The Jackpot Page 15

  It was how she learned that store never stopped struggling to survive; business was just enough to get by. Sales peaked once a year, just after the Lebanese Food Festival, when people were inspired by the chicken shawarma sandwiches, the baklava and the hummus. The rest of the year, the store catered to the Richmond's supportive but relatively small Arab community, and the Khouris needed every one of them to stay afloat.

  Money was a constant worry. Her parents always drove used cars, virtually running them into the ground before buying yet another jalopy already pushing six figures on the odometer. They rarely went out to dinner. Growing up, she recalled an occasional Friday night trip to Red Lobster. She always ordered the popcorn shrimp platter, which was far more than she could eat in one sitting. She didn't care, eating shrimp until her stomach ached because she knew the next night it would be back to tabouli and stuffed grape leaves and stale pita bread.

  When she was sixteen, she got her first real sense of just how bad things were. One night shortly before Thanksgiving, she had been unable to sleep and had gotten up for a glass of water. Halfway between her room and the kitchen, she saw her father sitting in the dark of the living room, his face in his hands, weeping silently. She knew things had been bad at the store. Business had slowed to a crawl, even during her weekend shifts, and her parents had been sullen and quiet. The phone rang frequently, creditors calling in long past-due accounts. Christmas came a month later, and the space under the tree was a bit more barren than usual.

  A month later, while working on a Saturday afternoon, she saw two large men enter her father's office. Loud arguing ensued. She never commented on the bruised eyes and jaw that appeared after they departed. A small inheritance after the death of Samantha's maternal grandfather later that spring floated the store through that crisis, and the store survived. Barely.

  By the time she graduated from high school, she had vowed she would never struggle financially. She thought about becoming a doctor, but she was just dreadful at science. She survived her introductory biology class at the University of Virginia with a big fat D, but it was her performance in the two-credit biology lab that really drove home the point that her future did not lie in medicine.

  The midterm examination consisted of identifying as many organisms under the microscope as she could in ninety minutes. The easy items were worth three or four points, the more difficult ones worth twice or thrice as much. A score of 180 was worth an A; sixty points was enough to pass. Samantha scored an astonishing fifty-eight. When she asked the professor if she could withdraw from the class, as the drop deadline had long passed, he cautioned her against jumping to any conclusions about her performance.

  "How did you do on the midterm?" he had asked kindly.

  "I got a 58," Samantha had said, as matter-of-factly as she could. No point in hiding from it.

  "Sure, I'll sign your form!"

  The professor had agreed to meet Samantha an hour later in the biology building. When she got there, she found him scouring the hallways looking for her, as if he couldn't wait to get her out of the biology program. With his signature inked on her withdrawal form, her medical career ended before it had begun, and she set her sights on law school.

  Despite the four-credit D weighing down her GPA, she banged away on the rest of her course work and graduated cum laude from Virginia. After college, she taught English in Japan for a year and then took the LSATs, scoring in the 85th percentile. This earned her admission to University of Richmond's law school, where, from day one, she studied like a fiend, often working late into the night.

  After her second year of law school, Samantha accepted a summer clerkship with Willett & Hall, which paid her the princely sum of $2,000 a week. During this twelve-week stint, she participated in a number of important legal events. For example, she took in a Baltimore Orioles game with her fellow summer clerks and sat right behind home plate. Over the July 4 weekend, the clerks traveled to the managing partner's large vacation home at Smith Mountain Lake. Every day, she and her fellow summer clerks were treated to fancy lunches at the city's finest restaurants. She gained ten pounds in twelve weeks. Needless to say, the practice of law was fantastic!

  The end of the summer brought an offer from the firm, and she cruised through her final year of law school before buckling down to study for the bar exam. That had been painful for a number of reasons, but she'd gotten through it. Afterwards, Willett & Hall was waiting with its six-figure offer and, of course, the Blackberry. With her law school debt on the very wrong side of six figures, she was ready to start making the big bucks. And the bucks started rolling in.

  She would never forget her first paycheck from the firm. After taxes, she had taken home $3,500. Two weeks later, another check. Her bank account grew so quickly it made her head spin. She bought a new Audi coupe and the Tobacco Row condominium. She paid off her law school loans in four years. She splurged on clothes. On her way home from work every night, she dropped forty bucks on a late dinner, confident that she had earned that particular extravagance.

  It wasn't long – probably about the time she started dreaming about dousing her Blackberry in lighter fluid – before she realized she was nothing more than a profit center to the firm. She smiled at her naïveté; she remembered thinking how nice everyone had been during the summer! She felt so stupid, especially since she'd heard the horrific reports from classmates who graduated earlier than her. She really thought they were exaggerating, and besides, she never took anybody's word on anything. But within a month, the truth lay sprawled out before her like a murder victim.

  Just another body to churn out billables. One night, about four years before Julius had walked into her life with half a billion dollars, Samantha had found herself sitting in her office at three in the morning, drinking expensive wine straight from the bottle while she worked on a discovery motion. Tears splashed her arms as she typed. She told herself she should've known this was going to happen. Still, she didn't really think, didn't really believe that they would demand every ounce of her being, every useful part of her. She could still remember how the wine tasted.

  She should've known, she should've realized that the firm just didn't care. Odds were, you weren't going to make partner anyway, and if you washed out early, there were twenty more eager beaver law school grads desperate for the opportunity to work a hundred hours a week and develop a substance abuse problem.

  Around her, personal lives collapsed in a dank, emotional apocalypse. With each passing year, wedding bands became harder and harder to find on her fellow associates' ring fingers. On her first day at the firm, a dozen of her fellow first-year associates were married. Eight years later, only two of them were, although a number of them were sleeping with each other. Sort of cushioned the blow of divorce. It was like high school, except everyone had oodles of cash and was old enough to drink legally. And, brother, did they drink. Every night, a handful of the younger associates darkened the door of one bar or another, where they drank until the pain went away.

  As she sat in her recliner, Samantha wondered what the next ten years held for her. If she went looking for another job after the holidays, was she just going to end up in one of the other big firms? She had long given up on the idea of working as a prosecutor. She just couldn't afford to work for sixty grand a year. She felt she had to keep raking in the big bucks to protect the family.

  Curled up in the recliner, thick clouds swirling outside her windows, she couldn't bear to think about going back to the firm. Now that the partnership was gone, how could she ever go back to the office? Of counsel. Give me a break, she thought.

  Dammit, Carter, she thought. She couldn't believe the mess he'd made of her life.

  She pounded the armrest, which, of course, sent hot coffee splashing across her arm. This she also blamed on Carter. From now on, she decided, she was going to be blaming everything on that asshole. Who was she kidding, anyway? Yeah, maybe he hadn't seen her up at the house, but he would quickly figure out that she wa
s the one who had stolen the ticket.

  Then what? Was he really in a position to hunt her down? Would he hurt her? Didn't he have his own problems to deal with – namely that little double homicide scene out at that cabin? What a mess this was turning out to be. All over a little bit of money. OK, it was a shitload of money, but it was still money.

  This scattershot line of thinking brought her back to the ticket again. She'd already checked on it twice in the last hour. She was starting to feel a little frayed at the edges, as if someone had found a loose string poking up from her soul and had started to tug at it. She got out of the chair and drifted back to her closet, where she sat down next to the safe.

  A roundtable discussion that Samantha was barely conscious of was underway in her head.

  It's Jamal's ticket.

  Maybe.

  How did Julius know Jamal was his son?

  Maybe there were other heirs.

  How would she ever find them?

  She thought again about her parents, about her father losing the store, losing his life's work. She thought about Ziad Khouri and how that idiot had all but destroyed the family's reputation in the name of an alleged holy war that he was either too stupid or too lazy to understand.

  Focus on Jamal, she thought. Jamal.

  Try as she might, though, her thoughts kept drifting back to Lebanon, to her aunts and uncles and cousins, and the years of civil war that they had endured. The bulk of the family lived in tenements in Beirut. Her father had two older brothers, one a butcher, the other, an electrician. Both were dirt poor, living in small concrete dwellings with their families and struggling to get by each day. Her mother had a brother and two sisters, one of whom had died in a car bombing during the war. Money was always tight. The specter of war sat in the nation's core like a cancer in remission.

  A thought snuck up on her like a pickpocket in a crowd.

  No one would ever know.

  No one would ever know.

  No one would ever know.

  Just disappear until Wednesday and then cash in the ticket. When it came to the lottery, possession was a lot more than nine-tenths of the law, as the saying went. No one could ever question her ownership of the ticket. Anyone who did would be written off as a jealous sideshow freak. It was perfect.

  And just like that, Samantha found herself at her line.

  Samantha believed that there was a line in every person, a line that once crossed was forever destroyed. Deciding whether to cross it was basically a referendum on the type of person you wanted to be, the type of life you wanted to lead. And here she was. Cross this line and she could make her life easier, make her family's life easier, put an end to their decades-old struggle. The downside, of course, was that she would become one of the greatest thieves in the history of the world.

  No, Samantha thought. No. This is wrong.

  But so was coming within a whisker of getting her head blown off.

  But she'd always be a criminal, she thought.

  She could live with that, she decided. It was a small price to pay. If it bothered her too much, she'd get an expensive therapist.

  She pulled the quilt tighter around her body as the ticket continued to swirl around her mind. The thing that scared Samantha the most was that she was starting to buy into the argument in favor of keeping the ticket. There was still a part of her that didn't want anything to do with the ticket, let alone keep it, but its voice was getting drowned out by the ever greedier drums of war.

  She needed help. She was ready to admit it.

  As she sat cross-legged on the closet floor, achy and feverish, she knew she was in no condition to handle this on her own. She crawled across her bedroom floor, yanked her comforter down from the bed and wrapped herself in it. With her strength flagging, she picked up the phone and dialed a number that she had never expected to dial again, but one that she still had committed to memory.

  "Yo!" a voice barked out.

  "Pasquale, it's Sam," she said. As quickly as she could, before she could change her mind, she added:

  "I need your help."

  She hung up, crawled into her bed, and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Saturday, December 22

  11:55 a.m.

  The weather deteriorated steadily as Charles Flagg neared the Virginia-North Carolina border, and he debated checking into a motel for the day. The freezing rain was mixing in with snow and caking the roadway with a beautiful but dangerous crust. As he crossed the state line, Flagg decided to keep moving despite the bad weather, as he was only eighty miles from his destination. Visibility was holding steady for now, and there were very few cars on the highway. With any luck, he would be there in the early afternoon.

  The cost of waiting would be too high. He would need every minute to track down the ticket, and he couldn't afford to lose another day. It was risky, yes, but natural selection didn't mean you just sat on the sidelines hoping that you didn't get eaten by a hyena. Sometimes, to evolve, one had to take risks. Just in case, though, he decided he needed to hear her voice. Just in case. Using the speed dial function (she was No. 1 on speed dial, she always would be No. 1 on his speed dial, and there was no No. 2), he placed the call.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  "Hello?"

  Oh, that voice, thought Flagg.

  "It's me," he said.

  A long sigh.

  "What do you want, Bobby?"

  He would have killed anyone who addressed him by his birth name, long ago discarded in favor of the namesake of the greatest mind in human history. Olivia Kellogg, however, was free to call him whatever she wanted.

  "You know that my name is Charles."

  "Whatever, Bobby."

  "I just wanted to say hi," he said. "Wish you a Merry Christmas."

  "I told you not to call me," she said. "You don't even acknowledge Christmas."

  "Why did you answer?" he asked. "You have caller ID."

  "Oh, don't give me that bullshit! I don't know how you can make the caller ID show that it's someone else calling, but I wish you would stop."

  "How are you?"

  "Is it time for me to get a court order?"

  Olivia brought this up from time to time, but he knew she would never go through with it. Thus, he didn't respond.

  "How are you?" he repeated.

  "I was fine until you called."

  "That hurts."

  "It's been six years," she said. "Isn't it about time you moved on?"

  "I'm just waiting for you to come to your senses," he said. "I know you will."

  "Why don't you just leave me alone?"

  "Because I love you."

  "I don't love you."

  "We're supposed to be together," he said. "It's what nature wants."

  "Boy, you're just as crazy as ever."

  "They called Galileo crazy. They called Michelangelo crazy."

  "Someone's feeling good about himself this morning."

  "Can you imagine how perfect our children would be?"

  "I try not to think about us procreating," she said. "It hurts my head."

  Again, he reminded himself that she was one of the chosen few and therefore exempt from extermination. Plus, she always smelled really good. He wondered if she still wore the same perfume.

  "Do you still wear the same perfume?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Do I really have to explain?"

  "What are you wearing now?"

  "I'm not telling you."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want you jerking off while you think about what I'm wearing."

  Boy, she was really pushing him today.

  "You know I don't do that."

  "Right. Your precious seed. Can't afford to spill a single drop."

  "It is precious. You're not seeing anyone, right?" he asked.

  "None of your business."

  "Remember our deal," he said.

  "How could I forget?" />
  Three years ago, Olivia had announced that she was getting engaged to a young accountant she had met at a farmers' market. When Flagg found out, he reassured her that if she went through with the nuptials, he would place a feeding tube down the man's throat and pipe in boiling vegetable oil. She broke off the engagement and had not dated since. She claimed he wasn't being fair, but he didn't want her to dilute her exquisite DNA with genetic garbage from some random idiot. Talk about unfair!

  Sometimes, he wished he could just do away with her, but he couldn't go through with it. She was too perfect a specimen. Professor Darwin would not approve.

  "Well, keep it in mind."

  "Can't you just leave me alone?" she asked. "There are other fish in the sea. Someone as high on the evolutionary ladder as me. I just want to live my life."

  "There's no one else!"

  He was getting upset now, she had this way of just getting on his last nerve, and he knew that it was because she was his evolutionary equivalent. No one on the lower rungs of the ladder had the ability to press his buttons the way she could. Rationally, to the extent that Charles Flagg was capable of rational thought, he was OK with that, but emotionally, he just wanted to slap her silly.

  "Bobby, I'm really nothing special." she said.

  "You're so wrong. And I really would prefer it if you called me Charles."

  "I'd prefer it if you suffered a massive stroke, but we don't always get what we want, do we?"

  "You're upset," he said. "It happens to the best of us. You need time to calm down."

  "Please leave me alone."

  "I'll call you soon."

  "Please don't."

  "Merry Christmas."

  "Whatever."

  She hung up. That she even humored him this long sometimes surprised him, notwithstanding the fact that he promised her he would execute one of her neighbors at random if she refused to take his calls. He supposed that she humored him because she actually believed him. He supposed that she probably should believe him, but really, she was being a bit melodramatic if that was the only reason she indulged him. He wouldn't kill one of her neighbors just because she wouldn't take a particular phone call.