Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) Read online

  TIM KIZER

  Also by Tim Kizer:

  Spellbound

  Mania

  The Mindbender

  Days of Vengeance

  Deception

  Intoxication

  Scorned

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  Contents

  · Dark Luck

  · Hitchhiker

  · Sixtus

  · Sample chapters from Days of Vengeance

  · Other titles by Tim Kizer

  Copyright 2012 Tim Kizer

  After winning a four-hundred-million dollar jackpot with the numbers he received from the future, Ted Duplass is as happy as can be. The fun stops when Ted learns that he's going to be murdered by the end of the year. Fortunately, he knows the name of the killer.

  DARK LUCK

  I despise the Lottery. There's less chance of you becoming a millionaire than there is of getting hit on the head by a passing asteroid.

  Brian May

  1.

  “We’re in this together, guys. You have to remember that.” Ted gave his sons, who were sitting on the couch in front of him, a solemn look. “We’re a team. We have to be the best team there ever was. We need to keep our eyes on the prize.” Ted paused. “And it’s a fucking big prize.” He smiled, and then his sons began to laugh.

  It was May 6th, 2013. They were over four months into the year in which Ted hoped to become a multimillionaire.

  “Did you get it?” Ted asked, staring at his youngest son, Joe.

  “Yes, I did.”

  Joe had been able to legally get a tattoo since last Tuesday, when he had turned eighteen. Ted was no procrastinator, so this morning he had handed his youngest son three twenty-dollar bills and instructed him to visit an ink shop by the end of the day.

  “Let me see.”

  Joe rose from the couch, pulled down the left side of his underpants waistband, and showed Ted the tattoo he had gotten at a parlor in downtown Long Beach an hour ago. The tattoo read ‘[email protected].’ It was Ted’s special email address. Placing this piece of information on the crotch, just outside the pubic area, was a strategic decision. In addition to being well-hidden, that spot had a very high chance of remaining attached to the body until the end. There hadn’t been many people who’d lost their lower trunks, you know. Pete, who was twenty two, and Mike, who was twenty, had gotten their own [email protected] tattoos on the same day two years ago.

  Ted didn’t mind getting an occasional email from one of his sons’ girlfriends—or whomever was going to see his boys buck naked. So far there had been no emails at all, though.

  “Looks good.” Ted nodded approvingly. “Thank you, Joe.”

  Why had he chosen this login name, ‘Ted2013’? Very simple: it was short and it contained his name and the year in which he preferred to be contacted. A longer login would have increased the risk of typos, which would have undermined his whole plan.

  His brilliant plan.

  You see, Ted Duplass had a dream: he wanted to win a lottery. A big fat nine-figure jackpot. Well, most people would love that, wouldn’t they? But unlike other people, Ted had a plan.

  The plan, which Ted thought to be almost sure-fire, was based on a simple, elegant idea. You see, he had faith in human ingenuity. He believed that one day scientists would invent a time machine. They just had to; there were no limits to technological progress. It might take a hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand years, but sooner or later the time machine was going to be built. Ted’s plan was to get one of his descendants to either travel back in time and give him winning lottery numbers, or simply send him those numbers by means of the time machine. Simple and elegant.

  Ted realized that time travel was a far-out concept, which bordered on a miracle. The scientists might never be able to send a human being back to the past, but they might find a way to transmit information, and that was where his special email address came into play.

  The hardest part, in Ted’s opinion, was to make the descendant remember that among his ancestors there was a guy named Ted Duplass and that Ted Duplass needed a winning lottery combination. He wouldn’t mind to receive the numbers from a total stranger, but, in the end, the only people you could really count on were your family. It was a hard part, all right. How do you pass your message down through dozens and dozens of generations? Taking into account that Ted was not a human marvel like Isaac Newton or Confucius, whose words had lived on—and would continue to live on—for centuries, his best bet was his three sons and his future grandkids.

  Ted didn’t worry about the next thirty-forty years—or however long he had left to live. And he was pretty confident that his sons wouldn’t let him down, which should cover the twenty-thirty years after his death. He was hopeful about his grandchildren, considering that he would most likely have a chance to personally communicate his instructions to them. All in all, he could rest more or less assured that his message would survive for the next eighty-ninety years. Beyond that point, this venture was out of his hands completely.

  All in all, Ted was very optimistic about his plan. One didn’t have to be particularly smart to remember that Great-Grandpa Ted Duplass needed winning lottery numbers.

  “You’re doing for yourselves,” Ted would say to his sons. “Whatever I win is going to be your inheritance. Keep telling that to your kids; it’s their inheritance, too. And they should tell that to their kids.”

  However, Ted realized that human memory was imperfect. People forget important things all the time. How many of us remember our great-great-grandparents’ names? How many recall their dreams and aspirations?

  His plan addressed this issue. One effective way to ensure that his descendants would remember and carry out his instructions was to overwhelm them with his mantra, bombard them with it day in and day out. Ted’s mission was to become a legendary kooky ancestor of yore who couldn’t stop talking about lottery numbers from the future.

  Yes, overkill was the key here. Tattooing his email address on his kids’ bodies was just one rung in the ladder. Ted had even considered creating a cult or a religion; they still remembered what Buddha had said twenty five centuries ago, didn’t they? However, he had abandoned this idea since it was a long shot and required too much effort and resources. Besides, he didn’t want to let total strangers in on his plan.

  Ted was also planning to buy a time capsule. Yes, he realized that the capsule was far from being a sure thing: in five hundred years its location would probably be forgotten or it would be buried under a shopping mall or a highway. However, he had nothing to lose by trying, so why not? The capsule wasn’t particularly cheap—it would set Ted back eight hundred bucks—but you have to spend money to make money, don’t you? He was not going to tell his wife, Nora, about the capsule: she would kick him in the nuts if she found out he had spent that kind of cash on some useless can.

  Ted told his sons to engrave ‘[email protected]’ on his tombstone. It was an excellent way to keep this email remembered since tombstones could easily last—and remain legible—for four-five hundred years. He had also put the engraving request in his will in case these three pinheads forgot about it. He was thinking of purchasing a gravestone and putting the email on it now, but then decided to wait a few years. If Ted had an extra fifty thousand bucks, he would unhesitatingly go for a private mausoleum—these things had enough wall space to write the entire story of his life.

  Another thing that Ted kept telling his sons about was personal safety.
He needed his bloodline to last for centuries, which meant that his sons and their children and their children’s children had to do their best to stay alive as long as possible.

  “Avoid riding together in one car or flying on one plane,” he would say to his boys. “Stay away from bungee jumping and skydiving; those things are for idiots who got tired of being alive. Don’t use drugs, try not to smoke, and don’t become alcoholics. You only get one chance to live, guys. One fucking chance.”

  What were the odds that all three of his sons would die before he did? Ted believed they were pretty low, especially after the guys had heard those self-preservation lectures of his a hundred times.

  Would they still have the lottery five hundred years from now? Would they still use email? Would they even remember what lottery and email were?

  They’d have to search the archives, he supposed.

  By the way, we still know what pigeon mail is, don’t we?

  Hopefully, there would be at least one shrewd guy—or gal—among his great-great-great-grandkids.

  Ted figured that the time machine would be kept in secret and only a handful of people would have access to it. For his plan to succeed, his progeny would have to either work at the time machine facility or have enough money to bribe someone who worked there. He was willing to bet that bribery would still exist in the year 2500 and even 3000.

  One could say it was a tenuous plan. Ted didn’t deny that he was facing some serious challenges. It required determination—lots and lots of it—to overcome them. And he was definitely going to need a boatload of luck, too.

  2.

  Ted’s idea had received a mixed reaction when he had presented it to his family three years ago. His sons thought it was cool. Like all teenage boys, they loved the prospect of becoming millionaires without having to work too hard.

  “It will be our conspiracy against the world,” Pete said to him.

  His wife believed he was nuts. And his parents agreed with her. In fact, his dad had gone to the trouble of explicitly calling Ted’s lottery idea the most idiotic thing he’d ever encountered in his life.

  “Why don’t you just get a better job?” his dad said. “Or invent something? Why are you looking for shortcuts? You’re gonna have to bust your ass like the rest of us, there ain’t no way around it.”

  Ted wouldn’t be surprised if everyone who heard of his plan believed that he had lost a few of his marbles. And he was fine with that. People’s ridicule didn’t bother him at all. Actually, it played into his hand: if no one took his idea seriously, no one would try it and he would have no competition, which was always a good thing.

  As for dad’s lecture, Ted appreciated honest hard work, but realized its limitations. The reality was that few people had become multimillionaires working for the man. And inventing the next Snuggie or ShamWow was not as easy as it might seem.

  It was his dad’s rejection of his idea that Ted was thinking about when he sat down before his laptop and opened the [email protected] email inbox at half past one in the afternoon on June 10th, 2013. He still didn’t understand why his old man couldn’t admit that this plan was at least somewhat clever and original.

  “Our conspiracy against the world,” Ted muttered, staring at the laptop screen.

  He had expected to see an empty inbox. This bitch had been empty these entire three years! When Ted’s brain processed what he was seeing, he froze.

  There was a message in the inbox. Its subject read: ‘Lottery numbers for Ted Duplass.’

  The text of the email was simple: ‘5, 16, 30, 33, 42. Mega #22. Megamillions.’ It was signed ‘Nick.’

  Interestingly, the ‘From’ field of the message was blank.

  His heart quivering, Ted moved the laptop closer and reread the message several more times. He was looking at the numbers with extreme intensity, barely blinking, as if trying to burn holes in the screen. His face was hot, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  Was this it? Did his plan work? Did Lady Luck finally smile on him?

  5, 16, 30, 33, 42. Mega number 22. These were obviously for Mega Millions lottery.

  Thank you, Nick. God Bless you, brother.

  There was a minor problem, though. The email didn’t specify when these numbers were going to win. It could be years, or even decades, from now for all he knew.

  Ted got goosebumps when it occurred to him that the message might have come too late and the numbers might have already won.

  The email could be a prank, of course. Even though his sons were old enough to legally buy cigarettes, a childish stunt like this was something they were absolutely capable of.

  Half an hour later, Ted entered the neighborhood grocery store, which had a California lottery machine, and purchased a Mega Millions ticket, using the numbers from the email. He paid for the next fifteen drawings. The jackpot for this Tuesday’s drawing was three hundred and eleven million dollars. When Ted came home, he hid the ticket in the back of the bottom drawer of his bedroom dresser.

  3.

  “I received an email today,” Ted said, looking fixedly at Joe. “With lottery numbers.”

  “You did?” Mike said. “Is it from the future?”

  Ted ignored Mike’s question and went on, “What I want to know is this: was it one of you who sent it? Just tell me the truth, I’m not going to yell or anything. So… Did you send this email?”

  “Why are you looking at me?” Joe asked. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Okay. How about you, Mike?” Ted shifted his eyes to Mike. “Did you do it?”

  Mike shook his head. “No. Why would I do that?”

  “Pete?” Ted looked at Pete. “Did you send it?”

  “No, Dad.” Pete cracked a smile. “You really received an email with numbers? So, your plan worked?”

  Ted shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “Did you buy a ticket?” Joe asked. “You’ve got to buy a ticket, Dad.”

  Ted nodded.

  He could hardly sleep that night. The idea that he could be three hundred million bucks richer in less than twenty four hours was incredibly titillating. His heart was ready to jump out of his chest as he checked the drawing results on Tuesday evening. Unfortunately, his numbers didn’t win anything, not even two dollars. The only consolation was the fact that nobody walked away with the jackpot this time.

  Ted felt as though he’d been hit in the gut with a baseball bat.

  “Maybe you should finally follow your dad’s advice,” Nora said, looking at him with her deep, judging eyes. “You’re forty three years old, Ted.”

  Ted was in no mood to talk, so he didn’t reply.

  4.

  The Friday drawing was also utterly disappointing. Again, zero, zilch, nada. The jackpot grew by seven million and remained elusive.

  This scenario repeated itself six more times. On July 9th, Ted’s luck changed.

  5, 16, 30, 33, 42. Mega number 22.

  Three hundred and ninety two million dollars, one of the largest jackpots in history.

  His was the only winning ticket.

  An out-of-body experience, that was the best way to describe what Ted felt when he saw the drawing results. For the first time in his life he could honestly say that the whole situation seemed like a dream.

  He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and grinned. Then he began to cry.

  The next morning he quit his position at Long Beach City College. While Ted enjoyed teaching math, he liked having free time even more. He cited a new job as the reason for resignation.

  5.

  Ted was thinking of keeping his win a secret, but in the end decided that it would be a great motivator for his boys to know that their plan had worked.

  “I guess you were right, after all,” Nora said after hearing the good news. “You did it. Congratulations, honey.” She smiled radiantly.

  “How much did we win?” Joe asked.

  “The jackpot was three hundred and ninety two million,” Ted replied. “I dec
ided to take the lump sum. It’s two hundred and ten million.”

  “After tax?” Pete asked.

  “Yes, after tax.” Ted smiled and then burst out laughing. “We won, guys! We won! The plan worked!”

  “Two hundred million bucks?” Mike’s eyes were as big as saucers with shock.

  “Yep, two hundred million smackeroonies.”

  “What about the butterfly effect?” Pete asked, smiling. “What if we somehow changed the course of history?”

  “I’m okay with that as long as we’re millionaires. We only live once, son. I have no time to worry about mankind and stuff like that. Something tells me the world’s going to be all right.”

  Ted didn’t see how their getting rich would make things worse as far as the history of the world was concerned. He also thought that the significance of the butterfly effect was exaggerated. You can delude yourself all day long that history is made by individuals. However, the truth, in Ted’s opinion, was that the world was ruled by hunger and sex.

  Just in case, Ted vowed to give no money to politicians or organizations with a political agenda. He didn’t want to inadvertently help create a new Hitler or Stalin.

  6.

  The day after his winnings had been deposited in his bank account, Ted met with Steve Sandes, a financial advisor from Merrill Lynch. They had a great talk. Steve turned out to be a natural born schmoozer.

  Yes, Ted was risk averse. No, he didn’t mind the lower return on his investment that resulted from the risk reduction. Yes, municipal bonds were fine with him. And he’d like to stay away from internet stocks for now.

  Steve suggested that Ted set up trust funds for his sons. Ted agreed.

  While he chatted to the Merrill Lynch guy, a shocking thought occurred to Ted. What if some—or even most—jackpot winners had received the winning numbers from their great-great-great-great-grandkids? It would be a fun idea to visit a couple of them and ask point-blank if that was the case.

  Just imagine their faces when they realize that he figured their little secret out.