“Then tomorrow afternoon, there’s the board meeting. You don’t have to come to that if you need some more time to settle in.”
Board meeting. Michelle felt a prickling down her spine.
“Would… am I allowed to attend?”
“Well, if you want. We have them every other week or so. I don’t attend every time, to be honest.” Caitlin laughed briefly. “They’d rather do them without me, I’m pretty sure.”
“It feels like a good way for me to get a better sense of what you’re doing, how things work,” Michelle said. “But if you have things you’d rather have me do-”
“No, of course not-if you want to go, well then, I think you should.” Caitlin sipped her chardonnay. “Just be warned-there’s lot of talk that generally doesn’t lead to much.”
“Consider me warned. But I’m actually really excited to have the opportunity.”
Gary wanted her babysitting Caitlin for a reason. Safer America was important to him. The people on that board might give her a clue as to why.
“You back in Houston?”
“What do you think, Gary? Like you don’t know.”
She heard Gary chuckle through her earbuds.
“I guess I can’t put one over on you anymore, can I?”
Michelle lay back on the bed in her new apartment, covered by her brand-new sheets. “You know, it’s late, and I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.”
“You enjoying it? The work?”
“It’s a little soon to say.”
“Well, you’ll like why I’m calling you. That first installment we agreed on-you can pick it up tomorrow.”
“Great,” Michelle said. She felt a little rush of enthusiasm. She needed the fucking money, after all, to pay for this place, to pay for her new sheets, to figure out what she was going to do about a car in this sprawling city.
“You’ll get some instructions tomorrow night. You’re not going to have a big window, time-wise-you’ll have to hustle to the drop.”
“Okay. You going to tell me what time?”
“It’ll be after seven p.m. Just be ready.” A snicker. “Don’t let Caitlin talk you into cocktails.”
Porter Ackermann looked at his tablet. “So, back to 391. Everybody’s had a week to think it over. Are we in agreement?”
They sat around a walnut table in a dark-paneled meeting room with a view of the mall across the street. The meeting had started at 3:30 p.m. By now it was 4:45. It seemed to Michelle that not very much had actually happened.
“I agree it should be a priority. But do we really want to focus that large a percentage of our resources on one campaign?”
The speaker was a middle-aged white man-all seven of the board members save Caitlin and the Secretary of the Board were middle-aged to older white men.
This one had a square head and gunmetal gray hair brushed back close to his scalp-the Donald Rumsfeld look. His name was Randall Gates, and he was involved with a company named Prostatis.
“I don’t think we have a choice.” An older man-white hair, big gut, genial expression, the perfect shopping mall Santa Claus: Michael Campbell, who represented something called ALEAAG. “We do public advocacy for law enforcement issues,” he’d explained when he’d introduced himself, giving Michelle a pillowy handshake.
They’d all introduced themselves at the beginning of the meeting, after Caitlin presented Michelle as her new “right-hand woman”-“any time you need to set something up for me, just talk to Michelle here.”
“She’s a real go-getter,” Porter had added.
Michelle, for her part, smiled, accepted handshakes and a few lingering looks-a couple of the men doing their “how fuckable is she?” inventories-and took notes. There was nothing strange about Caitlin’s new assistant wanting to know the names of the board members, was there?
“As California goes,” another one of them said, a compact, balding man with crow’s feet around his eyes reminding her a little of Danny-that look a person gets who’s spent a lot of time outdoors, or staring into the sky. She thought his name was Steve. He hadn’t named the organization he represented.
“If this proposition passes, we are looking at marijuana legalization sweeping across the country,” Steve said.
Of course. Proposition 391: Legalize cannabis for recreational use in California. She felt an electric sensation in the palms of her hands, a little adrenaline rush.
Danny in jail for pot. Maybe there was no meaningful connection.
Maybe there was.
“So what if it does?”
It was Caitlin who spoke. The first words she’d said since her introduction of Michelle. You could feel a little wave of shock go around the room: everyone suddenly more attentive, expressions ranging from surprised to skeptical to carefully neutral.
Caitlin waved a hand. “I don’t know, it’s getting to the point where all the fuss over pot just seems silly to me. I mean, how many people in this room have ever smoked pot?”
Michelle wasn’t about to answer that question.
“Well, I never have.” Debbie Landry, the secretary of the board, sat up straight. Probably in her fifties, but she looked younger-long, carefully dyed blonde hair, cheeks a little too taut, maybe some Botox on the forehead-but she was in great shape, too, her bare arms toned and cut.
“It’s one thing for kids from stable backgrounds to engage in some youthful experimentation,” she said. “And even then you never know who might be susceptible to mental and emotional problems from taking that drug. For kids from disadvantaged backgrounds? We might as well just consign them to failure.”
Another one of the men, Matthew Moss, nodded. Barrel-shaped, a helmet of brown hair, big head, full cheeks, like a Lego mini-figure. Moss had been the more obnoxious of the “is she fuckable?” crew (Campbell was too jovial for her to take seriously), holding her hand a little too long, doing the overt checking out of her cleavage. He’d introduced himself with the attitude that she should already know who he was and what he did. She didn’t.
“It comes down to, what kind of America do we want?” he pronounced. “One that’s populated by a bunch of stoned slackers? It goes against our values as a country.”
Had she seen him on TV, maybe? On one of those stupid political talk shows with shouting heads?
“It’s not that I disagree with you,” Randall Gates said. “I’m just wondering if it makes sense to put all our eggs in one basket, resource-wise. We’ve also got 275 in California, and I don’t need to tell you what the implications of changing those sentencing guidelines are. And if we can’t hold the line in California, and I’m not convinced we can, we’d better start focusing on shoring up our defenses elsewhere. There’s a couple of Congressional races where, as you know, we definitely have dogs in those hunts.”
Porter nodded. “That we do. I think the obvious answer here is, we’ll just have to raise more money.”
A round of chuckles.
“We’re on track to raise thirty-seven million this year,” Debbie said.
Porter smiled. “I think we can do better than that.”
“The polling on 391 shows a six percent majority in favor,” Steve said. “Those are numbers we can move. If we’re willing to devote the resources.”
Matthew Moss nodded. “I think we have to make a stand on this.”
“We’d better,” Steve said. “Things are going to get trickier in California if this new disclosure bill gets traction.”
“Disclosure bill?” Moss asked.
“We’ll have to report donors over one K to the secretary of state for any California races.”
They didn’t have to already? Michelle thought. That didn’t seem right. Maybe she misunderstood.
“Surely there will be work-arounds,” Porter said.
Steve nodded. “There will be. But this is an easier campaign to run now. In the future?” He shrugged. “The momentum and optics may not be on our side.”
“You find me a single user of meth or heroin who didn’t start with marijuana,” Campbell said, wagging a finger. “And then there’s the correlation with criminal behavior-”