Jackpot Read online

  For Henry and Reggie Korman

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Lottery Ticket

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  8

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  About the Author

  Don’t Miss Any Antics of the Man with the Plan, Gordon Korman

  Copyright

  Stockholm, Sweden.

  “… and this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Professor Albert Einstein.”

  There was thunderous applause in the auditorium as Einstein came up to the podium to accept his gold medal.

  Amazing, thought Griffin Bing. He didn’t comb his hair, even for this.

  The legendary genius took his seat on the platform beside Griffin as the ovation quieted.

  “Congratulations, Doc,” Griffin whispered.

  “And to you, young man,” Einstein responded.

  “Our next award,” the master of ceremonies went on, “is a new prize for us. Our first-ever Nobel Prize in Planning goes to a teenage gentleman from Cedarville, United States — Griffin Bing.”

  Griffin rose, brushing off the satin lapels of his rented tuxedo. The place erupted with cheers, especially the front row, where his friends were sitting — Ben, Pitch, Logan, Melissa, Savannah, and Luthor. They were all just as dressed up as he was, except for Luthor. They didn’t make tuxedos for Dobermans, but clipped to his studded collar was a little black bow tie.

  He felt a rush of gratitude toward them. They were the reason he was The Man With The Plan. No plan was worth anything without the right team to carry it out.

  The auditorium resounded with celebration. It was a standing ovation! Fireworks went off — indoors! — with an earsplitting report.

  Crack! Boom! Rat-tat-tat!

  * * *

  Crack! Boom! Rat-tat-tat!

  Griffin came awake with a start, the Nobel auditorium popping like a soap bubble, along with his dream. His clock read 12:18. It was the middle of the night.

  Crack! Boom! Rat-tat-tat!

  He sat bolt upright in bed. The sound wasn’t coming from any dream.

  He rushed to the window and threw the blinds open just as another barrage of pebbles ricocheted off the glass. Someone was in the yard! He lifted the window, peered out, and hissed, “Who’s there?”

  “Hey, Bing — nice bedhead!”

  Griffin squinted into the gloom. There behind a honeysuckle hedge stood a tall, burly eighth grader with pig eyes and a nasty sneer on his face. It was bad enough to be awoken from a super-great dream. But to be disturbed by the likes of Darren Vader was beyond annoying.

  “Beat it, Vader!”

  “Not till I show you this great thing I found.” For the first time, Darren stepped into the open.

  The wheeze that came from Griffin threatened to suck the neighborhood dry of all oxygen. Instantly, he recognized the contraption the boy was wearing. It resembled the white rectangular backpack that astronauts carry on their space suits, only this one was worn in the front. It was the SweetPick, Griffin’s father’s latest invention.

  Mr. Bing had developed several agricultural devices designed for orchard harvesting. But the SweetPick was different. It was made for the sugar industry, to cut and bundle stalks of cane. Mr. Bing thought it might be his big break as an inventor, his first step out of the small orchard field into the wider food-production world.

  “Vader, what are you doing with my dad’s invention?”

  No sooner had the words passed his lips than he knew: Darren’s mother was Mr. Bing’s lawyer. When the patent office had refused to approve the SweetPick, Mrs. Vader had taken the prototype to be professionally photographed for the follow-up application. Mr. Bing had brought it to her that very morning.

  “What?” Darren was the picture of innocence. “This little thing? It’s just some hunk of junk I found in the garage. Oh, wait, I forgot the most important part.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and held it up against the device. He switched on a flashlight to make sure that Griffin could read it:

  Griffin saw red. “You take that thing home to your mom, or I’m calling the cops!”

  “Well, that would be really scary,” Darren sneered, “except that it’s not patented yet. So if I get arrested, everybody’ll see the secret design. Dear old Dad won’t be too happy about that, will he?”

  Griffin was getting angrier by the second. “Put it back! It’s one of a kind! If you break it —”

  “Gee,” Darren teased, “I wonder what this switch is for.” He turned back to the honeysuckle and fingered the control that dangled from the pack.

  “Don’t touch that —”

  What happened next was straight out of Mr. Bing’s patent application. Flack! The U-Bundle mechanism launched a length of twine out past the target. It boomeranged and wrapped itself three times around the bush. Small teeth on the end of the rope bit in tightly, cinching the cord. A split second later, Whack! The Safe-chete blade knifed out and sliced through the honeysuckle branches. The neat bundle tipped over and landed at Darren’s feet.

  “Whoa!” said Darren, surprised and impressed. “Check it out!”

  Barefoot, Griffin sailed down the stairs and out of the house, struggling to be quiet in his fury. He hit the grass running, and made a beeline for Darren.

  Big Darren Vader was not normally intimidated by the smaller Griffin. But the blind rage could be felt from a range of thirty yards. He turned tail and fled, though weighed down by the heavy equipment.

  Flack! Whack!

  Suddenly, an escape route appeared in the hedge separating the Bing home from their neighbors. Darren disappeared through the opening. Hot on his heels, Griffin tripped over the neatly bundled cedar shrubs, ripping open both knees of his pajama pants. Then he was up again, pounding across the neighbors’ yard, fueled by white-hot anger.

  Flack! Whack!

  A perfectly pruned rosebush was cinched and slashed, all in the blink of an eye.

  “Stop doing that!” Griffin seethed.

  “It’s not my fault these controls are so sensitive!” Darren shot back. The Safe-chete blade beheaded a petunia.

  Griffin made a lunge for the back of the SweetPick’s harness, but Darren sidestepped. A lasso of twine snapped past Griffin’s ear.

  Darren was still defiant. “I feel sorry for you, Bing. If my folks bet our future on a NosePick, I wouldn’t show my face around town.”

  “It’s a SweetPick!”

  Darren beat a hasty retreat for the road. Griffin was determined not to let him off so easily. He was going to show his father, and also Mrs. Vader, how Darren was treating a top secret prototype like it was a sandbox toy. The SweetPick had been entrusted to Mrs. Vader in good faith. If this was how she looked after it, Dad should think about getting another lawyer.

  Despite his reduced speed, Darren was hard to catch up to. He played middle school football, and ran with a high-stepping gait that covered a lot of ground.

  Fine, thought Griffin. I’ll beat him at his own game. He threw himself at Darren’s legs in a flying tackle. One arm found its target around Darren’s knees. The other found the dangling button that operated the SweetPick.

  Flack! Thud!
r />   The Safe-chete mechanism burst out and lodged itself in the trunk of a large sycamore tree.

  Griffin knew a new panic. “Pull it out!”

  Darren yanked with all his might, but the blade was truly stuck. He turned to Griffin. “You are so dead!”

  “Me?! You’re the one who stole it!”

  Darren nodded solemnly. “Yeah, but you’re the one who broke it.”

  “I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t woken me up! I’d be safe in my bed having a really good dream!”

  “Well, maybe if your dad invented something normal for a change, I’d be able to resist making fun of it!”

  It was the last straw. With a howl of outrage, Griffin clamped his arms around Darren and wrestled him to the ground. With a deep thwang, the Safe-chete blade was dislodged from the trunk. The two boys stopped fighting and stared at it.

  “Let’s get this back in my garage before our parents kill us!” Darren blurted.

  “Right!” Griffin agreed.

  It rankled to have to help Darren cover this up when the whole thing was the jerk’s fault to begin with. Yet Griffin forced himself to focus on the big picture. It would be satisfying to see Darren get in trouble. But keeping the SweetPick a secret was far more important, at least until it was patented. So he accompanied Darren back to the Vader house and helped his enemy stow the prototype under a tarpaulin in the garage. He even nodded when Darren said, “Tonight never happened. Got it, Bing?”

  Then he padded home, still barefoot, pajamas ripped in the knees. Anyway, he reflected, there would be plenty of opportunities to take revenge on Darren. It would be easy for The Man With The Plan.

  The next morning, Griffin answered the knock on his bedroom door to find his father standing in the hall.

  “Hi, Dad. What’s up?”

  “My blood pressure, mostly,” his father replied gravely. “Old man Abernathy paid us a visit bright and early this morning. Have you got an explanation for this?” He held up a bundled rosebush, its dead blooms dropping petals on the carpet.

  Griffin’s heart sank. He had been hoping the cranky neighbor would swallow his loss and keep quiet about it. Then all that would need explaining was the hole in the hedge. Maybe he could convince Dad he’d done it himself in his early SweetPick testing.

  No such luck.

  “Did the SweetPick do that?” Griffin asked innocently.

  “Yes and no,” replied Mr. Bing. “A SweetPick can’t do anything on its own. So I’ll ask you again. Have you got an explanation for this? Did you take the SweetPick out for a test run before I handed it over to Mrs. Vader?”

  Griffin made a face. He didn’t want to be a rat, even though the person he’d be ratting out was his worst enemy, who had totally brought this on himself. He also didn’t want to lie to his father. Fine. He’d throw Darren to the wolves.

  But before he could open his mouth, his father went on. “It’s been rough since the patent office turned me down. I don’t know what I’d do without Mrs. Vader to guide me through the reapplication process.”

  And there, just about to drive Darren straight to jail, Griffin had to jam on the brakes and change direction again. If Dad found out that Mrs. Vader couldn’t control her own son and keep his mitts off the prototype, it would destroy his faith in the lawyer that he needed so badly. That put Griffin in a position he would have considered unthinkable.

  I have to lie to protect Darren!

  “It was me,” he confessed, shamefaced. “Like you said, I did it before you sent the SweetPick to Mrs. Vader, and I stood the bundles up, hoping nobody would notice.”

  His father was exasperated. “Are you kidding? Abernathy notices which direction every blade of grass is supposed to be pointing!”

  Griffin studied his sneakers. “I’m really, really sorry, Dad. I didn’t want to tell you because you were already so upset about the patent thing.”

  The lecture was loud and long, and the bitterest part was that Griffin didn’t deserve any of it. The only thing he himself was guilty of was catapulting the Safe-chete blade into that tree.

  If he expected to get any special appreciation from Darren for taking this rap, he was sadly mistaken.

  “You are some loser, Bing,” Vader said when Griffin confronted him at lunch that day. “I mean, I’ve heard of lying to get out of trouble, but to lie to get into it — that’s a special kind of stupid!”

  “You’re welcome,” Griffin seethed. “You know, for saving your neck at the cost of my own.”

  “What do you want — a medal, or just a hero cookie? Now beat it. I’m savoring the moment.”

  The worst part was that Darren would never understand why Griffin was covering for him. Darren’s parents were both successful attorneys. He didn’t know what it was to watch your father struggle.

  Someday, Vader. Someday when you least expect it …

  * * *

  GIGA-PRIZE SET TO EXPIRE OCTOBER 6

  It’s the stuff dreams are made of. Last October, someone on Long Island purchased a Giga-Millions lottery ticket with the numbers 12, 17, 18, 34, 37, and 55. And, when those numbers all came up on lottery night, the ticket was worth $29,876,454.53.

  A fairy tale, right?

  Not exactly.

  The owner of the ticket has never come forward. By law, lottery winners have only one year to claim their prize. After that, the ticket becomes worthless, and the money goes back into the lottery pool. That’s what will happen to this thirty-million-dollar payday when the lottery office closes at 6:00 p.m. on October 6, three weeks from today.

  So what’s the deal here? It’s easy to imagine a person buying a lottery ticket and forgetting about it, tossing it into the garbage along with old gas receipts and expired grocery coupons. Or perhaps we’re dealing with a crafty new millionaire who’s planning to wait till the last minute to redeem his windfall in the national media spotlight. Then there’s the possibility of a storybook ending — that somewhere out there is a Giga-Millionaire who simply doesn’t know it.

  As the deadline approaches, a lot of Long Islanders will be checking their wallets, their purses, their pockets, and their junk drawers in the hope of finding that lost ticket to the Good Life.

  * * *

  Ben Slovak put the newspaper down on the cafeteria table. “You want to hear the kicker? They know the ticket was bought at the convenience store by the train station in Green Hollow. That’s the next town past Cedarville! My dad gets coffee there on his way to work.”

  “Maybe you’re rich and you don’t even know it,” Griffin suggested.

  “Fat chance.” Ben broke off a piece of turkey from his sandwich and held it inside his collar. A small, furry, needle-nosed snout came up and grabbed it — belonging to Ferret Face, the ferret Ben carried at all times under his shirt for medical purposes. “My father doesn’t believe in lotteries. He says it’s like flushing money down the toilet. The odds are astronomical.”

  “It wasn’t astronomical for the guy with the right numbers,” Pitch Benson pointed out. “Man, thirty million bucks! I’d take my whole family to climb Mount Everest! The mountain permits alone are, like, a hundred grand each.”

  Melissa Dukakis agitated her head, parting the curtain of stringy hair that normally obscured her face. “Think of the computing power thirty million would buy! I’d be invincible!”

  “You’re invincible now,” Ben reminded her. “Who’s better at tech stuff than you?”

  “I’m good,” she conceded modestly. “Just not invincible.”

  Logan Kellerman sighed wanly. “If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t waste it on dumb stuff like that. I’d produce a movie, and cast myself in the lead role.”

  “Good thing you wouldn’t waste it on dumb stuff,” Pitch said sarcastically.

  Savannah looked disgusted. “You guys are so selfish. Big money like that — sure, you keep a little for yourself. But there’s only one thing to do with that kind of fortune — help others.”

  “Well, you’r
e a better person than me,” put in Ben. “It takes a big heart to want to do things for people.”

  “Who said anything about people?” Savannah demanded, outraged. “People can take care of themselves. I’d do things for animals.”

  It got a big laugh around the lunch table. Savannah was legendary as Cedarville’s number one animal lover. Besides her dog, Luthor, she was the housemate — never say owner — of a menagerie that included a capuchin monkey, rabbits (numbers varied), hamsters (ditto), a pack rat, and an albino chameleon named Lorenzo.

  Griffin looked unhappy. “It’s great to give money to people, or animals, or charities. But I don’t think it’s so selfish to want a little extra cash for your family. It doesn’t have to be the whole thirty mil. But it would be nice to have something to fall back on if my dad’s latest invention turns out to be a bust.” The stress showing in his face, he told the others how the patent office had rejected the first application for the SweetPick.

  “Don’t worry,” Ben said soothingly. “Your father’s inventions always seem totally useless at first, but they usually work out in the end.”

  “Tell that to Vader.” Griffin was bitter. “He stole the SweetPick prototype and woke me up last week. Crunch-’n’-munched half the landscape. I got keelhauled by my dad and took all the blame for something Vader did.”

  “Darren’s such a jerk,” Savannah commiserated.

  They all looked across the cafeteria to where Darren sat in solitary splendor, his mouth open wide enough to drive a truck through, about to tie into a gigantic hero sandwich.

  “I’m kind of amazed he’s at school today at all,” Ben said. “I thought he’d be out there scouring the streets with a magnifying glass, looking for that lottery ticket.”

  “He probably hasn’t heard about it yet,” Pitch muttered. “Vader would trade his own mother for a free Happy Meal. Imagine what he’d do for thirty million bucks! The minute he reads this article, believe me, the search will be on.”

  “No way,” Ben scoffed. “That ticket’s a year old already. It’s probably mush down some sewer, or smoke up an incinerator chimney. Even Darren’s not crazy enough to go looking for it.”