A novel
Lucky
Winner
A decent, fading, recently divorced man decides to trade every human bond he has for money — and gets exactly what he asked for.
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.
The scheme
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.
| Combinations on the board · C(44,6) | 7,059,052 |
| Lines on one Combo-12 slip | 924 |
| Price of one slip | $924 |
| Tickets two people can buy in four days | 5,040 |
| Coverage achieved | two lines in three |
| The prize | $27,140,000 |
Everything spent was clean, lawful, documented and traceable to the dollar. The investigation, when it came, returned boring.
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!
- The fuel polisher — suppresses the infection in the tanks. It never cures it. Somebody has to keep running it.
- The glass bowls — the one gauge on the boat Nora knew how to read, taught to her once, early, filed with his tediums.
- The water traps — bled monthly for a year, by a man who ran his own fuel system, until he stopped.
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 two years old, without a test drive, off the reliability data. The Lexus was Jon whispering.
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. Beside a porch last painted when his mother was alive to ask.
Black Jeep
Hers. Not the dually. The one the telegraph mentioned only as the black Jeep, and never once put her behind the wheel of.
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
Parked where the dually had gleamed. He moved into the room his father slept in at nine.
Add photographs
One image per vehicle, shot the same way — three-quarter front, available light, no styling. The uniformity is the argument.
The week
Four days, three hundred tills
More rooms
What else belongs here
Ideas, ranked by how much they'd add. The rule I'd hold to: the site should work the way the book works — artifacts, not explanations. Show the thing; let the reader assemble it.
The map of the money
Kamloops to Burnaby to three hundred tills across BC, then one wire to Belize. Four frames. The whole plot is a geography.
The paper
This is a novel about documents. The ILLUSTRATION ONLY sheet. Article eleven on page thirty-one. Marty's file notes: the most valuable sentence in this file is the one I did not write.
A note on the numbers
The arithmetic appendix — cut from the book because the book explains itself. This is its correct home: a reader who finished and came looking.
The cabin
A small cold lake, a road the plow forgets until January, a new sauna, a trench to the gravel shoulder. Never named, and it should stay unnamed here too.
The lanyard
Seven photographs of a badge on a cord. The book's quietest motif and its whole argument about institutions.
The storm
The marine forecast for that Friday. A radar frame, whited out by its own rain.
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.
Character dossiers
Only as records — a claims file, a registry entry, a photograph with a number beside it. Never as biography. Biography would break the method.