The Jackpot Read online

  He probably wouldn't.

  OK, so maybe he would.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, the high-rises of downtown Richmond drew into view, Flagg's mood darkening with each passing mile. These conversations with Olivia really ate at him. How could she not see that they were meant to be together? Move on, she had suggested on the phone. Might as well suggest moving on without oxygen. Ever since he had first laid eyes on her – on the anniversary of Professor Darwin's birth, no less – he had known she was the one. The only one. There would be no other ones. Anyone else would be inferior to Olivia Kellogg. Her bloodlines were flawless. Her father had been an Olympic swimming champion before becoming a groundbreaking cancer researcher. Her mother, also an Olympic athlete, had been a critically acclaimed novelist until her untimely death at the hands of a drunk driver.

  The happy relationship ended on a Tuesday, the day that Flagg confided in the love of his life what had become of the man that had killed her mother. Shortly after hearing the tragic story about the wife and mother cut down in her prime, Flagg paid the drunk driver a visit. When the driver, a divorced welder named Bryan Stewart, got home from work one afternoon, he found Flagg in his single-wide trailer, sitting in his recliner and drinking his last can of Cheerwine.

  A week later, police responded to the home after receiving a report of a rancid smell emanating from the trailer, where an officer found Stewart nailed to his bedroom wall. The death of Stewart, who was well-known in the county as a small-time thief and a batterer of women, did not spark an entirely in-depth investigation. His murder remained unsolved.

  Much to Flagg's chagrin, Olivia Kellogg did not react favorably to his tale of revenge. Olivia immediately ended her marriage to Flagg, whose only previous hint of strange proclivities was that his copy of On the Origin of Species (that he had one at all was a little weird, she later admitted to herself) was dog-eared on every page and heavily highlighted. She did not react favorably to his statement that his life's mission was to save humanity from itself and, in furtherance of that mission, that he had removed eighty-six people (counting Bryan Stewart) from the gene pool. She was not even swayed by his fervent belief that human evolution was at a crossroads and that something had to be done.

  Modern society disgusted Flagg. In just a century, mankind had undone millions years of evolution. Vaccines and antibiotics had been the first dominoes, but they were the first of many that were toppling toward the final domino – one marked EXTINCTION. Beta blockers, chemotherapy drugs, statins, anti-hypertensives, insulin, proton pump inhibitors, steroids – they all served to artificially lengthen life and prevent the timely removal of the weak from the gene pool. Worse, they kept people who otherwise would have been selected out of the herd alive and reproducing, which cycled weak genes through to future generations, further diluting the gene pool. It was a vicious cycle that would undoubtedly end with mankind as a footnote to history.

  Virtually no one exercised. People clogged their arteries with saturated fats, inhaling cheeseburgers and French fries like they were running out of cows and potatoes. Modern medicine and surgery kept alive people that shouldn't be alive, and then those same people took absolutely no advantage of the gift they'd been given. It was that simple. Instead of a few hundred million, Mother Earth was carrying seven billion of her children, stumbling through life like mindless zombies, and that was too much. Stories of impending apocalypse always got him excited.

  Flagg believed that survival instincts had been bred out of the human race. He had read studies confirming his hypothesis that people simply didn't know how to survive. In one about the September 11 terrorist attacks, Flagg read that after the North Tower of the World Trade Center had been hit, recorded messages broadcast over the public address system directed the office workers in the other tower to remain at their desks. To Flagg's surprise, many heeded the direction, ignoring any instinct to evacuate the building, despite the fact that a jumbo jet had just crashed into the building next door. A jumbo jet! It wasn't like someone had overcooked a bag of microwave popcorn. When the second plane hit the South Tower seventeen minutes later, those same people above the crash zone had become trapped.

  Later, Flagg read a dissertation about human reaction to mass shootings, which posited that the average person did not behave in the same manner as any other creature on earth did upon hearing gunfire. Every other species, at the first hint of danger, flees in the opposite direction in a graceful ballet of escape. People, on the other hand, freeze in place, and, in many instances, actually gravitate toward the danger. Toward the gunfire. During post-incident interviews, many of these surviving individuals, when asked why they had not run for their lives, stated that they just wanted to see what was going on.

  Olivia had not been impressed by any of this.

  Just thinking about the end of the relationship made Flagg's head hurt so badly that he needed to pull over. He eased into the breakdown lane, came to a stop and did his exercises. This was softening his focus on the mission at hand. As it was, finding the ticket was not going to be easy, and the last thing he needed were matters of the heart intruding.

  Outside, the snow continued to fall.

  * * *

  Flagg found Lucky Lou's Chicken Shack at around three in the afternoon. The weak light was fading fast on this, the shortest day of the year. Against the gray backdrop, the store looked as dismal in person as it had looked on television the night before. Located on a side street between Main Street and Cary Street just east of downtown Richmond, it was sandwiched between a dry cleaner and an abandoned storefront, previously home to a beverage place called Hydration Nation. A pathetic-looking banner hung over the convenience store's broken and cracked façade. It read, "We Sold a $415 Million Dollar Winner!" As if that somehow guaranteed that all their tickets would be "$415 Million Dollar Winners!"

  With snow piling up on the Saturday before Christmas, the downtown area was like a ghost town, but Lucky Lou's served the poorer neighborhoods just south and east of downtown, and so it remained open. Flagg, however, didn't see a soul as he made his way up the slippery walk to the front door. With the snow thickening behind him, Flagg stepped inside the store and closed the door behind him. Using his body to shield his hands, he flipped the OPEN sign over to CLOSED.

  Other than the clerk behind the counter, the store was empty, which Flagg accepted as a karmic bonus. Fewer people he'd have to kill today. The store was unremarkable in almost every respect, although there was a large deer head mounted on the wall behind the counter, almost staring down at Flagg. Aisles of overpriced and unhealthy groceries, coolers full of cheap beer and malt liquor, cases and cases of cigarettes. Flagg hated these places. They were like way stations on civilization's road trip to extinction.

  The clerk, whose name was Carly Madison, was everything Flagg expected – a pale, heavy-set woman in her mid-forties, smoking a Virginia Slim menthol and working a crossword puzzle. Not the New York Times Sunday puzzle, mind you. One of those paperbacks with the simple clues and the three-letter answers. She didn't look up when he came in, and so she didn't notice the madman approaching her counter. He stood at the counter silently until she acknowledged him. He never, ever said, "excuse me." He was the customer!

  "Help you?" she asked, not looking up from her still-blank puzzle.

  "Who bought the ticket?" he asked.

  "What?" Still focused on her puzzle.

  "The ticket," Flagg said. "Who bought the winning ticket?"

  This seemed to grab her attention.

  "Excuse me?" she said, looking up at Flagg.

  He grabbed her by the chubby lobe of her left ear and yanked her close, like a miscreant child who wasn't listening.

  "You heard me."

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do. You reviewed the security tape when you found out that the ticket had been sold here." He pulled harder.

  Carly's eyes went wide with high, thin terror, and Flagg was confident that he finally ha
d her undivided attention. He based this on the fact that she had wet her pants. The aroma of urine filled the air like mustard gas.

  "Black dude," she said.

  "What's his name?"

  "Julius. Julius Wheeler."

  "Where's he live?

  "I don't know."

  He tugged harder on the ear, and when he felt cartilage start to tear, he became confident that she did not know where he lived.

  "What else do you know?"

  Her ear still in Flagg's death grip, Carly tried to remember everything she knew about the lucky son of a bitch who had bought the ticket. While she did so, she found herself thinking that she probably should have studied a bit harder in high school. That might have sent her down a road that didn't end here, in Lucky Lou's, with her ear being slowly torn off her head.

  "Let's make it simple. We'll start with something easy. How do you know him?"

  Carly chose her next move carefully, as she strongly suspected that her life depended on it. Had she known that her life did not depend on her next move, as her fate had been sealed as soon as Flagg had walked in the store, she might have relaxed a bit. Thus, she weighed her options carefully. The truth, she decided, will set you free.

  "He works around here," she said, each word coming in between teary gasps.

  "Where?"

  Carly knew that Julius Wheeler worked at Willett & Hall because one of her co-workers, a young black girl named Tawana who also lived in the Tree, moonlighted on the same CleanSweep crew with Julius.

  "Big law firm up the street."

  "Which one?"

  "Willett & Hall," she said.

  "Where is it?"

  "Go west on Main," she said. "About half a mile."

  Flagg thanked Carly and shot her once in the forehead. He could only imagine the damage she had inflicted upon the local gene pool. For God's sake, she'd been capable of reproducing for at least a quarter century. He just wished he could have found her sooner.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Saturday, December 22

  4:17 p.m.

  "You've got the flu," said Dr. Roger Bouzein, M.D., studying her test results like they were the Dead Sea scrolls. "And strep throat. I'm going to write you a couple prescriptions. An anti-viral, which will help knock back the flu symptoms, and an antibiotic for the strep. You'll feel better in a few days. Really, though, take it easy until Christmas. You overdo it, you'll end up in a hospital. That's a promise."

  Samantha looked at him, her puffy eyes spider-webbed with red threads of exhaustion.

  "Thank you," she croaked.

  "You still look lovely," he said, cutting his eyes quickly to his left.

  They were seated in Bouzein's office at Henrico Internal Medicine, tucked in a four-story building on the grounds of Henrico Doctors' Hospital. It was furnished with cheap prefab chairs, accessorized with months-old magazines. A large practice, it was normally buzzing with patients anxious to take advantage of their benefit plans, but today it was a mausoleum. An hour ago, Bouzein had opened the office just for Samantha, even called in a lab technician to work with his favorite patient. The lab technician had been just thrilled to come in on a Saturday.

  He was decidedly disappointed when Samantha had appeared with a young man at her side. A few more episodes like this, he was going to start thinking she really wasn't interested in him, which was just a weird thing to contemplate. He was a successful doctor! Chicks dug doctors! Why the hell else did he go to med school? And this friend of hers was really starting to piss him off. Sitting there all superior with his Pac-Man sweatshirt and his baggy jeans. Shaking his head, Bouzein pulled out a small pad from a desk drawer and wrote the prescriptions. He reached across to hand them to Samantha.

  "I'll take those," her companion said.

  "I'm sorry," Bouzein said, jerking the papers just out of his reach. "Who are you again?"

  "Pasquale Paoli. I'm a friend of Samantha's."

  "Well, Mr. Paoli," started Bouzein, "I'm afraid I can't give these to you. They're Samantha's. It would be a violation of federal law. Perhaps you've heard of HIPAA? The Health Information Portability and Accountability Act?"

  "Right," Pasquale said, his hand still extended to accept the prescriptions. "She invited me in here with her. You really think she has any objection?"

  "Roger, it's OK," Samantha said, her voice weak.

  "As you wish." He said it with Darth Vader-like verve, even throwing in a head bob for full effect.

  Pasquale looked up after he had tucked the prescriptions into his pocket.

  "Thanks, Lord Vader," he said.

  * * *

  Sam and Pasquale filled the prescriptions in the hospital pharmacy and stopped at Mary Angela's in Carytown for a quick dinner. Carytown was a bohemian commercial district just west of downtown Richmond where wealthy suburbanites went to feel trendy. It was crammed with sushi bars, overpriced women's boutiques, used bookstores and gift shops that patrons loved to describe as eclectic. Mary Angela's, at the western edge of Carytown, was a Richmond institution, famous for its pizzas and pastas.

  Sam and Pasquale took a booth in the corner that looked out onto a snowy Cary Street. A moment later, a young waitress in her early twenties set two glasses of water on the gingham tabletop. Obligatory lemon wedges bobbed like buoys in the glasses.

  "Those wedges are crawling with disease," Sam said after the waitress had disappeared. "I saw a story about it on CNN."

  Pasquale's glass was nearly at his lips. He paused, considered Sam's warning, and then took a long drink of lemony, disease-infested water.

  "Cheers," he said. "Don't forget to take your medicine."

  "Don't start with me," she said.

  She placed the anti-viral and the antibiotic pills on her tongue and chased them with a swallow from her water glass.

  "What about your little plague wedge there?" he asked.

  "Honestly, I feel too crappy to care," she said. "Besides, these meds should protect me."

  He took another sip.

  "This is some good water."

  "I'm glad you like it," she said.

  "So what are we doing here?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm a reasonably smart kitty," he said. "You didn't call me for a ride to the doctor's office."

  "No, I-…" she started, then quietly: "No."

  "I'm kind of at a loss," he said. "I've been here since lunchtime, and all I've done is drive you around from doctor to pharmacy like you were my grandmother. It's not that I don't love seeing you, I do, really. But I didn't think you could stand to be around me anymore, so obviously, you're in some kind of jam, and here were are, and I don't know what it is. So help me help you. What's wrong, tiger?"

  She had forgotten how quickly he talked, how he sprayed you with his words like machine-gun fire, as if he had no internal monologue. It was refreshing in that with Pasquale Paoli, what you saw was what you got. It was also terrifying in its own way, in that Pasquale Paoli did not come equipped with any sort of restrictor plate or filter, and once he got going, it was best to stay clear. Pasquale frequently said what he thought, almost immediately. It was one part endearing, two parts horrifying.

  Pasquale ordered the linguine with red clam sauce; Samantha went with a single slice of cheese pizza. They decided to split the large antipasto salad. While they waited for their food, Samantha told Pasquale what had happened since Julius had knocked on her door about twenty-four hours earlier. She went into great detail, including her plan to deliver the ticket to its new rightful owner, omitting nothing.

  Except for the urge to cash the ticket herself.

  She didn't know why she did that.

  After all, wasn't that was why she had called Pasquale in the first place?

  Wasn't it?

  * * *

  Pasquale Paoli was already a bit of a folk hero when Samantha met him during her first year of law school at Richmond. He was two years ahead of her in school, but he was three years older than her.
After graduating from Princeton University, he had gone to work for an Internet startup called Leglift.com, which sold pet supplies online. The company never made a penny in profit and paid its employees, in part, in stock options. The founders took the company public after eighteen months. On the first day of trading, the stock opened at $3.25 a share and closed that afternoon at $65.75. Within a month, it was trading at $115. Pasquale, who began to suspect that failing to ever turn a profit was a poor business plan, sold his 40,000 shares and walked away with $4.4 million. Within a few months, the company's venture capital dried up, and the stock price crashed. The founder, the man who hired Pasquale, was last seen working a double shift at a Taco Bell.

  His financial future secure, Pasquale decided to go to law school because he thought being a trial lawyer might be fun. After taking the LSATs, he chose to attend Richmond because it was the first school to accept him. The study of law came easily to Pasquale. His mind worked quite logically and was capable of synthesizing a large amount of material and extracting the important threads like wheat. It was an important tool to have in law school, since the study of law was full of reams of useless and unimportant material. Law professors enjoyed spending a large portion of each semester on this useless material before administering a final exam based solely on an obscure point of law buried in a footnote of a case that the professor glossed over on a Friday afternoon. Oh, and the exam was worth 100 percent of the final grade.

  From his first day in law school, Pasquale proved true the old adage that a man with nothing to lose was very dangerous indeed. Since he wasn't worried about finding a job or getting good grades, he just didn't give a crap. He argued with professors when principles of law didn't make sense, he drank and played cards every night, he lived in a shitty apartment like everyone else and drove a six-year-old Bronco. Virtually no one knew about his huge wealth, so they just assumed he was crazy. The only hint that he was financially secure was that he did not stick around for the student loan seminar during first-year orientation.