In 2005, Jeff Bailey, 42, is called to Las Vegas by his best friend, Homicide Detective Danny Olsen, to identify a Jane Doe at the coroner’s office. Twenty years before as a young aspiring writer from Ohio, Jeff came to town looking for a story worth writing about. And now that search has come back to haunt him.
On the Vegas Strip in 1985, Jeff met an escort who called herself Angelique, but her real name was Mindy Spires, a young hustler who was touched enough by Jeff’s curiosity and innocence that she gives him her real name and number. Jeff’s sincerity (“I’m a writer”) also wins over Guy Reinhart, Mindy’s morbidly-obese, gangster-wannabe pimp who believes that Jeff could write their life story, making them all rich and famous.
Over the next two years, Jeff is welcomed into Mindy and Guy’s underworld of sex and money, when Sin City and the Mob were losing out to the FBI, AIDS, and corporations. But the most devastating turn in Guy’s “success story” was the blizzard of cocaine that looked like their actual big pay-off. Guy and Mindy’s move into coke distribution—along with snorting massive amounts themselves—kills the narrative of Mindy riding off for a legitimate life with Jeff far away from the Vegas Strip.
Instead, Jeff has to flee from his Vegas friends—but not before they involve him in a drug deal gone wrong that results in several casualties, leaving him with a story he can never tell.
Now that Mindy’s body has been discovered, Jeff must help his friend identify her and possibly help piece together the sad end of her life—hopefully without implicating himself in the process.
VEGAS WORKING GIRL isn’t just a misguided love story of two young people looking for luck and redemption in an absurd neon fantasy; it’s also a love story for the craziest, most surreal place on earth: Fabulous Las Vegas!
