Twenty-one
They set out the next morning after the free breakfast—Irene insisted, “We’re no use to anyone if we don’t have enough protein, and be sure and hydrate, ladies! I don’t want anyone passing out with delirium on my time.” Her industrial-sized water bottle required its own seat.
Irene had also put herself in charge of the heist kitty.
“Why did we need a kitty?” Frances asked. “I’m bankrolling this. Can’t we just play it by ear?”
“Seriously?” Irene scoffed. “Any one of us will need it for food, wine, incidentals, and bail. Not to mention burner phones.”
“Burner phones!” Frances said with delight.
“I’ve always wanted to need a burner phone.
” She felt good. Really good. It might have been her meds kicking in, but last night, after they had cleared the air with Edie, they had smoked a joint (Joan said pot was better than a wine hangover, and to get on board), howled at some of their antics long ago, plotted a route to Vegas with plenty of bathroom stops, and looked at floor diagrams of the Pelican, which Irene had somehow pulled up and printed for them.
Irene had also discovered who was the head of security at the Pelican. “Mark Wachtel,” she said, and pulled up a picture of a bloated, rough-looking middle-aged male with a crew cut. Predictable.
“Where did you find him?” Edie asked as they all put on their glasses to have a better look.
“LinkedIn,” Irene said. “You’d be amazed at what people put on the internet.”
This was fun. It beat book clubs and pickleball and square dancing or poker at Marjorie’s place.
It was exactly what Frances had wanted—she hadn’t felt this excited about anything in ages.
She didn’t need chemo, she needed this! She needed to complete her circles and live her life to the fullest up to the very last moment!
The only dicey part of the trip thus far had been that moment Edie came out of the motel bathroom and remarked on Frances’s cache of pill bottles. “There must be ten pill bottles in the bag you left on the floor in there.”
Her overnight bag. She’d forgotten it in the bathroom because she was high and not being careful. Note to self—do not get high in Vegas. “Supplements,” she said with an airy wave of her hand.
“Supplements,” Edie repeated dubiously. But she didn’t question it.
But the question was raised in Frances’s mind: Would she tell them?
And if she did, when? She hadn’t told them in the beginning because she’d really wanted them to come, and she feared if they knew she was sick, they would see this as a pity heist and save her from herself by saying no.
But now, on the road to Vegas, she debated confessing everything to them.
On the one hand, it would give her one less thing to worry about concealing.
But on the other hand, she didn’t want them to treat her differently.
As it stood, they were all back in their old patterns of friendship, and she liked that.
Anyway, she was driving. Irene had refused to let Joan drive. “You drive like a church lady,” she’d complained. “We don’t have a week to get there.”
“Well, I’m not letting Edie drive,” Joan countered. “She drives like a bat out of hell. So, you’ll have to drive, Irene.”
“Not me. This car is so big I can’t see over the dash.”
“You’re it, Franny,” Joan had said, tossed her the keys, and climbed into the back seat.
“I’m it!” Frances said gleefully.
The car was old enough to have a cassette deck, and Joan had a box of old cassette tapes.
They cycled through the music of their youth—Grand Funk Railroad, Doobie Brothers, War, Nazareth, Barry Manilow, Elton John, Gloria Gaynor.
They sang along, belting out the songs at the top of their lungs, laughing so hard that Frances had to pull over at a rest stop to wipe the tears from her eyes.
That, and they all needed a restroom again.
At a truck stop in a little Texas town, Irene was dismayed by how they lingered to shop. “It’s like you have no sense of urgency,” she complained when they returned to the car—Edie with a set of dish towels, Joan with an insulated wine tumbler that said, APPARENTLY WE ARE THE TROUBLE. WHO KNEW?
“I didn’t buy anything,” Frances said smugly, and Edie and Joan yelled at her for being a suck-up.
Irene then insisted on reviewing some information about the Pelican. She’d run across a press release—Mr. Rocco Vitali said the crypto casino would be fully operational by the end of the month.
“That means he’ll clean out the vault by then,” Edie said. “That gives us two weeks.”
“That’s all the time I have, anyway,” Joan said. “Love Island will be over by then and my brother isn’t going to stick around after that. Mama will be blowing up my phone, and that’s the last thing we need in the middle of a job.”
“How did you end up farming marijuana with your mom, anyway?” Edie asked.
“My uncle had this little farm in Colorado, and he had a bad case of emphysema. So, after everything happened”—she paused to give Edie a look—“I hid out with him, took care of him in his last couple of years. For forty years, he grew vegetables for the farmer’s market.
When he died, I took it over and invested what I had into upgrading it.
I was selling weed before Colorado legalized it, but when the state made it legal for medicinal use, I had a new market.
Years later, they legalized it for recreational use, and when that happened, I had so much business I couldn’t keep up.
That’s when Mama came to live with me. She’s still a pretty good bookkeeper. Left me free to learn about mushrooms.”
“Wish I’d known,” Irene said. “I went to Los Angeles and hid in Koreatown, because one thing that never changes about white people is that they think we all look alike. I stayed out there for a few years and ran a yoga class sometimes, bartended other times. Mostly, I learned how to hack into systems.”
“I still can’t believe you steal from old people,” Frances said.
“Instead of rich people? Is that really better? What did you do, Fran?”
“At first, I bummed around Europe. Aimless. Hopeless. Missing you guys and not knowing what to do with myself. And then … I went to see my last stepmother. Freya.”
There was a collective gasp from the rest of the car riders.
“Why? Did you lose your fucking mind or something?” Irene asked. “Nils would have had you arrested and thrown into some castle dungeon in a heartbeat.”
“I know.” Frances laughed. “It was so crazy. But I got lucky—Nils happened to be in Prague, terrorizing other people. And, you know, Freya was always nice to me when Nils wasn’t around.
I think she was happy to see me. She asked me how life was going, and I told her it sucked, and that thanks to her and Nils, after after Dad died, I’d been left to figure everything out on my own.
She said that probably made me a strong person.
Then she said she hoped I intended to finish college, that my father always wished that for me. ”
She could picture Freya now, sitting in that beautiful sunlit room with the blue-and-white curtains and the wood floors, so casually receiving Frances’s news.
She was thin and dressed in couture, while Frances was in the same clothes she’d been wearing for days.
She had nowhere to go, no family to call.
Seeing Freya that afternoon, she’d hated her.
She’d imagined killing her. Just putting her hands on her neck and squeezing until her eyes bulged out.
Fortunately, while Frances was many things, she was not a killer. “So I did,” she said.
“You did what?” Edie asked.
“I cut my hair, bought some cheap reading glasses, came back home, and went back to school. In a little tiny college in Vermont where I figured no one would ever find me. No one ever did. And then, I was a teacher.”
“No way!” Edie exclaimed.
“I know, right? I wasn’t the teacher sort, but I ended up teaching art history at a private school. Not because I had any talent or knew that much about art, other than what it would sell for, but because that school needed a body.”
“Wow,” Joan said. “That’s poetic—the art thief teaches art.”
Frances grinned. “Anyway, that’s where I met my Nick.”
“Teaching art history?” Edie asked.
“No, during a field trip to New York. I took the senior class to the Met. That night, after the kids were in lockdown, I went to the hotel lobby for a glass of wine and there he was, an oil guy from Houston.”
He’d been sitting at the bar, so handsome, his blue eyes shining.
He didn’t give off a creepy vibe and didn’t leer at her.
He just started up a conversation and he was so nice and appeared to be interested in her.
In a strictly platonic way, at first. That had been a new experience for Frances.
“We had a really good life,” she said wistfully.
“I guess I did, too,” Joan agreed, sighing. “Farming is not bad, really. Pretty damn cold in the winter, but summers are great. My love life suffered, though. It’s hard to carry on a torrid lesbian affair when you’re Black in Colorado and living in some remote mountain area.”
“Well, my life sucked,” Irene said. “Thanks, Edie.”
“Oh my God,” Edie muttered.
“But Florida has been okay,” Irene continued. “Lots of Koreans around, and the elderly are easy to scam. They will give you a credit card or a check just for smiling at them. So gullible.”
“Stop talking,” Frances said.
“Okay, well, I didn’t get so lucky to find a man like you, and not have to steal for a living, Fran.”
“I also had a degree and a job, which was also available to you.”
“She has a point,” Edie said wistfully. “I wish I would have gone back to finish college. But … Simon came along.”
“Great catch,” Irene said dryly.
“If we’re through judging each other, I need a bathroom break,” Joan announced.
“Again?” Frances complained. “It was only forty-five minutes ago.”
“Yes, again, Franny, not that I need to justify my bladder to you.”
“I knew this would happen,” Irene complained as Frances steered to the exit. “This time, no shopping!”