The Winner

by David Baldacci

  Everything will be all right, LuAnn.” Roger Davis, the young, handsome man who had announced the lottery drawing, said these words as he patted her on the hand. “I know you have to be nervous but I’ll be right there with you. We’ll make it as painless as possible for you, I give you my word,” he said gallantly.

  They were in a plush room inside the lottery building, just down the corridor from the large auditorium where a mass of press and regular folk awaited the latest lottery winner’s arrival. LuAnn wore a pale blue knee-length dress with matching shoes, her hair and makeup impeccable thanks to the in-house staff at the Lottery Commission. The cut on her jaw had healed enough that she had opted for makeup instead of the bandage.

  “You look beautiful, LuAnn,” said Davis. “I can’t remember a winner looking so ravishing, I mean that.” He sat down right next to her, his leg touching hers.

  LuAnn flashed him a quick smile, slid a couple of inches away, and turned her attention to Lisa. “I don’t want Lisa to have to go out there. All them lights and people would just scare her to death.”

  “That’s fine. She can stay in here. We’ll have someone watching her of course, every minute. Security is very tight here as you can imagine.” He paused while he once again took in LuAnn’s shapely form. “We’ll announce that you have a daughter, though. That’s why your story is so great. Young mother and daughter, all this wealth. You must be so happy.” He patted her on the knee and then let his hand linger for a moment before pulling it away. She wondered again whether he was in on all of it. Whether he knew she had won an enormous fortune by cheating. He looked the type, she concluded. The kind who would do anything for money. She imagined he would be very well paid for helping to pull off something this big.

  “How long until we go out there?” she asked.

  “About ten minutes.” He smiled at her again and then said as casually as possible, “Uh, you weren’t exactly clear on your marital status. Will your husband—”

  “I’m not married,” LuAnn said quickly.

  “Oh, well, will the father of the child be attending?” He added quickly, “We just have to know for scheduling purposes.”

  LuAnn looked dead at him. “No, he won’t.”

  Davis smiled confidently and inched closer. “I see. Hmmm.” He made a steeple with his hands and rested them against his lips for a moment and then he laid one arm casually across the back of her seat. “Well, I don’t know what your plans are, but if you need anyone to show you around town I am absolutely here for you, LuAnn, twenty-four hours a day. I know after living all your life in a small town, that the big city” — Davis lifted his other arm dramatically toward the ceiling — “must be very overwhelming. But I know it like the back of my hand. The best restaurants, theaters, shopping. We could have a great time.” He edged still closer, his eyes hugging the contours of her body as his fingers drifted toward her shoulder.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, I think maybe you got the wrong idea. Lisa’s father ain’t coming for the press conference, but he’s coming up after. He had to get leave first.”

  “Leave?”

  “He’s in the Navy. He’s with the SEALs.” She shook her head and stared off as if digging up some shocking memories. “Let me tell you, it downright scares me some of the stuff he’s told me about. But if there’s anybody that can take care of himself it’s Frank. Why, he beat six guys unconscious in a bar one time ’cause they were coming on to me. He probably would’ve killed them if the police hadn’t pulled him off, and it took five of them to do it, big, strong cops, too.”

  Davis’s mouth dropped open and he scooted away from LuAnn. “Good Lord!”

  “Oh, but don’t say nothing about that at the press conference, Mr. Davis. What Frank does is all top-secret-like and he’d get real pissed at you if you said anything. Real pissed!” She stared intently at him, watching the waves of fear pour over his pretty-boy features.

  Davis stood up abruptly. “No, of course not, not one word. I swear.” Davis licked his lips and put a shaky hand through his heavily moussed hair. “I’d better go check on things, LuAnn.” He managed a weak smile and gave her a shaky thumbs-up.

  She returned the gesture. “Thanks so much for understanding, Mr. Davis.” After he had gone, LuAnn turned back to Lisa. “You ain’t never gonna have to do that, baby doll. And pretty soon, your momma ain’t gonna have to do it no more either.” She cradled Lisa against her chest and stared across at the clock on the wall, watching the time tick down.

  Charlie glanced around the crowded auditorium while he methodically pushed his way toward the front of the stage. He stopped at a spot where he could see clearly and waited. He would’ve liked to be up on the stage with LuAnn, giving her what he knew would be much needed moral support. However, that was out of the question. He had to remain in the background; raising suspicion was not part of his job description. He would see LuAnn after the press conference was completed. He also would have to tell her his decision about whether he would accompany her or not. The problem was he hadn’t made up his mind yet. He stuffed his hand in his pocket for a cigarette and then remembered smoking wasn’t permitted in the building. He really was craving the soothing influences of the tobacco and for a brief instant he contemplated sneaking outside for a quick one, but there wasn’t enough time.

  He sighed and his broad shoulders collapsed. He had spent the better part of his life roaming from point to point with nothing in the way of a comprehensive plan, nothing resembling long-term goals. He loved kids and would never have any of his own. He was paid well, but while money went a long way toward improving his physical surroundings it didn’t really contribute to his genuine overall happiness. At his age, he figured this was as good as it was going to get. The avenues he had taken as a young man had pretty much dictated what the remaining years of his life would be like. Until now. LuAnn Tyler had offered him a way out of that. He held no delusions that she was interested in him sexually, and in the cold face of reality, away from her unpretentious and yet incredibly seductive presence, Charlie had concluded that he did not want that either. What he wanted was her sincere friendship, her goodness — two elements that had been appallingly lacking in his life. And that brought him back to the choice. Should he go or not? If he went, he had little doubt that he would enjoy the hell out of LuAnn and Lisa, with an added plus of being a father figure for the little girl. For a few years anyway. But he had sat up most of the night thinking about what would happen after those first few years.

  It was inevitable that beautiful LuAnn, with her new wealth, and the refinement that would come from those riches, would be the target of dozens of the world’s most eligible men. She was very young, had one child, and would want more. She would marry one of these men. That man would assume the responsibilities of fathering Lisa, and properly so. He would be the man in LuAnn’s life. And where would that leave Charlie? He edged forward, squeezing between two CNN cameramen as he thought about this again. At some point, Charlie figured, he would be compelled to leave them. It would be too awkward. It wasn’t like he was family or anything. And when that time came it would be painful, more painful than allowing his body to be used for a punching bag during his youth. After spending only a few days with them, he felt a bond with LuAnn and Lisa that he had not managed to form in over ten years of marriage with his ex-wife. What would it be like after three or four years together? Could he calmly walk away from Lisa and her mother without suffering an irreparably broken heart, a screwed-up psyche? He shook his head. What a tough guy he had turned out to be. He barely knew these simple people from the South and he was now engulfed in a life-churning decision the consequences of which he was extrapolating out years into the future.

  A part of him said simply go for the ride and enjoy the hell out of yourself. You could be dead from a heart attack next year, what the hell did it matter? The other part of him, though, he was afraid, was winning the day. He knew that he could be LuAnn’s friend for the rest of his life, but
he didn’t know if he could do it close-up, every day, with the knowledge that it might end abruptly. “Shit,” he muttered. It came down to pure envy, he decided. If he were only twenty — he shrugged — okay, thirty years younger. Envy of the guy who would eventually win her. Win her love, a love that he was sure would last forever, at least on her side. And heaven help the poor man who betrayed her. She was a hellcat, that was easy to see. A firecracker with a heart of gold, but that was a big part of the attraction: Polar opposites like that in the same fragile shell of skin and bones and raw nerve endings was a rare find.

  Charlie abruptly stopped his musings and looked up at the stage. The entire crowd seemed to tense all at once, like a biceps flexing and forming a ridge of muscle. Then the cameras started clicking away as LuAnn, tall, queenly, and calm, walked gracefully into their field of vision and stood before them all. Charlie shook his head in silent wonderment. “Damn,” he said under his breath. She had just made his decision that much harder.

  Sheriff Roy Waymer nearly spit his mouthful of beer clear across the room as he watched LuAnn Tyler waving back at him from the TV. “Jesus, Joseph, Mary!” He looked over at his wife, Doris, whose eyes were boring into the twenty-seven-inch screen.

  “You been looking for her all over the county and there she is right there in New York City,” Doris exclaimed. “The gall of that girl. And she just won all that money.” Doris said this bitterly as she wrung her hands together; twenty-four torn-up lottery tickets resided in the trash can in her back yard.

  Waymer wrestled his considerable girth out of his La-Z-Boy and headed toward the telephone. “I phoned up to the train stations around here and at the airport in Atlanta, but I hadn’t heard nothing back yet. I didn’t take her to be heading up to no New York, though. I didn’t put no APB out on LuAnn because I didn’t think she’d be able to get out of the county, much less the state. I mean, the girl ain’t even got a car. And she had the baby and all. I thought for sure she’d just hightail it over to some friend’s house.”

  “Well, it sure looks like she slipped right out on you.” Doris pointed at LuAnn on the TV. “Right or wrong there ain’t many people that look like that, that’s for sure.”

  “Well, Mother,” he said to his wife, “we don’t exactly have the manpower of the FBI down here. With Freddie out with his back I only got two uniformed officers on duty. And the state police are up to their eyeballs in work; they couldn’t spare nobody.” He picked up the phone.

  Doris looked at him anxiously. “You think LuAnn killed Duane and that other boy?”

  Waymer held the phone up to his ear and shrugged. “LuAnn could kick the crap out of most men I know. She sure as hell could Duane. But that other guy was a hoss, almost three hundred pounds.” He started punching in numbers on the phone. “But she coulda snuck up behind him and smashed that phone over his head. She’d been in a fight. More than one person saw her with a bandage on her chin that day.”

  “Drugs was behind it, that’s for sure,” Doris said. “That poor little baby in that trailer with all them drugs.”

  Waymer was nodding his head. “I know that.”

  “I bet’cha LuAnn was the brains behind it all. She’s sharp, all right, we all know that. And she was always too good for us. She tried to hide it, but we could all see through that. She didn’t belong here, she wanted to get out, but she didn’t have no way. Drug money, that was her way, you mark my words, Roy.”

  “I hear you, Mother. Except she don’t need drug money no more.” He nodded toward the TV.

  “You best hurry up then, before she gets away.”

  “I’ll contact the police up in New York to go pick her up.”

  “Think they’ll do that?”

  “Mother, she’s a possible suspect in a double murder investigation,” he said importantly. “Even if she ain’t done nothing wrong, she’s probably gonna be what they call a material witness.”

  “Yeah, but you think those Yankee police up in New York gonna care about that? Huh!”

  “Police is police, Doris, North or South. The law’s the law.”

  Unconvinced of the virtues of her Northern compatriots, Doris snorted and then suddenly looked hopeful. “Well, if she’s convicted wouldn’t she have to give back the money she won?” Doris looked back at the TV, at LuAnn’s smiling face, wondering whether to go out to the trash and try to reconstruct all those lottery tickets. “She sure as heck wouldn’t need all that money in prison, would she?”

  Sheriff Waymer didn’t answer. He was now trying to get through to the NYPD.

  LuAnn held the big check, waved, and smiled at the crowds and answered a barrage of questions thrown at her from all sides of the vast room. Her picture was transported across the United States and then across the world.

  Had she definitive plans for the money? If so, what were they?

  “You’ll know,” LuAnn answered. “You’ll see, but you’ll just have to wait.”

  There were a series of predictably stupid questions such as “Do you feel lucky?”

  “Incredibly,” she responded. “More than you’ll ever know.”

  “Will you spend it all in one place?”

  “Not likely unless it’s a really, really big place.”

  “Will you help your family?”

  “I’ll help all the people I care about.”

  Three times her hand was sought in matrimony. She answered each suitor differently and with polite humor but the bottom line was always “No.” Charlie silently fumed at these exchanges; and then, checking his watch, he made his way out of the room.

  After more questions, more photos, and more laughter and smiles, the press conference was finally over and LuAnn was escorted off the stage. She returned to the holding room, quickly changed into slacks and a blouse, erased all the makeup from her face, piled her long hair under a cowboy hat, and picked up Lisa. She checked her watch. Barely twenty minutes had passed since she had been introduced to the world as the new lottery winner. She expected that the local sheriff would be contacting the New York police by now. Everyone from LuAnn’s hometown watched the lottery drawing religiously including Sheriff Roy Waymer. The timing would be very tight.

  Davis leaned his head in the door. “Uh, Ms. Tyler, there’s a car waiting for you at the rear entrance to the building. I’ll have someone escort you down if you’re ready.”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.” When he turned to leave, LuAnn called after him. “If anybody shows up asking for me, I’ll be at my hotel.”

  Davis looked at her coldly. “Are you expecting anyone?”

  “Lisa’s father, Frank.”

  Davis’s face tightened. “And you’re staying at?”

  “The Plaza.”

  “Of course.”

  “But please don’t tell anybody else where I am. I haven’t seen Frank in a while. He’s been on maneuvers for almost three months. So we don’t want to be disturbed.” She arched her eyebrows wickedly and smiled. “You know what I mean?”

  Davis managed a very insincere smile and made a mock bow. “You can trust me implicitly, Ms. Tyler. Your chariot awaits.”

  Inwardly, LuAnn smiled. Now she was certain that when the police came for her, they would be directed as fast as possible to the Plaza Hotel. That would gain her the precious moments she would need to escape this town, and this country. Her new life was about to begin.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The rear exit was very private and thus very quiet. A black stretch limo confronted LuAnn as she left the building. The chauffeur tipped his cap to her and held open the door. She got in and settled Lisa in the seat next to her.

  “Good work, LuAnn. Your performance was flawless,” Jackson said.

  LuAnn nearly screamed out as she jerked around and stared into the dark recesses of the limo’s far corner. All the interior lights in the rear of the limo were off except for a solitary one directly over her head that suddenly came on, illuminating her. She felt as though she were back on the stage at the lo
ttery building. She could barely make out his shape as he hunkered back into his seat.

  His voice drifted out to her. “Really very poised and dignified, a touch of humor when it was called for, the reporters eat that up, you know. And of course the looks to top it all off. Tres marriage proposals during one press conference is certainly a record as far as I’m aware.”

  LuAnn composed herself and settled back into her seat as the limo proceeded down the street. “Thank you.”

  “Quite frankly I was concerned that you would make a complete fool of yourself. Nothing against you of course. As I said before, you are an intelligent young woman; however, anyone, no matter their sophistication, thrust into a strange situation, is more apt to fail than not, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “Excuse me?” Jackson leaned forward slightly but still remained hidden from her view. “Practice with what?”

  LuAnn stared toward the darkened corner, her vision blocked by the shining light. “Strange situations.”

  “You know, LuAnn, you really do amaze me sometimes, you really do. In some limited instances your perspicacity rivals my own and I don’t say that lightly.” He stared at her for several more seconds and then opened a briefcase lying on the seat next to him and pulled out several pieces of paper. As he sat back against the soft leather, a smile played across his features and a sigh of contentment escaped his lips.

  “And now, LuAnn, it’s time to discuss the conditions.”

  LuAnn fumbled with her blouse before crossing her legs. “We need to talk about something first.”

  Jackson cocked his head. “Really? And what might that be?”