by Bobby Akart
If it bleeds, it leads—was an often used phrase used by New York Magazine in the eighties referring to fear-based media. Over the years, Ryan had learned a news cast was no different than any other business. It had to make money. In order to make a profit, the station had to sell advertising time. The more viewers the station could boast, the higher the demand. It was basic supply and demand economics.
A report was showing scenes of a violent attack in downtown Orlando at the Dr. Phillips Center, a performing arts complex which frequently hosted concerts, comedy and theatrical events.
Following a comedy show featuring Kathy Griffin and Chelsea Handler, the attendees filed out of the facility only to be greeted by protesters angry with the duo for their stance on political issues. The verbal assaults had erupted into a barrage of fisticuffs, leaving several people badly injured. In today’s age of digital imagery courtesy of the smartphone, every punch that drew blood was replayed on the family’s big screen television.
“What happened?” asked Blair as she set the girls food down on their placemats. Chubby stuck her head in the bowl and began to chomp at her kibbles mixed with strained pumpkin before Blair could set the bowl down.
“Same old, same old. Another day, another riot, or protest, or whatever has managed to piss someone off.”
Ryan didn’t like to watch the news anymore. It angered him more than it informed him. Plus, he’d become keenly aware that the television news media fed him what they wanted him to see. The nation had become hyper-politicized. It didn’t matter what interaction Ryan and Blair had with the outside world, somebody’s political agenda or point of view slipped into their consciousness. They tried to avoid it by watching less television to no avail as tonight’s newscast proved.
He was about to turn off the monitor when Blair stopped him. “Wait. Check out the Mega Millions payout. One-point-six-billion dollars. Maybe we should play?”
Ryan chuckled. “The lottery is a scam. It’s a tax on poor people by giving them hope to hit it big, but really they’re pissin’ their money away.”
Blair slugged him. “You’re such a pessimist, sometimes.”
He shrugged and then mumbled, “I guess the news is getting to me.”
Blair tried to cheer him up. “Come on. I have an idea. Let’s play a ticket. It’s only a dollar, for Pete’s sakes.”
It was a Friday evening and the drawing was to take place that night. Ryan didn’t want to go out just to buy a lottery ticket, but he wouldn’t mind going to Publix to pick up something to eat that didn’t require his bride to cook.
“Okay, deal. But, we have to get some Boar’s Head meats and cheeses with some of that thick Sara Lee Artisan bread, okay?”
“Fine by me,” Blair replied. “Let’s pick our numbers. There are five regular numbers and then the sixth number works as a multiplier. If we hit the winning numbers, we can cash in on the one-point-six billion bucks!”
Ryan laughed and pulled his wife to sit down next to him again. He turned off the television and retrieved his phone off the sofa table.
“Okay, let me put our numbers on the notepad app, then we’ll head for the store. Whadya wanna play?”
“No, we’ll do it together,” she replied. “Like this. I’ll pick a number, and then you pick a number. Right?”
Ryan smiled and readied himself for the first pick. “Go ahead, Blair Witch. What’s the first number?”
“Four. There are four Smarts, so we should pick four.”
“Um, okay. I pick eight.”
“Why eight?”
Ryan quickly replied. “It’s my birthday.”
“Everybody does that,” she said, shaking her head. She thought of her next number. “I pick eleven. One is a powerful number. Combining it with another one makes the number eleven, one-one, creating a master number.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Nope,” said Blair who was very serious. “In numerology, the number eleven is said to have powerful forces that can guide you toward change and opportunity.”
Ryan shook his head and laughed. “All-righty, then. I choose twenty-two. There are two of us and we’re a team. Two times eleven is twenty-two.”
“Good grief,” said Blair with an accompanying eye roll. “Well, lucky for you, despite your logic, twenty-two is also a master number.”
“Hey, I’m getting’ the hang of this stuff.”
Ryan just earned another eye-roll. Blair summarized. “So, we have four, eight, eleven, twenty-two, and we need one more. I choose one because we only need one set of numbers to win one-billion dollars.”
Ryan cocked his head. “Wait, the jackpot is one-point-six billion.”
“I know, but after the government sucks the taxes out of our winnings, we’ll only get a billion.”
“Oh, yeah. Damn government!” Ryan genuinely lamented the thought of paying nearly half his winnings in taxes. He immediately began to think of ways to minimize his tax bite. It was the American way.
“All right,” continued Blair. “We’ve picked out five main numbers. Let’s add them altogether. When we have that number, since it’s a multi-digit number, we’ll add it together to make our last number.”
“Huh?”
“Just trust me on this. I am the Blair Witch.”
The two of them reiterated their numbers. One. Four. Eight. Eleven. Twenty-two. The total was forty-six.
“Now what?” asked Ryan.
“Okay, forty-six is a multi-digit number, so we’ll add four plus six to equal ten. Ten is our Megaball number.”
“Why don’t we add together eleven and twenty-two?”
“Their master numbers.”
“I’m so confused.”
“Relax, Mr. Smart, I’ve got this,” said Blair with a smile. “One, four, eight, eleven, twenty-two, and the gold Megaball number is ten. I feel like a winner, how about you?”
Ryan laughed and gave his wife a high-five. The two fed the cats on the way out to their garage and talked during the short drive to Publix about how they’d spend their winnings. Blair was first with her wish list.
“I’m a simple girl. You can just buy me baubles and bags. How about you? Do you still wanna build your dream beach house?”
Ryan thought for a moment. Florida had just experienced two years of back-to-back devastation at the hands of Hurricane Irma and then Michael. He wasn’t sure if wanted to deal with the storms that might come their way someday.
“Actually, I was thinking the mountains.”
“Tennessee?”
Ryan shook his head and replied. “Nah, been there, done that. Twice. North Carolina, maybe. I love the Smokies, or even the foothills that would be within a couple of hours of the coast. Ever since I was a kid skiing around Banner Elk, I liked the concept of owning property in a secluded spot. You know, on a lake or maybe a river.”
“Sounds, heavenly,” cooed Blair as they pulled into the Publix parking lot that was teeming with shoppers, or lottery ticket buyers.
Ryan screeched on the brakes. “Watch out!”
Blair used the dashboard to brace herself as their truck screeched to a halt. A homeless man pushed a shopping cart between two cars into the middle of the parking lot without looking. Ryan saw him at the last second.
Blair let out a sigh. “Jeez, Louise. We’ve got ya’ buddy.”
“No, kidding,” added Ryan as he found a parking spot and the two exited the vehicle.
Inside, the store was full as fellow lottery winners worked their way around the customer service desk. A line of twenty people wrapped their way around the kiosk and into the floral department, waiting their turn to make a play for the Mega Millions jackpot.
Blair sighed. “Honey, we can skip it. It’s pie in the sky anyway.”
“No, I’ve got a feeling. You wait in line. I’ll hit the deli counter and pickup the bread. By the time I make the rounds, you’ll be near the front.”
“Sounds good.” Blair squeezed her husband’s hand and Ryan wa
s off to gather up their dinner. By the time he got back, she was the next in line.
He was slightly out of breath from his shopping. “Good, I’m glad I caught you before you got to the front. I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s both play the same numbers.”
“Why? We’ll just split the winnings.”
“Exactly,” Ryan responded. “I’ll take a lump sum and deal with the tax hit. We’ll have plenty of money leftover to build a new house, or whatever. You take the cash payout over thirty years. That’ll give you a guaranteed income for life, pretty much.”
At the time, Blair was forty-five and Ryan was fifty-eight. They never spoke about it, but longevity generally favored women and their thirteen-year age difference would leave Blair to support herself for many years after Ryan passed away. His logic was solid.
She shrugged. “Um, you’re the boss. Makes sense to me.”
“Wait, what was that?” he asked with a big grin.
“Makes sense to me,” she repeated.
“No, before that. You know, the boss part.”
“Shut up. It was a slip of the tongue in a moment of weakness. Give me a dollar. I might just keep my winnings for myself.”
Ryan pulled out a dollar and the two of them approached Carlos the customer service agent. His robotic actions didn’t allow him to notice that both of the Smarts played the same numbers.
1 – 4 – 8 – 11 – 22 with a Mega Ball Number of 10.
As they exited the kiosk, Blair pulled Ryan in front of the lottery ticket dispensing machine. “Wait, I wanna take a snap for Instagram. Hold your ticket next to mine.”
They positioned their hands under the pink flamingo emblazoned below the Florida Lottery logo on the side of the machine. Blair took a couple of pictures and scrolled to her Instagram app.
“No, you can’t post it on the gram,” Ryan admonished. “Then, everybody and their brother will know we won. They’ll be on our doorstep in the morning with the paws out.”
“But,” began Blair before he interrupted her.
“No, here’s what we’ll do. When we win, we’ll tell no one. We’ll hire one of those attorneys in Tallahassee specializing in lottery trusts to hide the identities of the winners from the public. Then, we’ll systematically call all of our friends and family.”
“But, you said we can’t tell anyone.,” interjected Blair.
“No, not to tell them about winning. Instead, we’re gonna ask, no, beg for a loan. We’ll make it something big, like five-thousand-dollars. They’re all gonna say no. Right? So, when we win, if we do tell them, and they come around looking for their slice of the pie, we can say, ‘remember back when I needed the five grand’, my answer’s the same. N-O, no.”
Blair shoved her ticket into her shorts’ pocket and escorted Ryan out of the store. “You’re so rude, husband.”
PART ONE
NEW YEAR’S EVE
Two years later …
Chapter 1
Early Morning
New Year’s Eve
Ryan Smart awoke before dawn on New Year’s Eve. It didn’t matter that a four-day long holiday weekend was upon them. There were still things to attend to and he had a couple of appointments scheduled throughout the day.
He quietly kissed Chubby and The Roo on the top of their heads, then made his way to Blair where he nuzzled up against her neck and whispered, I love you. A slight smile came across her face and she mouthed the words back to him. At this hour, that was as much as he’d get from his wife of nearly twenty-five years.
She typically slept for a couple of hours past when he got up for the day. To balance things out, she always stayed up a few hours later at night. It was one of those compromises made in marriage that allowed a couple to have their alone time without having to take nights out with the girls or play in Friday night poker games with the guys.
Ryan made his way into the bathroom and closed the door behind him so as not to disturb the girls. He hopped on the scales, as he’d done everyday since the summer of 2018. Earlier that year, he’d become concerned about his heart. Hypertension and the threat of Type-II diabetes had raised alarms that he’d kept hidden from the love of his life. His doctor started him on medications but Ryan was encouraged to do his part.
He coupled a better diet with weight training and exercise at the local gym. By year’s end, he’d lost nearly fifty pounds and was in the best shape of his life. He vowed not to go back to his previously chubby self, a promise he made to himself, and for the benefit of Blair. It was selfish, he’d often thought to himself, to get so big in the first place.
Turning sixty hadn’t caused him to place one foot in the grave, as they say. He looked in the mirror and a young man looked back, at least in Ryan’s eyes. To be sure, the graying hair wasn’t what he liked to see, but hey, at least it was all still there.
His two-day beard came out gray, something he could deal with. What drove him nuts were all the squirrely hairs that emerged around his eyebrows, ears, and nose. Over the last several years, he’d become a proficient plucker, even watching YouTube videos to master the art.
Then, Blair warned him that at some point, his eyebrows might stop growing and so he took to trimming them. He wasn’t sure if she was pulling his leg as images of Larry Hagman, J.R. of Dallas fame, and his bushy brows would pop into his mind. He returned to plucking anyway and was pleased to see the Hagman-brow theory was spot on. They sure enough came back, whenever and in whatever length they felt like.
Ryan got dressed and made his way to the kitchen. As he got older, he found himself adopting an established routine that included fixing an insulated cup with a mixture of iced decaffeinated coffee and Fairlife low-fat chocolate milk. He started avoiding the caffeine to fight the hypertension years ago, not that he needed the stimulant to get the juices flowing in the morning, so to speak. He was always full of energy when he woke up.
He poured a bowl of cereal and sliced up a banana for extra flavor. Ryan leaned against the counter as he turned on FoxNews to see if the world had gone to hell in a handbasket overnight. As he watched the news reports from New York City where they were setting up security for the big New Year’s Eve festivities from Times Square, his mind wandered to the state of the nation.
Over the last two years, the country had become even more polarized as the presidential campaigns heated up. The president had brought America’s economy to life in his first two year’s in office. Every demographic saw record employment and wage numbers. He began his campaign on the premise that he’d made promises to the American people and he’d kept them.
But then, the primary season began two years ago and the rhetoric turned increasingly ugly. The president’s economic accomplishments immediately became a target for his political opponents. A constant barrage in the media began to take a toll on the American psyche. Despite stellar economic numbers to the contrary, politicians effectively began to convince the public that all was not as it seemed.
When the Federal Reserve surprisingly raised interest rates in October just before the election, the stock market came tumbling down. The sell-offs became so large that program trading kicked in, virtually erasing all of the profits investors had earned in the past four years. This was seen as the potential death blow to the president’s reelection efforts, but his popularity remained firm with his base and he managed a win in November.
The protests in major cities had grown out of control after the election. The allegations of ballot tampering, foreign meddling, and cyber attacks on voting machines once again called the election results into question. Without any tangible proof that the president was reelected with the benefit of these alleged misdeeds, people took to the streets from coast-to-coast, expressing their anger by destroying businesses and other’s personal property.
The National Guard had been called in to contain riots in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Angry mobs stormed government buildings in Chicago, Detroit, and New
York demanding recounts and justice. The situation became so bad that local municipalities declared early evening curfews to keep the mobs off the streets, to no avail. There simply weren’t enough members of law enforcement to quell the uprisings. It was an anger that hadn’t been seen since the Vietnam War, and now it was relentless.
Ryan watched as the reporting switched to the White House where the president and his family was leaving for Florida to Mar a Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. The camera panned out to the protective iron fencing that surrounded the White House grounds, separating the beautifully manicured lawn from the many thousands of protestors holding up signs and chanting, hell no, we won’t go.
Ryan finished his cereal and chuckled. “Thank God for iron fences.” He rinsed his bowl out and placed it in the sink. After topping off his iced coffee drink, he headed for the front door. Before he left, he paused to look at the framed collage Blair had created two years ago. She’d displayed the photograph of their Mega Millions lottery tickets that she took. Underneath the image, the numbers 1 – 4 – 8 – 11 – 22 – 10 were written on the canvas with a black Sharpie.
She’d also included a newspaper clipping from the Orlando Sentinel. He read the headline, and the accompanying byline, aloud. “Two local winners in one-point-six billion Mega Millions payout. Anonymous winners purchased tickets back-to-back at local Publix.”
Ryan put on his jacket and wrapped a wool scarf around his neck. Then he smiled and said thank you as he walked out into the icy cold North Carolina morning.
Chapter 2
Morning
New Year’s Eve
North Carolina
Ryan climbed into his new Ranger Crew XP 1000 NorthStar four-wheeler and fired the motor. The enclosed cab and climate control was a feature not found on any other off-road utility vehicle. Heck, at the twenty-eight-thousand-dollar price tag, he could’ve purchased a new mid-sized sport utility vehicle. But then, that wouldn’t befit the Ranger’s purpose.