Blizzard Ball (4 page)

The convenience store clerk ducked below the counter. Unhurt, he caught his breath, gripped a short baseball bat, and sniffed the burnt gunpowder. “Please, no more shooting!” the clerk shouted.

“No weapons! Stand up!” Eduardo ordered. “What’s your name?”

“Jamal,” the clerk said as he dropped the club and emerged. His clothes smelled like wet wool. “The register is open. Please, take the money. I will be no problem.” He opened his hands in a gesture of giving. “Cigarettes, beer, anything.”

“Turn the sprinkler off, Jamal.” Eduardo ordred. The soggy hood of his sweatshirt dropped like a monks cowl.

“I must then call the landlord. I am just a tenant and I have no such understanding.”

“No comprehendo?” Eduardo shoved the barrel of the gun into Jamal’s chest, knocking him backwards into the snack food shelf. A bag of Doritos broke open, spilling onto the flooded floor. The triangular pieces bobbed about like a regatta. “Where’s the FedEx boxes of cash?”

“I only have the cash in the register. Please take it and go.”

“Rafie, look around!” Eduardo shouted over the food aisle. Rafie had removed his soggy itching ski mask and was huddled in the corner with a grocery bag over his head as an umbrella against the sprinkler shower. The leather soles on his shoes had separated, and water wicked up his pants to his knees.

“If we don’t find the cash, we’re gonna blow that rag off your head.” Eduardo’s dark-brown eyes fixed hard on Jamal and his braided skullcap.

“I do not want any harm. Tell me, where did you hear about such great money?” Jamal dropped to his knees in prayer, sinking his forehead into the water.

“Hey, Eddie, I found it!” Rafie yelled out from the back room.

“Hurry! Load ’em in the car!” Eduardo swung the shotgun barrel hard across Jamal’s head. “I’ll take care of this pescado.”

Rafie swiped his forearm over the windshield in a half-assed attempt to clear off the freshly fallen snow and jumped in the car. “Eddie, cra-a-nk up the car heater!” Rafie stammered, his blue lips quivering. “My pa-a-nts are frozen, I can’t straighten my legs.”

“Open a box and sniff some cash, that’ll warm you up.” Eduardo flicked on the overhead dome light.

Rafie reached into the back seat, retrieved a FedEx box, and stripped back the sealed flap. “Hey, man, something’s not right here.” He dug deeper into the box, tossing off small bundles of paper.

“What?” Eduardo hit the brakes; the car fishtailed and bounced off the curb. He grabbed the package and shook the contents onto his lap. Neat bundles of pink tickets bound with rubber bands tumbled out.

“What is this shit?” Rafie ripped open another box, then another and another. “No money.”

Eduardo struck a Bic lighter to get a better look. “Fucking BlizzardBall Lottery tickets.”

“Hey, maybe we win the lottery,” Rafie cracked.

“Shut up.” Eduardo examined the FedEx shipping labels, all addressed to Vancouver, Canada. “Alita, she set us up for some bad luck, man.”

Alita Torres could never have imagined that her big mouth was responsible for what lay outside her bedroom door at 4:00 a.m. Nor could she have foreseen that her two roommates would pawn her silver-turquoise bracelet to buy a shotgun, or that they would stake out the local convenience store for over a week on a path to robbery.

She emerged from her bedroom to find FedEx boxes stacked throughout the living room and kitchen. She cinched her bathrobe and swept back a twist of raven hair. Pink slips of paper stuck to her bare feet as she made her way into the kitchen. She tried to rub some understanding into her eyes. “What the hell’s going on?”

“A mistake,” Eduardo said, tearing off an end of a breakfast burrito and feeding it to the dog.

“You’re a mistake, all right!” Alita raked a FedEx box off the kitchen counter. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but you and your cerveza-guzzling shadow better run it right out of here.”

Alita was twenty-four, single, attractive, and serious enough to be left alone—although that didn’t stop men from staring at her long after she had passed them by. Alita had taken control of her life, unlike her ass-backwards idiot roommates. They treated her like the virgin queen she wasn’t, then expected her to be their personal housekeeper. Respected her sobriety, but drank like fish around her. Were in awe of her job at the bank, but couldn’t save a dollar.

“We found the boxes scattered on the street, fell out of a truck or some other shit vehicle,” Rafie said, leaning back on a kitchen chair and tipping down a long-neck beer. “So, we brought them here for safekeeping.”

Alita gave the chair a quick pull. Rafie tumbled to the floor and spun like a break-dancer, adeptly saving his beer.

“It’s your fault.” Eduardo said. “You said the Pakistani at the convenience store was cashing checks at your teller window trying to avoid the IRS and carrying money out of the bank in FedEx boxes.”

Alita tried to make sense of the accusation. Eduardo and Rafie were both day laborers with a keen curiosity about money and an even keener interest in rich people. She ignored most of their inquiries. But as needed, she would parcel out bank customer information to her overbearing machismo roomies just to keep her household status buoyed.

“Yeah, bum steer,” Rafie said.

“I relay a simple story about a nice man who has silly banking habits and you asnos see it as an invitation to rob him? I can’t believe this.”

Eduardo kicked a FedEx box. Tickets burst forth and littered the carpet like spent cherry blossoms. “We’ve been totally fucked over.”

“Been through every one of the boxes, no cash,” Rafie added.

Alita’s hands fluttered as though she were shooing blackbirds out of a corn patch. “I want you crazies out of my apartment,” she said, “and take this crap with you, right now!” She swatted a box of tickets toward the door. “I’m not going down for your stupidity.” Her anger swirled in the air along with the tickets.

Rafie twisted the cap off another beer. “Hey, you can’t kick us out. We’re cousins.”

Alita’s tirade trailed her into the bedroom. When she slammed the door, another poof of tickets rose and settled on the floor.

Kirchner sensed the Christmas storm had the makings of a terrible mess. He pulled up his coat collar and trudged towards the house. Ice pellets stung his face like a stirred-up batch of hornets. Before going inside, he paused on the top stair step. What had been footprints on the walk only moments ago were now hardened indentations filled with the wintry mix. The snow, heavy with moisture, settled in with the consistency of wet concrete. It stuck to his car, molding it into the proportions of a great white whale. Across the street a blow-up snowman stood in front of a neighbor’s house. It was surrounded by a lighted Santa, elves, and reindeer. Plastic blight, he thought and had half a mind to use the decorations for target practice. With any luck the crap would blow away in the storm.

He listened for the scrape of the plows. Nothing was moving. The rigs were holed up in the sheds waiting it out. Nobody was going anywhere.

There had been a Christmas night like this not long after he’d been married. As a young cop, he had been a law enforcement junkie. Every day brought a new experience. He was hooked on the action, absorbed in it and totally alive. It took a lock-down snowstorm to make him relax even a little. He fidgeted and stressed about being trapped that night—he looked out the window, then settled into the button-tufted wing-back armchair.

33

His wife, whose sense of timing was always perfect, saw the beast was at rest and appeared with two tumblers. The air soon filled with the scent of peppermint. Peppermint schnapps with a touch of brandy was her holiday drink of choice.

As the grog loosened the tension of police work, they spoke easily about their future. You can’t be in the law enforcement business for the money. His wife would finish her graduate work in American Indian studies, get a teaching job, so they would be in position to have children.

“What position would that be?” his wife teased as she hiked her glass to signal refills.

“Make mine a double. I’ll put a record on,” Kirchner said, and watched the hypnotic, graceful sway of her skirt.

He had put on Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.” It was the closest he could come to apologizing for letting the job take priority over the relationship. They danced right there in the living room next to the twinkling backdrop of the Christmas tree lights. He held her close. His fingers combed her thick dark hair and glided over her soft, overripe lips. They played her favorite, “Light My Fire,” the Jose Feliciano version, and laughed all the way to the bedroom. Kirchner never knew time to stop like that before or since.

Now, standing in the night air like an abominable snowman, Kirchner sniffed at the snowy sky, hoping to catch the scent of peppermint. She had passed away seven years ago.

His house insulated with snow, seemed extra quiet tonight. He hung up his coat and walked into the kitchen over squeaking planks. A half-eaten bowl of cereal sat on the counter. He made himself a cup of coffee and put on the Willie album. His cell phone rang and he hesitated, too tired and exhausted to answer. He could use the night off. It was Tyler, a young pain-in-the-ass BCA analyst, but he clicked him in.

“Whattya got?” Kirchner groused.

“Our money-laundering suspect has been murdered. Found him dead at the Cash and Dash. No immediate suspects. One other curious note…”

“Give it to me.”

“The convenience store was the source of the winning BlizzardBall jackpot ticket.”

“Somebody won?”

“And it looks like somebody lost.”

Morty announced himself to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s receptionist, who sat behind a bulletproof acrylic window and managed communications through a microphone. The BCA was an umbrella law enforcement agency. It provided investigative crime lab resources and aggregated criminal records to local police, sheriff ’s departments, and citizens throughout the State of Minnesota. The Lottery director was not pleased with having had to navigate through the half-plowed roads and now being made to wait. He paced a bit before taking an open spot among other visitors on a hard wooden bench bolted to the terrazzo floor. To pass the time he scrolled through the e-mails on his BlackBerry.

“Morty Frish?”

“Yeah.” Morty stood, wearing a double-breasted camel-hair topcoat, looking like a mafia boss.

“Appreciate ya coming in on short notice.” Kirchner extended a quick firm shake and led the way into the secure chambers of the BCA.

“This better be important, goddamn snow Armageddon out there,” Morty said. “Where’s the coffee?

“No lattes, but caffeine we got.” Kirchner dropped four quarters into a vending machine. “Cream, sugar?”

“Black.” Morty winced as the sludge plopped into a paper cup.

“Got a room for us.” Kirchner padded soft-soled wing-tip shoes down a long narrow corridor and opened the door to a small conference room. A thick report folder with a pair of reading glasses on top sat in the middle of the table.

On the way in Morty had observed the large bisected stones that flanked the entrance to the BCA building. “Nice pile of rocks you got out in the yard,” he said. “Where’s the inmates with sledgehammers?”

“They’re glacial-age granite boulders, split clear through,” Kirchner said, and looked out the window at the rock sculpture. “Suppose to be a metaphor. Something about the insides of those rocks revealing unique patterns, similar to fingerprints and DNA,” he turned his attention back to Morty. “But that kinda thinking makes my head hurt. Nothing seems to be what it is anymore.”

“Interesting tour note, but as you are aware, I’m in the middle of a high-profile Lottery offering.”

“What did you do before you ran the Lottery?”

“I was an accountant in New York before being dragged out to the tundra by my ex, whose sole mission was to make my life miserable.”

Perhaps chased out of town would have been a more apt description of Morty’s departure from the Big Apple. His accounting specialty was turning zeros into sixes and eights, along with subscribing wealthy individuals into aggressive tax avoidance schemes. A government restraining order and angry clients, subjected to audit and penalty, hastened his flight to the Gopher State.

“Bought a ticket to your lottery. Just one. No sense spending any more than it takes to win.” Kirchner pulled the pink ticket from his wallet, examined it and launched it toward the wastebasket in the corner. “So what accounted for the draw interruption and delay?”

“Goddamn internal screwup,” Morty said. A ticket was missing. It was a fiasco to stop and restart the drawing, but it would have been a bigger disaster to have a properly sold ticket win and not be in the certified database of eligible tickets. We got it straightened out.” Morty stabbed at his coffee with a wooden swirl stick. “So what was it you wanted to discuss?”

“It’s the Agency’s understanding that the winning BlizzardBall ticket was sold at the Cash and Dash convenience store on St. Paul’s lower East Side.”

“Front page news.”

“Winner come forward?”

“Not yet. Probably laying low out of the limelight, letting the shock wear off.”

“The BCA and the FBI have been investigating the operator of that convenience store and his check-cashing activity.” Kirchner put on black-framed reading glasses, slid them out to the end of his nose, and flipped open the report. A passport-style photo of Jamal Madhta was stapled to the first page. A thick mustache rested on a full upper lip. A stubble shadow covered the hollow of his cheeks and jutting chin. There was no humor in the large brown eyes that stared up at Morty and followed him like the Mona Lisa’s.

“What’s his game? Drugs? Forgery?” Morty asked.

“Mr. Madhta was under investigation for money laundering.”

“Always something with these convenience store jockeys. Have you questioned this Madhta?”

“Unfortunately, no. He’s dead.”

Kirchner related how the BCA had been in the process of getting a blanket surveillance order out on Madhta just as the Cash and Dash came into the national spotlight as the winning lottery ticket point of sale. Sometime after midnight, well after the lottery drawing, someone had reported water gushing out of the store into the street. When the St. Paul Police and Fire Department arrived on the scene, they found a foot of water. Cash was still in the register. The ceiling sprinkler head and a webcam had sustained a shotgun blast. Shell casings were found floating on the floor. Jamal Madhta’s lacerated body was found in a back room among boxes and shipping materials.