Lucky Read Free

flat. Where to? She had no idea. But from the way the sun was dropping toward the western horizon, dark was inevitable. And the last thing she wanted was to be on the streets at night in a strange city without a room.
    “A motel, I guess. One that’s cheap…but safe,” she added.
    The cabdriver rolled his eyes. Another newcomer thinking to make it big.
    “Just get into town?” he asked.
    Lucky sighed, rejecting the urge to rail at the man for stating the obvious. He was only doing his job. Driving acab had to be monotonous. Small talk was a part of the game.
    “Yes,” she said.
    He nodded. They drove for a bit and then he asked another question that was equally impossible to answer.
    “Planning to stay?”
    Lucky considered her answer before she spoke. And what she didn’t say was more telling than what she did.
    “I have no other place to go.”
    The cabby looked up in his rearview mirror and resisted the notion of telling her to go back home. He wondered if he would recognize her six months from now or if she’d even still be alive. Las Vegas, for all its splendor, was a fast-paced, dangerous town in which to live alone.
    “Here we are,” he said, and pulled into the parking lot of an Econo-Lodge motel. “Not too pricey, not too dicey.”
    Lucky handed him her fare and got herself and her bag out of the cab. She didn’t even notice when he drove away. She was too busy absorbing her surroundings. There were still mountains visible, just like back home. But she’d gone from the rich, green mountains of Tennessee to harsh, unforgiving mountains surrounded by near-desert. It made everything seem that much more lonely, that much more frightening.
    Less than half an hour later, Lucky took off her last item of clothing and walked into a hot, steamy shower, letting the water take away what was left of her blues. There was no time for sadness or last-minute regrets. Tomorrow was time enough for the places she had to go and the things she needed to see.
     
    Sunrise in the valley came without warning. What had been a faint but colorful glow on the eastern horizon was suddenly a burst of white, cloudless light and a gradual warming that would, as the day progressed, turn into a blast furnace. And yet the locals claimed, because of the lack of humidity, one wouldn’t really feel the heat.
    Later, as she walked the streets, Lucky grimaced while sweat beaded across her upper lip. She not only felt the heat, she could see it. Dancing above the pavement, waving seductively down the ribbon of highway, blowing about in the basin that was Las Vegas’s home. And as she looked around in total confusion, she wondered if she’d traded one sort of hell for another. One Whitelaw’s Bar for a thousand casinos.
    For Lucky, the previous night had been a sort of reckoning. She’d had to restrain herself from dashing out into the streets and gawking at all of the garish displays of lights she could see in the distance. Caution had made her wait. She had the rest of her life to explore this city. Losing her chance and her life on the first day here didn’t make sense. First she had to know the rules. Then she could play the game.
    Lucky might be a gambler’s daughter, but she took no chances herself. Life had made a careful, thinking woman of Johnny Houston’s baby girl.
    Just when Lucky thought she was going to have to stop and ask directions again, the address she’d been looking for was suddenly right before her eyes. With little regard for traffic or lights, Lucky bolted through a break in the line of cars and sprinted across the street toward the realtor she’d read about in the paper.
    Within the hour, she was seated and buckled in a company car, on her way to view apartments. The pad of temporary checks she carried in her bag was visible proof of her newly opened checking account. Several hours later, Lucky was still riding, her jaw set, her eyes glacial. The initial friendliness of the realtor, Tammy, had faded to