The Jackpot Page 5
When people asked Samantha what she did for a living, she had once proudly told them that she was a trial lawyer. Sitting here as her career played out the string, like a baseball team eliminated from playoff contention, she felt very silly all of a sudden. She had appeared in court six times in eight years, and never in a court of record. What the hell kind of trial lawyer was she, exactly?
And what was she doing with her life? The questions were coming like machine-gun fire now. Representing giant companies pitted against other giant companies. Or, more accurately and more pathetically, giant insurance companies for giant companies. She thought about the OmniCare case again. OmniCare had sued HealthSoft because it claimed that the proprietary software that it had designed had nearly erased OmniCare's customer database. HealthSoft countersued because countersuing would unnecessarily complicate things, a personal favorite of lawyers.
She could only imagine what a jury would have thought if it saw two extremely large and wealthy corporations fight about a software contract. She suspected that, if they could, the jurors would return a verdict for neither party. Juries were not stupid, despite what big firm attorneys frequently thought.
With that little career retrospective complete, Samantha turned her attention to her personal life. Another highlight reel! Single at the age of thirty-four! No prospects in sight! The love of her life, long since checked out! With her index fingers, she massaged her temples. Her headache was worsening, and this trip down memory lane was not helping. Jesus, she wanted to puke. To top it off, her nose was starting to run, and she caught a big, wet sneeze in a tissue.
She checked the clock in the corner of her computer screen. It was almost 2:30. For the next three hours, the firm would be hopping as the support staff hurried to finish its pre-Christmas work and the attorneys hunkered down in their offices, conducting the important business of the firm. With moist tissue in hand, she staggered to her office door. Cracking it open, she had a view of the cube farm. At a couple of cubicles, partners were barking orders at their secretaries. Rage swelled inside her like helium filling a balloon.
She staggered back to her chair.
CHAPTER FIVE
Friday, December 21
2:47 p.m.
Unaware of the despair in his soon-to-be-former associate's heart, Carter Livingston Pierce sat in his 5,000-square-foot Windsor Farms home, focusing on his myriad other problems and sipping scotch. Single malt, according to the bottle. Carter didn't have any idea what that meant, but he knew it was important. He didn't normally drink in the afternoon, but what the hell. It had been a long year. And this was expensive scotch.
The house was empty now, his wife Ashley and the twins, Cameron and Madison, out somewhere finishing up the last-minute Christmas shopping that he likely could not afford. Carter was at the dining room table, grimly studying that month's credit card bills like they were bad medical test results. Twenty-six thousand dollars! Finding it difficult to catch his breath, he reached for the top button of his custom-made dress shirt and was surprised to discover it was already undone. He felt like he was choking. Jesus, it was hot in here. He looked up at programmable thermostat on the wall. Seventy degrees. Maybe he was having a heart attack, he thought, more hopefully than he cared to admit.
Carter was forty-five years old and had made partner at Willett & Hall more than a decade ago. He made $1.5 million a year, and yet it was not enough. Money flew out the door like inmates breaking out of jail. He looked around at the opulence before him, and it made him retch a little. The table at which he was now sitting had been custom-made by a well-known local carpenter for the tidy sum of $41,000. In her seemingly constant quest to strip Earth of its usable natural resources, Ashley had requested it cut from a rare tree in the Amazon rainforest. Carter couldn't remember how many times the family had actually eaten at the table, but he didn't think it was more than five.
A matching china cabinet (sixteen grand) stood in the corner, home to a variety of rare plates and silverware that Ashley had collected over the years. Her proudest find was a plate that Princess Diana had eaten from at the Hotel Ritz on the night she died in Paris in 1997. Carter thought it was a bit creepy, but hey, whatever made her happy. That dish alone had sucked $44,000 out of the Pierce bank account. Another $40,000 went to installing new hardwood floors in this room.
At least that crap was paid for. Carter found himself thinking about their monthly and daily expenses, money that drained out of the family's accounts like water from a bathtub. Lunch for the family averaged about a hundred bucks a day, as Ashley and Carter each enjoyed lavish midday meals with friends and associates. For Ashley, lunch was a competitive sport, and she wouldn't dare miss a lunch with the other ladies of the Junior League. The girls refused to pack their lunches, as it would send the massively inappropriate message that they could not afford to buy their lunch. That simply would not do. Not that they ate it. The twins and their friends never ate anything because teenage girls never actually ate lunch. Too many tight clothes to shoehorn themselves into.
Dinner ran at least a hundred bucks a night. Sometimes two hundred. The girls frequently invited friends over for takeout, since Ashley hadn't lifted a finger in the kitchen since they were born. Much of the food ended up in the trash because teenage girls didn't eat dinner either. Carter usually took his dinners in his office, ordering in. Food ran the Pierce family about a thousand bucks a week.
Ashley, who liked driving a new car every year, was currently zipping around in a Mercedes coupe. Carter drove a Hummer that was bright yellow and all but screamed, "I have a small penis!" The girls had received their own SUVs for their sixteenth birthdays in August. Carter had justified them with the latest crash-test data they'd found on the Internet. After all, they needed the girls to be safe. The monthly payments on the vehicles totaled about $3,000.
Madison and Cameron attended St. Genevieve's, the area's most exclusive girls' private school and their mother's alma mater. The Pierces lived inside the city limits, which would've meant sending them to one of the city's wretched public schools. Carter cringed at the idea that the girls would be elbow-to-elbow with the sons and daughters of the crack addicts, the blacks, and God knew what else. So they paid two grand a month to send them to St. Genevieve's.
He tried not to think about the oceanfront cottage that they had bought six years ago. Located right on the beach in Duck, North Carolina, it sported six bedrooms, three stories, wraparound decks on each floor. The mortgage payment was $6,000 a month, much of which, theoretically, could have been recouped by weekly rentals, if Ashley had been willing to let strangers inside her vacation home. Which, of course, she was not. Instead, the house sat empty fifty weeks a year. He didn't want to think about the condominium in Park City either.
Last but not least was Ashley's addiction to Vicodin and Percocet. Five years ago, she had torn her ACL playing tennis, and since the surgery to repair the damage, she had been popping the pills like candy. She got them from Andrew Whitestone, a well-known orthopedic surgeon in the Richmond area. Two grand a month. Plus a monthly blowjob for the good doctor, but Carter didn't know about that. Since that wasn't costing him anything, he probably wouldn't have cared all that much.
Carter Pierce drank more scotch.
* * *
An hour later, Carter was down in the media room, well into his second scotch of the day and pleasantly buzzed. It was in the basement of the three-story home, and once upon a time, this had been the crown jewel of the house. It was where the family had congregated, ate pizza from Mary Angela's, and enjoyed what little time they had together while Carter had sowed the fields of partnership with the seeds of his soul. Once upon a time, the girls were still little and he was still Daddy and Ashley still planned to return to teaching kindergarten. Once upon a time, they were happy.
When Carter and Ashley bought the house a decade earlier, he had had great plans for this room. He had always wanted a home theater with a theater-like screen, and once his salary rea
ched a point that it could become a reality, he went to work. He shopped long and hard for the right setup. He read magazines, frequented boutique home theater stores, even researched what Hollywood people put in their own homes. Finally, he took his Visa Black card to Speaker City and went to town.
He dropped nearly $100,000 to soundproof the room and retrofit it with an LCD projector (which he upgraded every year or so), a 103-inch screen, Polk audio speakers built into the walls, stadium seating for twelve. A Kegerator stood at the ready, loaded with Heineken, as did a fountain drink station. The walls were painted black to minimize light interference. A functioning popcorn cart completed the room.
For the first year or so, the room was a hit. Time with Madison and Cameron. Time with the wife. As time marched on, Weekly Movie Night turned into Monthly Movie Night, and then they were lucky if they gathered for the rare Night-That-All-Four-Of-Them-Could-Stand-To-Be-In-The-Same-Room Movie Night. Now it sat empty most nights, indicative of the current family dynamic in the way a deserted skyscraper reflected a down economy.
These days, he came here to hide. Madison and Cameron had moved on to their own lives and looked for ways to avoid being home. After all, many of their friends whose parents weren't nearly as weird as theirs had similar entertainment centers in their large homes, so the draw just wasn't there. They didn't understand why Dad had such a hard-on for this room. Ashley herself was busy with the Junior League or tennis or, for all Carter knew, banging her yoga instructor, Malik. Had Carter known Ashley was, in fact, sleeping with her yoga instructor, he would have realized he couldn't judge her too harshly, given that he had been having an affair with his paralegal, Dawn, for the past year. Glass houses and all.
* * *
The chimes of the deactivated alarm system roused Carter from his early afternoon stupor. He'd fallen asleep on the leather loveseat, a string of drool arcing from Carter's chin to the throw pillow. His head was pounding and his mouth was dry. Great, he thought. Perfect conditions in which to do battle with the wife. He gave his head a hard shake and made his way upstairs. He was halfway up the stairs when Ashley started calling for him. Jesus, her voice was like broken glass.
"Carter," she called out. "I'm home! You've just got to see what we bought."
Just thinking about it made his heart flutter.
He found Ashley in the living room, surrounded by an army of shopping bags from the mall's ritziest tenants. She sat cross-legged in front of the exquisitely decorated eight-foot Douglas fir that had given its life to become the Pierce Family Christmas tree. It stood majestically in the corner of the living room, strategically placed so it could be seen from the street. Ashley had wanted to have the best-looking house on the street, and so a month ago, she had hired a Christmas consultant to select the tree and decorate the home. Until the moment said consultant showed up at their door, Carter didn't know what a Christmas consultant did or that there even was such a thing, but there was no arguing with Ashley once she'd set her mind to something. He decided that tonight, after everyone was in bed, he would drink more scotch and look at his fantastic-looking tree.
Ashley barely noticed him as he entered the room, intent on the various packages before her. She wore green khakis and a cream-colored turtleneck, filling out the clothes as well as she did ten years ago. Her sandy blond hair caressed her shoulders in soft ringlets. In addition to tennis, yoga and banging Malik, she ran three miles every day and did weights four times a week. If Carter didn't despise her so much, he would've been tempted to take her there on the sectional sofa. He watched her examine a new knife she had purchased from Williams-Sonoma and briefly wondered if she would one day try to kill him with it. It wouldn't surprise him.
"Where are the girls?" he asked as he examined the loot, trying to estimate how much deeper Ashley's latest spasm of spending would bury them.
"Oh, they ran into a couple friends from school and decided to go to lunch. I gave them the credit card in case they wanted to do a little shopping."
"Splendid," he said.
"What's with the tone?"
"Nothing," Carter said. He didn't feel like fighting. His head hurt.
"Good," she said. "Let me show you what I got."
For the next fifteen minutes, she walked him through the spoils of her latest assault on the Short Pump Town Center, the ritzy open-air mall on the west side of town. For a bit of that quarter hour, he wondered how he was going to pay for it all. For the rest, he wondered if Dawn would dress up as Princess Leia the next time they hooked up. It had long been a fantasy of his, and Ashley Matheson Pierce was not one for fulfilling fantasies.
"Are you even listening to me?" Ashley said suddenly, ice in her tone.
"What?"
"You're not listening to me," she said. Each word was shriller than the last.
"So?"
"I want you to listen to me," she said. "This is why we have so many problems."
"It's not because you're spending it faster than I can make it?"
OK, so maybe he was in the mood to scrap a little.
"Screw you," she said, turning her attention back to her packages. "I just want to have a nice Christmas. Don't you ruin it for me."
"Ruin it for you?" Carter said. "I'm subsidizing it for you."
"Leave me alone!"
Well, that was enough of that. Without another word, he turned on his heel and slipped out of the room. Carter decided it was a good thing he was relatively intoxicated, because if he'd been in the mood to really brawl, that scene could have gotten ugly. Whew. Well, time to head to the office. He glanced over his shoulder as he made his way to the garage, suddenly fearful that she might be chasing him down with the new knife.
Traffic was light as Carter made his way east toward downtown, the scotch only marginally affecting his ability to keep the Hummer in his lane. It was just before 4:00. He planned to work until about nine, when he and Dawn would break for a quick dinner and even quicker screw in his office. Hell, maybe there'd be some news about the size of this year's bonus. With any luck, he could undo some of the damage that Ashley had wrought over the past twelve months. Then back home to the harpy.
Merry Christmas!
CHAPTER SIX
Friday, December 21
5:01 p.m.
The snow was thickening when Julius Wheeler joined his four-man CleanSweep crew on the twenty-ninth floor of the Willett & Hall Building. He pulled on his coveralls, loaded his cleaning cart, pushed it down the hallway. The ticket (THE TICKET!) was tucked safely in his right shoe, secreted in a zippered plastic baggie to protect it from sweat. He had not slept in more than twenty-four hours. As he silently made his way from office to office, he tried to gather his increasingly fragmented thoughts, which was proving to be about as easy as herding goldfish.
As Julius had fled the Tree the night before, two things had occurred to him. First, he didn't have the first clue what to do with his winning lottery ticket. Second, he had a few bucks in his wallet and no credit card. So, although he was worth nearly half a billion dollars, he had been unable to get a hotel room.
At about three in the morning, he stumbled across the Third Street Diner near downtown, where he sat in a booth and nursed a cup of coffee until sunup. At dawn, he ordered the cheapest breakfast he could and picked at it for another hour. Then he had wandered around downtown until his shift started, freezing his ass off. First thing he was doing was buying a house in Hawaii.
His co-workers were in a festive mood, excited about Christmas, now just four days away. Under normal circumstances, Julius wouldn't have been that excited. Christmas fell on a Tuesday this year, meaning that Monday and Tuesday were both holidays, even at this firm. That meant no work, and no work meant no pay. But these weren't normal circumstances, at least not for him.
He turned his cart down a long corridor of darkened offices, going over his plan once more. Of course, Julius hadn't needed to come to work today, but he did need help.
"J-Dub!"
Jul
ius looked across the cube farm and spotted Luis, another janitor on his crew.
"Merry Christmas!"
Julius nodded. Luis disappeared into the stairwell.
At the next office, he found the lights on and the door slightly ajar. Inside, he heard a sneeze, a loud, wet one. He checked the nameplate on the door, trying to gauge whether this was someone he could trust.
SAMANTHA KHOURI.
The olive-skinned young woman, who often worked late into the night, sometimes even after the CleanSweep crew had finished its rounds, was seated with her back to the door, wiping her nose with a tissue. She was slouched low in her chair, staring out the window, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail. She was always nice to him, nicer than most of the attorneys that he came across as he emptied their trashcans.
Well, he had to trust somebody.
Julius Wheeler took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Friday, December 21
6:40 p.m.
Samantha spun her chair around away from the windows toward the sound of the soft but insistent tapping on her door.
"Yes?"
The door swung open slowly, revealing Julius' presence behind it.
"Yes?" she said.
Sam had been in her chair for a few hours, just staring out at the dark city. She was too tired to move, and she wasn't quite ready to head to her parents' house, where she was expected for dinner shortly.
"Hi," Julius said, rooted in the doorway. Then silence.
Samantha reached for another tissue. After destroying that one, she looked up again a few moments later and with some unease noticed that Julius was still standing in her doorway, eyeing her closely. He hadn't moved. Immediately, and she hated herself for thinking it, she realized that she was effectively cornered by a large black man. She glanced at the clock in the corner of her computer screen. It had been quiet for at least an hour, and it was extremely unlikely that any other W&H employees were still here. Maybe Carter Pierce was still dicking around in his office, but he'd probably hide under his desk if she screamed out for help.