The Voting Machine

A Losing Hand

My father always told me that no good deed goes unpunished. Try to do the right thing and sooner or later, it's going to bite you. 

I had decided to move to Las Vegas and volunteer in a critical swing state election. It was my first time getting involved in politics. I put my faith in a candidate who said he was going to help all the people in this country who were hurting. 

I started to believe maybe we could change things. Maybe the world our parents handed down to us didn't have to be so broken. I felt the hope stirring inside of me, blossoming like desert flower in spite of the desolation, thriving on the challenge. The chance to make a contribution.

No good deed goes unpunished.

***

The FBI agents arrived one morning in late October, a week before Election Day. They knocked on the door of my week-to-week room in a motel on Sahara Avenue, a few miles west of the Strip. They stood in the entrance in gray suits, a white man and a black woman, Albert Decatur and Marguerite Polk, agents from the local office. They led me through the motel parking lot, past a rusty fire escape and the slot machines in the first floor lobby. 

Once we were in the car, they explained I was a person of interest in a double homicide.

We rolled through the blue-collar blocks of the city's west side. This was a part of Vegas that the tourists never see. These were the streets where I'd pounded the pavement for six months as a voter outreach volunteer, talking to people in front yards and strip malls, trying to convince them to show out for my candidate in the upcoming election. 

I wondered what kind of case they had pulled me into. 

Why would Federal agents be interested in a homicide? 

Why wouldn't they leave that to the local police? 

Most FBI case work in Las Vegas was related to bank robberies. Gamblers arrived in town with dreams of winning the World Series of Poker. Then, after losing their life savings at Texas Hold 'Em, they started passing notes to tellers threatening to blow the place up if they didn't empty the safe.

Life is a gamble anywhere you go. When bets go sour, everybody has their own way of taking the loss. Some rob banks. Some get divorced. Some disappear into the flood tunnels underneath the glamorous lights of the Strip. I made plenty of bets in my own life that went sour during the past year. I knew what it was like to go after the things you want the most and come up empty.

"Can you tell me anything about the murders?" I asked the two agents as we turned onto MLK Boulevard.

"We've been instructed to wait until you meet the Special-Agent-in-Charge," Decatur said. "All we can say now is that it's related to the election."