Blizzard Ball (7 page)

“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.”

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 stumbled 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.

“Hey, man.” Rafie rubbed the sleep out of his eyes; the revelation of the tickets was coming into focus. “Maybe we should FedEx them back to Canada.” Rafie pointed at the shipping label.

“Shut the fuck up! If you weren’t so stupid, you’d be funny.” Eduardo swatted at Rafie and continued sorting the tickets.

“Wait here.” Eduardo slammed the car door and entered the truck stop. He handed the clerk fifty lottery tickets.

“Looks like you got some winners here,” the mustached clerk, who only moments ago had tried to evict Eduardo from the parking lot, said enthusiastically.

“All right!” Eduardo high-fived the clerk, then quickly tamped down his eagerness. “Might have a few more tickets in the car,” he said as he backed out of the store, quick to seize on the opportunity. “I’ll be right back.”

“Rafie, hand me another stack of tickets.”

Rafie watched Eduardo head back into the store and flipped open the glove compartment. He pulled out the Irishman’s cell phone and dialed Alita. “Hey, Alita, Rafie. Just called to say, we’re cool. We’re living large, Eddie’s cashin’ out right …” the phone beeped three times and went dead. A battery icon with a diagonal line slicing through it appeared. “Shit!” Rafie banged the phone on the sole of his shoe in an attempt to beat some juice back into the battery. “Just wanted to share the good news,” he said to no one, tossing the dead phone on the dashboard.

“Pretty good streak of luck—$810,” the clerk said, keeping track of the winning tickets presented by Eduardo. “Newspaper says the winner of the $750-million-dollar ticket is still floating around out there. Couple of more matches and you could have been the big winner.”

“No matter, just playin’ for fun,” Eduardo said, poker-faced, trying to diffuse the attention.

“Say,” the clerk said, fingering through the till. “I don’t quite have that much cash on hand. Need anything?”

Eduardo kicked at the car door. “Rafie, give me a hand,” he said. His arms were loaded with beer, snack food, motor oil, and scratch-off game cards; a wad of cash bulged from his shirt pocket.

Rafie tore at a bag of chips and opened a beer. “You got all this from a couple of ticket bundles? Let’s go in and cash ’em all. To hell with that slaughterhouse.”

“We don’t want to call attention to ourselves,” Eduardo cautioned. “Better to take this down the road.”

“Yeah, like all the way to Albuquerque. Get me some senoritas,” Rafie hooted.

“Where did that phone come from?” Eduardo asked, snatching the phone off the dashboard.

“The Irishman,” Rafie said innocently.

“Goddamnit,” Eduardo growled, his temper sparking like a live wire. “Who did you call?”

“Just Alita. To give her the good news.”

Eduardo smashed the phone against the steering wheel. Now they had her number. This was bad.

Joanne Finstedt jumped out of the parked sleeper cab, landing hard on the pavement, and dashed across the parking lot of Siminonson’s Food and Fuel. A fat, bald trucker in stocking feet and a sleeveless shirt gave chase. She grabbed onto the rear door handle of Eduardo’s car just as it started to roll out of the parking lot. Dumping her backpack on the floorboards, she jumped into the back seat and punched the door lock. The truck driver hopped along the side of the car, hammering the roof with his fist.

“Hey, man! Don’t be fucking with my car,” Eduardo yelled, jerking the steering wheel, throwing the trucker off balance.

“Gimme that log,” the truck driver yelled, trying to keep up with the rolling car.

“Drive. Get out of here. He’s crazy!” Joanne shouted at Eduardo.

“He sure is ugly.” Rafie strained to look at the trucker from his shot gun position.

As Eduardo sped off, Joanne rolled down the side window and tossed the trucker’s logbook onto the frozen pavement. She watched as he bent to pick it up and tossed her the middle finger.

Joanne was no stranger to the road. In her earlier days she had been one of the original Deadheads, traveling across the country in the wake of Jerry Garcia’s band. To survive, she braided hair, peddled LSD, bootlegged CDs, and sold tee-shirts. But the Grateful Dead were history and so were her hippie days.

Up until a year ago Joanne had worked as a receptionist at a veterinarian clinic and lived alone in a co-op high-rise in Minneapolis. A series of maddening headaches led to the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, which propelled her on an alternative healing quest. Waw-wah Jesus, a Paiute shaman, conducted nomadic healing journeys into the Smoke Creek Desert north of Reno, Nevada. After two months of schlepping around the desert in tents, losing fifteen pounds, and being left alone with the coyotes while Waw-wah slipped off to get drunk, Joanne called it quits. The ten thousand dollars she had spent on the endeavor had been her entire savings.

She managed a lift into Reno and hung out at a truck stop hoping to catch a ride east, home. A trucker hauling a refer rig was likewise looking for some company. He considered Joanne’s company an added stimulant in case the Red Bull with Benzedrine lost its edge—and it did. Joanne drove the rig over 350 miles while the trucker’s greasy head jiggled like a bobblehead doll in the passenger seat.

At the truck stop in Luverne, Minnesota, the trucker considered that she owed him something for the ride—a blow job would do for starters.

Eduardo, with his uninvited passenger in the back seat, sped out of the parking lot, onto the service road, and toward the Interstate 90 entrance ramp.

“You want to party?” Rafie opened a beer and extended it to the woman in the back seat wearing a woven stocking cap and tie-dye tee-shirt under a heavy woolen sweater. The earthy scent of the desert hung on her clothes.

“Knock it off.” Eduardo reached over and batted the back of Rafie’s head.

“Actually a beer sounds good,” Joanne said, exhaling, feeling irrationally comfortable with the two amigos. “Thanks for the help.” She removed her stocking cap and swept her flattened hair into a loose ponytail. “You can drop me at the next truck stop.”

“That trucker, he was like an ape-man pounding on the car. I shoulda kicked his ass.” Rafie handed a beer over the back seat. “You steal something from him?”

“I knew that retread would be trouble at some point. So I borrowed his logbook in case he got stupid with me, and of course he did. Where you guys headed?”

“Anywhere we want.” Rafie raised his beer and laughed. “We won the lottery.”

“Shut up,” Eduardo snapped.

“Congratulations, I sure could use some luck.”

“What kinda trouble you got?” Eduardo asked.

Kirchner was scratching around for a lead in the convenience store operator’s death. The Pakistani had originally drawn the attention of the feds because of his curious financial transactions at a local bank. Certainly Kirchner would start by paying the bank a visit. But beginnings were a slippery slope for a history major, and he was curious about lotteries themselves.

Kirchner had found accounts to support the notion that the lottery, in various forms, has been around since the dawn of mankind. The random outcome was seen as divine will intervening on human meddling. Formal documentation picked up somewhere around two thousand years ago. It has been claimed that the Great Wall of China was built with lottery funds.

The lottery caught on with the Renaissance crowd, too. Queen Elizabeth I established one of the first English lotteries, offering tickets for a chance to win royal pieces of gold. It quickly spread throughout Europe and was carried onto American shores with the first settlers. It became a favorite colonial pastime, especially among the Founding Fathers.

Kirchner found it telling that even back in the early days, the lottery was a conflict-generating concept. Protestant reformists, who opposed gambling on moral grounds, embraced the lottery to raise funds for schools and churches. The same government that outlawed gambling promoted the lottery. Old Ben Franklin financed cannons for the Revolutionary War using lottery money. George Washington operated a Virginia lottery to finance construction of roads to the West. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn’t resist raising a quick buck by means of a chance event.

Lotteries were pretty commonplace, doing mostly good work, funding public projects and universities right into the late 1800s. But over time, the scheme fell prey to scoundrels whose only mission was personal enrichment. One of the most notorious operations was the Louisiana State Lottery, also known as the Golden Octopus for its reputation of having a hand in nearly everyone’s pocket. President Harrison did not take kindly to the rogue nature of the lottery and enacted legislation that put a ban on it in 1900. This led to all manner of underground numbers rackets. The prohibition didn’t hold, with the government getting back in the lottery business in the 1960s. Kirchner thought about that. They should have kept the lid on it.

Kirchner found Jerome “Fitz” Fitzgerald sucking down a cigarette on a sidewalk in front of the Minnesota National Bank, East Side Branch. He was standing with a gaggle of other nicotine-addicted bank employees. Kirchner waited patiently while Fitz finished the butt and escorted him inside the bank. Fitz, an assistant branch vice president, was eager to help and extended a hand shake which felt like a limp, dead fish.

“When someone from this neighborhood walks in and cashes a $9,995 check, I know something’s up.” Fitz rearranged the already neat stack of papers on his desk. A piston-like jaw working a piece of Blackjack stretched his mouth from ear to ear, revealing tiny teeth set in gums the color of licorice. “I assume you want to see the surveillance tapes?” Fitz asked, nodding his head up and down to prod a confirmation from Kirchner. Fitz led Kirchner to the second-floor security room. The time-dated tapes, from a camera positioned behind the teller, showed Jamal from the Cash and Dash presenting a check and handing the teller a box. The teller cashed the check, stuffed the money in the box, and handed it back: always the same routine. “What’s with the box?” Kirchner asked Fitz.