Last Call For Caviar Read Online Free Page B

house in order. Now, they were preparing to the best of their ability to ride out this shitstorm of financial pandemonium and the breakdown of society that would follow.
    First rule of business had been to make like Jews fleeing pogroms and to convert wealth into gold. Long before the markets crashed, Leah and Jack sold their portfolios of stocks and bonds, cashed in their life insurance policies and money market accounts, and converted their assets into semi-numismatic coins that were easily transportable. Their hoard kept increasing in value as the paper money tied to the world’s currencies decreased in purchasing power.
    But the problem for Leah and Jack, and, indeed, anyone who had the foresight to have acted similarly, was that once you had all these nice, pretty gold coins, so light you could carry half a million dollars’ equivalent on your person, where did you hide the gold? Not in a fake cabbage in the fridge. And, if you planned to hide it, you better bury it damn deep—at least four feet—or else, one fine Saturday morning you’d encounter a nosy relative, or your next-door neighbor, moseying around your backyard with a metal detector and uprooting your freshly planted petunias.
    It probably wouldn’t do you any good to stash it away in a safety deposit box, because when panic from the meltdown caused a run on the banks, you couldn’t expect to be able to get within blocks of your local branch, due to the crush of freaked-out hordes fighting to get access to their own accounts and safety deposit boxes.
    Even if you were able to get at the stash in your safety deposit box, there would still be those gangs hanging around the bank, watching and waiting for some lucky bastard—just like you—to emerge laden with all that portable wealth. They just might follow you home and show up later for a bit of trick or treat, like something out of A Clockwork Orange .
    I’ll admit, I made a mental note when I first heard about all their gold: “Must pack metal detector on my next visit to stay with Leah,” until I heard about the guns.
    Just like horse and carriage, cowboys and Indians, strip clubs and an ex-boyfriend, gold and guns just logically seemed to go together.
    During one of our weekly sisterly chats, Leah confided to me casually—as if she were mentioning a new designer handbag she’d acquired—“Jack and I have gotten permits to carry concealed weapons.”
    “What are you talking about? You guys are packing heat? Don’t you still have police? Has Las Vegas become that dangerous?”
    “Of course we still have a police force, though with more and more people losing jobs every week, crime is soaring. Tourism is way down, and many of the casinos on the Strip have closed up shop. We need the permits to carry concealed weapons now that we’ve bought all this gold.”
    I wasn’t sure if guns and Leah were a good fit, but even I could connect the dots; once you got the gold, the next step was you hadda get the guns.
    Leah had always been a meticulous and organized person, always ahead of the game, whether it was doing her homework in advance or going to summer school in order to graduate early from high school. When she had a family of her own, she arose at 5 a.m. to get all the household chores done before anyone even stirred, much less sat down to freshly squeezed orange juice and homemade blueberry muffins.
    I never saw her sit down or eat one of those muffins herself, because while her family ate, she would be making beds, cleaning rooms, proofreading homework, or walking the dogs, before roaring off in her red Corvette to her casino gig.
    Since Jack came into her life and her daughter Sloan was packed off to college, she changed. Gone was the Stepford Wife and workaholic overachiever. Cruises to the Caribbean, holidays in Hawaii and Mexico, weekends in the wine country. She and Jack, both of them tanned and sinewy, a glass of chardonnay in hand, were each other’s co-conspirators and support