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.”