Joanie Timpten

"Larce, you're my one call," she said into the phone, which she carefully held away from her face.

"What?"

She thought he sounded tired, uninterested. "I'm at the police station."

"This was really dumb."

Joanie was hurt. "What?" she growled.

"Why did you call me? They've connected us now."

"Sometimes when you talk I just stop listening."

She heard him sigh. She waited for the click, but it didn't come. "Are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"Tell me what to do."

"Smart enough to get this started. Not smart enough to finish it," he said.

"You're just trying to hurt me right now."

The moron Joanie was seducing to carry out her plan left in the testing numbers. He was supposed to be an expert programmer, with years and years of experience. And this kind of mistake should not have happened, but it did. Twenty people won the lottery in an unprecedented event; not twenty people in the same group or a couple of groups. Let me rephrase that: twenty tickets won the lottery all on the same night. The numbers were also sequential for the first time ever: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

She was elated at first, when she saw it working. Over the moon, as her mother would have said. But the next morning, things had worked out in her mind while she had rolled and bounced in her restless sleep. There was no way that was going to go unnoticed and she had a winning ticket. She did not even have a winning ticket.

Joanie had never attempted such a grand event, and her skin tingled as she thought about it. The pick lottery numbers were being announced while she watched television. The idea gave her a sense of purpose like she had never felt before, not when the twins were born, not when her mother had died, not when her little sister asked her about boys for the first time. The TV dinner was getting cold and the fat in the gravy was congealing into white blobs. She looked around at the her home: tilted photographs, cracks in the paint, stained carpeting, a dog too lazy to leave its bed. This was not the life she had imagined for herself when she was younger. It was not even the life she had hoped for when she was in community college failing most of her classes. But her she was, and she was seeing a way out.