Read Online Never Use a Chicken and Other Stories by Jim Newell - Free Book Online

and peered at him from beneath bushy eyebrows furled in some puzzlement. He stretched out his hand and touched the man’s shoulder. There was no reaction. He rose and stood in front of the man, bending down to examine him more closely. Realization of the truth arrived at John Hamilton Rogers’ brain. The man was dead, no doubt about it. He sat there on the bench in the park facing straight ahead, apparently thinking, but the eyes were not focused on anything and there was no movement of the chest to indicate breathing. The fact that he did not fall over was due to the way he had balanced himself when he sat down. Now the man was dead, totally, completely and unexplainably dead.
    Carefully, John Hamilton Rogers resumed his seat on the bench, but closer to the dead man. He looked around to see who was in the area and whether anyone might be looking. Nobody. The park was, at least that part of it, deserted. He could hear the voices of children from the distant playground and traffic noises from the city streets on the other side of the trees and hedges bordering the park, but nobody seemed to be within eyesight at that particular moment.
    “Might as well have a look,” he muttered to himself, reaching with some care into the dead man’s jacket pocket. The jacket was an old windbreaker with a slash pocket on either side. The near pocket proved to be bottomless, the entire lining torn away. Mr. Rogers stood up again and facing the man, reached into the other pocket. “Easy now,” he muttered, again to himself. “You don’t want to knock him over.”
    This pocket had a reward of some sort. His fingers touched a small rectangle of printed paper. John Hamilton Rogers drew it slowly out of the pocket with the practiced touch of the master scrounger, a man who had provided for his needs for many years by “finding things.” He straightened up, palming the ticket, or whatever it might turn out to be, and slipping his hand into his own pocket, turned slowly and strolled away. His gait quickened ever so slightly as he moved farther and farther from the bench. He carefully did not look back, just kept walking until the sidewalk turned a corner and the dead man on the park bench was completely hidden from his view.
    At that point Mr. Rogers began to walk quite briskly until he came to the park’s public lavatory. He entered one of the stalls and locked the door. Then, and only then, did he look at the small piece of heavy paper. The lottery ticket, for that is what he had found, a lottery ticket, was one of those with six separate numbers generated by a computer and printed on one side. The date of the drawing was there also. Yesterday’s date.
    “Whoo-eee,” breathed John Hamilton Rogers IV very softly. “Wouldn’t it be something now to be a winner.”
    Slipping the lottery ticket back into his pocket, he left the building and walked slightly faster than his usual morning pace, out of the park and along the street to a group of small stores clustered in a plaza beside a busy intersection. One of them was a neighborhood convenience store, the kind in which lottery tickets form a good share of each day’s sales. John Hamilton Rogers IV stepped inside, nodded casually to the young woman slouched behind the counter reading at a magazine. Her eyes followed him indifferently as he looked around before moving toward the poster promoting the lottery. He could see the poster held a notation of the winning numbers from the latest draw. She turned back to her reading as he casually produced his ticket and began to compare the numbers. She couldn’t have noticed that his heart skipped a beat. The first two numbers were the same. His heart skipped two more beats when he compared the third and fourth numbers. They were also the same on both ticket and poster. Then, for a moment, his heart seemed to stop beating totally. He began to perspire heavily. He shook his head. All six numbers were the same. He had the winning number.
    John