Jackpot

The back-BACK room at Leo’s Bar & Grill is no place for a 13-year-old girl to be—especially after midnight.

‘Cuz like mom always said—past tense—nothing good happens after midnight.

She’s heard the stories around the neighborhood; she knows what goes down at Leo’s.

And seeing as it’s now going on 1 am, and Noreen Murphy sits across from one of the biggest bookmakers in the Garden State, and sits next to her deadbeat and nearly beaten-to-death dad, who in turn is flanked by the goons who roughed up her father, this is what her mother would have called “a real Mongolian cockup.”

(Which, admittedly, sounded A LOT better in mom’s signature lyrical brogue.)

But Leo Fitzgerald, the aforementioned big bookmaker, has other things on his mind, things Noreen would rather not get into at the moment.

“Whattya mean, you don’t wanna get into it?” huffed Leo Fitz as he’s known around their neighborhood. “I’m not asking you, I’m TELLING you to tell me! What’s this your dad says about you being a psychic?!”

“I ain’t psychic, okay? I am NOT Ms. Cleo! I can’t read your mind or anything like that, okay? I’m whatchya call precognitive, or clairvoyant. I get, like, glimpses of the future sometimes? Like, a picture pops in my head, and it’s there for like a coupla seconds, and then it always comes true. But there’s a catch…”

"Of course there is,” spits Leo Fitz. “There’s ALWAYS a catch with scammers like you, you little hood rat, the girl punk with the dead-from-cancer mom and the soon-to-be-dead-in-a-ditch father, who’s into me for $20 large. 20 Gs!! Damn degenerate gambler! He couldn’t pick a winner if it bit him on the ass.

“He’s gonna make you an orphan—unless you start showing me how it works. Right now.”

Noreen sat silently for a few beats, just taking in the room. She surveyed the goons, glanced at her unconscious dad, then turned back to look Leo Fitz square in his beady, black and bloodshot eyes.

She crosses her legs luxuriously, lithely, like a predator cat. Crosses her arms across her chest, defiant.

And smirks.

“I predict, Leo, that you’re gonna have one of your goons here get me a bottle of Stoli and a shot glass so that I can get a good buzz on and show you how ‘it’ works,” quips Noreen, adding the air quotes around “it” for good measure, just to be extra annoying.

“Especially once you read…this,” as Noreen pushes a small sealed envelope, one that looks like a greeting card, across Leo’s desk.

Leo looks at it for a second or two like someone just crapped in his cornflakes, but then, overcome with curiosity like that infamous killed cat, he picks it up at the corner with two fingers, grabs a letter opener from his desk, slits open the top, and extracts a folded piece of plain stationery.

He unfolds it, reads it. Reads it again. Looks over the paper at Noreen. Reads it again. Then reads it again, and puts it down. He reaches across his desk for a large ceramic ashtray, puts a flame to it with his Zippo lighter, then waits for it to burn all the way to ash before he looks up at Noreen, a mixture of fear, respect, and wonder inhabiting his face.

“There’s no way you could possibly know that,” Leo Fitz accuses.

“And yet…here we are,” Noreen says, spreading her arms wide as if to give the whole world a big hug.

“Tommy, run to the bar and get little miss here a bottle of Stoli and a shot glass.”

Tommy knows better than to question the order. He’s back in sixty seconds with the Stoli and the glass.

Without a word, Noreen pours herself a shot of vodka and tosses it back. She than proceeds to down five more shots in the span of ten minutes, and when she slams the empty down on the last round, she almost misses the desk and practically catapults out of her folding chair. Righting herself, Noreen overcorrects and almost capsizes the other way, but stops herself by grabbing her unconscious father’s arm.

“Ugh, I think that arm’s broken,” he slurs before passing out again.

“Okay, now here we go. See, the thing is, my brain needs a little…lubrication…before it’s willing to tap into the ether and show me the future. Here’s how we can make a quick buck, okay? Quick Draw still running for the night?”

“Yeah, till 4am. Why?” Asks Leo Fitz.

“I’ll get you the money dad owes…but you’ve got play the numbers I tell you on Quick Draw, and cover me for the initial wager. You gotta play a ten-spot. Deal?”

A big smile spreads across Leo Fitz’s face. He opens the center desk drawer, pulls out a dangerous looking .38 handgun with black electrical tape on the grip, places that on the desk pointed at Noreen’s dad, then goes back into the drawer and withdraws a compact leather notebook.


It was black, with a black elastic band holding it shut tight, and it had a black bookmark built in, placed about a third of the way into the notebook. It was a Moleskine, the fancy Italian stationery maker; Noreen knew it because her mother had one just like it, but in Burgundy red, and she’d kept it as her diary, and she’d gotten it on holiday in Italy as a kid when she still lived in the old country. Now it was under Noreen’s mattress, a precious keepsake, the sole remaining link to her deceased mother.

The irony didn’t escape Noreen. (Yeah, she knew what irony was, even if she hated English class, but that wasn’t because she didn’t like reading or couldn’t absorb the material, it was because of her pervy teacher Mr. Lutz, aka Birdman, who was always trying to peek up the girls’ skirts or down their shirts. GROSS!)

“Write down the numbers here in my little black book,” explains Leo Fitz like he’s talking to a child. “I run my whole organization with just this. I get a new one every year, then file ‘em away in my personal safe when they're all filled up.

“Anything important, anything I need to remember, anything I don’t wanna forget, I write it down in here. When you write something down, that makes it official…permanent, even.

“Tommy’ll run over to the machine and play your numbers, and I’ll be happy to stake your wager. But it’s coming out of YOUR end when they hit,” Leo Fitz snickers.

Leo spins the little black book towards Noreen, and hands her a cheap black ballpoint pen, a see-through Bic like she uses to shoot spit balls at the jocks during lunch. Noreen scribbles out ten numbers, blows on the page for a second or two to make sure the ink doesn’t smudge, then closes the book, slides it back to Leo Fitz across the desk, and puts her long messy blond hair into a loose bun, which she holds fast with the black Bic pen.

“Good luck, little miss,” chuckles Leo Fitz as he passes the notebook and a couple of bucks over to Tommy, who trots out to the main bar so he can play the numbers before the next drawing, which happen every four minutes.

The other goon, who’s name we’ll never know, has the foresight to flip on the QuickDraw monitor in Leo’s office so they can watch the drawing together.

“Let me be very clear here,” Leo Fitz threatens, "If these numbers don’t hit, and I don’t get my $20 grand, your deadbeat, degenerate dad is deader than disco—and so are you, little miss. I don’t like killing kids, but I can’t let ANYONE get over on me. Gotta protect my rep at all costs.”

It's time. Leo Fitz and his goons watch the drawing intently. It’s game #361395. They look at their tickets as electronic balls bounce across the screen on a field of numbers between 1 and 80.

Twenty numbers get selected by an algorithm somewhere in a magic box and light up on screen. It takes less than a minute.

When all is said and done, Leo Fitz and his goons look at his ticket.

They look at the screen.

They look back at their tickets.

The goons stare at Leo Fitz, while Leo Fitz stares at Tommy. (He can’t remember the other one’s name, and does’t want to make eye contact and get called out for not knowing.)

The goons and Leo Fitz look over at Noreen.

Who’s smiling a cat-just-ate-the-canary grin. “So, how’d we do?”

Leo Fitz shakes his head in utter disbelief. “I can’t believe it. I ain’t never seen anything like that in my life. You hit all ten numbers on the ten-spot. The payout is…I can’t believe I’m saying this…it’s…$100K. One-hundred-thousand dollars.”

“I know I’m a hood rat who’s failing trigonometry," Noreen says, "But I’m pretty sure that $100,000 is more than the $20 thousand my dad owes. So I’ll be needing a receipt to show his debt is paid, and then I’ll be taking a 40 percent finders fee on the rest of the winnings—which is $32K for us and you keep the rest. Do we have a deal?”

Noreen sticks her hand out across the desk, waiting for a handshake.

“I don’t have that kind of cash around here this time of night. Come around tomorrow around lunchtime and we’ll have it for you. That okay?” Leo Fitz says as he grips Noreen’s hand and pumps it three times.

“It’ll do. Can you have the guys drive us home? My dad can’t really walk under his own power.”

Leo Fitz nods at the goons, who grab Noreen’s dad under his arms, haul him out of his chair, and drag-slash-carry him out of the back-BACK office. Noreen gets up to follow them out, but Leo Fitz pats the air, asking her to wait a minute. “I’m sorry about what we did to your father—that was just business. And I personally apologize for saying that about your mother. I hope you can forgive me and we can move past this to discuss an ongoing…business arrangement.”

“Here’s the discussion, Leo: You put up the cash, I’ll do my thing, you place the bets. You keep 60 percent of everything we win. You put the rest in various accounts for me, and start putting aside a retirement fund for my dad. I’ll work a couple hours here each day after school, and when I hit eighteen, we’ll discuss next steps.

“But know this: Every time I use this…ability…someone dies. Sometimes it’s total strangers, sometimes it’s people…close to me. Knowing this—you still wanna partner up?”

Leo Fitz doesn't hesitate, the answer's out of his mouth before the question's finished ringing in his ears. “Absolutely.”

“Then get out your little black book, Leo—you’re gonna want to write this down…”