The Betting Window
by Bill Kowaleski
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
My teachers always said I was an underachiever, and who am I to argue? In some ways, my life was like any other: childhood, high school, girlfriends, drunk and rowdy, three years in the Navy, married, divorced, married again, divorced again.
In other ways, my life was a little different: gambling and drinking my money away, two years in prison, gambling some more, armed robbery, parole violation, more years in prison, type two diabetes, finding Jesus, a string of crappy jobs. A life right out of a whiny country and western song, but all I can do is take it from here.
One of my former brothers-in-law always liked me, though I can’t imagine why, so he got me this job at the airport. He’s an airplane mechanic, makes good money and he said the cleaning crew always needed people; lots of turnover. So here I am working my section in Terminal three Concourse B. Not much of a story so far, but stay with me, it gets better.
I may be compulsive, but I’m also observant. I see things that go right by other people, like the slightly different carpeting in the Gate 33 waiting area, the different types of newspaper vending machines, the way people going to Milwaukee always politely line up to board while the people going to New York storm the gate. On the other hand, the people waiting for their flights don’t see me at all. I come by with my broom and covered dustpan, sweeping up the stuff they throw on the floor, and they never look at me, never say thanks, never even get annoyed with me.
Other people might not like the lack of attention, but I’m a guy who’s always looking for how to take advantage of a situation, and being ignored gives me the freedom to observe people closely, listen in on their cell phone conversations, check out the hot ladies and, maybe once in a while, grab some money that drops out of their pockets. Yes, I know I said I found Jesus, but I’m just doing my job, picking up stuff that hits the floor.
So I keep my eyes open, and that’s why I noticed the reflections in the windows looking out onto the taxiway at the very end of the concourse. Let me paint the picture for you. The windows are lined up behind gates 31, 32, and 33. If you face the opposite way from the gates, you’ll see two of those TV’s they have mounted from the ceiling, and you’ll also see some newspaper boxes.
When night falls, you can read the newspapers in the boxes quite clearly and see detail from the TVs in the reflected light from those windows. It only happens after dark, and only if you sit in just one certain area, so I first noticed it in October when the terminal darkened right when the evening news was on and, to amuse myself, I watched it as a reflection in those windows.
OK, I said it gets better. It was a real quiet period right after a whole bunch of flights had left. Not much to do, so I amused myself watching TV in the reflection. But something was weird. What I heard from the TVs was not synching up with what I was seeing in the reflection. I was hearing some drone about economic projections from behind me, but I was seeing footage of some flood somewhere where everybody was wearing turbans and kaftans.
I swung around and looked at the TV. There was a big chart and some guy pointing to a line on it. I swung around again, and the reflection was showing guys in dresses wading through water. I was getting a really creepy feeling, like maybe I shouldn’t have smoked that joint before work.
And then Jack, my supervisor, startled me. “Hey, Nowitski, you starin’ at yourself in the glass again? Why a guy so ugly would always be lookin’ at hisself is beyond me!”
“Uh, hi, Jack. No, it’s like a meditation thing my parole officer told me. You stare at a spot and think about some word.”
“What word?”
“It’s my mantra, I can’t tell nobody what it is.”
“Alright, whatever. They, need some help near security. Somebody threw a bottle of soda at a security guard when they made him pull it outa his bag. Big mess.”
“OK, Jack, I’m on my way.”
Before I headed toward security, I looked one more time at the reflection. I saw a chart and some guy pointing to a line.
The next evening, I determined that the TV and reflection were out of synch for only about thirty minutes. It happened at the exact same time as it had the previous day. And I hadn’t smoked anything or had a drink before work. Nothing. At the very least, this was making my bleak life of cleaning the terminal and living in my sister’s basement a bit more interesting. I was actually looking forward to going to work for maybe the first time ever. I had to figure this thing out.
All the TVs in the terminal were tuned to the same station. The reflection wasn’t some strange optical phenomenon picking up a distant TV. But then what was the glass reflecting? It took a week before I found out.
At what I had started to think of as the usual time, the reflection and the TV were out of synch again. The reflection was showing a Ford commercial, and the TV was talking about a flood in Pakistan. I swung around and looked at the TV. There were guys in dresses wading though water. And then I thought, “Wait a minute, this looks real familiar.” It was in fact exactly what I had seen a week ago.
I swung around again and looked more closely at the reflection. The news had just come back on, and it was displaying the football scores. It was Sunday night, but these scores were for the games scheduled for next week. I just sat there staring like a moron until the reflection suddenly got fuzzy, wavered so bad it gave me vertigo, and changed back to the flood coverage.
So I blew it that first time but, the next Sunday, I was ready. I wrote down all the scores for the games scheduled for the following week. I don’t think it will come as a shock that all those scores were correct. I placed bets on all the games with three different online betting services that I know pay up, and I made a nice little bonus for myself.
My goal now was to monetize my discovery as much as I possibly could. I was finally gonna be able to get some of the nice things in life. But life is never that simple. I began to find that out when I walked into my sister’s house with a nice new model smart phone about three weeks into my lucky streak.
“So, Stan,” she barked at me, “who or what did you hold up to get the money for that phone?”
“Hey, I know how to pick winners, what can I say?”
“You’re not betting on football again, are you? You better not let your parole officer know about that.”
“You got your rent, so why don’t you just let me live my life?”
“Because I know where this goes. You start losing, you go to one of those payday places, then you get in deeper, you go see Larry Donatelli, you hold up a Kwik Trip—”
“No, not this time. I’m over that, I swear, I got a system that works now and, if it stops working, I’ll know right away, and I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Just trust me this once.”
I wasn’t dumb enough to start bragging about just how far ahead I was at that point. Thousands. I had even opened a savings account. Never had one of those in my whole life.
Speaking of things not being as simple as I’d hoped, it wasn’t long before I was getting frozen out of the betting sites. They want customers who lose more than they win and, I admit it, I was getting greedy and not throwing enough losing bets in to keep them happy. So I was down to Larry the bookie.
Those convenience store robberies that I went to prison for? They were to pay Larry back. Larry is a guy who spent some years in a branch of the Service that I’d rather not name so as not to besmirch their reputation. The military claims that it builds character, but Larry was able to learn a whole lot about explosives in Afghanistan while completely avoiding any character building.
Once out, he entered into a career of taking bets and intimidating people. The first time I met Larry was in a bar I used to frequent. Somebody told me he could take some bets for me so I walked over to his table. He was holding a can of beer in his huge paw. His forearm was bigger around than my thigh and was covered in abstract-art tattoos. His ginormous, thickly bearded, shaved head seemed to erupt like a huge pimple directly out of his massive, muscled chest which was thinly covered by a tight, tattered, sleeveless, formerly-white T-shirt. But what seemed to intimidate most were his eyes, almost black, never blinking, always boring into you like he was looking at something beyond you in the distance.
Larry didn’t need enforcers; he threatened without saying a word, without lifting an arm. Larry did subscribe to an ethical system, but it was Larryism, not anything you’ve ever heard of. Larryism was all about not screwing people, all about taking immediate and violent revenge on those who dared to screw Larry or his friends, and all about getting out of his way when he decided he wanted something. He wasn’t a guy I wanted to deal with, but I knew he’d take my bets and that he wouldn’t stiff me.
I knew I could only use Larry for a few weeks before he froze me out, too, but the season was almost over, and Larry would be doing a big business on the playoffs, so he’d easily make enough money to pay me. I thought about betting on basketball and hockey during the winter, but who’s gonna work with a guy when he’s always winning?
I kept watching for the lottery numbers, but the TV station that was on in the terminal never showed those. I needed a new angle and, on a cold, late December night, I found it.
At the usual time, I was sitting expectantly at my seat by the window into the future. When the image swirled and faded in, I could see that something really big was happening, and it looked a lot like it was happening right at my airport. A reporter in a winter coat, holding a microphone close to his mouth, his breath condensing into a fog that partially obscured his face, was talking earnestly. Bright lights were flashing around him in the darkness. The lights would occasionally illuminate a big hunk of smoldering wreckage behind him.
And then a banner flashed across the bottom of the screen with an airline flight number and the words “No survivors.” I burned that flight number into my brain and headed down the concourse until I saw Diane at one of the gates. Diane and I get along OK even though she turned me down when I asked her out. But then who’s gonna go out with an ex-con like me? Diane was better than that.
“Hey, Diane, what’s shakin’?”
“Hey, Stan. Not much. Quiet again. This flight is only about 50% booked. This keeps up, there’ll be more layoffs.”
“You got some seniority, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but they just keep cutting and cutting and, eventually, it’s your turn.”
“Well, what can you do? Hey, Diane, can you look up a flight for me? I just want to see when it’s supposed to arrive so I can be ready at the gate.”
“You, planning ahead? I’m shocked, but OK.”
She looked at her screen and then said, “Stan, I think you must have the number wrong. That’s a flight that departs this airport at 5:05 p.m. for Cancun. It just left about an hour ago from gate C16.”
“Oh, I see. Not even my concourse. Well, my mistake, thanks anyway.”
She gave me a kind of odd look as I scurried off, but I had what I needed. A plan was rapidly forming in my devious mind. Cancun is a place that a lot of people would like to visit in the depths of winter. One of those people would be my scumbag ex-wife, Treena.
Now, I’m not the type to commit murder but, if I were, Treena would be first on my list. She always seemed to have at least two boyfriends going during our brief marriage. In fact, she made it with some waiter she met during our honeymoon in Vegas. This I found out when I walked in on them in our very own hotel room. She figured I’d be gambling late, but I lost so much so quickly that I decided to quit before I was broke. The waiter was some martial arts expert with a chiseled body that I saw entirely too much of, and he tossed me right out of the room. You don’t forget things like that. Ever.
Copyright © 2026 by Bill Kowaleski
