Finders Keepers

Sean Costello

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Red Tower Publications

Sudbury, Ontario

Copyright © 2015 by
Sean Costello

Cover art Copyright @2015 Jason Moser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Red Tower Publications

Sudbury, Ontario

www.seancostello.net

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

Finders Keepers / Sean Costello
– 2nd
 
eBook edition (2015)

eBook ISBN - 9780973146950

Print ISBN 9780973146905 (2003 – Red Tower Publications)

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THERE WAS A feeling Keith Whipple got every time he walked through the door of Rudy’s Quik-Mart. It was the product of an array of sensations: the fragrance of strong, fresh-brewed coffee; the sweet aroma of expensive cigars; the pleased sparkle in Rudy’s eyes when they met Keith’s; the vaguely startling realization induced by this atmosphere that he was retired, without obligation. It made him feel fine, and since he was clear-headed and without serious ailment, it made him feel young again, too.

Rudy turned to the cheerful sound of the bells strung over the opening door. As usual Keith was his first customer.

“Herr Whipple—” he said.

“Stamp your feet,” Keith said, dutifully complying. “I swear, Rudy, you need a new rap.”

Hiding a grin, Rudy limped over to his percolators. His left leg was a monstrosity, the result of a mining accident thirty years ago, the skin from the knee down like that of an iguana, scaly, a cadaverous looking gray-brown. Keith had actually felt ill the first time Rudy showed it to him.

“Coffee?” Rudy said, already pouring.

“Black and nasty,” Keith said, completing the ritual exchange. He joined Rudy at the soda shop-style counter, the only anomaly in the otherwise standard convenience store. Behind the counter exotic brews perked on a half-dozen hot plates and a selection of cigars stored securely under glass waited for the discerning patron. A small magazine rack featured only
Smoke
and
Cigar Aficionado
. It was a personal touch, a nod to bygone days, and Keith felt right at home here. A creature of habit, he’d been coming into Rudy’s every weekday morning since his daughter Kate was nine—fifteen years of coffee, conversation and good-natured gossip, Rudy a connoisseur of all three. The only tough part was keeping his mitts off those cigars. Kate had finally browbeaten him into quitting two years ago, after a suspicious opacity on a routine chest X-ray gave them both a scare. It turned out to be scar tissue, the remains of some benign infection he’d picked up as a kid swamping out the hen house on his parents’ farm, but Kate had effectively stamped out his pack-a-day habit, including the cigar jones he’d picked up hanging around with Rudy. On the job he’d looked forward to those cigars, comfortable in his chair in the projection booth at the Grande Theater, Sudbury’s oldest movie house, alone up there in a haze of flickering light and swirling smoke. When she was younger Kate had often joined him, complaining mildly about the smoke.

He shed his parka and draped it over one of the chrome and red leather stools. Rudy slid over a steaming cup of coffee. “Try this,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron, “but be careful. It’s a man’s brew.” He glanced over his shoulder at the tail end of a news break on the wall-mounted TV, an old black and white Zenith that was always turned on; Rudy had scotch-taped a length of plastic garland to the consul, his nod to the Yuletide.

Keith took a cautious sip. “Hot. Delicious.”

“So what do you know that I don’t?” Rudy said, facing Keith now, leaning his big hands on the counter to get the weight off his leg.

“Did I tell you Katie got accepted in the film school at UCLA?”

Rudy said, “Not counting the last twenty times?” and Keith grinned. “Gonna miss her, huh.”

“Sure am,” Keith said. “But it’s long overdue. She’s a gifted writer. The script she just finished? Loved it. It’s a blend of crime, science fiction and black comedy that’s really got legs. But she needs maturing. Not to mention the exposure; her work needs to be seen. No way she’s gonna get all that up here in Sudbury. Besides, the last thing I want is to see her hanging around town just to keep her old man company.”
Brave words
, Keith thought, picturing life without her and not liking it much. Cancer had taken his wife when Kate was six, a protracted, painful death, and he and Kate had been pretty much inseparable ever since. They shared a duplex on Howey Drive, living modestly but in comfort, the last mortgage payment made three years ago. “She needs to be where the action is,” Keith said. “It’s the nature of that business.”

“I hear you,” Rudy said. “But look at the bright side. Come September you can party every night ’til she makes it big, then move down to California and sponge off her the rest of your life. Fraternize with the help.”

“There’s that,” Keith said, putting his cup down, a storm warning on the TV catching his attention. Rudy followed his gaze, saying, “More snow. Can you believe it?”

Keith glanced out the storefront window. “I don’t buy it,” he said. He’d walked to Rudy’s as he always did, the winter sun warm on his face, no hint from his joints about lousy weather. But in the Canadian north, you never could tell. He took another sip of his coffee, then got his reading glasses on and fished his wallet out of his parka, the weather forgotten. “Gotta check my numbers,” he said.

Rudy spoke to his back as he made his way to the lottery display. “You hear about Howie Tremblay’s kid?”

Keith said, “The mental defective?” and dug a sheath of tickets out of his wallet, checking them against the posted winning numbers.

“The very one. The coppers caught him up at Bell Junior High yesterday, poking his wares through the cyclone fence for the amusement of the teenyboppers. When the dopey bastard tried to run, his johnny froze to the fence like a wet tongue. Son of a bitch got a free circumcision…”

Rudy’s voice faded to a drone in Keith’s brain, every neuron suddenly focused on the apparent enigma that now appeared before his eyes. There were three sets of two-digit numbers on the ticket in his hand, six numbers in each set. The series in the first two sets were nowhere close to the winning numbers, no confusion there. But what utterly fouled Keith’s normal lines of perception was the fact that the third set matched the winners exactly.

The right numbers. The right order. The right lottery. The right date.

Keith realized he wasn’t breathing. He commanded his lungs to inflate, but in the same instant his gaze ticked to the dollar value attached to this draw and his throat sealed off completely.

God in heaven
, he thought.
I’m gonna die before I can spend a dime.
Then Rudy’s voice came through—“Keith, you okay?”—and his lungs admitted a thin slip of air.

Rudy came around the counter in a hurry, certain his old friend was having a coronary; Keith’s usually placid face was beet red, the veins in his neck standing out like cables. But before Rudy had closed half the distance, Keith darted past him in the opposite direction, almost bowling him over.

“Jesus, Rudy, move your ass. I gotta call Katie.”

He grabbed the phone behind the counter and punched in the numbers, staring wide-eyed at Rudy as it rang, holding the ticket up for Rudy to see.

“Ten million bucks, old buddy,” Keith said. “Ten million
bucks
.”

* * *

To avoid the congestion of the main streets Kate Whipple had mapped out an alternate route to head office. It took her through a maze of residential streets narrowed by snow banks and illegally parked cars, the big van barely squeaking through in places, but it suited her temperament better than the ill-mannered, bumper-to-bumper grind of morning traffic. She sometimes felt that all the really shitty drivers in the country had been secretly exiled to her home town, then encouraged to procreate.

Elvis doing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” came on the radio, the King’s rich voice bringing a mist of tears to Kate’s eyes. “Bugger,” she said softly and laughed. She turned the radio up a notch and wiped her eyes.

Kate loved Christmas, everything about it. If there was magic in the world, she sometimes felt, it revealed itself during the Yuletide. At twenty-four, she still anticipated Christmas with the same excited yearning she had as a ten-year-old. This year especially she could hardly wait. She’d bought her dad a fancy new DVD player, blowing a big chunk of her tuition money but what the hell. He was going to flip.

As she turned onto the last street before the industrial stretch on Kelly Lake Road her cell phone rang. “Panther Courier,” she said into the handset. “Kate speaking.”

“Katie, it’s me.”

Kate felt a flicker of alarm. “Dad, you sound out of breath—”

“Honey, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Believe what?”

Keith told her and Kate felt her jaw come unhinged. She veered too sharply into a curve and the rear wheels slewed into the oncoming lane. Kate over-corrected and the van plowed nose-first into a snow bank, sending a huge plume of snow into the air. Unharmed, Kate simply sat there, staring out at the drift.

“Katie? You still there?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“If I’m lying I’ll do the Shing-a-ling naked on Paris Street.”

“Dad, that’s
incredible
.”

“Take the rest of your life off, kid.”

“What…?”

“Tell your boss you’re retiring. I’ll meet you at home in an hour. We’re going shopping.”

The line went dead.

Kate sat there stunned, the phone still clamped to her ear, until an old woman in a Volvo wagon pulled up behind her and leaned on the horn; the van was blocking her way. Kate gave the old gal a numb wave, then reversed out of the snow bank.

Her life had changed, just like that.

Like magic…

* * *

Kate made it home before her dad. Mo, her boss, drove her there personally. It was remarkable how polite he became once she told him why she was quitting. Until that moment he’d never been more than casually rude to her. A big frog in a little pond. She was pretty sure she was going to enjoy being rich.

The duplex she shared with her father overlooked the now-frozen expanse of Ramsey Lake, a large in-city lake banked by some of the most sought after properties in town. They didn’t have lake access—the Howey Drive side was separated from the water by a railway track and a steep hill—but the view from Kate’s living-room window was no less spectacular. Keith owned the building and Kate paid him a modest rent for the upstairs half. When Kate was between sweethearts, which in the past couple of years had been pretty much a constant, she and her dad spent most evenings together, sharing meals and talking film, then curling up together in front of the entertainment center they’d set up in Keith’s living room: a sixty-inch Mitsubishi TV and a full set of Paradigm speakers, an investment Keith sometimes joked he’d still be paying for when Kate was a grandmother. After that, usually between about eight and eleven, Kate sat in front of her computer and wrote. Not counting her earliest efforts, hand-written on yellow legal pads and buried in the back of her closet, she’d completed nine feature-length scripts, five she was still very proud of and one that had netted her a three-year option from a small indie company in L.A. which, unfortunately, had gone broke. Writing was her favorite thing in the world, slipping into that private space in her mind and watching it happen, then finding the words that would make others see it as clearly.