The Jackpot Read online

  THE JACKPOT

  By

  David Kazzie

  Copyright © 2011 by David Kazzie

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written consent of the author.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel is for Jennie, who never stopped believing in me.

  To Scott Weinstein, who was the book's first reader and who made me think that I might have something really good here.

  To Dave Buckley, whose comments about the manuscript and insights into life at a big law firm proved invaluable.

  To James Mosrie, Matt and Kathy Phillips, Eric and Ericka Snyder, Wes Walker, and many others, whose comments on early drafts of the manuscript helped me make this book the best it could be.

  To Steven Booth and the entire team at GOS Multimedia for their brilliant editorial, formatting and cover design work.

  To my family for always supporting me.

  And special thanks to the Richmond, Virginia metropolitan area, which kept largely quiet as I manipulated its geography and landmarks to better serve my story.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Thursday, December 20

  11:00 p.m.

  When Julius Wheeler stopped by his cousin Leroy's in time for the late local news, he was worth approximately seventy-five dollars. His assets included eight compact discs, a green plastic picnic table, a broken iPod, and a mattress of questionable repute. He paid two hundred dollars a month for a small apartment in Carrolton Oaks, a crumbling housing project just inside the eastern border of Richmond, Virginia. Twenty hours a week, he cleaned a large downtown law firm as a member of a CleanSweep work crew. He made eight dollars an hour.

  "Hey, Julius, you buy a lotto?" Leroy asked.

  "Yeah," Julius said, cracking open a beer and taking a seat in the center of the threadbare couch in Leroy's living room. The couch sagged in the middle and was peppered with cigarette burns.

  "How many?"

  "One."

  "Ain't gonna win shit buying one," Leroy said, fanning out his tickets for Julius to see. "I got eight. Gonna make me rich. What numbers you play?"

  "Just had the machine pick'em. Like it make a difference. Nobody ever win these things."

  "Bullshit," Leroy said. "You think like that, you be stuck in that shitty apartment the rest of your life, and I be living on the beach. You come visit anytime."

  "Shouldn't even be playing," Julius said, thinking about his shitty apartment and how much he preferred it to his eight-by-eight cinderblock cell at Red Onion State Prison, where he had once spent three long years. "I ain't working that shitty job so I can piss it away on the lotto. You sure as shit shouldn't be buying eight."

  "Shut up, shut up," Leroy said, his attention drawn back to the screen. "They starting. This my night. I can feel it."

  Julius shook his head and took a pull from the bottle. There was no arguing with Leroy, his twenty-two-year-old pseudo-cousin and alleged man of the house. Although it was just days before Christmas, no tree adorned this apartment, which was redolent with the aroma of fast-food grease and stale cigarette smoke. Leroy elected not to celebrate the birth of Christ, believing Christmas was a racist holiday, favoring rich white people and making black people poorer. Julius once tried to convince him it was for the kids, but Leroy wouldn't hear it. Racist, he said. Julius suspected that was a convenient cover for Leroy's perpetual poverty and his general inability or unwillingness to provide for his family. Leroy, who last attended school at the age of thirteen, had never held a legal job. He fancied himself a player in the Tree's crack trade, but he smoked far more than he sold. For the most part, he sponged off his girlfriend Rhonda and her part-time gig at Burger King.

  From an unseen bedroom, a baby started to wail. As the crying ramped up in intensity, Leroy turned up the volume on the television.

  "Jesus, Rhonda!" barked Leroy. "Can't you shut that baby up? I can't hear."

  "She your baby, too," Rhonda replied.

  "She need a bottle," Leroy said. "Go feed her."

  The coffee table was covered with fast-food wrappers, overflowing ashtrays and half-filled bottles of cheap infant formula. Rhonda, who hadn't made it to many parenting classes in her time, had fed the baby from the same bottle all day. She retrieved a lukewarm bottle of likely spoiled formula from the table and disappeared down the hall.

  "Our top story tonight," the well-groomed news anchor was saying, "is one that's got people excited all over the Richmond area. SuperLotto fever. Let's go straight to tonight's drawing from SuperLotto headquarters."

  "Here we go," Leroy said, scooting forward to the edge of the couch.

  SuperLotto, America's first national lottery, was played in all fifty states. Players selected five numbers between one and forty-nine and a sixth number, the mystical SuperBall, between one and fifty-nine. The odds of correctly matching all six numbers were an encouraging one in infinity.

  At 11:03 p.m., a pretty SuperLotto employee plucked five numbered Ping-Pong balls from the rotating plastic drum to her left, each delivered via pneumatic tube with a satisfying thwoop. These five white balls shot through the tube like torpedoes: 5, 9, 16, 17, and 43. The sixth Ping-Pong ball, the bright red SuperBall, arrived from its own rotating drum. The SuperBall on this particular night was stamped with the number 24.

  Julius checked his ticket.

  5. 9. 16. 17. 43.

  SuperBall: 24.

  His eyes bounced between the numbers posted on the screen and the ones stamped on the light blue ticket in his hand. Each time he checked, all six numbers on his ticket matched the six winning numbers.

  Holy Christ, he thought. It couldn't be.

  "The estimated jackpot is four hundred and fifteen million dollars," the SuperLotto spokeswoman said. "Tonight's drawing has been monitored by the accounting firm of Beisswanger & Mosrie. Good luck! Now back to your local news."

  Julius had heard people claiming out-of-body experiences and had dismissed them as the ramblings of lunatics. But now, at this moment, he felt something he could only describe as a near-death experience. His heart rate accelerated to nearly a hundred and fifty beats per minute, and his hands started trembling like a window with a freight train rolling by.

  "Aww, fuck it," Leroy was saying. "Like you said, J. Nobody ever win thes
e fucking things."

  Leroy crumpled up his eight tickets into a tight ball and shot it at the coffee table. Like a BB shot from a gun, it struck a half-full beer can teetering on the edge and toppled it over. Warm, flat beer glugged out onto the floor, but no one made a move to pick up the can.

  "Rhonda, get that fuckin' can off the floor."

  Rhonda, having just returned from the baby's room, ignored him, instead taking a long drag from her cigarette.

  "We have breaking news for you tonight," declared the anchor grimly, which was corroborated by the ominous-looking Breaking News banner striped across the bottom of the screen. You'd have thought the anchor had just gotten word an asteroid was minutes away from colliding with Earth. "SuperLotto officials have confirmed a single ticket matched all six of tonight's winning numbers, and the winning ticket was sold here in Virginia."

  "Just my fuckin' luck," Leroy said. "Sold in Virginia."

  Julius tried to wrap his head around the news he was hearing. Four hundred and fifteen million dollars. One ticket. How was it even possible? As the magnitude of the situation began to settle in, he became hyper-aware of his surroundings. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. He took a long look at the two other people crowded around the television.

  At thirty-eight, Julius was basically a town elder and garnered a fair amount of respect. He had no doubt, however, that Leroy would cut Julius' throat and possibly sell his own daughter on eBay to get his hands on the ticket.

  "How many you get?" Leroy asked. "Lemme see."

  "None," Julius whispered. "Every time, nothing."

  "Lemme – Rhonda, I said get that fucking can off the floor!"

  Rhonda was twenty-four, but rough, sallow skin drawn tightly across bony cheeks made her look twice that. She had grown up in the Tree, grown up fast, and would almost certainly die here. Years ago, she had shown promise in the classroom, but Rhonda had been more of a follower than a leader, and being a follower meant jumping into sex and drugs with both feet when everyone else did. As they had promised in health class, the sex resulted in a pregnancy, which ended via an abortion. Another pregnancy quickly followed, this one resulting in an underweight baby boy. A year later, a juvenile court terminated her parental rights after finding evidence of extreme neglect.

  Rhonda had been with Leroy for about three years, but never for more than a few months at a time. During their courtship, he had taken the time to present her with an assortment of very special gifts – her daughter Angel and a volcanic case of genital herpes. The child was still in her custody because, so far, she had managed not to commit any act that would draw the attention of the city's Department of Social Services. So far.

  After a disgusted sigh, she stood up and grabbed a dirty t-shirt that was poking out from under a seat cushion. With a stony glare directed toward her beloved, she began mopping up the beer from the thin carpet. Leroy's interest in housekeeping briefly diverted his attention from Julius' ticket, for which Julius was thankful. He used the interruption to quietly tuck the ticket into his breast pocket.

  "You win something, Julius?" Leroy asked, his one-track mind refocusing like a heat-seeking missile.

  "No," Julius said.

  "Then why you keeping the ticket?"

  Julius felt a stab of heat shoot up his back. He was a terrible liar. It was one of the reasons Julius had been unable to talk his way out of any of the police entanglements in which he had found himself during the past twenty years.

  "I dunno. Just felt like it."

  He forced himself to maintain eye contact with Leroy. That was something he'd learned during police interviews. If you broke eye contact with the interrogator, they smelled blood, and ten minutes later, you were signing a waiver of your Miranda rights and a full confession while munching on the fast-food meal the officers were all too happy to provide after you admitted everything. It was just the way these things went down.

  "Free ticket," Julius said. He could feel sweat moistening his undershirt, and his voice was shaking. Try as he might, he couldn't maintain eye contact, and his gaze drifted away from Leroy, settling on a half-eaten taco sitting on the table.

  "You lying motherfucker." Leroy said. "You won. How much?"

  Leroy probably would have made a good detective.

  "I swear, it's just a free ticket."

  "If it was just a free ticket, you'da said that from the mother-fuckin' get-go."

  "The hell with this," Julius said. "I'm going home." He stood up and made his way for the front door.

  "Bullshit you are," Leroy said. "Let me see your mother-fuckin' ticket."

  Julius was pretty sure he was related to Leroy on his momma's side and had known him for all of his twenty-two years on the planet. Leroy was one of the most dangerous individuals he had ever met. He just had no conscience. For the most part, people in Carrolton Oaks were just well-meaning products of their shitty environment. Crack cocaine was the infected star around which this little corner of the world revolved, and it destroyed everything in its orbit. Leroy, on the other hand, seemed to be missing the part that made him human.

  As Julius wrapped his fingers around the doorknob, he glanced over his shoulder and into the gaping barrel of Leroy's nine-millimeter pistol, just a few inches from his face. Just over Leroy's shoulder, Julius saw Rhonda, looking back across the sofa, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

  He sighed softly, turning his gaze back toward the door. He felt the barrel press up against the base of his neck. It was not the first time he had had a gun put to his head, and it gave him the opportunity he needed.

  "Turn around slow," Leroy said.

  Given that many men living in Carrolton Oaks did not live to see their thirty-fifth birthdays, it was understandable, if not a little short-sighted, that Leroy had pegged Julius as a feeble old man. Moreover, Julius was still vibrant, having avoided meaningful relationships with crack and booze for most of his life. To top it off, he was thick through the chest, and his hands were like bear paws.

  Julius followed Leroy's instruction to the letter, but he tossed in one angry and unexpected swipe for good measure, which knocked the gun against the wall. It clattered harmlessly to the floor. Leroy was so startled by Julius' display of self-defense he put up none of his own, other than a muffled uggh, when Julius drove him to the floor by his throat. Julius knelt down and drew close to Leroy's face.

  "You do that again," Julius said, "I'll kill you."

  "Uggh," repeated Leroy.

  "Come on, man!" Julius barked at him. "We fuckin' family!"

  Julius let go of Leroy and retrieved the gun, his eyes never leaving his would-be robber, not for a second. Although he was deeply disappointed, he wasn't completely surprised by Leroy's attempt to shake him down for the ticket. Truth be told, it was probably to be expected. In his youth, Julius might have been similarly tempted by the shiny promise of a winning lottery ticket. The funny thing was Leroy would never have guessed that not only had Julius won something, he had won all of it. The funnier thing was that it didn't even matter. Leroy would have killed his momma for four hundred dollars. Four hundred million? Shit.

  With the gun still trained on Leroy, Julius looked up at Rhonda, who was staring right back at him.

  "I don't want no trouble," Julius said.

  Rhonda held her ground, still puffing on her cigarette. Leroy remained on the ground, his head cocked toward Julius, his hands massaging his sore neck.

  "Don't you fuckin' hurt him," she barked at him. She said this despite the fact Leroy beat her on a fairly regular basis. True love, Julius thought. The heart wants what it wants.

  "I'm gonna leave now," Julius said, his mind whirring. He figured once he exited the apartment, he would have about ten minutes to vacate the Tree before Leroy gathered up his crew and came hunting for him. Didn't matter that Leroy and Rhonda didn't even know how much he'd won. The rumors would start to fly, and for once, rumor would match reality. After all, he did have the winning ticket. And they would
come for him.

  He had to leave his home tonight. Forever. He could never come back here again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thursday, December 20

  11:21 p.m.

  Julius ducked out onto the landing outside Leroy's apartment, the night's chill smacking him hard and good. His hand was stuffed deeply in his pocket, wrapped tightly around the Ticket. Even in his mind, it already deserved a capital T. The freaking thing felt almost alive in his pocket, wriggling and quivering like a newborn.

  He bounded down the cracked concrete steps, and after a quick detour to the edge of the complex to deposit Leroy's gun into a storm drain, he continued across the courtyard to Building 349, where he lived in a second-floor unit. But for a guy he knew only as LT walking around in circles, muttering to himself, the courtyard was relatively quiet. While the navy-blue pea coat LT was wearing provided him some protection from the cold, Julius suspected the fact the man was nude from the waist down would limit the coat's warming capabilities. Julius wouldn't miss this part of Carrolton Oaks at all.

  "'Night, Mister Julius," LT said.

  Julius stopped at his front door and looked back at LT.

  "Good night, LT."

  He watched for a few more moments before ducking into his apartment, giving himself three minutes to get in and out. Leroy wouldn't come after him immediately. He'd take a few minutes to come up with a strategy to get Julius' ticket, even as he remained blissfully unaware of how much the ticket was actually worth. Part of him questioned the wisdom of returning here, but he had nothing but the clothes on his back, not even a coat, and a lottery ticket that wouldn't be worth much unless he could actually get it to lottery headquarters.

  Julius had lived here since his release from Red Onion eight years ago. It wasn't much, really just a single large room with a small bathroom and kitchenette. No artwork or pictures adorned the walls. He slept in the corner on an old mattress, recovered from the apartment next door, which had been vacated when its tenant had himself been shipped out to Red Onion for murder. Still, it was home.