A novel
Lucky
Winner
He won twenty-seven million dollars and buried two friends.
Nobody did anything wrong.
It had given him everything. It had taken nothing he had not handed it. He could not call it a bad trade. A fair one. He was almost sure. The almost was what was left.
A DREAMER, A DOER
AND A SON OF A BITCH
Evidence
Nobody buys the whole board. Not me, not anybody.
A provincial six-of-forty-four game has 7,059,052 combinations. Past a certain jackpot, buying most of the board stops being madness and becomes a trade. What he needs is a front man, and a monitoring system looking somewhere else.
Everything spent was clean, lawful, documented and traceable to the dollar. The investigation, when it came, returned boring.
Junk mail, opened, turned over.
Evidence
The paper
A novel about documents. Three of them decide everything, and not one is a forgery.
Marty's file, November
The most valuable sentence in this file is the one I did not write.
Marty's file, December
Nobody will ever look at this. It only has to exist.
The one page he would not mail
ILLUSTRATION ONLY
ASSUMED PRIZE: $24,000,000
Handed across a desk in Burnaby in February. Never posted, never filed, never wrong.
Article eleven, page thirty-one
Standard survivorship. A two-man partnership cannot run with a dead partner in it — probate would freeze the whole structure for years, in two countries — so on the death of either partner, the partnership property vests in the survivor's trust, entire.
Read aloud, on the record, by a lawyer who offered them independent counsel first. Both men signed six places. Nothing was hidden.
Evidence
The sauna
Cedar, black steel, one plane of roof.
Evidence
Four days, three hundred tills
Evidence
The map of the money
Four moves. The whole plot is a geography, and only one leg of it is offshore.
Dirty money moves like it is being chased. It hops. This went once, in daylight, with its papers in its hand — and then it sat still forever.
Nora's map. Folded to the crease of the week — one dot to a counter, the tally in pencil down the margin.
Evidence
Five vehicles, five economies
This book does character through machinery. What a person drives, how they bought it, and whether anyone was meant to notice.
Silver-grey Lexus
Bought used, based on the reliability data alone. Body-on-frame, a Land Cruiser underneath, almost nothing on it that can break.
The Yota
Two years of weekends, the two of them; then a year of weekends, mostly Jon; then just — . Finished alone. His son has never sat in it.
2019 Dodge dually
A truck that announced him long before he did.
Black Jeep
Hers. SRT. Blackout. Chip, pipe, custom wheels.
Grey minivan, base trim
One hubcap scuffed. The car-seat smell of somebody else's family still in the carpet. On the corporate card, for four days.
A work van
Stand-up white contractor van marked on the side with a business name and phone number.
Evidence
The Lucky Winner
A Kanter Custom 52 — fifty-two feet of welded aluminum out of a yard in St. Thomas, Ontario. Twin inboard Cummins. Dave bought her in month three and named her after the cheque. She is also, eventually, the weapon, and nobody ever touches her.
Her name is on the transom. It is also the last thing Dave ever says: Me and the Lucky Winner. Back for dinner!
Plate II · The fuel system — drawn to the same line as the vehicles. Specified by the boat's first owner for tropical service. Installed, plumbed, wired — and never commissioned. He did not live to switch it on.
The polisher — Reverso FPS 210, 24 volt, on its weekly program. Day zero is the day the hum stops.
The glass bowls — Racor 1000MA turbines, one per engine, valved to run singly. The one gauge on the boat Nora knew how to read.
The water traps — self-venting drains, bled monthly for a year by a man who ran his own fuel system. Until he stopped.
Jamie's Gibson. A guitar from before Jon was born, the finish gone off the top. Traded across a table like a chip because it was the fastest way to close.
Evidence
The storm
NATIONAL METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE — BELIZE COASTAL WATERS FORECAST Issued 0400 hours, Friday 12 November 2027 SYNOPSIS. A trough extending southeast off the mainland continues to interact with moist unstable air over the western Caribbean. Instability increasing through the period. INSHORE AND REEF WATERS. Winds east to southeast 10 to 15 knots, becoming variable near convection. Seas 2 to 4 feet. Scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms, becoming widespread by afternoon. Locally higher winds and seas in the vicinity of thunderstorms. OUTSIDE THE REEF. East-southeast 15 to 20 knots. Seas 4 to 6 feet, higher in and near convection. SMALL CRAFT SHOULD EXERCISE CAUTION.
On the second day a dive charter found her, swamped and rolling awash against the outside of the reef four miles south of the cut, her hull whole. They towed her in. They found none of the people.
