LAS VEGAS — Jake Crandall took a deep pull from his vape as a woman emerged from the darkness of Fremont Street and into the parking lot of the Desert Moon Motel. She gripped the final $20 she owed him.
“Here you go,” she said. He didn’t ask how she got it.
“Thanks,” Crandall, the property manager, replied. “We will figure it out again tomorrow.”
It was just after 9 p.m., and since she had now paid the full daily rate — $57 — Room 5 would again be hers for the night, a welcome reprieve from the woman’s other option: the back seat of her red Pontiac sedan. Crandall knew the woman, who asked that her name not be used because of the sensitivity of her situation, didn’t have anywhere else to stay.
For much of the last week, she and her two teenagers, both autistic, alternated between sleeping at the motel or inside the car. The 45-year-old woman said she lost her one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since, she’s been traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, staying with family when she can.