Blizzard Ball

by Dennis Kelly

  “Nobody cares,” Bonnie said, ignoring Kirchner’s request for clarification. “Last year fifteen thousand dogs and cats were euth-anized—dumped into landfills or worse.”

  Kirchner could feel Bonnie’s wheels slipping off the rails and attempted to get her back on track.

  “What’s your personal relationship with Morty?” He would have preferred to ask the question in person and observe Bonnie’s body language. “Do you feel indebted to him in any way?”

  “What are you getting at? He’s my supervisor, nothing else. How dare you!”

  Kirchner knew he’d crossed the line and wondered whether Tyler had given him poor information with the fondling observation.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,” he quickly backpedaled. “I’m working on a murder case with a possible connection to your lottery. Not all the questions are polite.”

  “Look, I have to go. I have a meeting scheduled,” Bonnie said.

  “One more question.” Kirchner knew he was losing her and decided to toss a grenade into the interview. “Do you know what the penalty is for public fraud and theft by swindle?”

  “Am I in some sort of trouble?”

  Kirchner didn’t respond, letting her become uncomfortable with the silence. He looked over at Tyler thumbing away at a game, his head bobbing.

  “Are you there?” she said nervously.

  “Let’s just say you have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “I’m afraid,” Bonnie whispered.

  Kirchner covered the phone and nudged Tyler, “She’s buckling,” he mouthed. Kirchner could feel his pulse quicken. He had to contain himself, slow-play her. “What are you afraid of, Bonnie?”

  “You,” she said. “Morty. Everything. I don’t know. I’m confused.”

  “Bonnie, I can help you.” Kirchner’s voice was steady, deliberate, as if soothing a startled horse. “You have options.”

  “I can’t talk during business hours,” Bonnie said.

  “When can we meet?”

  Bonnie volunteered that the BlizzardBall Lottery office was officially closed tomorrow due to the New Year’s holiday, but she had access to the building. Kirchner agreed to meet her at the Lottery office. He hung up and thought about the conversation as he stared through the windshield at the snow heaped up like mashed potatoes alongside the road.

  “That woman’s crazy with animals,” Tyler said, without taking his eyes off of his mobile phone game. “She has cat photos and animal knickknacks all over her office. As I recall from the Lottery revenue distribution pie chart, a certain percentage of the revenue goes toward animal protection. Could be somebody catered to her pet interest in return for favors.”

  Kirchner rubbed his forehead. The puzzle pieces were emerging, but he felt lost as to the picture they formed. He hoped Bonnie held the key.

  Target

  The parking lanes in the Target lot were flanked by mountains of plowed snow. It took Roddy a couple of passes to find Alita’s beat-up green Camry. He pulled up next to it and surveyed the area. The store’s red-and-white bull’s-eye signs made him feel like he was in a shooting gallery. The sky, heavy and gray, touched the seam of the snowbound horizon. The owner of Lotto2Win needed a day-brightener and pulled a joint from his shirt pocket. Upon arriving in Minnesota from Vancouver, he had instructed Alita to identify her car and park it in a remote section of the retailer’s parking lot. She was to leave it unattended, doors unlocked, with the lottery tickets inside. No pleasantries required—except the tickets better all be there.

  Out of his side window, Roddy could see black plastic bags stacked in the back seat. In the smoke-filled haze and warmth of his own car, he thought about the millions of lottery tickets he sold at inflated prices. Likening himself to a carnival ride operator, he thought of how the lottery slowly ratcheted people up the roller-coaster rail to the heights of possibility and then dropped them in a stomach-wrenching free fall. Instead of being sick from going around in circles, they came back for more. Sometimes angry at the source of their desperation, but ready for another ride. Spaced out, he lost the reflective thread and stubbed the roach into the ashtray. Fuck it. I just give ’em what they want.

  He stepped out of the car, stuck out his tongue to catch some lightly falling snowflakes, and went to work. As he pivoted from car to car, transferring the tickets, the bottom of his unbuttoned full-length leather coat whipped and flared in the blustery wind like a whirling Dervish’s cape. Tossing in the last bag, he considered it only proper to leave a payback message. He popped the hood latch on the Camry and ducked his head into the engine compartment. He wasn’t a car guy, but he was pretty sure he could cause some mischief.

  “Jesus Christ!” Roddy yelped as the hood came down on his head with a dull thud.

  “What the hell are you doing to my car?” Alita demanded.

  Blindsided by the attack, Roddy fixed his stunned gaze on Alita’s peep-toe pumps and red-painted toenails, and wondered where she’d come from. Had she been hiding behind the plowed snow mountains, or had she sprinted from the store across the icy parking lot in high heels?

  He rubbed at the rising knob on his head. “Just a little taste of the bullshit you and your amigos put me through,” Roddy grumbled, inching in on Alita.

  “Slimeball,” Alita said, eyeing him wearily. Roddy’s dilated eyes looked like burned pancakes.

  “Bitch,” Roddy shot back, and with starling quickness, threw his weight against Alita, pinning her to the car. He grabbed her throat and throttled her like a chicken as he brought his thin hatchet-face next to hers. “Well, ain’t you a hot little tamale, eh?” The smell of patchouli oil and the hate in Alita’s dark eyes filled him with both resentment and sexual excitement.

  Alita spit in his face. Roddy felt the sting of spittle in his eye, and squinting like Popeye, made no move to wipe it off as he tightened his grip.

  “Where’s the Irishman, eh? I know he came to see you and your wetback friends.”

  “The dog ate him,” Alita said as she struggled to break his hold, “I should of let him eat your lottery tickets, too.”

  “Motherfuck!” Roddy felt the spike of Alita’s heel drill into his ankle. He hopped around, angry as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. Alita slid along the car attempting to escape, but Roddy caught her arm and reeled her in.

  A black–and-white police cruiser pulling into the parking lot interrupted the struggle, and in unison, they turned their heads to watch its slow approach. Puffs of frosty breath hung above their heads like empty cartoon bubbles. Roddy could already hear a siren running through his skull, even though the flasher bar on the roof was turned off. He tried to block out the pain in his ankle.

  “Don’t be stupid. We’re even, eh?” he said to Alita, hoping to square up the assault on the spot.

  The cruiser pulled up perpendicular to the side-by-side cars and powered down the window. “Problem?” the uniformed man asked, pushing his yellow-tinted sunglasses up onto the crown of his fur-trapper hat. The shield on the side of the car read “Sentry Security.”

  Phony cop. Roddy had to bite his lip to keep the words in his mouth. “Car trouble, damn cold,” he said, “but she’s good to go now. Thanks.”

  “You okay, ma’am?”

  Alita gave a clenched-jaw nod.

  Roddy dropped his weight onto Alita’s hood to secure the latch and gave the security cop a thumbs-up. The cruiser slowly rolled on, gray clouds of exhaust billowing from its tail pipe. Roddy jumped into his car and drove off. Alita did the same.

  Honeymoon

  The gray shadow of the plane, in route from Vancouver, skipped across the white tundra below. Minnesota in January—could it get any worse than this? Gisele pressed her face against the oval window. Other than a crash landing.

  But a highly improbable scenario. The Professor’s voice joined in her self-talk. In the midst of chatting with the Professor, he would often cite the practical application of probability science, including the offbeat c
hance of finding a black pearl in your oyster. In a strange way, the Professor’s observation on chance events had been his way of flirting. Gisele had taken full advantage of this idiosyncrasy, assuming the role of a vulnerable female, and played him like a drunken sailor on a two-day shore leave. But now, in hindsight, she wondered who had been the real sucker in the game.

  Gisele fanned a five-dollar bill at the flight attendant rattling a galley cart down the aisle. She skipped the plastic cup and drained the two-ounce bottle of Smirnoff. The burn constricted her throat and flushed her face. In a moment of brutal honesty, she admitted to herself that her dialogue with the Professor had bordered on phone sex. She shuddered to think of herself as a prostitute being pimped by Roddy to sell lottery tickets, and even worse, somehow culpable in the Professor’s death. She twisted the overhead air nozzle and directed it toward her face. As the plane banked in descent, she clutched the armrest and recalled the Professor’s claim that ninety percent of all plane crash deaths occur on takeoff and landing.

  As she stepped through the Twin Cities airport exit door, the icy air momentarily seized her lungs. Roddy waved to her from a rental car parked curbside in the passenger pickup area. A female airport cop in an oversized parka signaled him to move on, but he held the parking spot long enough for Gisele to toss in her carryon bag. Roddy gave the cop the finger as he inched his way back into the airport traffic crawl and headed east from the airport into St. Paul.

  “What, no hug?” Roddy reached for her.

  “Get out of my face.” Gisele pushed him back and locked down her seat belt

  Roddy feigned hurt feelings. He fished the stub of a burned-out joint from the ashtray and lit it. He inhaled in a rapid bellows breath, then offered the roach to Gisele. “Here, it’ll perk those tits right up.”

  “Cut the bullshit. You got the tickets?” She pushed his hand away and turned her attention to the frozen Mississippi River, the natural boundary between St. Paul and Minneapolis.

  “Garbage bags full.” Roddy jabbed a thumb toward the trunk.

  “You sort the winners?”

  “We’re cool, got the most important one right here.” Roddy patted the jackpot ticket in his shirt pocket. “Stupid bitch.” Roddy rubbed the bruise on his head.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Roddy recounted the ticket transfer encounter and felt a swelling in his crotch at the memory of the woman’s scent, smooth Latin skin, and trim ankle above her high heels.

  “What kind of twisted sicko are you?” Gisele said.

  “Just because you don’t get your hands dirty, don’t mean we aren’t cut from the same cloth, eh.”

  Roddy turned onto St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, a commercial strip of coffee shops, boutiques, and cheeky restaurants bounded by a schizophrenic turn-of-the-century neighborhood. The area could not decide whether it was headed for the slums or historical preservation. Once-stately Colonial Revivals with listing columns and low-income renters stood in mixed company with Queen Anne Victorians being rehabbed by savvy young speculators. He curbed the car in front of a two-story brick building fronted by a cigar shop.

  “Don’t even think about smoking cigars anywhere near me.” Gisele rolled down the car window at the thought of it.

  “Set your sights a little higher, eh.” Roddy pointed to the Attorney at Law sign one level above the cigar shop. “His name’s Abe Weisman. He’s expecting us.”

  Gisele’s eyes instantly burned as she ascended the stairway to Abe’s office. The trapped musty air smelled of mildew and tobacco.

  Abe, in his mid-sixties, pot-bellied, with short white hair like duck fuzz, ushered them into his office. A faded diploma hung askew on the wall above a worn leather swivel chair. Legal volumes and manila files bowed the shelves and covered every inch of his desk. Abe gave the one and only visitor chair a dusting with his hand and offered it to Gisele.

  “Abe knows the drill. He’s going to front-run the lottery claim process to keep us out of the limelight,” Roddy said, looking for an empty spot on the wall to lean against. “Right, Abe?”

  There’s an Abe in every town. An attorney who specializes in working with clients who operate on the edge: laundering money, avoiding taxes, bilking customers, skirting creditors, fencing products. Abe’s ilk provided counsel without judgment, held to confidentiality, and got paid up front in cash.

  “Well, we can certainly limit your exposure.” Abe appraised the representatives of the Canadian company in front of him: a sleazy entrepreneur and a nervous woman in over her head. Roddy had made him aware that they trafficked in illegal lottery tickets and were in need of help in redeeming their winning ticket. Abe’s substantial gut told him that this was not the beginning of a happy ending.

  Abe cautioned the pair that they better have a good story about the winning ticket’s origin. All BlizzardBall Lottery tickets are coded to the retailer where they were issued, which would connect the purchase to the now infamous Cash and Dash convenience store. Even though lottery tickets are bearer instruments and proof of purchase is not required, fraudulent lottery tickets and prize claims can be forfeited and are subject to prosecution. After some variation on the theme, they settled on a sort of Cinderella story: Good fortune had befallen Roddy obliquely. He was working as a part-time bartender near the docks in Vancouver and a cruise ship tourist left him the ticket as a tip. Roddy had considered it a cheap gesture at the time. He was engaged to Gisele, but the wedding had been forestalled by financial considerations. He and his fiancé, who would appear at his side during the award ceremony, were on their way to be married and would honeymoon at an undisclosed location.

  Abe felt the couple angle would help the subterfuge and play out better with a public that ultimately felt no one deserved $750 million, unless they were that no one. Once Roddy and Gisele escaped on their honeymoon, Abe, with power of attorney, would handle the press as well as wire transfer the funds to an offshore account.

  “That story’s so full of shit, I’m going to gag.” Gisele pointed two fingers down her throat. “You know with that kind of money someone will blow our cover.”

  “I’m of the same mind,” Abe said. “But hopefully by the time someone sorts it out, the trail will be cold. You brought the ticket?”

  Roddy removed the jackpot ticket from his breast pocket and handed it to Abe. Abe inspected Roddy’s signature on the back of the ticket, notarized it, and made a photocopy, front and back, from an agonizingly slow machine.

  Roddy dropped Gisele off at a downtown St. Paul hotel. Abe had arranged a meeting for Roddy with Jake Wilson. Jake managed BlizzardBall Lottery public relations and was responsible for screening major winners, and very specifically the BlizzardBall jackpot winner. The BlizzardBall Lottery office was officially closed today, but Jake was eager to meet Roddy to ensure he was presentable. Tomorrow, Roddy and Gisele would come forth and officially claim the prize.

  Hostage

  Earl wiped off the condensation beading the inside of his pickup truck window as he sat in the frosty parking lot of the BlizzardBall Lottery headquarters in Roseville, Minnesota. He looked at his cell phone. There were three unanswered calls from his wife, Maureen. Things had gotten out of hand after the Christmas day lottery drawing. He and Maureen had had strong words, putting a swift end to the Christmas celebration. He felt bad about the spat. But he’d been screwed by the Lottery restart, a point his brother Floyd hammered home. Maureen told him to let it go. Another “let it go.” He was tired of being displaced. Ever since he’d been laid off from the taconite mine, he’d been feeling the respect drain from the relationship. Seems his wife, now the breadwinner, no longer had confidence in his ability to handle things. After a couple of days of spousal bickering, things had settled down to a muted tension. But Earl’s sense of being wronged had grown and festered to the point where he aimed to set things right.

  Earl surveyed the two-story office park building and felt disappointed. During the four-hour drive from Hibbing, he’d ima
gined a building with more architectural pride, something worthy of bestowing financial freedom on the chosen ones. Instead, he was met with an uninspired, monolithic structure clad with white paneled siding and a blue racing stripe around its midsection. It reminded him of a White Castle on steroids.

  He checked the wires taped inside his vest. A red-hot rush of blood throbbed at his temples and pulsed in his ears as it always did before a mining detonation. He loved the report of a blast: a signal of new things to come, a new order. There was decisiveness. Unlike the BlizzardBall Lottery, there was no redo.

  A woman shuffled across the parking lot and made her way toward the building’s front door. Earl opened the pickup truck door and dropped a size fourteen steel-toed boot to the pavement. His legs were stiff from the long ride but he caught up with the woman just as her card swipe released the door lock.

  “Excuse me, sir, we’re closed for the holiday,” Bonnie said, blocking Earl’s entry.

  “I want to know who’s responsible for restarting the Lottery and messing with my ticket!” Earl fixed his gaze on her wide mouth and large round glasses.

  “Sir, you can take that up with customer service. We are closed for the New Year holiday. They’ll be in tomorrow.”

  Earl pushed past Bonnie, scanning the reception area. He listened for the clickety-clack of the Lottery balls that had been colliding like heated molecules inside his head for the past two hun dred miles, but the only sound was the hum of forced-air ventilation. On the wall hung framed posters featuring the Lottery campaign You Got To Be In To Win and photos of winners holding oversized checks.

  “Sir, please leave, or I’ll call security,” Bonnie said, looking past Earl to the parking lot and hoping Agent Kirchner would show. But she had arrived early to get some work done and knew he wasn’t scheduled to meet her for another couple of hours.

  “Screw your video-cop.” Earl shot a middle finger toward an overhead camera and flashed his bowie knife. “I’ll leave when my lottery ticket’s cashed.”