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  "Assuming I accept your offer, what's to stop me to from cashing it for myself?"

  "Because I'm hiring you to find it for me."

  "If I cash it, I could buy and sell you."

  "I hear that you're a man of honor."

  "Yeah, but that is a shitload of money."

  "So is three million dollars."

  "A good point."

  "But you're right," the caller said. "I do need an insurance policy. Let me make it simple. If I were you, I wouldn't try to cash the ticket. If you do, you'll get nothing."

  Flagg considered the offer. He had no doubt that he'd find the ticket. The real mystery was behind the caller's warning. On the one hand, the guy could be completely full of shit. On the other hand, the man had shown himself to be a legitimate player, what with the good-faith deposit and tracking Flagg down in the first place. It wasn't like Flagg's telephone number was in the phone book. Three million. More than enough to fund his life's work, really for the rest of his life.

  "OK," Flagg said. "You've convinced me. What happens after I find the ticket?" The use of the word 'after' instead of 'if' was deliberate. Always good to bolster your employer's confidence in you.

  "Payment of three million dollars upon delivery of the ticket. Wired into the bank account of your choice."

  "Five million," Flagg said. "And don't bother countering. I don't negotiate. Five million. Take it or leave it."

  He could hear the caller pretending to mull things over, clicking his tongue, sniffling, that kind of thing. Flagg knew that the caller was putting on a show because if the opening offer was three million, he was probably prepared to go to six million. But Flagg had built a reputation as a reasonable man.

  "Fine," the caller said. "Five million it is."

  "How do I contact you?"

  The caller gave him the number of a prepaid wireless phone.

  "Don't call the number until you've got the ticket in hand and ready to make the delivery," the caller said. "If I see the winner on television with the big oversized check, I'll know you failed."

  "You'd make quite the detective," Flagg said. "So dramatic. Anything else, cowboy?"

  "Just get it done."

  The caller hung up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Saturday, December 22

  4:39 a.m.

  Carter Livingston Pierce was not dead, but he sort of wished he were. His fingers were stiff with cold, and his teeth were chattering. It was the sound of the chattering that had roused him back to consciousness in the first place. His head throbbed from its collision with the floor. Every blink of his eyelids felt like tiny sledgehammers colliding in his sockets. He'd been out for a while, that much he knew. When his last memory suddenly began replaying in his head, he popped upright, as if awakening from a nightmare.

  The nightmare, though, was right in front of him.

  When he saw his very deceased and very shish-kabobed brother-in-law staring back at him, nausea rippled through him, and despite his very best efforts to keep it together, his insides rebelled against him. He puked all over the hardwood floors, turning his head just in time to avoid getting it all over his clothes.

  When his insides stopped churning like a washing machine, he rolled over, away from his fresh spew, its ripe smell hanging acidly in the cold air, and onto his stomach. It was then that he saw for the first time what had become of Julius. He hadn't exactly been able to check on his client's well-being while Todd was trying to kill him.

  "Oh, shit," he whispered. That probably would not sit well with the Virginia State Bar.

  Then it hit him. The whole reason he'd come to this hellhole to start with. The ticket!

  Where the hell was the ticket?

  Slowly, he staggered to his feet, giving the dizziness a chance to work itself out. The ticket had been in his hand while he defended himself against that dickweed brother-in-law of his. That's what it was, right? Self-defense? Todd was going to kill him all along. There was just too much money at stake to think otherwise. God knew how much money Todd owed to bookies, arms dealers, drug dealers, suppliers, hookers, pimps, loan sharks, terrorists, you name it. Carter hadn't had a choice. He wondered if Ashley would buy it. He wondered if the police would buy it. He wondered if he bought it.

  He thought about this while he searched the cabin. He started at Todd's feet and worked his way out in concentric circles. It had to be here somewhere. He remembered very clearly clutching it in his hand as he rushed at Todd with the poker (just because he had charged the man with a fireplace poker didn't mean killing him wasn't self-defense, right?). Nothing.

  After two minutes, Carter began to really worry. Feeling lightheaded again, he crumpled against the couch, curling up into a ball. The ticket was gone. Gone.

  How could it be gone?

  Then it hit him. It hadn't been taken by extraterrestrials. It hadn't been transported to another dimension. Someone had walked in here and stolen the ticket.

  Someone had been here.

  No, not someone. Samantha. Samantha had been here. Samantha had stolen the ticket.

  Oh, shit.

  Another thought gripped him with icy hands.

  If she was here, she may have seen everything that had happened. She may have already called the police. They might already be on their way. He massaged his forehead with the palm of his hand. He should've known she would be a problem. He should have kicked her off the case as soon as Julius set foot in his office. Didn't she get it? Couldn't she get it through that thick skull of hers? Julius didn't have any business winning that much money. He wouldn't have been able to shoulder the enormous responsibility that accompanied great wealth. He was black, after all.

  Julius had the ticket for one day and had gotten his head blown off. What if he'd actually made it to lottery headquarters and walked away with a couple hundred million bucks? It would've been like sticking a nuclear device in the hands of a terrorist.

  His eyes drifted back and forth between the bodies, growing stiffer with death with each passing minute. He needed a plan. He needed to evaluate. In his mind, he ticked off the facts as he knew them to be.

  1.Todd and Julius were dead.

  2.If the police placed Carter at the scene, he would be the primary suspect in their deaths.

  3.Samantha Khouri had the ticket.

  4.Samantha knew he had tried to steal the ticket.

  5.The police were not here yet.

  These five facts served as the premise for his first deduction. Samantha had not yet called the police. Otherwise, they would've been here by now, and he would have been answering a series of extremely uncomfortable questions in some tiny room in Henrico County's Public Safety Building, tackily decorated with Christmas cheer. Upon this foundation, he laid another brick of deduction. Samantha had her own plans for the ticket. Christ, why else would she have taken it? Panic stampeded through his chest like a herd of elephants. Was she going to cash it in? Steal his future? Steal his family's future? No, no, no, he had to stop her.

  But how? Come on, Carter, come on! Think! Marshalling the full powers of his average intelligence, he toyed with the idea of calling the police, pinning the deaths on Samantha.

  He cleared his throat and practiced his 911 call.

  "Please, I just found my brother-in-law dead!"

  No, too rehearsed.

  "There's been a shooting!"

  Too theatrical.

  "Yeah! I need an ambulance!"

  Too precise.

  "Please help!"

  OK, not bad.

  He tried to visualize the dispatcher's response.

  "What's the problem, sir?"

  He continued the production.

  "It's my brother-in-law. He's been stabbed! I think he's dead!"

  "Where are you calling from, sir?" said the imaginary dispatcher.

  "Uh, my brother's house. Just off Mountain Road."

  Calmer now, appropriately so. Even the brother-in-law/brother discrepancy would make his panic more
genuine. The dispatcher would be doing his job, getting the caller calmed down, letting him tell his story. Carter had just been worried about his brother-in-law and came out here to check on him on this Friday night.

  "Holy shit, that's the guy that cleans my office!"

  "Yeah, I think he and my associate had a little something on the side."

  "Her name is Samantha. Samantha Khouri."

  "She knew where Todd lived."

  "You don't think she had anything to do with this?"

  OK, that was a bit much.

  He pulled out his Blackberry and started to dial the three familiar digits.

  Then he stopped.

  Something felt very wrong about this.

  Samantha was a shade over five feet tall and weighed about a hundred and ten pounds. Maybe. And he would have the police believe that she had overpowered Julius and tied him to a chair? And skewered Todd to boot? Plus, Todd was his brother-in-law, not Samantha's. Forget teaming them up. It wouldn't take them long to figure out where Julius worked, whose office he cleaned.

  What if he untied Julius and knocked him to the ground? He could make it look like a home invasion gone bad. And so what if the police figured out Julius worked for Carter? It wouldn't have been the first time a service person had bitten the hand of those who fed him. Ungrateful bastards.

  His brain started to seize up with the complexity of the task. He would have to doctor the scene to make it look like there had only been two people here, and he didn't have the first clue how to do that. He also couldn't calculate the impact of the Samantha Situation, how the ticket played into everything. There were too many variables to consider.

  If he called 911 now, he'd be in the same place he would have been had Samantha called the police on him in the first place.

  Oh, brother.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Saturday, December 22

  6:50 a.m.

  Samantha spent the night shivering in her recliner, wrapped in a heavy quilt. Sleep came raggedly and in small bursts. The ticket was in her safe, where it would remain until she was ready to deliver it to Jamal. She just needed to rest. The ticket was safe. No one knew she had it. Carter hadn't seen her. The television stayed on all night, a comforting companion, taking her mind off the decidedly unusual events of the previous twelve hours. She watched two Ron Popeil infomercials and, at about 2:30 in the morning, she ordered his famous rotisserie oven. She didn't know why she did it, but it seemed to calm her down, and it would be here within three business days. For reasons she could not articulate, this pleased her immensely.

  The end of Animal House was on the tube now, its familiarity soothing Samantha, although real sleep continued to elude her. A couple of Advil swallowed when she had gotten home had knocked down the fever, but exhaustion had set into her bones like concrete. She could barely muster the energy to change the channel, and the remote was sitting on the armrest, about six inches out of her grasp.

  As the credits rolled at movie's end, the entire evening played out in her head again like the back end of a comedy-horror double feature, starting with Julius knocking on her office door. An incident seemingly so minor, so insignificant, yet it had kickstarted a chain of events that had severely and permanently altered the course of her life. This was more than a pebble tossed into Lake Samantha, a few ripples undulating out from center. This was an asteroid that had screamed through the atmosphere and obliterated all life on Planet Samantha.

  It didn't seem real. Part of her felt like the images in her head were just the byproduct of reading an account of the incident in the newspaper, maybe catching the story on CNN. That creamy puff of pink behind Julius' head? That was his brain, Sammy! His brain!

  And what was she supposed to do now?

  She didn't know. She really didn't. She felt adrift, without a tether. During the drive home from the bloodbath at the cabin, she briefly debated stopping at a pay phone and calling the police. But she had felt too sick, too confused, too stunned to make such a decision. They, whoever They were, would trace the call to the pay phone. They would lift her fingerprints from the handset. They would identify her license plates from a surveillance video. They would charge her with murder.

  It was too risky. Julius was dead, and there was nothing she could do about that. This was what Julius would want, and given the price he had paid for winning this jackpot, he was probably entitled to have his final wishes carried out. After all, she thought, he had been murdered by his own lawyer. The attorney-client privilege at its finest. When this story got out, it was not going to do much for the image of the legal profession.

  At seven, she struggled out of the recliner and staggered into the bathroom, where she took stock of her physical condition. Bad news on all fronts. Her head was pounding. Her muscles still cramped, and her night in the recliner probably hadn't helped that. The sore throat had worsened, and a tickle at the back of her throat portended a hacking cough that would be moving in for the next two weeks. She dry-swallowed two more cold-and-flu tablets and staggered to the kitchen to make coffee.

  Rage bubbled up inside her as she considered Carter's behavior.

  "Jackass," she whispered as she dumped the ground coffee into the filter.

  Wasn't it bad enough that people already thought lawyers were slime? She worked in a profession in which the worse off the clients were, the more their services were needed, and the richer the lawyers got. The better off people were, the more their services were needed, and the richer they got. She recalled a class-action settlement the firm was involved in a few years ago, after which the members of the class ended up with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for contact lens solution and the firm had used the fees to renovate its partners' lounge. Eighty-one people had gone blind from the contact lens solution that had been contaminated as a result of poor sanitation at the factory. Blind!

  As a first-year associate, she worked on a merger of two steel companies that cost nine hundred people their jobs. Very little came of the merger other than the indictment of the newly installed CEO for smuggling steel into North Korea in violation of about two dozen federal laws. She had even received death threats, which Carter advised her were like medals, to be worn proudly.

  Carter Pierce made more than a million bucks a year. That hadn't been enough? He had two vacation homes. Or was it three? She couldn't keep up. That hadn't been enough? And Julius, clearly terrified by his stroke of luck, placed his trust in her and Carter, who might as well have gone pee-pee on Julius' head for all the respect he had showed the man. Moreover, no one besides her would ever know what had really happened in that terrible sixty-second span at the cabin, seeing as how Carter probably wouldn't be in a very truth-telling mood.

  As the coffee finished brewing, a sudden and strong urge to check on the ticket washed over her like a wave. She went to the bedroom and knelt before the safe, which was tucked near the back corner of her walk-in closet. Upon making it home from the cabin, she had decided that it was the safest place for the ticket. The key was tied to a piece of dental floss that she had strung around her neck. She slid the key home, unlatched the clasp and swung the lid open. There it was, still safely secured in the plastic baggie. Its feathers had been ruffled a bit in the fight, but it was none worse for the wear.

  Four hundred and fifteen million dollars.

  Images of a possible future erupted from the depths of her soul like lava. This ticket would sure solve the problem of her parents' struggling business. They could retire. Buy a nice home where they could be comfortable for the rest of their days. Buy a big place for them back in Lebanon, near the family, where they could spend the summers. It could solve the problem of her relatives in Lebanon, struggling to get by in a country that never knew what each sunrise would bring. It would most certainly solve the problem of her dissatisfaction with her chosen profession, a dissatisfaction that she confided in no one. All she had to do was show up at lottery headquarters on Wednesday morning with a big, nervous smile on her face. No
one would ever know. The rest would work itself out.

  The beep of the coffeemaker jostled her back to reality, and she pushed her plans for the ticket back into a dusty old closet in her mind.

  "Go lock it up," she said aloud, as if she needed to order herself to do it.

  She hurriedly replaced the ticket in the safe, as if someone might walk in on her. She closed the lid and slid the safe back into its hiding spot. Her heart was racing, and her palms felt clammy.

  "Coffee," she said. "You'll feel better after some coffee."

  You might even stop talking to yourself, she thought.

  After staring at the locked safe for another moment, she got up off the floor and went back to the kitchen. With a steaming mug of coffee in hand, she settled back into the recliner and turned on the morning news. The logo imprinted on the side of the mug caught her eye.

  WILLETT & HALL

  Your Constant in a Changing World

  It was a changing world, alright.

  Halfway through her cup of coffee, she decided to check on the ticket again.

  Just to be sure it was safe.

  * * *

  Samantha Khouri first went to work at the Mediterranean Express when she was fourteen. She started by stocking shelves a few hours a week before graduating to the cash register. This was a gigantic thrill for her because handling money made her feel very grown-up. At first, she didn't really notice how little money she was handling, and had she known, she probably wouldn't have cared. During the store's frequent slow times, she did homework or, when her parents weren't looking, read Tiger Beat magazine. This was a publication her parents would not have approved of.

  After a while, she began to detect some patterns in the life of the store. Rarely did anyone ever wait in line to pay for groceries. Dust collected on many of the canned goods. A good deal of the bread that they bought from a bakery in Fredericksburg often went home with the Khouris just as it started to become stale. This even though they bought the minimum order allowed under their contract with the bakery.