"Well, you might be right."

"It's just a shame you've got to split the jackpot with somebody else." Trish spoke with true sympathy. "Not that fourteen million bucks is anything to sneeze at, but it'd be nice if you were the only winner. Nice for Grange, too."

Demencio shot a glare at his wife. "It's still nice for Grange," he said. "It'll put us on the map, for damn sure."

JoLayne Lucks said, "Ya'll want some coffee?"

"So what's next, girl?" Trish asked.

"I thought I'd feed the turtles."

Trish chuckled uneasily. "You know what I mean. Maybe a new car? A place at the beach?"

JoLayne Lucks cocked her head. "You're losing me now."

Demencio had had enough. He stood up, hitching at his trousers. "I won't lie. We came to ask a favor."

JoLayne beamed. "That's more like it." She noticed how Trish's hands had balled with tension.

Demencio forced a cough, to clear his throat. "Pretty soon you'll be all famous, in the newspapers and TV. My idea was maybe when they ask where your Lotto luck came from, you could put in a good word."

"For you?"

"For the Madonna, yes."

"But I've never even been to the shrine."

"I know, I know." Demencio held up his hands. "It's just an idea. I can't promise hardly anything in return. I mean, you're a millionaire now."

Although he sorely hoped JoLayne wouldn't ask for a commission on his take, he was prepared to part with ten percent.

Trish, quietly: "It'd just be a favor, like he said. Pure and simple. A favor for a neighbor."

"Christmas is coming," Demencio added. "Any little thing would help. Anything you could do."

JoLayne Lucks walked them, one on each arm, to the door. She said, "Well, it's surely something to think about. And, Trish, that's glorious cake."

"You're so kind."

"Sure you don't fancy a turtle?"

In tandem, Demencio and his wife edged off the porch. "Thanks just the same," they said, and walked home in silence. Trish pondered the possibility she'd gotten some bad information, as JoLayne Lucks didn't behave like a woman who'd won a free toaster, much less a Lotto jackpot. Demencio, meanwhile, had concluded JoLayne Lucks was either a borderline psycho or a brilliant faker, and that further investigation was necessary.

Bodean James Gazzer had spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame. His personal credo – Everything bad that happens is someone else's fault– could, with imagination, be stretched to fit any circumstance. Bode stretched it.

The intestinal unrest that occasionally afflicted him surely was the result of drinking milk taken from secretly radiated cows. The roaches in his apartment were planted by his filthy immigrant next-door neighbors. His dire financial plight was caused by runaway bank computers and conniving Wall Street Zionists; his bad luck in the South Florida job market, prejudice against English-speaking applicants. Even the lousy weather had a culprit: air pollution from Canada, diluting the ozone and derailing the jet stream.

Bode Gazzer's accusatory talents were honed at an early age. The youngest of three sons, he veered astray to develop a precocious fondness for truancy, vandalism and shoplifting. His parents, both teachers, earnestly tried to redirect the boy, only to hear themselves lashingly blamed for his troubles. Bode took the position that he was persecuted because he was short, and that his shortness was attributable to his mother's careless dietary practices (and his father's gluttonous complicity) during pregnancy. That both Jean and Randall Gazzer were genetically slight of stature was immaterial to young Bode – from television he'd gathered that humans as a species were getting taller with evolution, and he therefore expected to surpass his parents, if only by an inch or two. Yet Bode stopped growing in eighth grade, a fact lugubriously chronicled in the family's bimonthly measuring ceremonies, conducted at the kitchen door-jamb. A multicolored sequence of pencil slashes confirmed Bode's worst fears: His two older brothers were still ascending positively, while he himself was finished, capped off at the ripe old age of fourteen.

The bitter realization hardened Bode Gazzer against his MSG-gobbling parents, and society at large. He became "the bad element" in the neighborhood, the cocky ringleader of misdemeanors and minor felonies. He worked diligently at being a hood, taking up unfiltered cigarets, public spitting and gratuitous profanity. Every so often he purposely provoked his brothers into beating him up, so he could tell friends he'd been in a savage gang fight.

Bode's schoolteacher parents didn't believe in whippings and (except for one occasion) never laid a glove on him. Jean and Randall Gazzer preferred "talking out" problems with their children, and spent many hours around the supper table "interacting" earnestly with the insolent Bodean. He was more than a match. Not only had he acquired the rhetorical skills of his mother and father, he was boundlessly creative. No matter what happened, Bode always produced an elaborate excuse from which he would not budge, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

By the time he turned eighteen, his juvenile arrest record filled three pages, and his weary parents had put themselves in the hands of a Zen counselor. Bode had come to relish his role as the family outlaw, the bad seed, the misunderstood one. He could explain everything and would, at old talk and a multitude of convenient resentments. "I'm on God's shit list," he'd announce in barrooms, "so keep your damn distance."

A series of unhealthy friendships eventually drew Bode Gazzer into the culture of hate and hard-core bigotry. Previously, when dishing out fault for his plight, Bode had targeted generic authority figures – parents, brothers, cops, judges – without considering factors such as race, religion or ethnicity. He'd swung broadly, and without much impact. But xenophobia and racism infused his griping with new vitriol. Now it wasn't just some storm-trooper cop who busted Bode with stolen VCRs, it was the Cubanstorm-trooper cop who obviously had a hard-on for Anglos; it wasn't just the double-talking defense lawyer who sold Bode down the river, it was the double-talking Jewdefense lawyer who clearly held a vendetta against Christians; and it wasn't just the cokehead bondsman who refused to put up Bode's bail, it was the cokehead Negrobondsman who wanted him to stay in jail and get cornholed to death.

Bode Gazzer's political awakening coincided with an overdue revision of his illicit habits. He'd made up his mind to forsake burglaries, car thefts and other property offenses in favor of forgeries, check kiting and other so-called paper crimes, for which judges seldom dispensed state prison time.

As it happened, the hate movement in which Bode had taken an interest strongly espoused fraud as a form of civil disobedience. Militia pamphlets proclaimed that ripping off banks, utilities and credit-card companies was a just repudiation of the United States government and all the liberals, Jews, faggots, lesbians, Negroes, environmentalists and communists who infested it. Bode Gazzer admired the logic. However, he proved only slightly more skillful at passing bad checks than he was at hot-wiring Oldsmobiles.

Between always-brief jail stints, he'd decorated the inside of his apartment with antigovernment posters purchased at various gun shows: David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Gordon Kahl were featured heroically.

Whenever Chub visited the place, he raised a long-necked Budweiser in salute to the martyrs honored on Bode's wall. Through television he'd acquired a vague awareness of Koresh and Weaver, but he knew little about Kahl except that he'd been a Dakota farmer and tax protester, and that the feds had shot the shit out of him.