Blizzard Ball (12 page)

“Lots of winners, but not the jackpot pick,” Alita said, without taking her eyes off the Cash and Dash lottery tickets.

Brian watched Alita from a slight distance as she thumbed through the tickets. Her small globes with their taut nipples were visible beneath the fabric of her sheer blouse. He could feel the stir and rise of something long dormant. He followed his yearning down her short skirt over the firm bump of her backside. But his libido quickly nosedived as he caught sight of his mother’s Sorels. He broke out in laughter.

“What?” Alita said.

Brian held his arms out as though presenting her to the world stage.

“You’re no Brad Pitt, either,” she laughed.

Eduardo kept the car pointed in a southerly direction along the two-lane highway under the cold night sky.

“Hey.” Eduardo batted Rafie’s hand away from the car radio. “Leave it there.”

“The watchmen are blind,” said the radio preacher. “They are but mute dogs unable to bark. Dreamers lying down, who love to slumber; they have all turned to their own way, each one to his unjust gain, to the last one.”

“Isaiah 56,” Eduardo said.

“Put your hand on the radio,” the preacher exhorted, “and acknowledge the fear, insecurity, anxiety, tension and understand your false beliefs and they will vanish, then you will know your purpose and take up the work of the Lord.”

“Now put your hand in your pocket for a donation,” Rafie laughed as the static scratched over the preacher’s words. The signal faded, swallowed by the dark, and he safely turned the dial.

“Always the jackass,” Eduardo snapped. “Maybe if you listened instead of talking, you wouldn’t be so fucked up.”

“I heard the preacher man.” Rafie folded his hands in mock prayer. “If the Lord wants me to do his work, then give me a road grader. A big yellow Cat, G12, with a scraper blade. I’ll bulldoze the hills and valleys out of life, level folks’ troubles flat as a pool table, and make their way as smooth as a baby’s ass. Rafie be on duty day and night. You got problem? Call Rafie.” He cracked a beer, spraying foam on the windshield. “Hallelujah!”

“You’re going to hell.”

“So what’s your Lord’s work?” Rafie pestered.

Eduardo ignored the question.

Rafie persisted, “Music?”

“Mariachi,” Eduardo conceded. “Like my father and grandfather. I will wear the traje de charro with silver buttons and embroidered sombrero. With stampeding guitarrón, sweet violins, honking trumpets, and the nightingale tones of the vihuela, we will play weddings, baptisms, birthdays, and quinceañera’s.” Eduardo smiled, lost in the memory of the clamor of the street musicians from his youth. “But we are special Mariachis, like angels. If you are in trouble or sad, we hear your prayers and appear—to serenade, to make love to your saddened heart with the Jarabe Tapatio.”

“Amen, compadre,” Rafie said, tranquilized by the thought of traditional music.

Eduardo accepted a beer from Rafie, locked in the cruise control, and let the car feel its way down the road—lurching to maintain speed uphill and throttling back on the downgrade. They ran along twisted guardrails and wavy snow fences, listening to the thump of the highway expansion cracks hitting the tires.

“It don’t feel right, running out on Alita,” Eduardo said, breaking the mesmerization of the road.

“She told us to go. She’d of killed us if we stayed.” Rafie stripped the paper off a Slim Jim.

“Yeah, but she could be in trouble—more Irish punks or somebody coming around.”

“She’s smart, got college. She’ll figure something out.”

“What if she gets hurt? My stomach aches just thinking about it.”

“Hey, we’ll send her some money as soon as we cash in more lottery tickets.”

“I think we should go back,” Eduardo said.

“No way, man,” Rafie said. “We left a pile of shit back there. Cops’ll bust us sure.”

“We’re going back to get her.” Eduardo gripped the wheel with both hands. “Bring her with us. It’s been a long time since she’s seen her mama anyway. Hang on to your cerveza!” He cranked a mid-highway U-turn.

The black ice on the highway overpass caught the driver of the Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler by surprise. He strained against the resistance of the air brakes and sent the rig into a rudderless glide. The trailer carried a heavy load of pigs, and it jackknifed around the cab into an oncoming Ford Escort. The truck driver heard an ugly thud, the screech of metal, and the crunch of glass. The Ford and the trailer meshed. The cab came to a stop on the guardrail.

For a moment, the wreckage sat unattended in the cold night. A radiator hissed, a wheel wobbled down the road. Injured pigs, some trapped in the overturned trailer, some running free into the night, sent out a siren wail.

Firemen positioned a Jaws of Life cutter on the car’s crumpled roof in an attempt to extricate the passengers. A hydraulic surge to the blades separated the compressed metal. A member of the rescue team leaned into the cavity with a flashlight and emerged with a lottery ticket between his fingers. “Them boys plumb ran out of luck.”

The governor stepped cautiously onto the roof of the Minnesota State Capitol under a cool blue midday winter sky. He cinched the belt of his wool-lined trench coat and picked his way along the granite parapet. Below, in the distance, the ice-chunked Mississippi snaked along the edges of downtown St. Paul. A puff of smoke rose next to the Quadriga, the gold-leafed sculpture of a chariot and four muscled horses—centurions of the state—at the base of the Capitol’s dome.

“Morty, what the hell are we doing up here?” the governor asked.

“Smoking.”

“That’s disappointing!” The governor was shouting to be heard over a low-flying jet. “Thought you wanted a witness to your jump! I’m getting hammered in every paper and on every channel.”

“Pinhead talk shows and their conspiracy theories.” Morty crushed the cigarette butt underfoot. “Crissake, it hasn’t even been a week since the drawing,” Morty said. “Can’t these press jackals give the winner a little breathing room?”

“No, and thanks to you,” the governor said, “my tax plan and credibility are directly linked to this fiasco. I’m starting to take heat from the legislators—who are getting hounded by their constituents.”

The airwaves were abuzz with speculation on how the $750 million BlizzardBall drawing had been rigged from the start. The talk jocks, bloggers, and office Dilberts pointed out how the first BlizzardBall number drawn had been a mistake—disqualified, due to technical difficulties (wink-wink). They surmised that the restart and subsequent picks were part of a string of planted numbers the Lottery officials knew would not be claimed. The theorists further speculated that the convenience store where the winning ticket was issued was a government front. Absent a claim, the jackpot would revert back to the state coffers. To cover their tracks, the conspirators flooded the convenience store and murdered the owner. Thus dodging the retailers $100,000 bonus payout for selling the winning ticket.

“Hey, buck up,” Morty said, “you got to let this play out.” Morty pulled a flask from his coat pocket and took a swig. “The winner’s just laying in the weeds trying to get over the shock.”

Morty extended the flask to the governor. “Here, put a little antifreeze under your hood.” The governor’s face pinched from the whiskey burn. “You gotta keep these legislators in line,” Morty said. “Just remind them about how much money the lottery’s delivered to fund their piggy little programs and they’ll back off. Gaming’s the future. It’s a rough business. The lottery’s simply a launching pad, a foothold into other state gaming opportunities.”

“Surely you’re not forgetting the Indians and their gaming pact with the state?” The governor kicked away an aggressive pigeon trying to peck his shoe. “What are you going to do, run them off the reservation?”

“Let ’em have their smoke-filled pole barn casinos,” Morty said, retrieving the flask. “The future’s instant gratification. Instant win games are to lottery what crack is to cocaine. Supercharged games, delivered electronically through an infrastructure of video terminals and online sites, twenty-four seven. We’re talking about a billion dollars of incremental revenue.”

“Look, just bring me a winner, so we can get the lottery ticket sales reenergized and this conspiracy lunacy behind us.” The governor pulled his trench coat collar around his ears and retreated inside, leaving Morty to the birds.

Kirchner gingerly opened his mouth. An aspirator pulled at the inside of his cheek. A metallic pick probed the cracked molar: enamel, dentin, nerve. He flinched. “Still eating hard candy?” the dentist scolded. Kirchner had carried the toothache around ever since the Eastside AA meeting.

Cell phone vibrations tickled his thigh. He regretted not having turned it off, and with the dentist on his chest, he couldn’t reposition himself to reach it. His attention ping-ponged between the cotton wad pressed between his gum and cheek and the persistent calls. He counted six in all.

“Let that numb up a bit.” The dentist withdrew the Novocain syringe and moved on to another patient.

Kirchner used the respite to attend to his phone.

“We must have a bad connection, you sound muffled,” said Tyler, the young BCA analyst.

“I’m having some dental work done. Whattya got?”

“Some lottery tickets from the Cash and Dash were redeemed at a truck stop near Luverne, along the interstate. First ones we’ve been able to identify.”

Kirchner bolted up from his reclining position on the dental chair and struck his head on the overhead halogen exam lamp. He felt a welt rising on his forehead. “If the truck stop has a videotape, I want it pulled and the images transmitted pronto.”

“Won’t be necessary, we already got ’em.”

“Where, how?” Kirchner wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth. The right side of his face hung like dead meat.

“They met up with a Peterbilt.” Tyler scanned the report from the highway patrol. “Two males, Mexican, probably meat packers. Two green cards and one driver’s license found at the scene, but it’s fairly certain they’re bogus.”

“How do you know these are the same guys who redeemed the tickets?”

The dentist reappeared, extending his wrist to Kirchner and tapping his watch. Kirchner responded with the one-minute pointer finger.

“There were so many lottery tickets on the scene it looked like a bunch of flamingos were run over. A FedEx packing slip with a Vancouver shipping address was also found at the crash scene. I suspect it’s the location of a lottery reseller who was pounding ticket sales through the Cash and Dash.”

“Get the FBI to run it down. What about the plates?” Blood dripped from the corner of Kirchner’s mouth. He was unaware he’d bitten his numbed tongue.

“Probably falsely registered, but I got a search in the works,” Tyler said.

“Let’s meet,” Kirchner said.

“See you at Nina’s Café.” Tyler clicked off before Kirchner could offer an alternative. Kirchner flipped the phone shut. The dentist and assistant were standing at the head of the exam chair, arms crossed, waiting. Kirchner rubbed his jaw. He did not have a good feeling about this.

Tyler Bigsby, the cocky young BCA analyst, got off to an inauspicious start. As a young boy, he lived like a desert rat on the outskirts of Las Vegas while his mother, Lola, plied the casinos for work. Lola worked as a dancer, drink hostess, blackjack dealer, chip cashier—whatever it took to support a child in a dilapidated trailer home. The ever-precocious Tyler picked up on the trailer’s neglected condition and creatively patched holes to keep varmints and rain out. A regular little MacGyver, the neighbors called him. What he couldn’t fix was the parade of Lola’s nightly visitors that forced him outside into a pup tent. In the little camp he set up near a dry creek bed, he slept in the company of iguanas, sidewinders, and tarantulas.

The chip-cashing job was the last employment stop for Tyler’s mother. Lola got busted altering credit card slips from gamblers buying chips at her casino window. The cumulative theft, at $28,000, was not a large sum by Vegas standards, but nobody steals from a casino, and those who do pay dearly. Especially when one of the altered credit cards belonged to an angry big shot high roller, with girlfriend in tow. The dustup attracted the attention of the high roller’s wife, who thought he was at a software convention in Seattle.

Lola was sentenced to three years, and her thirteen-year-old son, now a ward of the state, was sent off to Mankato, Minnesota, a small college town just south of the Twin Cities, into the custody of a reluctant unmarried aunt. The temporary transfer, however, turned into a permanent change of residence for Tyler when Lola died unexpectedly from meningitis in the prison infirmary.

Aunt Becky worked as a librarian at the local high school and kept tight tabs on her new dependent. Overwhelmed by the advance of electronic media, she increasingly relied on Tyler to manage the library’s computer system. However, Tyler’s assistance, with his intuitive feel for technology, came at a cost. Screen savers on the school’s computers randomly depicted hot babes. Sporadic snippets of dialogue from the movie Napoleon Dynamite—“You guys are retarded” or “Ugh! Gross! Freakin’ idiot!”—burst forth from the school’s intercom.

Tyler’s career in criminology brought with it an active connection to his childhood. It was an opportunity to demystify the dark world of cops and robbers and the system that had ripped his mother out of his life. Law enforcement work also placed him in the culture of male mentors—something Aunt Becky couldn’t provide and a role to which Kirchner, the alpha dog on the lottery case, was oblivious.

Kirchner arrived on time at Nina’s Internet Café on St. Paul’s Selby Avenue. Tyler was late as usual. The young analyst had been assigned to dig around at the BlizzardBall Lottery office to look for a connection between the death of the Cash and Dash store owner and the issuance of the winning lottery ticket. Tyler’s frenetic behavior drove Kirchner crazy. He was forever talking into space with a wireless ear piece stuck to the side of his head, while his thumbs tortured an electronic iPhone game. The only way Kirchner could get his dedicated attention was to feed him.