Chub laughed. "Pull up your pants, for Christ's sake." He handed the ticket to Bode, who recited the numbers out loud.
"You're sure?" he kept asking.
"I wrote 'em down, Bode. Yeah, I'm sure."
"My God. My God.Twenty-eight million dollars."
"But here's what else: They's two winning tickets is what the news said."
Bode Gazzer's eyes puckered into a hard squint. "The hell you say!"
"Two tickets won. Which is still, what, fourteen million 'tween us. You believe it?"
Bode's tongue, lumpy and blotched as a toad, probed at the corners of his mouth. He looked to be working up a spit. "Who's got the other one? The other goddamn ticket."
"TV didn't say."
"How can we find out?"
Chub said, "Christ, who gives a shit. Long as we get fourteen million, I don't care if Jesse Fucking Jackson's got the other ticket."
Now Bode Gazzer's stubbled cheeks began to twitch. He fingered the Lotto coupon and said: "There must be a way to find out. Don't you think? Find out who's this shitweasel with the other ticket. There's gotta be a way."
"Why?" Chub asked, but it was awhile before he got an answer.
Sunday morning, Tom Krome refused to go to church. The woman who'd slept with him the night before Katie was her name; strawberry blond, freckles on her shoulders said they should go and seek forgiveness for what they had done.
"Which part?" asked Tom Krome.
"You know darn well."
Krome covered his face with a pillow. Katie kept talking, putting on her panty hose.
She said, "I'm sorry, Tommy, it's the way I'm made. It's time you should know."
"You think it's wrong?"
"What?"
He peeped out from beneath the pillow. "You think we did something wrong?"
"No. But God might not agree."
"So it's precautionary, this church visit."
Now Katie was at the mirror, fixing her hair in a bun. "Are you coming or not? How do I look?"
"Chaste," said Tom Krome.
The phone rang.
"Chased? No, sweetheart, that was last night. Get the telephone, please."
Katie put on her high heels, balancing storklike on elegant slender legs. "You honestly won't go? To church, Tom, I can't believe it."
"Yeah, I'm one heathen bastard." Krome picked up the phone.
She waited, arms folded, at the bedroom door.
Krome covered the receiver and said, "Sinclair."
"On a Sunday morning?"
"I'm afraid so." Krome tried to sound disappointed but he was thinking: There isa God.
Sinclair's title at The Registerwas Assistant Deputy Managing Editor of Features and Style. He relied on the fact that nobody outside the newspaper business understood the insignificance of his position. At smaller papers it was one of the least nerve-racking and lowest-profile jobs. Sinclair couldn't have been happier. Most of his reporters and editors were young and unabashedly grateful to be employed, and they did whatever Sinclair told them.
His biggest problem was Tom Krome, who also happened to be his best writer. Krome's background was hard news, which had made him impossibly cynical and suspicious of all authority. Sinclair was scared of Krome; he'd heard stories. Also, at thirty-five Krome was older by two years, so he held the advantage of age as well as experience. Sinclair realized there was no possibility, none whatsoever, that Krome would ever respect him.
His fear in fact, Sinclair's most serious concern as the ADME of Features and Style was that Krome might someday humiliate him in front of the staff. Figuratively cut off his nuts in front of Marie or Jacquelyn, or one of the clerks. Sinclair felt he could not psychologically endure such an episode, so he had resolved to keep Krome away from the newspaper office as much as possible. To that end, Sinclair committed ninety-five percent of his meager travel budget to assignments that kept Krome safely out of town. It worked out fine: Tom seemed content to be gone, and Sinclair was able to relax at the office.
The most challenging of Sinclair's responsibilities was handing out lame story assignments. Calling Tom Krome at home was particularly trying; usually Sinclair had to shout to make himself heard above the loud rock music or women's voices in the background. He could only imagine how Krome lived.
Sinclair had never before phoned on a Sunday. He apologized numerous times.
Tom Krome said: "Don't worry about it."
Sinclair was encouraged. He said, "I didn't think this one could wait."
Krome had no trouble containing his excitement. Whatever Sinclair was calling about, it wasn't breaking news. Breaking fluff, maybe, but not news. He blew a kiss to Katie and waved her off to church.
"I got a tip," Sinclair said.
"Yougot a tip."
"My brother-in-law phoned this morning. He lives over in Grange."
Krome thought: Uh-oh. Crafts show. I will murder this fucker if he makes me cover another crafts show.
But Sinclair said: "You play the lottery, Tom?"
"Only when it's up to forty million bucks or so. Anything less is chump change."
No reaction from Sinclair, who was deep into his pitch: "There were two winners last night. One in Dade County, the other in Grange. My brother-in-law knows the woman. Her name is are you ready for this? Lucks."
Inwardly Tom Krome groaned. It was the quintessential Sinclair headline: lady lucks wins the lotto!
You had your irony. You had your alliteration.
And you had your frothy, utterly forgettable feature story. Sinclair called them Feel Goods. He believed it was the mission of his department to make readers forget all the nastiness they were getting in other sections of the newspaper. He wanted them to feel good about their lives, their religion, their families, their neighbors, their world.
Once he'd posted a memo setting forth his philosophy of feature writing. Somebody Sinclair suspected Tom Krome had nailed a dead rat to it.
"How much she win?" Krome asked.
"The pot was twenty-eight million, so she'll get half. What do you think, Tom?"
"Depends."
"She works for a veterinarian. Loves animals, Roddy says."
"That's nice."
"Plus she's black."
"Ah," said Krome. The white editors who ran the newspaper loved positive stories about minorities; Sinclair obviously smelled a year-end bonus.
"Roddy says she's a trip."
Krome said, "Roddy would be your brother-in-law?" The tipster.
"Right. He says she's a character, this JoLayne Lucks." The headline dancing in Sinclair's brain actually was: lucks be a lady!
Tom Krome said: "This Roddy person is married to your sister?"
"Joan. Yes, that's right," Sinclair answered, edgily.
"What the hell's your sister doing in Grange?"
Grange was a truck-stop town known mainly for its miracles, stigmata, visitations and weeping Madonnas. It was a must-see on the Christian tourist circuit.
Sinclair said, "Joan's a teacher. Roddy works for the state." Sinclair wanted to make clear they weren't nutcases but were responsible citizens. He noticed his palms had gotten damp from talking to Tom Krome for too long.
"This Lady Lucks," Krome said, in a tone designed to cast scorn on the inevitable headline, "is she a Jesus freak? Because I'm in no mood to be preached at."
"Tom, I really wouldn't know."
"She says Jesus gave her those lucky numbers, end of story. I'm coming home. You understand?"
Sinclair said, "Roddy didn't mention anything like that."
Solemnly Krome played his ace. "Think of the letters we'll get."
"What do you mean?" Sinclair hated letters almost as much as he hated telephone calls. The best stories were those that produced no reaction, one way or another, from readers. "What kind of mail?" he asked.
"Tons," Krome replied, "if we do a piece saying Jesus is a gambling toot. Can you imagine? Hell, you'll probably hear from Ralph Reed himself. Next they'll be boycotting our advertisers."
Firmly Sinclair said: "So let's stay away from that angle. By all means." After a pause: "Maybe this isn't such a hot idea."