Too Lucky to Live

by Annie Hogsett

  Oh no. I was pleading with God, with the Fates, with all the assorted resources I turn to whenever I’m under serious duress.

  Please. Oh, please. Not Margo.

  Tom hung firmly onto my elbow all the way across the room to the body. “Margo.” Her name was a sob, stuck in my throat.

  “Margo?”

  She had been tied to the chair. There was a patch of duct tape over her mouth and a giant purple bruise spreading over her cheekbone. But she was breathing. A lot. I could see her ample bosoms heaving. Her eyes were open, and the gleam in there was pure fury.

  “She’s conscious, thank God,” I muttered to Tom. “But she’s extremely mad. She’s got a big piece of tape stuck to her mouth. This is going to get ugly.”

  He offered a small sound of sympathy and support, but it was clearly my ball game.

  I needed to get the tape off, but it was going to be a lot trickier than your simple Band-Aid removal. Margo was watching me, her eyes darting side to side, warily, as if she knew what was going through my mind. I used a fingernail to loosen one corner of the tape, trying to decide if I should go for the clean and jerk or the slow peel.

  I took the cowardly route and started gently pulling it away. The skin underneath—Margo’s lovely, virtually unlined, Tintoretto-worthy skin—of which she was justifiably proud and protective—was red and irritated. Not as red and irritated as Margo appeared to be, but painful to see.

  She made a “Rrrr-rrrr-rrrr” sound in her throat and glowered at me in a meaningful, get-this-over-with way.

  Alrighty.

  I tightened my grip on my corner and let her rip.

  “Ow. Ow! Damn it, Allie. Ow. Son of a bitch! Fucking, two-bit, dip-shit moron! Not you, Allie. Thanks so much. Sorry. That dumb, ridiculous, shit-for-brains, motherfu—”

  She continued in that vein for some time, and, not feeling suicidal, I let her roll on.

  For an enlightened being, Margo has quite the potty mouth. It’s that alternating current thing again. So after I removed the tape, I had taken a short step back and brought Tom back with me. Thus, we were not bowled over by the deluge of invective.

  I was impressed, though. And so was he. Even for Margo, this was getting very detailed. I stepped bravely back in, and got her untied. She didn’t even seem to notice.

  One of the themes she touched on in the grand panoply of her swearing was that Tom appeared to have won the fucking 550 million-dollar Mondo and we’d not told her. It took all my self control to resist squealing a response aimed at the enhanced number. Glancing sideways at Tom, I could see he was mortified all over again.

  Tom and I gave Margo the super-condensed version of the backstory of the accidental jackpot and our fear for Rune. Plus an even-more-abbreviated account of the trip to the high-rise and all that had transpired at Tom’s house. I did not mention how or where we’d hidden the ticket. Dangerous knowledge. I was somewhat sorry I knew.

  Our hasty explanations mollified Margo enough to redirect her wrath back onto the intruder who’d shown up in the early morning hours, slapped her around, and tied her to the chair.

  “You’re bleeping lucky,” she growled, “that I didn’t figure out what ticket he was actually talking about until after he’d put the tape over my mouth.”

  Once Margo has vented all of the obscenities in her repertoire, she usually regains control of her temper and begins to make a few euphemistic substitutions for her more florid profanities. She actually says “bleeping.” A lot.

  “That bleeping little weasel,” she snarled, her attention blessedly diverted from us. “That ferret-faced, numb-nuts, little dip-shit. Him and his miserable, bleeping ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, for crissake. If he hadn’t had that great big gun, I’d have wiped the floor with him and planted his skinny rear-end under the skunk cabbage.”

  “Wait a sec,” I held my hand up. “Stop. Your ferret-faced little dip-shit sounds exactly like our ferret-faced little dip-shit. I think he got on the elevator with us with us last night. Margo. Let’s be grateful he didn’t shoot you. He must be incredibly stupid not to realize you could identify him.”

  “I don’t think he had the guts to shoot me. I saw him think about it. He put it at the back of his mind and forgot where he left it. He’s a lightweight, your ferret. You’re going to have a lot more competent criminals than him after you in a heartbeat, girl. You and the blind babe-a-rama here had better get out of Dodge until this blows over. How did your weasel find me, anyway?”

  “I can’t imagine, Margo. We weren’t followed. There was nobody on the street last night.”

  Margo was regarding me with disbelief. “I don’t suppose,” she offered in a tone thick with irony, “that anybody up in the projects would have been able to see the Ohio plates on the front and back of the Volvo you drove off in, honey. Would they?”

  “Oh.” I devoted a half second to the realization that any confidence about my own anonymity last night had been ill-considered. “Oh. Oh, Margo…”

  She sniffed. “‘Oh, oh’ is right. You need to brain up, sweetie. I can definitely tell neither one of you is what I’d call a lottery aficionado, but surely you know that even if you take the lump sum payout, and even after taxes, 550 million dollars boils down to many, many millions of dollars.

  “Right now, people who might be looking for you would maybe—just maybe—not know precisely where you live. But they obviously know you were driving my car. Somebody was already smart enough to do one of those online searches and find me. WhitePages, Google Maps street view, and lookie! Here’s your name, address, and a picture of your house.” She sucked in a breath.

  “You both need to be careful. You need to be extra careful about the boy.”

  She waved her arms. Her chunky costume jewelry rings caught what little sunlight pierced the shutters and threw tiny sparkles across the ceiling. “Most of the time I buy that line about how ‘money is neutral.’ In the hands of a kind person—and you both are kind people, I know that—it can do wonderful things. Bad person? Bad things. That’s the common wisdom. And it works for common amounts of money. That’s anything under a hundred dollars these days.

  “But for this situation? That money-is-neutral thing is crap. Your kind of money? The uncommon amount of money we’re talking about here? Fucking Mondo money? Somebody’s bound to wind up dead. I only hope it’s Dip-Shit and not you.”

  She was a sight to see, standing there barefoot in her shadowy foyer, robed in a magnificently large, boldly embroidered, silk dressing gown. Our Roman Goddess of Wrath. Her curly black hair straggling out of its helter-skelter bun, her lips chapped and swollen from the tape, the ugly bruise, dark eyes gleaming, rings flashing. She swept her gaze from Tom to me and back, trying to gauge the level of our acquiescence to her advice. Then the expression on her face underwent a radical shift.

  Her eyes narrowed. She appeared to be actually seeing the two of us for the first time that morning. Her chin jutted out. Her lips were pursed. Calculating.

  Uh oh.

  “Wait a sec,” she commanded, squinting even tighter. “Wait. Hold on. I just now figured out where the two of you yahoos were last night while I was getting beaten up on your behalf. You were over there across the street. In bed. Together. Weren’t you? Weren’t you?

  “Al, you can tell me. Look at me. Eye contact. This is Margo. Your best-friend-in-your-current-world. Ha! You did it. I know you did. Was it great? Was he fabulous? Was it two years overdue. Or what? C’mon! Give! Or I’ll kill you myself.”

  I was only minimally embarrassed. This was Margo, after all, and I was used to hearing the contents of her mind spill out all over the place with absolutely no editing. But the expression on Tom’s face was, like they say, priceless.

  “Margo…” I commanded. “Shut. Up.” I glanced at Tom, who was looking exceptionally nonplussed but not at all humiliated and not in the least sorry. Rig
ht then I fell the rest of the way in love with him.

  “No, seriously, Margo, shut up. And, yes. Yes, indeed. He was fabulous.”

  She clasped her hands over her massive chest and favored me—and Tom, by proxy—with her most beatific smile. “I knew it. I knew it. Go! Get out of here. Figure out how to handle the money and keep yourselves and that little boy safe. And for godsake, be careful. You just found happiness, Al. This is no time to die!”

  Chapter Ten

  Tom and I took the Volvo and headed off to the Cleveland Fifth District Police Department headquarters to see if they’d put a car on my house and Margo’s, too. Which I doubted. They aren’t loaded up with extra cop cars in our end of town, but it was a place to start. I hoped we’d have a better chance if we showed up in person and were fifty percent blind and fifty percent feminine and vulnerable. I also hoped they might be able to provide some guidance on how to cash in your Mondo ticket without getting beaten senseless.

  But about five minutes down the road, my cell phone played a couple of bars of “One Night in Bangkok” and it was Margo, subdued and worried. “That guy. That ferrety guy, you know, the one you saw and the one at my place, in the loud shirt?”

  How could I not know that guy? Last time I remembered, we were speaking of him in a substantially less respectful tone of voice. I recalled that she had even wished him dead instead of us. Things must have taken a turn.

  “I remember him. Why?”

  “He’s dead. And two other guys. A fat black guy with dreads. And a white guy with no distinguishing features except that he was old and in a wheelchair. And dead. They’re all dead. Shot. Up at the projects. The cop who came to file my report showed me pictures on his phone because my description of my guy—rest his pathetic, annoying soul and may he do better next time around—matched up with the photos of the scene. With that.”

  Her voice was trembling now. “Are you being careful? Because even seeing a picture of someone you barely know and don’t especially like shot dead is worse than I imagined. I can’t imagine what it would be like if…well, what it would be like.

  “The cop says the theory they’re working is these guys got to arguing about what they were going to do with the money when they got it, and they killed each other. That’s the kind of money you and Tom’ve got going on, Allie. The kind people kill each other for when they don’t even have it yet. For only thinking about how they would split it up if they got it.”

  “Margo,” I began in my most placating mode. “Margo—”

  She swept right on through. “Allie, listen to me. You have got to get that ticket of yours and turn it in. Then at least you can prove you turned it in already if somebody grabs you for it. And then you need to get your cash and buy some protection. Bodyguards. Security systems. Big toothy dogs. An airplane to Tahiti. Whatever it takes.

  “You need to protect yourself the way rich people know how to do. But you need the money to do that. You need to be rich for real. Stop wussing around and get Tom’s cash where it can do you some good. It’s the only protection you’ve got right now.”

  I glanced over at Tom who was lost in his thoughts, unaware that his unvalidated ticket and unclaimed jackpot had recently caused three guys to kill each other. Plane ride to Tahiti sounded perfect at that moment, but there was Rune to think about. And Margo, too. She wasn’t home free either.

  “Thanks, Margo, I’ll tell Tom and we’ll decide what to do.”

  I pulled over to the side of East 152nd, which doesn’t have much of a side to pull over to, so I could break this piece of Mondo news to Tom and we could think. One thought I was having was “white guy in a wheelchair?” That could have been the white guy wheelchaired up next to my own Ulysses A. Grant last night. Was Ulysses okay? Since he wasn’t listed in my inventory of the deceased, I decided to park Ulysses and his chair for a minute and worry about him later.

  “Tom, there’s a problem.”

  After about three minutes, punctuated by a lot of honking, yelling, and some finger gestures from folks whose progress up the road we were obstructing, Tom calmed down ever so slightly, and we decided to stop thinking, turn around, and head back to my place.

  Margo was right. It was time to get the ticket out of hiding, for Tom to sign it, and to let the lottery people take it from there. Surely we could figure out how to do that. We had Google like everybody else. Getting the ticket into Lottery Sanctuary wouldn’t solve our global Mondo problem, of course. But it would help with the dilemma of our needing a lot of money to protect us from the complications of winning a lot of money. At least it would be a start.

  Before we left our noisy parking spot, though, I brained up in a way that would have made Margo proud. I called the police.

  ***

  Understaffed, underfunded, and over-stretched as the police were, I was sure “I’m afraid to go home” was not going to fly as a flat-out 9-1-1 emergency, so I used the information number for the department. I described our lottery-winning/two-related-assaults/one-break-in situation to the person who took my call. I said we were returning to my house which was right across the street from one of the assault locations, and we needed police protection for that visit. I did my best to strike a nice balance between freaked and matter-of-fact.

  This person had clearly missed the news about the Mondo and therefore took that part with a grain of salt. On the basis of the beatings, she did, however, get my address and said she’d “send someone around.” The drive home took maybe seven minutes, and I knew from common neighborhood wisdom that it would have to be “shots fired” to get somebody that fast.

  We’d have to wait for the cops.

  I pulled up in front of my gate and glanced over at Tom. His handsome jaw was set, as if he couldn’t clench his teeth hard enough to stop bad stuff from happening. My heart stabbed me. “Tom.” I put my hand on his arm. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll be fine. We’re…we’re…off balance right now.”

  He snorted. This snort conveyed sarcasm like there was no tomorrow.

  “No, listen,” I persisted. “Margo’s advice was good. We need to get your ticket to a safe place and be very careful ourselves until we get all this sorted out—Tom?”

  His face, if anything, had gotten stormier. I wasn’t helping things.

  “Allie. You. Don’t. Get it.” He bit off the words. Small, angry bites. “I have worked so hard, for so long to make my life work. Everything needs to be where it belongs. My house. My job. My students. My nice predictable paycheck. That’s where my independence comes from. When any part gets disrupted—like at my place last night—I’m a blind man. Staggering. I’m lost.”

  “Shhh.” I touched my fingers to his beautiful mouth. “Shhh. Don’t say that. You are not a blind man staggering, Dr. Tom Bennington. Or lost. For one thing, I’m right here. You have me now.”

  That hauled me up short. Did he even want me here now? I faltered, “That is if—”

  “Allie, don’t. Don’t be an idiot. How about letting me be the only idiot in this car right now? You can have your turn again in a minute.” The dimple sparked like the sun poking out from behind a cloud and then vanished after the second and a half it took to warm me. “You are the only good thing that’s happened to me since I left Joe’s and walked out in front of that Hummer.”

  “Well, you do have the 550 million dollars. And change. Probably there’ll be some change.”

  He clenched up again. “That is not a good thing, Allie, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  I shook my head to rattle some sense into it. I had managed to get myself hooked up with a man who thought I was better news than money raining down from the sky. He was going to change his mind about that pretty soon, I was sure, when the money rain started. I needed to think of ways to be very nice to him. I thought of some ways, and leaned over to plant a kiss on the spot where the dimple had last been seen.

&nb
sp; “Okay. If I’m your good thing, stop grousing at me and let me help you get us out of your multimillion-dollar mess. The cops are going to take another forty minutes. We’ll just open the door and check. If it’s all clear, we’ll get the ticket out and run.”

  Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

  The front door was ajar.

  Alrighty.

  Chapter Eleven

  Between our visit with Margo and the short drive to and from nowhere, we’d not been gone all that long. However, there had been ample time for somebody to break in and ransack my house.

  Even from well outside the door, I could see plenty of stuff out of place. Flipped over. Tossed around. We scrambled backwards toward the car. I stood on the front walk, heart skittering, ears singing, the taste of metal in my mouth, and clutched on tight to Tom’s arm.

  I fished in the depths of my purse for my cell phone. “This is ridiculous. I’m calling 9-1-1.” My sweaty, shaking fingers scrabbled around, sorting tissues, pens, mints, wallet, hairbrush. Crap. “In a minute.”

  Then I noticed that he had a cell phone of his very own. In his hand.

  “Oh. You have your own, your own—”

  “Phone? Honey, this is the twenty-first century. I may be a blind man, but I’ve got a phone. And from the sound of things it may be a while before you do.”

  Cool. The stuff I didn’t know about how the world worked had increased exponentially since yesterday. It had been such a busy time.

  He called. Impressed a dispatcher with the nature of his emergency. And after a long ten minutes, a siren wove its way to us.

  Two cops, a man and a woman, emerged from their car and cautioned us to stay behind our car while they checked things out. The woman warned us that if “anything happened,” we should run. She gave the two of us a skeptical look. “Do you think you can do that?”

  We thought we could. We were almost running already.