The thing about Sam Kowalski was that he had spent thirty-two years being exactly what the world expected him to be: Polish, working-class, slightly behind on his payments and slightly ahead of his problems, living in a two-room apartment above a auto repair shop in downtown Los Angeles that smelled perpetually of motor oil and someone else's dinner.

He was not a bad man. He was not a good man. He was a man who had learned, over three decades of incremental disappointments, that the difference between good men and bad men was mostly a matter of lighting and camera angle, and since neither of those things was particularly generous in his life, he had stopped worrying about the distinction.

He ran a used car lot out of a cinderblock building on Vermont Avenue that had once been a liquor store and would eventually be a something else that Sam would not live to see. The cars were mostly Ford and Chevrolet—slightly older models with slightly higher mileage, sold to people who could not afford new cars and did not yet understand that the two things were essentially the same thing.

The old man appeared on a Thursday afternoon, which was significant because Thursday afternoons in downtown LA are the hours when the city is between one thing and another: past the morning rush, not yet evening, and the heat is at its most oppressive, the kind of heat that makes you wish for a rain that will never come.

The old man was sitting on the curb outside Sam's lot, which was really just three parking spaces and a hand-painted sign that said CARS FOR SALE in letters that had been painted by someone who thought the letter L looked like a garden tool. The old man was wearing a suit that had been fashionable in a different decade and a hat that had been fashionable in a different century.

"Hey," the old man said. "You got a minute?"

Sam looked at him. The old man was one of those LA characters—the kind of man you see on every street corner, someone who has decided that the sidewalk is a reasonable substitute for a home. But there was something about him that made Sam stop. It was not his appearance—it was the way he looked at Sam, the way his eyes held Sam's for a second longer than was comfortable, the way he smiled like a man who knew a joke that Sam had not yet heard.

"I always got a minute," Sam said. "That's the problem."

The old man laughed. "That's a wise man's answer. Most guys say they don't got time, which is the lie people tell when they're afraid of being wise." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "I got a proposition for you. But first I need you to answer a question."

"What question?"

"If I could give you whatever you wanted—money, power, a wife who looks at you like you're the only man in the room, a house that doesn't smell like motor oil and regret—would you say I'm a devil or an angel?"

Sam looked at him for a long time. He had spent his life surrounded by men who promised him things they could not deliver, and he had learned to be suspicious of anyone who offered something for nothing. But the old man was not offering something for nothing. He was asking for an opinion. And opinions were free.

"You're a guy sitting on a curb in a suit that cost more than my car," Sam said. "So right now, you're neither. You're just a guy who needs a meal. You can be devil or angel after you've had a burger."

The old man stared at him. Then he laughed—a real laugh, deep and belly-shaking and the kind of laugh that had probably been a rare commodity for a long time. "You know," he said when he could speak again, "most people would have said something flattering. You're the first person who's offered me food instead."

He reached into his coat and pulled out two objects. The first was a pair of dice, ivory-white and perfectly balanced, with pips that seemed to catch the light even when there was no light to catch. The second was a lighter, brass and heavy, with a flame that burned blue and steady.

"The dice," the old man said, "will tell you the next lottery numbers. Not every day—maybe once a week, maybe once a month. When they feel like it, they'll show you the numbers in your dreams. You just have to pay attention."

"And the lighter?"

"The lighter will not go out in the rain. Or in a fire. Or in anything. Strike it and it will burn, and it will keep burning, and nothing—not wind, not water, not God himself—will put it out."

Sam took both objects and went home to his apartment above the garage. He ate a burger that his neighbour's wife had brought over because she knew he was too proud to ask for one, and he dreamed that night of numbers he could not quite remember when he woke up.

But he did remember some of them. And he used them.

He started small—a five-dollar ticket at a gas station on Pico Boulevard, a twenty-dollar win that he used to buy a case of beer. Then a hundred-dollar ticket, a thousand-dollar win that he used to buy three more cars for his lot. Then a thousand-dollar ticket, a fifty-thousand-dollar win that changed everything.

Sam's car lot became a car empire. He bought adjacent lots, then blocks, then streets. He hired salesmen and accountants and a secretary who was twenty years younger than him and looked at him the way he had always wanted to be looked at. He bought a house in Beverly Hills that he never stayed in because it didn't smell like motor oil and that made him restless. He became rich in the way that Los Angeles makes rich men: quickly, quietly, and with the implicit understanding that the money was held on loan from whatever force was keeping track.

Decker was a deputy sheriff in the LA County Sheriff's Department, and he was the kind of man who had spent thirty years learning how to take things from people who could not defend themselves. He had heard about Sam's luck—everyone had—and he had decided that luck belonged to the man who could control it.

"Operation of an illegal gambling enterprise," Decker charged. The charge was technically plausible and practically impossible to disprove, because Sam's winnings were technically gambling, and Decker had the judge, the prosecutor, and the judge's judge in his pocket.

Sam was thrown into a private jail—a holding facility that Decker operated out of a warehouse in San Pedro, and which the official records referred to as "under maintenance." In that jail, Sam discovered something he had not known about himself: without his dice, without his luck, without the numbers that had been guiding him through life like a compass, he was not a man. He was an empty shell wearing a man's clothes.

He was not brave. He was not noble. He was a man who had outsourced his decision-making to a pair of dice, and now the dice were gone and he had to make his own choices and he could not.

On the third day, he convinced a guard to let him visit the roof for "fresh air." The guard, who was also a man who could be convinced for twenty dollars, led him up to the flat roof of the warehouse and left him there for five minutes. Sam climbed over the parapet and dropped.

He did not land cleanly. He landed on a metal vent, and the vent bent but did not break, and Sam broke instead. It was not a romantic death. It was not a tragic death. It was a death that smelled of motor oil and rust and regret, and it was exactly the kind of death Sam Kowalski deserved.

His daughter Sue—twenty-three, sharp-tongued, already carrying the kind of bitterness that comes from watching a father make the same mistake over and over and being unable to stop him—went to Decker and offered him the dice and the lighter.

"Take them," she said. "Just leave me the one thing he left behind: the right to never speak his name again."

Decker took both objects and smiled the smile of a man who had just won the biggest hand of his life.

What he did not know was that the dice were not what they seemed.

The dice told Decker other people's numbers, not his own. He won at the lottery three times, and each time he won, he celebrated with a bottle of champagne and a call to the man he paid to make problems disappear. But the numbers always pointed to someone else—someone in the San Fernando Valley, someone in Long Beach, someone in Pasadena. Decker won money that was not his by winning numbers that were never his to win.

The lighter never went out. Decker used it to burn things—evidence, mostly. Documents. Photographs. Letters. He burned everything that could be used against him, and the lighter burned and burned and burned, and each time he struck it, the blue flame showed him something he did not want to see: Sam Kowalski, standing on the roof of the warehouse, looking down at him with eyes that were empty because they had been empty long before the body fell.

Sue Kowalski works at a Denny's off the 101 freeway, flipping burgers and wiping tables and listening to the conversations of people who are too tired to go home and too poor to go anywhere else. She does not think about her father. She does not think about the dice or the lighter or the old man on the curb. She thinks about the next shift, and the next paycheck, and the fact that in twenty-two years she has never once won anything that did not require effort.

Sometimes, when she is walking to work in the rain, she strikes a match and watches it burn. She does not know why. She just likes the way the flame looks against the dark, steady and small and entirely its own.