The Jackpot Read online

  "Like I give a shit about that right now," Dawn said. "And you can rest assured that your pen is the only one that's been in my ink for the last six months."

  "Fine," he said. "How sure are you?"

  "What do you think I've been doing all afternoon?" she said. "I've taken a dozen pregnancy tests. All positive. Jesus, it seemed like some of them were turning positive before I even peed on them."

  Silence settled over the conversation. Carter imagined boxes of still-sealed pregnancy tests in the supermarket popping like popcorn as she walked by them.

  "Congratulations, Dad," she said. "Jesus, what are we going to do?"

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Friday, December 21

  7:22 p.m.

  Julius sat in Samantha's office sipping a lukewarm Sprite. His new lawyer had stepped out for a moment, leaving him alone with his thoughts about the money. He really couldn't get his head around it. In his life, Julius had never had more than a few hundred bucks to his name at any one time. He had never owned a car or a house, and he had never had a bank account. He had never filed a tax return. That, he suspected, was about to change.

  He wondered if he should finish his shift. On the one hand, he did have some suddenly pressing matters to attend to, and his mind was really not focused on his janitorial duties. On the other hand, if he suddenly quit, Mark Jenks, the need-to-know-everything supervisor of the evening shift, would have a lot of questions that he didn't feel like answering right now. Plus, he was a pain in the ass, and Julius would have liked nothing more than to give him a little heartburn, make him work late. In the end, he decided to bag it. Eff it. Jenks had treated him like dog shit for the last two years. What was Jenks going to do? Fire him?

  "How we doing in here?" Samantha asked as she stepped back into the office.

  "Okay, I guess," he said. "Little nervous."

  "I'm sure you are."

  "So what do we do now?" he asked.

  "Well, today's Friday. Because of Christmas, the lottery office doesn't open again until Wednesday. That gives you some time to get some stuff in order."

  "I got no place to stay," he said.

  She looked at him, a puzzled look cutting a fissure in her forehead.

  He laughed softly.

  "I live in a bad neighborhood," he said. This she would understand. "Carrolton Oaks."

  "Ah." A flash of recognition. Naturally, Samantha had seen countless news stories reporting the latest drug bust or drive-by shooting at the Tree.

  "Dude I knew found out I won some money last night," he said. "There was some trouble."

  "I see," Samantha said in her most professional and lawyerly voice.

  "I walked around all night," Julius said. "Didn't even have enough cash for a hotel room. Ain't that a kick in the ass?"

  "We'll find you a place for the weekend," Samantha said. "Don't worry about that."

  Julius nodded. A weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders.

  "OK, let's talk numbers," she said. "First of all, you need to understand that the government is going to hit you hard with taxes."

  "Oh," Julius said, a cloud settling over him again. The government was going to leave him with nothing. He'd probably owe them money. What a goddamn racket the lottery was. No wonder they called it a tax on poor people.

  "Hang on," she said. "I don't want you to get the idea that you're going to be scraping by. If you take the money all at once, rather than in yearly installments, my guess is that you're going to walk away with about a hundred and fifty million dollars, free and clear."

  He laughed out loud, a laugh that broke free of him like an escaped jail inmate. There hadn't been a whole lot of shit worth laughing about in Julius' life, and so the fact that he was laughing at all came as a great surprise to him. A shiver rippled through him like an earthquake, and he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.

  "Yeah," Samantha said. "It's a lot of money. Don't worry. We're going to help you all the way through. You're going to be able to do anything you want. You'll be able to take care of your kids, your kids' kids, your kids – well, you get the idea."

  Julius smiled. He felt comfortable with her. Her boss was a jackass, but with each passing minute, he became more confident he'd knocked on the right door earlier this evening.

  "Do you have a will, Julius?" she asked.

  He laughed. "No."

  "You'll need one," she said. "The firm has a trusts and estates section. Do you have a family?"

  "No," he said.

  "Parents? Siblings?"

  "Parents dead," he said. "Brother got killed 'bout ten years ago."

  "Cousins?"

  "Yeah, a few. Some might even be related to me."

  "I'll tell you one thing," she said. "Anyone you've ever met in the last ten years is going to claim to be your cousin."

  "Yeah," he said.

  Silence followed.

  "Actually…" he said.

  "What?"

  "I do have a son," he said.

  "Oh?"

  "Jamal."

  "How old is he?"

  "Fifteen. I think."

  "Where does he live?"

  "I think with his grandmother. His mama died a while back. I haven't seen them in a long time. I think they live in Ravenwood Court."

  Julius tried to act embarrassed because he thought that was what Samantha would expect.

  * * *

  Jamal Wheeler had been the unexpected fruit of a brief and fumbling encounter with a young woman named Alicia. Maybe was it Alison. Alyssa? Julius had never been able to remember. He met her at a party about nine months before Jamal was born. They were both drunk, a keg of beer playing its part as the social lubricant for the evening. Julius had been quite charming, quite debonair, and sometime around three in the morning, Julius and Alicia/Alison/Alyssa consummated their relationship in the breezeway outside the apartment building. Immediately before the forty seconds of intercourse commenced, she inquired whether Julius had a condom. Although Julius did not have one because he didn't like the way they felt, he assured her that he would "pull out in time."

  He did not.

  When they were done, he zipped up, went home and, before turning in for the night, tossed the girl's telephone number in the trash. Eight weeks later, after two missed periods and unrelenting nausea, the girl took a pregnancy test, which came back positive. The girl, whose name, Julius decided, almost certainly began with the letter A, decided to keep the baby for a number of reasons, primarily because she thought it would convince Julius to hook up with her again.

  After steadfastly refusing to take her calls, Julius didn't see her again for about six months, when she approached him while he was playing hoops near the Tree. At first, he didn't even remember who she was. When she reminded him of the romantic moments they had spent in the breezeway, he was immediately disgusted by the presence of the large belly. He didn't roll with big girls, and he wrote it off to having been pretty drunk that night. It never occurred to him that she was pregnant.

  When she told him that not only was she pregnant, but that Julius himself was the baby-daddy, her hope that he would sweep her up into his arms and tell her everything would be OK did not, shockingly enough, come to pass. He certainly did not admit that the baby was his, because seriously, this was the Tree, and young men did not admit paternity in the Tree until a blood test gave them no other choice.

  Three months later, the girl gave birth to a healthy baby boy. That the baby was healthy was remarkable, given the fact that his mother spent most of her evenings drinking, smoking and dancing and received no prenatal care until she arrived at the hospital, fully dilated. Julius, of course, was not present at the birth. Once mother and son arrived home from the hospital, people quickly noted the strong resemblance between father and son.

  Julius first saw his son when he was two weeks old, resembling his father more and more with each passing day. He was on his way home (where he had boxes of condoms in his night stand), another y
oung lady on his arm, and ran into Jamal and his mother in the courtyard, where she was trying to soothe her crying son in the cool night air. The meeting was, to say the least, awkward. Julius refused the mother's offer to hold the child. She called him an asshole and warned the young lady accompanying Julius that she had contracted herpes from him a month earlier. The girl left, but Julius didn't even notice. He was so freaked out by seeing his flesh and blood that he fled to his apartment and hid for two days.

  He didn't see much of them over the next year, avoiding them when he could. If he saw them in the courtyard, he went the other way. She called him once asking for child support, but she might as well have asked him for the identity of the second gunman in Dallas. He laughed at her and hung up.

  When Jamal was about two, he and his mother left the Tree for good. In the first couple years after they left, Julius heard rumors about their whereabouts. Another housing project in Richmond. South Carolina. Texas. Southern California. Early on, he wondered a lot about little Jamal, growing up without his real father. Eventually though, he stopped wondering about Jamal's fatherless existence, and not long after that, he pretty much stopped wondering about Jamal at all. After all, Julius was far too occupied stealing stuff and trying to get laid. God, he'd been such an idiot back then. More than a decade later, Julius heard from a cousin that Jamal's mother had died and that Jamal was living in Ravenwood, a housing project on the south side of town.

  * * *

  "I'd like to see Jamal taken care of," Julius said. "Without him knowing about me. No point for him to struggle like me. I wasn't much of a father. Seems the least I could do."

  "That's fine," Samantha said, making some notes on a legal pad. "That's something the firm can take care of. Since he's a minor, we can set up a blind trust, appoint a trustee who can deal with him directly and manage the money. We'll set it up so even the trustee won't know the money is coming from you. Is his last name Wheeler?"

  "I think so."

  "And the mother's last name?"

  He shook his head. He saw this concerned her.

  "Don't worry. Most kids from the 'hood take their daddy's name. I heard it makes it easier to qualify for benefits. Or something."

  "Oh."

  "How will they know if it's really Jamal?" he asked.

  "They can verify identity through DNA testing," she said. "Take a strand of his hair, compare it to yours."

  "Right," Julius said.

  "Do you have a recent picture of him?"

  "I ain't seen him since he was a baby."

  "And you said he lives in Ravenwood?"

  "Maybe. I'm not a hundred percent sure."

  She made a note of it on her legal pad, enclosing both the name of Julius' son and the name of the complex in a block of blue ink.

  "What else?" she asked, mostly of herself. "You can probably afford a place to stay now. Somewhere a little less exciting than Carrolton Oaks. Maybe another city. Even another state."

  "Another state? I never lived nowhere else."

  Samantha weighed her words carefully.

  "Listen," she began, "when you go public, you're going to attract a lot of attention. From family, friends, people who'll tell you they're your friends. People who'll tell you just about anything. People who will get pissed off or worse if you don't help them out because what do you need with all that money?"

  In his mind's eye, Julius saw Leroy breaking down Monk's apartment door.

  "You really think that it'll be like that?"

  "One thing I've learned working here is that money makes people crazy," she said. "Doesn't matter if they're white, black, purple. And you have a shitload of it."

  She was right. Had he really thought it would end with Leroy? At first, he had bristled at her words because he figured it was because he was just a black dude from the projects. Hell, it probably was, at least in part, but that didn't make it any less true. He had close to a dozen cousins of varying familial proximity scattered through Richmond's housing projects. He didn't know whether some, none or all of them were even related to him. He could only imagine what they would do when they found out he had a bazillion dollars in the bank.

  "No offense, but I'm trying to be honest with you," she said. "Tell you what you need to know."

  "No, it's cool," Julius said. "You right. I got enough problems to worry about anyway."

  * * *

  They spent another thirty minutes making a wish list that Julius could barely wrap his head around. He threw out every wild-haired idea he had ever had, every crazy fantasy he had imagined in prison. Samantha wrote each one down without comment, without acting like it was silly or ridiculous. When they were done, she placed her notes in a folder and set it on her desk. She called Carter and told him they were done.

  "Fine," he said. "Just leave it on your desk."

  He sounded distracted, which annoyed Samantha almost more than anything else that he had done in the time she had worked for him. She might have cut him a break had she known that he was currently sitting across from his very pregnant paralegal.

  "I'm going to take off," she said. "Probably not much reason for me to be working late anymore."

  "Fine," he said.

  She started to hang up but stopped. She hated to ask, but she couldn't afford to let it go.

  "Carter?"

  "What?"

  "Do you really think this might change the Committee's mind?"

  "Yeah, yeah, sure."

  "Thanks."

  She felt dirty for bringing it up. But shit, it mattered, didn't it? She had to do everything she could, right?

  "Fine."

  She was silent a moment, feeling like she had mortgaged her soul just by asking.

  "What should I do with Julius?" she asked.

  "Who?"

  "Julius? The client?"

  "Right," he said. "Um–"

  "Forget it," she said. "I'll set him up in the partners' lounge. He can watch television and have a couple drinks until you're ready to meet with him. I think we should check him into the Marriott on Fifth until Wednesday morning."

  "Yeah, good idea. Not sure we have any malt liquor in there though."

  Carter laughed hysterically at his own joke and hung up.

  "Seems like a nice guy," Julius said.

  "He's an ass," she said. "Follow me. The partners' lounge is really nice. Full bar, stocked fridge, widescreen TV. When Carter's done talking to you, he's going to take you to the Marriott. You'll stay there until you can go cash in your ticket."

  "Appreciate your help," Julius said.

  "Don't worry," she said. "You'll get a bill for every bit of the help."

  They took the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, where they found the partners' lounge dark. Samantha flipped on the light, revealing the opulence that the firm's bottomless pit of income could buy. The north wall was made entirely of three-inch-thick smoked glass. Four leather couches were set up in the southwest corner, surrounding a large LED television. A full bar stood ready against the east wall.

  "You hungry?" she asked.

  He nodded.

  She pointed him to the Viking refrigerator. "Help yourself. The television is pretty easy to use."

  "What if someone else shows up?"

  "I doubt anyone will, but if they do, just tell them to call Carter Pierce. Everyone's afraid of him."

  Julius looked around the room, his breathing rapid and shallow. Samantha watched the man try to pull himself together, and her heart went out to him. This she did not often see in her practice.

  "It's gonna be OK," she said, squeezing his shoulder. "Listen, if you need anything tonight, let me give you my cell phone number." She wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper, which Julius tucked into his pocket.

  "I'll see you later," she said. "Relax. You're a rich man now."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Friday, December 21

  8:18 p.m.

  Dawn was pregnant.

  This tidbit shoved its way up to the
bar in Carter's head, where previously, Julius' lottery ticket had been drinking alone. This new patron was pissed and needed a shot.

  He and Dawn had really decided nothing. Nothing other than concluding that they were screwed six ways to Sunday. He poured a glass of scotch and stared out the window. He couldn't believe it – he really was screwed. There was no thought, no consideration of leaving Ashley for Dawn. He certainly did not love her. He wasn't sure he liked her all that much. Stripped down to its core, the relationship was basically a live-action version of what he checked out on his favorite Internet porn sites. And now she was having his child. Dynamite.

  Ashley. Christ, what a headache she was going to be.

  He thought about the arc of their relationship, which had begun with such promise seventeen years ago. He first met Ashley Matheson on a Thursday night during a fundraiser at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He'd been with the firm a couple of years, and Ashley was a kindergarten teacher. At twenty-seven, she was becoming increasingly antsy about her unmarried status. Nearly all her friends were married, and most already had little ones pitter-pattering around the house.

  They were both a little tipsy, happening upon the same impressionistic painting at the same time. He tried to act like he knew what the painting meant, and she acted like she gave a crap. It was a momentous event, the laying of the cornerstone of emotional deceit that would become the foundation of their relationship. Later that night, they had angry (her contribution) and sloppy (his) sex in her apartment. When he woke up the next morning and wasn't overwhelmed with the urge to run screaming into the streets, he decided that there might be a future with this woman.

  They jumped into the relationship with both feet. Within a year, they were married. They bought an old Victorian house in the Fan, a historical district just west of downtown, and they started playing house upper-class style. Ashley joined the Junior League. They both joined the Country Club of Virginia, where he played golf every Saturday. He did so despite the fact that he hated playing golf. All his co-workers seemed to like it, so he made himself like it as well. He had never shot under 115.