I hadn’t spent much time at campaign headquarters. This was a good excuse.
There were maybe twenty people at campaign headquarters. Most of them were working the phone banks.
I wasn’t about to interrupt them with some lame pep talk.
The cliché is that elections are won or lost based on the battle your supporters put on. That’s somewhat overstated but not by too much. The phone calls, the door-to-door, the rallies, the outreach to various groups... all are critical elements in any victory. Only since the Supreme Court claimed that corporations are people, too — just neighbors as nice as can be — did the value of the supporters diminish somewhat. When millions are poured into a Congressional battle like Jessica Bradshaw’s, cash dominates everything else.
A woman named Jean Fellows had been a reporter before retiring. She was second in command here. She should have been first. All I’d heard about the number one, someone named Mary Schmidt, was that Jean had to follow her around and fix her mistakes. Schmidt’s husband had contributed something like seventy thousand dollars to the coffers so his wife had her choice of positions.
Jean had a tiny office in the back of the place. As I walked back there I heard the eager, friendly voices of the phone workers. Once in a while they got attacked. They called somebody who believed that Jess had been born in Moscow and had won her Congressional seat by using arcane black magic on the voters. The good phone workers know to just excuse themselves and hang up when all this starts. The bad ones stay on the line and fight. It’s useless to try and persuade the tinfoil hat brigade, but I have to admit — having been a bad phone worker myself way back when I was in college — it makes you feel one hell of a lot better than just hanging up.
Jean was just wrapping up a phone conversation reminding somebody in a terse, vaguely threatening voice that the two billboards that had been promised had yet to appear over on Sixteenth and Twenty-first avenues respectively and that certain people — namely one Jean Fellows — would be mightily displeased if they did not appear within the next six hours. She hung up, shaking her head.
Jean was given to jumpers and Navajo jewelry. She had a strong handshake and a somewhat accusatory brown gaze, as if you were going to sell her a car that would fall apart one week after she signed the papers. She also had fluffy and elegant pure white hair.
‘Slumming, huh, Dev?’
She’d visited our Chicago offices with Ted one time and we’d taken to each other immediately.
‘Yeah. I figured this’d be a good place to score some meth and some hookers.’
‘You joke, but we’ve had a few volunteers here over the three campaigns that really worried me. There was a college senior who was sleeping with a fifteen-year-old girl. He dumped her, of course, and, of course, she went right to her parents — which she should’ve done. Which I would’ve wanted my daughter to do — obviously I would’ve preferred that she not start sleeping with the jerk in the first place — but the parents decided against bringing charges because of how it would affect their daughter. You think that wasn’t terrifying? It could’ve cost us the election. That year we won by less than two points.’
That was one campaign horror story I hadn’t heard. Jean wasn’t exaggerating. The other side spread so many false rumors. Was Jess gay? Was she into threesomes? Was she transgendered? The press would do the bidding for the other side with unmatched zeal; it was always s-e-x, wasn’t it?
‘So how’s Jess doing?’
‘As far as I know, pretty good.’
‘Between us, I’d be afraid to be in public again.’
‘She’s got a lot of protection but I’m nervous for her sake, too.’
‘I saw Ted on TV this morning. He did a good job. But he loves the spotlight a little too much for my taste.’
‘Well, let’s say he did a good job and leave it at that.’
‘Someday we’ll have a real discussion about Ted Bradshaw and I’m going to force you to tell me what you think of him.’
Her phone rang. She went into field commander mode again. Apparently there was a sector of the city that had not been visited by our volunteers. She was relaying her feelings about this in a voice that would have done George S. Patton proud. Whoever was on the other end of the phone was no doubt cowering and getting ready to beg for mercy.
After she hung up, she said, ‘By the way, you hear what a caller said on Phil Michaels’s show?’
Michaels was our local hate-radio guy.
‘The caller said he hoped that next time there’d be a better shooter and Michaels said he’d be willing to pay for target practice at a firing range.’
‘You’re actually surprised? I’m not.’
‘In my day if you said something like that two of J. Edgar Hoover’s boys would pay you a visit.’
‘That dates you right there.’
‘What does?’
‘J. Edgar Hoover. He was a long time ago.’
‘Yes, he was, sonny boy.’ Her harsh laugh was a salute to the institutions of tobacco and alcohol. ‘But the stench lingers on.’ Then, ‘I suppose you want to bore our gang with a pep talk?’
I slid my arm around her and hugged her. ‘I’m thinking you and I would make a perfect couple.’
Thirteen
The dark waters reflected the moonlight. The yellow security lights swayed in the wind. Only one of the houseboats showed any light in its windows. The expensive craft were at the west end of the dock. The ones nearest the asphalt I stood on were not only modest, a few of them were in shambles. Paint faded, windows patched with tape, not much bigger than a prison cell. I doubted that these ever left the dock. They’d work for beer parties just fine as people, drinks and drugs sprawled over the land, keeping the shabby houseboats nothing more than storage bins. The elites at the far end of the dock probably roared up here just to stand on the bow and piss. It was strange then that the pavilion would be at my end. It was behind me in the wooded area. I’d checked it out. It was empty.
A politician is shot at. A minimum-wage landscaper has six thousand dollars cash in his underwear drawer. A woman who claims to be his wife woos me out here...
My rental was the only car in sight. There was no traffic on the river road, either. The surrounding timbered hills made me uneasy. After last night I’d become aware of all the places a sniper could hide.
The temperature had to be below forty now. I wore the collar of my Burberry turned up. My Glock was in my right pocket.
I watched as every few minutes cars drove east on the narrow river road. There was a new housing development about two miles from here. I kept waiting for one of the cars to crank down a turn signal and pull in here. Then the woman and her husband would appear and explain everything. And after they explained, we could bring in the police and the matter would be resolved.
I walked around to keep warm. The long line of watercraft should have been the scene of women in bikinis, cookouts and little kids proving that they were in fact powered by batteries. And husbands and wives happy to be together again after the long hard week of scraping together a living in these brutal and unforgiving economic times.
The pep talk at campaign headquarters had gone well for the twelve minutes it took to deliver it. How confident I’d sounded; how downright paternal. When you mention that you’re working with the FBI, the state police and a security task force, most people buy in. For all the time they’re listening, anyway. But then you leave and they start thinking and talking — you know how these damned human beings are, thinking and talking all the time — and all of a sudden it’s as if that fatherly gent hadn’t spoken at all.