Chapter Fifteen
NICKY
Nicky shoved his hands in his pockets and absentmindedly glanced around at the collection of family sedans and high-end SUVs parked in the garage beneath the Lusso Resort.
He was nervous.
Nicky couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to impress a woman.
Or, to be completely honest, the last time he’d had to.
After a certain number of platinum records, impressing women wasn’t so much a desire as a nasty side effect of fame that he did his best to ignore.
But suddenly, he really wanted to impress Lucy.
Since the moment she walked away from him on the rooftop, he’d been sort of obsessed by the possibility of it, actually.
‘Okay, here I am,’ came her voice from behind him.
Nicky turned, and felt his boxer briefs get a little tighter at the mere sight of her. Dark jeans, white T-shirt with fine black stripes. A pair of red Chuck Taylor’s. Her hair was kind of curly and wild. Beautiful.
‘You look amazing,’ he said.
‘It’s jeans and a T-shirt, Nicky,’ she said, looking down at her outfit.
‘I know.’
He smiled, and she smiled right back. The silent communication was so ordinary, commonplace. Still, it made his heart bang.
‘Mr. Broome? Ms. McManis?’ A large bald man in a black button-up and gray jeans approached them. ‘My name is Sonny. I’ll be your guide and driver for the evening.’
Nicky shook the man’s hand. ‘Good to meet you, Sonny.’
‘Where are we going?’ Lucy whispered, coming up to Nicky’s side.
He took her hand. ‘You’ll see.’
The Las Vegas Strip spilled out around them, a kaleidoscope of flashing light and color, just beyond the cool comfort of their black SUV. Flashes of red and orange flickered across Lucy’s face as she peered out the window.
‘It really is the most American kind of crazy,’ she mused beside him. ‘This insane circus of greed and excess in the middle of the desert.’
‘We absolutely do crazy better than anybody else,’ said Nicky.
‘We’re so good at it,’ Lucy added with a grin that he felt in his stomach.
‘We’ve reached our first stop,’ came Sonny’s deep voice from the driver’s seat.
He pulled the car into a parking spot and turned to face them.
‘You may recognize the California Casino and Hotel from the explosive opening sequence of Casino starring Robert De Niro. The California is one of the oldest surviving casinos in Las Vegas. Many of the film Casino ’s other exterior locations have since fallen to the wrecking ball, as Las Vegas is a city in a constant state of renewal and reinvention. ’
Lucy turned to Nicky, her eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘Are we on a movie tour of Las Vegas?’
‘We are,’ he replied.
Lucy trilled, ‘Nicky Broome!’ in a sing-song tone. Nicky went ahead and translated the giddiness and the giggle that followed: Nicky Broome, you goddamn fucking dreamboat. You’re a bona fide genius .
Over the course of the next hour, Sonny took them to locations from Natural Born Killers , Leaving Las Vegas , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Showgirls , Vegas Vacation , and The Hangover movies.
‘Our next stop,’ Sonny said, ‘is the world-famous Neon Museum, a sign boneyard where the history of Las Vegas continues to inspire awe and wonder. If you’d like, we can go in and have a walk around.’
‘Sonny,’ Lucy chided, ‘I thought you knew me by now. Of course we want to go in.’ Then, she threw the door open and raced out.
‘I would have opened the door for her,’ Sonny said with a chuckle. ‘Guess I was too slow.’
‘Welcome to the club, my man,’ Nicky replied. ‘Welcome to the club.’
The Neon Museum was like an electrified fever dream.
The signs were enormous, rising fifteen or twenty feet up into the night sky.
Nicky could pick out the more important ones by how well they were propped up, how much space they had around them.
Others remained unlit, lying on their sides, stacked on top of one another.
Sharp, space-age fonts from the Sixties.
Big block letters from the Seventies. A cowboy. A showgirl. A neon duck.
Lucy wandered aisle after aisle taking pictures with her phone. Happy. Impressed .
‘You may find it interesting to know that in addition to films like Mars Attacks! and Fools Rush In , the boneyard has been the setting for a number of music videos,’ Sonny said, mostly to Nicky.
Lucy turned around from where she’d been staring at a sign that said ‘Sassy Sally’s’ and said, ‘Come on, Nicky. Give us a taste.’
‘A taste of what?’
‘The rock-star vibes,’ Lucy teased.
Nicky scoffed. ‘Excuse me, I always have the rock-star vibes.’
Lucy tilted her head, examined him, pretended to be skeptical. ‘Nope.’
‘Nope?’
‘You’re going to really need to turn it on. You know, smolder a little.’
‘Oh, sorry. I can’t turn on the smolder without a wind machine. It’s not safe.’
Lucy laughed and stepped closer, threaded her arm around his. ‘Do you guys even make music videos anymore?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes. But they basically go straight to YouTube.’
‘Weird.’
‘I know,’ he said, guiding her through the aisles of broken old things. ‘Remember MTV?’
‘I would turn it on as soon as I walked in the door after school, and didn’t change the channel until my parents had to watch something dumb like Murder, She Wrote .’
‘Or The Rockford Files ,’ he added.
‘The Nightly News with Dan Rather,’ Lucy offered.
‘Such a buzzkill.’
‘Totally.’
On the way out of the museum, Nicky shoved a wad of hundreds into the donation box in the souvenir shop and bought Lucy a T-shirt that said ‘I got lit at The Neon Museum’ just so she had to put it on and he could take her picture.