“I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip.Īt the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade.
A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients.
This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting.
It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M.
