Which was weird.

I mean, here I’d escaped my grandmother, stowed away in a car, jumped a plane to Las Vegas, weaseled my way into Mrs. McKenze’s hotel room … and I was freaking out about seeing my mother?

I guess that tells you something about my mother. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like I was worried about her raging at me.

Lady Lana raging?

Please.

But I
was
there to mess up her wedding. Or at least that’s what would happen when I appeared out of nowhere
and raged at
her
. Because you know what? I’d had enough. If she didn’t tell me who my dad was, I wasn’t going to let her marry me a stepdad
—especially
not my boyfriend’s father—without a fight.

And somehow getting ready for that battle scared me more than anything else I’d done so far. I mean, hadn’t I ruined her life enough? Hadn’t my just being alive gotten in the way of … everything? She’d almost
died
once trying to cover up that I was her daughter, because she thought it made her seem too old for a part she was auditioning to get. And she’d almost married some guy who had no clue I existed, because he was a Hollywood hotshot who was crazy over her and she felt like she had to. And when I’d asked her if she loved the guy, she’d frowned and said, “We can see how far
love’s
gotten me.”

So yeah. I’ve felt like a burden for a long, long time. And the only consolation—the only actual
clue
I’d gotten—was that whoever my dad was, she
had
been in love with him at one point.

So me being alive wasn’t my
fault
.

Still. My brain was good at finding ways to forget that.

It was also good at wondering if I wasn’t jumping to wrong conclusions. Maybe she’d just
said
that bit about being in love to protect me from the truth. Maybe my father was actually a violent criminal. A horrible, heinous man, and just the sight of me reminded her of the terror she’d gone through.

Or maybe he was a weirdo who’d kidnapped her
and held her on some remote property in the redwoods. Maybe he’d brainwashed her into
believing
she was in love with him. Maybe she’d left me with Grams so she could escape her past. Escape the memories. Escape what I represented.

But then what was his catcher’s mitt doing in Grams’ closet?

So maybe she’d run away to a commune to escape Grams and her rules. Maybe the commune held big softball tournaments with other communes, and she’d fallen in love with the catcher from another commune and had joined it to be with him!

And that’s how my brain runs off to the Land of Maybe and gets hopelessly lost. I can never seem to find my way out, and it’s
exhausting
being in there. I’ve spent so many nights wandering through dark alleys and down dead ends in the Land of Maybe that I’m just sick of it. I don’t want to go there anymore.

But the only way out is through answers.

Real answers.

And that’s what I was going to get.

So as we marched along behind Mrs. McKenze, I decided that once my mother was checked in, Step Five was going to be to park at her door and not let her leave until she told me the truth.

Even if that meant pinning her down and mussing up her fancy wedding dress.

Mrs. McKenze had obviously stayed at the MGM before, because she led us out of the giant lobby toward a
carpeted area with slot machines and then took a sharp right down a wide hallway without even slowing down. The place was packed, so Marissa and I had to dodge and weave around people just to keep up.

Near the end of the hallway, we passed by a little convenience store and entered a sort of walking roundabout with a huge tiered water feature in the middle of it. The roundabout had a bunch of hallways coming off it, and Mrs. McKenze made a beeline for one that led us to a bank of elevators.

Now, okay, it
was
Friday night of a long weekend in Las Vegas, but good grief, there were people everywhere. People with drinks, people with luggage, people decked out in rhinestones, people in swim cover-ups and flip-flops … And they were all
going
someplace. I felt like a lost little minnow in a river of salmon that were all swimming in different directions.

“Come on!” Mrs. McKenze called from inside an elevator. The thing was already completely full, and there was no way Marissa and her stuff and me and my backpack and skateboard were going to fit. But Mrs. McKenze gave us a fierce look and held the door, so we said, “Sorry! Sorry!” and squeezed inside.

We got off at the fourteenth floor and started down a hallway that was, like, two hundred feet long. I didn’t know how far we were going, but I was really tempted to throw down my skateboard. “It would be way faster to ride,” I whispered to Marissa.

“That would be very rock ’n’ roll of you,” she said.