by Dennis Kelly
Jackpot
Gisele’s excitement could be heard throughout Lotto2Win’s telemarketing operation. She exploded into the owner’s office. “One of my clients, the wacko Russian professor, just nailed the BlizzardBall! Every last number. Can you believe it?” She pumped her arms overhead like a victorious prize fighter. “Said he’ll give me a huge tip. We’re talking millions!”
Roddy ignored the interruption, his attention fixed elsewhere.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” asked Gisele, waving her hand in front of Roddy’s face.
“Yeah I . . .”
“. . . Heard you,” Kieran finished for Roddy.
Gisele was suddenly aware she’d blown right past Kieran, Lotto2Win’s special projects guy. She threw him an off-center glance, avoiding his acne-scarred face and coal black eyes. Kieran had come to work for Lotto2Win from Belfast, Ireland. His résumé included credit card fraud, smuggling, and tax evasion. But the missing pinky finger on his left hand suggested he had experience in an even more aggressive line of work.
“Well, when the Thorazine wears off,” Gisele said as she bent down to examine Roddy’s eyes, “or whatever you’re on. Come join the party. The professor’s on his way here from St. Petersburg. Took the first flight out. He’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
Roddy’s head jerked like he’d been shocked by a Taser. “You g-gotta stop him,” he stammered.
“Why would I do that?” Warning sirens screamed in Gisele’s head. A wave of nausea washed over her.
“Kieran, you tell her.”
“We don’t as yit, and Aay emphasize yit”—Kieran’s thick brogue filtered through twisted, mud-colored teeth—“hive the winnin’ ticket.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gisele shouted. “This guy purchased over fifty thousand tickets from us and you don’t ‘hive’ the ticket? I can’t believe this.”
“We just need some time, eh,” Roddy said, massaging his temples. “We’ve got confirmation that the tickets for your professor were purchased in St. Paul, but we just don’t have them in hand.”
“You have a shipping tracer on it, right?”
Roddy avoided eye contact with Gisele and jammed a knuckle in his mouth, obstructing a plausible response.
“The tickets were ripped off,” Kieran interjected. “Jamal, our ticket buyer’s dead.”
“Dead?” Gisele stared in disbelief.
“Mexicans,” Kieran confirmed. “We got a good look at one of ’em on the webcam we had installed at the Cash and Dash before it got poked in the eye with a shotgun.”
Gisele stalked around the room, pulling at her hair, and stopped in front of Roddy. “What’s to keep these Mexicans from cashing in the tickets?”
Roddy twisted in his chair. “If the thieves are smart enough to figure out they’re sitting on the winning ticket, they’ll probably try to cash it through a third party,” he mumbled, operating in the dark.
“Third party?” Gisele blurted, fighting the impulse to grab Roddy by the throat.
“Don’t be getting riled,” Kieran said dismissively. “I am on my way to take care of the situation and retrieve the tickets.” His lips curled in a hint of a dark smile. “I’m going to cut the balls off those bloody filchers.”
“Gisele, you’ve got to stall the professor,” Roddy said, squirming, his hands steepled. “Keep him from coming here.”
“Like, shoot down his plane? How in the hell do you stall someone who has just won $750 million dollars?”
Roddy looked to Kieran for a silent read before responding to Gisele. “Meet him at the airport and book him into a hotel, find something for him to do. Tell him it will take a couple of days before our agent can claim the prize on his behalf—ticket validation procedures or some such shit. Hopefully, we’ll have the situation under control by then.”
“Please don’t screw this up,” pleaded Gisele. “The professor’s not your run-of-the-mill schmuck, someone you can blow off. He won’t be put off for long. You and the leprechaun here better fix this now!”
“Bugger off.” Kieran tossed her a hard look.
Gisele bolted from Roddy’s office, skidded down the stairs two at a time, and charged through the exit. The sunlight flashed like a trip flare, causing her to shield her eyes with a crooked salute. Gisele spotted Claude, the ticket manager, leaning against the side of the building, a cigarette pinched between his thumb and index finger.
“Bonjour, ma jolie l’une. Is there a fire?”
“Not yet.” Gisele caught her breath. “Can I bum one from you?” She fumbled the cigarette into the flame cupped in Claude’s hand. “Jesus, you smoking rope?” she coughed out.
“Brunes Gitanes. Very hard to get, but satisfying, don’t you think?”
“I hate to burst your bubble, Frenchy.” Gisele took up a position on the wall like a bird on a wire. “Gitanes are now made in the Netherlands.”
“What a pity,” he said, as though seriously wounded. “What’s next? Champagne from Saudi Arabia?”
“Claude, you see all the lottery ticket transactions. Please assure me Roddy will pay off the BlizzardBall winner.” Gisele crushed the cigarette under her heel. “I mean, he’s always honored winning tickets in the past, right?”
“I think it’s wise to consider we are in uncharted, shark-infested waters.” Claude hitched his pants as if expecting the sidewalk to flood.
“Are we finding Nemo or lottery tickets?”
“Seven hundred fifty million is a lot of chum, ma cherie.” Claude looked at his watch and walked back inside the building, leaving Gisele to hold up the wall on her own.
In the distance, she could see Vancouver’s gleaming glass towers reflecting the majesty of the distant North Shore Mountains and shimmering with a montage of commerce from the streets below. Deep within that reverberating image, just beyond the gritty auto repair shop and adult video store, stood Gisele and Lotto2Win’s faded-red, four-story brick building with gulls perched on its brittle cornices. She wondered how the hell she had landed here.
Teller
Alita could not get back to sleep with the mischief of lottery tickets outside her bedroom door. She trudged through a blanket of new snow on the way to her bank job and stopped for coffee at the Mediterranean Deli. On the opposite side of the street sat the Cash and Dash. The hole-in-the-wall convenience store was squeezed between the Worn-A-Bit and Julio’s Barber Shop. The metal shutters were locked down. A curious amount of ice layered the sidewalk. A Channel 5 TV truck idled at the curb with its satellite boom extended skyward. Alita shoved a quarter in a newspaper dispenser and quickly scanned the Pioneer Press for a notice of a breakin. Nothing. Too early, she concluded. Racked with anxiety, she considered turning herself in and admitting to being a party to the robbery rather than be humiliated in front of the bank staff and customers. She wanted to skip work and go back home and kill those two mongrels. Force of habit, however, carried her into the bank, where she took up her teller position with a pasted-on smile.
“Is it you that’s got the winning lottery number, honey?” her supervisor asked.
Alita flinched. She swiveled her head, expecting someone to step forward with handcuffs.
“Didn’t mean to startle you, girl.” Lasiandra spread her arms wide and inhaled, expanding her already robust figure. On an audible exhale, the suspended weight dropped like a free-fall elevator. “Maybe I do have a career as a cat burglar. Ha!”
Alita felt a headache beginning to sink its talons into her skull.
“Honey, you okay?”
“Yeah, just had a rough night.” Alita yanked at a twist of hair as if pulling the rip cord on a parachute. “And I don’t waste my money on gambling.”
“Good girl, but too bad, because the winning ticket was purchased at the Cash and Dash.”
“Who won?” Alita asked, avoiding eye contact.
“Don’t know, but I can tell you who lost. They found the owner of the Cash and Dash sliced up like a cucumber. That man be d
ead.” Lasiandra thumped her bosom like an altar boy saying mea culpas.
“Oh, my God.” Alita put her hand to her mouth, trying to keep more words from falling out. A knot squeezed her chest. She fought for air to keep from being sucked into the blackness of panic whirling below the surface.
“What’s that, honey?”
“Just a little faint,” Alita said, trying to hold back tears about to burst a dam. “I gotta call it a day. Coming down with something I don’t think you want me to share with you.”
As Alita hurried back toward the apartment, she felt like she was being dragged along a chamber of horrors, one monster after another jumping out at her in the form of a question. Did her cousins hurt the convenience store owner? Did they steal the winning ticket? Is someone looking for them, for her? Did her big mouth trigger this stupidity?
As the apartment came into view, Alita could see Eduardo’s feet sticking out from underneath his car. Grabbing a wrench from his tool box, she banged on the fender.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Eduardo scrambled out from under the muffler.
Alita squared up, fists on hips. “I thought I told you to clear out.”
“Jesus, I’m just doing a little repair. We’ll get those boxes out of the apartment, don’t worry.”
“Where’s your dirtball amigo?”
“He’s on a beer run.”
“Get in here.” Alita marched into the apartment, dragging Eduardo along by the shirt sleeve, while reading him the riot act.
“You talk crazy,” Eduardo protested. “No way did we kill that man.”
Irishman
Kieran pointed through the windshield of his parked car at the scarecrow figure exiting the liquor store. “There’s one of the tacos,” he blurted into his cell phone to Roddy, “that we saw on the webcam. I’ll call you back, got some persuading to do.”
The top three buttons of the man’s ragged denim shirt were unbuttoned and exposed his chest to the winter chill. Earlobe-length hair sprouted out below his soiled Caterpillar ball cap. He stopped on the sidewalk to fish a bottle of Grain Belt beer out of a brown paper bag.
Kieran gunned the engine, hopped the curb, skidded on the icy sidewalk, and sideswiped his target, knocking him into a boulevard tree.
Blood streamed from a cut above Rafie’s right eye. He weakly attempted to retrieve the unbroken beer bottle rolling on the sidewalk next to his knee.
Kieran jumped from the car, grabbed the crumpled man, and tossed him into the back seat. The tires spun in reverse, burned to the pavement, and caught. The car lurched back to the street and sped away.
“You ripped off the wrong people, mate!” Kieran yelled. “Where’s the lottery tickets? Where?” He stopped the car, swung his right arm into the back seat, and clutched Rafie by the throat.
“If you got any respect for breathin’, you’ll direct me right to those tickets.”
Alita opened the door of the garden-level apartment. Rafie stumbled across the threshold, followed by Kieran, who had him in a choke hold. The air had a greasy cooking smell. Beer bottles overflowed the kitchen wastebasket. A nervous bull terrier with a muscular neck stood with its legs apart and barked aggressively at the visitor.
Alita was still wearing her bank uniform. The gold-banded epaulets sewn to the shoulder of her starched white blouse gave her an air of authority. Kieran paused momentarily, cautious until he spotted the Minnesota National Bank logo on her breast pocket. He pushed his way into the living room, skirting past the dog. He surveyed the torn FedEx boxes and strewn lottery tickets. “You maggots are in some serious shit.”
“Eduardo! ¡ayuda! ¡ayuda!” Alita screamed.
A shotgun barrel emerged from the bedroom, with Eduardo at the trigger. He pumped a shell into the chamber.
“Be cool, mate.” Kieran produced a knife and pressed the razor point to the side of Rafie’s neck. “Or I put a shank into this edjit.”
“Talk Engleesh. What’s he saying?” Eduardo shouted at Alita, confused by Kieran’s thick Irish brogue.
“How about I draw him a picture?” Kieran ratcheted up the choke and Rafie’s face turned purple. He flailed his arms as if drowning.
“Stop, stop!” Alita pleaded over the frenzied bark of the dog. “Take your packages and get out of here.” She shoved a FedEx Box at Kieran.
Kieran grabbed at the box, providing an opening for the terrier. He heard the brown dog’s toenails click on the linoleum floor like castanets just before it sank its toothy grip into his leg. “Call the fucking dog off!” Kieran snapped a hard kick forward, sending the dog airborne. The canine landed on Eduardo’s chest, knocking the shotgun out of his hands onto the floor, butt first. The sound of the discharge vibrated off the apartment walls and stunned the scene into slow motion. Kieran raised his hand to shield against the errant close-range shot in the millisecond before the blast ripped his chest. He collapsed in a rag doll heap on the dirty beige carpet, leaking blood like a colander. A diagonal plank of light escaped through a gap in the dusty Venetian blinds and illuminated the twisted body. Eduardo and Rafie dropped to their knees and made the Sign of the Cross. The dog hid under the kitchen table. The stench of blood and intestinal matter enveloped the room. Alita gagged, tried to close her throat to the surge in her stomach, but lost the battle, adding the sickly perfume of vomit to the air.
“Call an ambulance! Call the police!” Alita screamed, wiping her mouth on her shirtsleeve.
“It’s too late,” Eduardo said, watching a bloody bubble gurgle up through Kieran’s nose and hang motionless.
“If we call the police, they arrest us for murder, maybe they find out we robbed the store,” Rafie said with his hands on his head. “For sure they arrest us for border jumping.”
“I don’t care if they do arrest you crazies. Just get him out of my apartment. Now!”
Eduardo emptied the Irishman’s pockets, gathered up his car keys and wallet. Rafie pocketed the Irishman’s cell phone. They wrapped the body in a bed-sheet. Eduardo instructed Rafie to get their car and pull it around back so they could load the stinking corpse into the trunk for a remote dump. They would leave the keys to the Irishman’s car in the ignition, guaranteeing someone would steal it.
“Once we ditch this guy, we’ll come back and clean up the FedEx boxes,” Eduardo said.
“I don’t want you back here. Ever!” Alita waved them away. “Just go, you’re nothing but trouble.”
Slaughterhouse
On the heels of their banishment, Eduardo and Rafie set a fast course from St. Paul to Sioux Falls.
“Knock-knock.”
“Who’s there?” Eduardo shook his head, wishing the game and this part of his life would just go away.
“Irish stew.”
As he replied, Eduardo anticipated that the punch line would be a direct reference to the condition of the dead Irishman they had just weighted down and dumped in the river.
“Irishstew in the name of the law.” Rafie let out a macabre laugh and tossed his empty beer can into the back seat.
In need of money, they were relying on the modern-day Hispanic Underground Railroad, a network of employers who readily took in undocumented alien workers with few, if any, questions asked.
As they approached the AgriCentral meat packing plant, they were greeted by its fetid air of gamey decay. The sun filtered through the dust that rose from the holding pens and washed the red brick three-story building in a sepia haze. The hydro-turbines on the Big Sioux River that had been indentured to power the plant spewed unfiltered carrion downstream. Eduardo and Rafie had worked this plant before and dropped seamlessly into the second shift.
A cattle trailer backed up too fast and banged the loading dock, jostling the load. The animals caught wind of the slaughter smell and pitched inward on each other. Eduardo stuck a 9000volt electric prod through the trailer’s galvanized metal slats. The panicked cattle scrambled out of the trailer through a chute. Their hooves slipped on the wet concrete floor as they stum
bled into a restraining device.
A Nicaraguan with Popeye forearms brought a compressed-air gun into contact with a cow’s head. Phoop was the last sound the animal heard before a piston-action bolt dropped it dead. An electric hoist elevated the shackled carcass of the cow and moved it along the line. Rafie gripped a sixteen-inch knife in his metal mesh-gloved hand. He slashed at the cow’s throat and ripped out its trachea. Blood gushed and squirted like a Jackson Pollock painting onto his plastic apron, then spilled off his shoes into the floor drain. In the adjacent station, the hides were washed with calcium hypochlorite solution. Rafie’s eyes burned from the overspray.
Exhausted from the shift and without a place to stay, they eased their car into the back parking lot of Simonson’s Fuel and Food, a truck stop on the Minnesota side of the border along the interstate. They hid the vehicle among the rows of parked trucks and attempted to catch some sleep. The light from Simonson’s towering pink neon sign flooded the car and seeped into their dreams in which they were struggling to stay afloat in a sea of Pepto-Bismol.
A knuckle rapped on the car window, startling Eduardo. He rose abruptly from his curled position on the front seat, banged his head on the steering wheel, and fumbled to crack open the window.
“This ain’t no campground.” A rat-faced man with a moustache directed his squeaky voice through the opening.
“No problem, we’re leaving.” Eduardo yielded to the authority of the Simonson’s Food and Fuel patch on the man’s jacket.
Eduardo reached into the back seat to roust Rafie and spotted a FedEx box underneath his head. “Get up,” he growled, and yanked the box, bouncing Rafie’s head into the car door armrest.
“Hey?” Rafie protested.
The FedEx box, full of lottery tickets, had been jammed under the back passenger seat and overlooked when loading the convenience store cache into Alita’s apartment. Rafie, foraging for comfort, had dug the box out and appropriated it for a pillow. Eduardo lifted out the bundles of pink tickets secured with rubber bands and laid them on the dashboard.