Opening Paragraph

Below is the opening paragraph to a novel that I just started, and in all likelihood, will not finish.   

    Since the age of nine, Jacob Colby could not watch a raccoon and a dog play checkers without two things; his lucky hat and exactly forty-seven dollars in change in his right front pocket which needed to be mostly nickles and dimes. As I'm sure you can imagine, this has caused poor Jacob more than his fair share of heart ache over the past twenty six and three-quarters years. The worst example of this being when he was forced to strangle the love of his life, Sarah Nikelholm, in a Toronto alley-way after she insisted on giving a vagrant one of Jacobs quarters, even though this would have left him exactly ten cents shy of his necessary amount, which the man claimed was needed in order to save his life. It was later confirmed that the man did indeed need the twenty five cents, and that it did in fact save the man's life. This was of no consequence to poor Sarah who lay bloated and dead in a rat infested Canadian sewer, her face so swollen and bruised that the coroner was forced to confirm her identity by swabbing some DNA off of her rarely used, but by no mean virgin, vagina.