Lucky(28)

Perhaps Steph thought the sounds of them leaving the house were the sounds of Santa and his reindeer, or perhaps she just slept right through it. It didn’t matter now. They were on the highway, miles away. They were never going to see Steph or Darla again.

Lucky exhaled in a big white puff as her father sped up on the empty road; no one was out on Christmas Eve; everyone who was coming home for the holidays had already arrived. It was only people like them who would be out on a night like this. The drifters. The rolling stones.

“Anything I can do to make it feel better, kiddo? It’s Christmas, after all.”

“No,” Lucky said.

“This is for the best,” her father eventually said, after the miles between them and Bellevue had increased even more. He took one hand off the steering wheel and placed it on top of hers. “We won’t involve people anymore. It’s too easy to get hurt—both us and them—when you’ve got to worry about people and their feelings.”

“What if we just don’t do this at all anymore? What if we just moved somewhere, and settled down, and you got a job, like other dads do? And I went to school. You always told me I was smart. I could go to school, and then high school, and then a really good college. I could get a job and take care of you. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

He turned on the radio, but it was Christmas carols so he turned it off. “I know you wish you were like other kids, but what you maybe don’t realize is that what you’re really wishing is for me to be like other dads,” he said. “And I’m not. I don’t know any life but this one. I don’t know how I’d go about changing that. What sort of job could I even get?”

“You could do anything you put your mind to. I’ve seen you.”

But he went silent again, and they were getting close to the border between Washington and Oregon when she realized the conversation was over.

“Get out the map, Lucky. Atta girl. Let’s figure out our next stop.”





CHAPTER NINE


Lucky stared out the window of the bus, sifting slowly in her mind through bad option after bad option. When she arrived at the bus station in San Francisco, she was still undecided. She looked at the schedule, considered buying a ticket to Fresno—but she wasn’t ready to see Priscilla yet, if ever.

Only, what if Priscilla knew where Cary was? Did that matter to her? Lucky pushed the thought aside. She had to keep moving forward, beyond the heartache of being abandoned by Cary, beyond all the other things that had hurt her in her past.

But names she had tried to suppress for years still came to mind as she stared down at the bus schedule in her hand. Darla. Steph. She had tried so hard not to think of them, ever, after she and her father had driven away from their house. How could her father think any good could come from contacting them now? Hadn’t they hurt them enough?

She kept poring over the bus schedule, moving her finger over the destinations, rejecting them all. Finally, she just closed her eyes and pointed. She opened her eyes. Baker City, Oregon, it was.



* * *




Before boarding, she picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. There was only one article of interest:

YOUNG BONNIE AND CLYDE COUPLE WHO FLED BOISE STILL ON LAM

An Idaho Supreme Court judge has issued a warrant for the arrests of Alaina Cadence, 26, and David Ferguson, 30, in connection with investment fraud and money-laundering charges.

The FBI is also now involved, with an investigation launched into the couple’s alleged connections to organized crime and racketeering. District attorneys’ offices in several states, including New York and California, are joining the investigation…



Lucky stared at the black-and-white words until they blurred. She could still hear Cary’s voice from that day at the gas station, cutting, dismissive, telling her how funny he found it that she was always trying to redeem herself—when meanwhile, only he had known she was beyond redemption. I’m not trying to redeem myself. I’m trying to help people who need help, Lucky had said that day, what felt like a lifetime ago. Was that it, though? Did she truly, in her heart, want to help people? She had a strange way of showing it, if so.

She flipped through the paper again. There was also a small article about the lottery ticket. MASSIVE MULTI MILLIONS LOTTERY TICKET WINNINGS STILL UNCLAIMED, read the headline. The winner still has several months to collect the winnings before they will be returned to the lottery pot…

Lucky put the paper away and took the lottery ticket out of her wallet, slowly, carefully. It was frayed at the edges, ripped on one side, and she knew she needed to find a place to keep it where it wouldn’t get so beaten up—but that was a hard thing to do when you were constantly on the move.

Three hundred and ninety million dollars.

She allowed herself to consider claiming the money. She rummaged in her backpack and took out a pad of paper and a pen, both pilfered from Jeremy’s room at the Bellagio. She could start by repaying the people she and Cary had stolen money from in Idaho. She began to make a list. There were twenty clients, and she owed a few million between them. She would find a way to secretly pay it back, if she ever got that lottery money. She would make it right.

She tapped the pen against the page.

Steph. Darla, she wrote. She would find them again. Someday, somehow, she would pay them back for all the lies she and her father had told.