Ride the Lucky

by Kendric Neal

  Ride the Lucky

  KENDRIC NEAL

  Copyright © 2017 Kendric Neal

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER 1

  Neely Thomas reached for the shower partition to steady himself, turning the water to full blast to drive the images out of his head. The nightmare didn't want to end, though—he saw her shape through the glass…

  “Neely, you're using all the hot water.”

  Get a grip, he thought. It's just Hope. “Out in a sec. When that thing finally goes, we're replacing it with a 200-gallon monster.”

  “Great, we can be on Hot Water Heaters of the Rich & Famous.”

  “Gotta dare to dream.”

  He almost collided with his daughter Jess on the stairs. “You leaving already, sweetheart?”

  “Yeah, dad. Have a good day.”

  “Mr. Hauptmann called yesterday, he wants to set up a meeting Tuesday at—” Neely said as the front door slammed shut behind her. “Good talk…”

  Cullen blew by as well and Neely barely snagged a sleeve. “Whoa, hold on, Hitler Youth,” Neely said, as Cullen looked surprisingly neat and well-groomed. “You going out like that?”

  Cullen raised an eyebrow and nodded toward his mom in the kitchen… Neely mussed his son's perfect hair, yanked one side of his shirt out of his pants, and jabbed his collar out of symmetry. He nodded. “Keep it.”

  Cullen grinned and dove out the front door as Neely followed…the street full of hulking, new Southern Colonials like theirs, the highest tier of middle-class, the lowest tier of well-off.

  “SUH?!” Cullen yelled, racing to catch up with a tricked-out Impreza.

  “Ethan, stop!” Neely yelled to the driver, who showed no indications of slowing down, “STOP! Ethan!! ETHAN!!” Cullen jumped into the moving vehicle and threw Neely a sign in goodbye. “At least slow down. Dammit…” Neely said, picking up the Charlotte Observer.

  “Morning,” Hope said, sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, reaching for the paper.

  “It's water heater,” Neely said.

  “What?”

  “People say 'hot water heater', but it's really just water heater. You don't need to heat hot water.”

  “Ooh stop, Neely,” she said, licking her lips like a porn queen and writhing in mock ecstasy. “You know what it does to me when you correct me.” He chuckled to himself as she dropped the act and opened the paper… still sexy, he thought, still a smart-ass.

  They'd gone to high school together and sat in some of the same classes, though neither could actually remember meeting. She'd been beautiful, athletic, smart and sexually active while he’d run the school Unix club, played competitive Frisbee Golf and was county champion (two years running) at Mortal Kombat II. Their paths, as such, did not cross. Well, not until the 5-year reunion. He'd been surprised she remembered him at all—she said she'd known who he was, she just hadn't cared.

  College had been good for him—he'd met all manner of intelligent outcasts like himself who'd excelled at computers and he even managed to attain a measure of geeky popularity. He'd had chipmunk cheeks in high school but college had slimmed him, his acne had cleared, he'd found a good barber, a great tailor, and turned himself into a guy who could turn heads when he entered a room. An easy self-assurance began complemented his best feature, soft baby blues that Caroline Wopat, his first college girlfriend, pronounced “bedroom eyes” and promptly put to the test.

  Meanwhile, Hope's allure had been a dusky and unsettling sexuality that had a way of freezing male conversation whenever she walked by. While most of the other dreamworthy girls in school had been blonde, friendly and outgoing, Hope was dark, moody and aloof. She had a tumbling of glossy black hair, brown eyes, luxuriant brown lashes and a healthy tan, and to Neely, who had spent his high school years admiring her from a distance, she had the aura of an unapproachable exotic animal. A leopard, or more appropriately, a black panther—coiled in feline grace, lurking unobserved in the wild.

  They drank, flirted and danced, and he woke in the downtown Radisson in a state of utter post-coital disbelief. He texted a photo of her sleeping form to every member of the Unix club he was still in touch with. Her discovery of this act led to their first fight, which regrettably came before the opportunity for a satisfying bout of morning-after sex. She came around eventually after Neely made lengthy reparations that involved dinners, flowers, declarations of devotion, and even a half-serious marriage proposal accompanied by pie-charts and graphs detailing his impressive lifelong earning potential.

  Even a liberated and highly-educated woman could see the benefits of being freed from the regular workday to pursue more creative and fruitful ambitions, and Neely was able to provide her that as soon as he accepted the most promising job offer. Kids and house quickly took up much of her time, while she spent the rest of it volunteering for a consumer group that protected the elderly from fraud. It worked, they were happy, they had a good life, and neither of their kids was on drugs or in jail. Among the majority of their friends, that was as good as it got.

  Then he had to go and meet that damned truck. Why couldn't that old biddy just forget about it? Why couldn't she just chalk one up to fate, anyway? Not everything happens for a reason.

  “You're still thinking about it, aren't you?” Hope asked. She'd startled him, not just because his thoughts were somewhere else, but because she seemed to know where.

  “Busted,” he smiled.

  “You can't blame yourself, Neely.”

  “I don't blame myself. I'm over it, Hope, and you know it.” She peered over her coffee at him and he could feel her disbelief welling into another remark. He jumped in first, “I might still think about it, but what happened happened. I didn't fasten the load.”

  That was his first and best defense, of course. That fell to a guy named Clint Higgs, a career driver in a hurry on a bitterly cold morning. He somehow hadn't gotten the thingamob in the whozits quite right and that was all it took. A curve at 60 mph, the frigid cold, the weight, the icy rain, all were cited as contributing factors. Why, there was even a lengthy digression about how the trees were larger than Mr. Higgs was used to as the lumber company had illegally harvested a dozen old-growth yellow-poplars from the adjacent preserve and taken steps, thoroughly documented later by a conservancy group, to hide the fact.

  The inevitable conclusion was simple.

  It was just bad luck things went the way they did. Just bad luck.

  We're all familiar with that one, aren't we? We've felt its cold breath before, standing in a spot where things could have gone just a little differently… just as we knew the elation that comes from having dodged it. And even better, the elation that comes from—

  “That's right, and that's the real point, isn't it?”

  He'd lost the thread and didn't want to admit it, so he lit into his breakfast just to prove her wrong. Two over-easy, applewood-smoked bacon, crusty sourdough, real butter, Breakfast Blend… all was copacetic, as his old pal Dunn would have said. Life goes on. Life goes on.

  Yet, Neely's thoughts turned to Jess. She'd had the most trouble in the aftermath of the accident. He never knew if it was because of how close she'd come to losing him or if it was a first glimmer of her own mortality, but she'd gone into a dark and strange depression that had taken a month to lift.

  At first the depression hadn't worried him, she was a teenager after all, but she'd stopped her incessant texting and stayed home nights—too tired or unmotivated to do much but sleep. Her previous episodes of teen darkness had been accompanied by enough theatricality to make them almost comical, but there was nothing funny about this one. She ate listlessly, appearing at dinner and picking at her food just to appease them.

  He later found out she
was being bullied at school, which helped explain some of it. She was popular enough that a handful of girls hated her guts anyway, and she regularly regaled Neely and Hope with stories of the crazy twisted things the high school harpies did to her when they thought they could get away with it. She wore it as a badge of honor. At that age, if a girl didn't have at least a couple other girls in school who made serious-sounding death threats, she didn't crack the social register.

  She got through it, at last, as the one saving grace kids have at that age is short memories. There's always some new happening, some fresh victim of embarrassment or humiliation, some new catastrophic event to blur time and space and return them to their chaotic orbits. Jess was more resilient than most—her difficult moods were countered by a growing independence and strangely mature way of interacting with her family. Neely was just glad the whole thing had passed without requiring a heart-to-heart with her, a prospect he dreaded after she began, as an adjunct to her rapidly growing maturity level, looking at him like a science experiment gone seriously off the rails.

  He plowed through the rest of his breakfast, shunting aside his more worrisome concern that the difficulty Jess faced in dealing with the accident was her suspicion that he had, in some way, caused it. Wives could deny such things, they had to, while independently-minded teenage daughters did most of their climbing without ropes. Maybe it was the evolutionary process, throwing off happy childhood memories of dad and the zoo, dad and Christmas, dad and Disneyland, to face the possibility that dad might just be a weak and pathetic old sack who got some poor Native American kid killed for no reason. Maybe that's just the kind of detachment a capable offspring needs to skip off to college without tears or teddy bears.

  “You know it was an accident, don't you, Jess? You don't think your old man would do something like that. Some things happen that are beyond our control—part of growing up is learning to accept that. I swerved to avoid the truck, there wasn't time to do anything else. I know what the kids are saying. I know how kids are. But this will pass. They'll find some new tragedy or embarrassment, something far juicier than a boring old traffic accident to occupy their scandal-seeking minds. You'll probably find this out today, but we went to see Mrs. Strautz.” Her head shot up up that. “Yes, we did, yesterday, after school hours of course. No one saw us. You have to understand we're concerned. Your grades are down, you haven't been yourself. We know something's going on.

  “You can't blame a parent for being a parent, Jess. She confirmed our suspicions, you've been struggling in class, but she also speaks very highly of you. Very highly. She said you've applied yourself this year and have become one of her top students. We don't want to jeopardize that. Certainly not by anything I did, even if it was an accident.” Tears came to Jess's eyes now and she wiped them away, embarrassed. “This will pass, sweetheart,” Neely said, taking her hands. “It was just a traffic accident. I was lucky.”

  Jess seemed to hear him now and her shoulders relaxed. He hadn't realized how hunched they'd been. Weeks of carrying the weight of suspicion seemed to tighten and she let it go. That's what lies were for, weren't they? That's when they were justifiable, when they protected a loved one. To ease your family's burden. Your only daughter, your little Jess, a girl who's hardly seen any of life, a girl who deserves a clean slate, a girl who's been for some time now the most precious thing in your life. Yes, God would forgive him for that. That was what lies were for, to protect perfect daughters.

  He looked up as Hope poured the rest of the coffee into his cup. He always liked a refresher; she always gave it to him without asking. Just because he liked it. Just because she knew. He loved their routines, the things they did for each other did that seemed like a joy the first few months, a pain after the first few years, a concession after the first few counseling sessions, and a treasure now. A love drip into eternity… A binge watch of wedded bliss. No longer rendered in fits of passion, though there were still those too, but in pouring a hot half-cup without needing to ask. Or how he brought her a single chocolate-iced whenever he passed a Krispy Kreme just because she loved them. To think, they could have lost all that...

  She read his look. She knew he'd been thinking such things since it’d happened. She knew he was thankful. He looked down at the paper with a pang of guilt. He'd opened to the sports scores before this reverie had started. He'd done it without thinking, what he always did, the only news he really cared about, the news he thought of the moment he woke up, the news he thought of as he dropped off to sleep. He shut the sports section quickly and tucked it under his arm. When he looked up, Hope was sitting next to him. He hadn't even heard her get up.

  “You shouldn't feel bad that you were lucky and someone else wasn't,” she said, laying her head against his chest. “If it had happened the other way around, someone would be telling him the same thing.”

  Yes, he thought. She knew no matter how much he acted like he was over it, he wasn't. And yes, he probably did need to hear it every morning, yes, maybe every night. Take twice a day for two years or maybe twenty, it was a kind of medicine wasn't it? It's okay, it's not your fault, these things happen. It's okay, it's not your fault, these things happen… He sipped his coffee and opened the sports page again, mouthing the refrain quietly to himself.

  CHAPTER 2

  It rushed toward the ground, silently picking up speed. He tried to yank his foot free but the root held him tight as the tree swung down to finish the job. He threw his hands up to shield his face and screamed as it burst through the glass…

  The blip woke him.

  He'd nodded off at his desk, and his phone was now blinking. The resulting conversation was such a shock, he had to stare out the window for twenty minutes just to digest it. It made him think about what it must have been like for real estate agents and stockbrokers back in the boom-boom days. Nice to be on the receiving end for a change. Nice when they came to you.

  After less than a year with Pedott-Carey, Jason Bellard's company had had a change of heart and wanted to know if his bid still stood. Neely stammered out a yes without thinking, wondering if what he was hearing was true. He got his confirmation when Jason emailed him the signed contract before they'd even hung up. Just like that. “Can we get this done today? Can you get your guys in here tomorrow?” Jason asked.

  Damn, Neely thought, how much of a mess had Pedott-Carey left? “Sure, sure, sure, Jason, anything you want.” You're the biggest account we've ever landed. Your company alone will triple our billing. Yes, Jason, whatever the hell the question is, the answer is YES. He'd courted the Jepp contract for three months, his expense account alone topped $10,000, not counting the time spent preparing the estimates and bid. He'd officially given up after the last lunch during which he was gently informed they'd gone with Pedott-Carey. It hadn't been a surprise, Pedott was ten times the size and had a successful working relationship with Jepp's VP of Operations. Still, Neely had given it all he had and it was a blow. His company couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on a lark. He'd never forgotten the silence his announcement was met with at the next status meeting and Ken's smirk from across the table. Neely took a hit and Ken's star rose, as he'd said all along it was too much of a longshot. Neely had had an uncomfortable grilling at the next partner's meeting, chiming in with a quote he'd read in a business book: If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. Ken chuckled and thanked Dr. Phil.

  Now Neely could call a special meeting of the partners and announce the deal. What could be sweeter than seeing Ken's face after that little bombshell? The little bastard had scored a lot of points over the last six months—Neely would win them all back now in one hand. He'd watch Donaldson, head of the company, run the figures in his head and tally his share of the profits while they all talked of more mundane things like how to actually get the work done. Neely knew one thing, anyone who put a sizable chunk of money in Donaldson's pocket had a great future with the firm. This would accomplish that in droves.


  Neely sent an email calling an emergency meeting for 11:30—give them time to wonder what's up—and left the office quickly before anyone could ask him. He took his laptop as he'd have to do a quick blast to the freelancers checking availability. He was going to need two dozen bodies by the end of the month and he'd have to vet another 10 or 12 techs. This was going to be huge, he'd ask to be the sole account manager. He could hand off SpiritWorx and McCoy, they were stable accounts, their systems updated and running well. Yes, he and Jason would be chums, he'd take the guy out on the boat once a month and be sure he had enough Fat Tire to wet his whistle. A single sixer wasn't enough, he'd need two to get through a Saturday with that guy.

  He called Hope and waited for her to say the usual when he called before noon. “What's wrong?”

  “Eagle Crest.”

  “Pardon?”

  “If you don't want to, that's okay. I can always ask Marcia.” His secretary. Nice woman, good at her job, but not the object of most mens' fantasies.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I'm talking about Eagle Crest.” High-end resort up in the Smokies, built on railroad land back in the 1880's out of local timber and granite. 360 degree views of nothing but forest and lake, nothing to do but soak in your private hot tub, take long walks, eat four-star meals and make love on pure Egyptian cotton sheets. “It's fine if you don't want to go.”

  “I WANT TO GO.”

  “This weekend.”

  “This weekend? Why? What happened?”

  “Jepp happened, baby. Jepp happened.”

  “YOU GOT IT?!”

  “I sure did. All that time and effort paid off, he just called. I guess Pedott screwed up, they want us bad and they want us now.”

  She squealed again. “I'll need a sitter. Oh my God, how are we going to find one in time?”