An excerpt from the final chapter of PALMER, Vol 4, What Really Happens in Vegas by James Patterson…
The big bird rises at dawn from the Las Vegas airport, saluting the sun.
“Everybody buckled up?” asks the Maverick helicopters pilot, who has flown through the war in Iraq.
“Because here we go!”
There are seven passengers aboard the helicopter. Four women and their best friend, who is celebrating her fortieth birthday with a girls’ weekend in Vegas. A former Chippendale’s dancer, who is videotaping the morning’s excursion. And, sitting next to the pilot, Chundrea Gardner, now simply known as Dray, a dexterous fifty-five-year-old yoga instructor who grew up on the streets of South Central Los Angeles. As the helicopter leaves the Strip behind, the passengers gaze through its glass bottom as Las Vegas reveals its greatest wonder of all, just a twenty minute flight away: the Valley of Fire, forty-six thousand acres of vast outcroppings in the Mojave Desert, majestic pillars and arches that seem to have been sculpted from sandstone, blazing pink, orange, and red in the fiery dawn. The valley is considered a sacred place, inhabited for at least eleven thousand years by a succession of Indigenous peoples, from the Basketmakers and the Ancestral Puebloans to the Paiutes, who left behind ancient petroglyphs chiseled into the stone walls.
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