CHAPTER ONE
“Y
ou feeling okay, Boss? You look like hell.”
Riley Evans stood next to her longtime employer Ryan Williams in the wings of the Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Outside, furious storms rolled through north-central Alabama, and the pair could feel more than hear the muffled thunder rumbling through the building.
Williams had spent the past two decades working as a political consultant, but this night and the months preceding had been well outside his normal experience. He surveyed the scene unfolding around him at the Republican Party’s election results watch party with a mix of dismay and resignation. Across the stage, a jazz band attempted to infuse energy into the cavernous room with a series of old standards. Two big-screen televisions flanked the ballroom, currently showing welcome messages but ready to tune to local television as soon as polls closed and results started to come in. Candidates for offices big and small, from the hopeful future Senator Merrick Comstock to incumbent County Commissioner Gloria Castille, sat with well-wishers in various green rooms throughout the facility. And high above it all, tucked safely in netting in the rafters, red, white and blue balloons were waiting to be released in a deluge when Comstock’s victory had been assured. Dozens of well-dressed men and women mingled throughout the hall, drinking flutes of champagne and snacking on hors d’oeuvres delivered by waiters in faux black-tie attire. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, all had gathered together for what they hoped to be a traditional celebration in what had been the most non-traditional of years.
For all the people there, it was the lack of attendance that most caught Ryan’s attention. Only a few hundred people had braved the thunderstorms pummeling Jefferson County to come to the party, rather than the 1,300 the center normally held. At least, Ryan hoped the droves stayed away because of the rain and not the equally stormy campaign the state had endured for the past few months. The air felt heavy from the humidity outside and tasted stale as it was circulated through the building’s heating system.
Ryan let Riley’s question sit and turned toward his assistant, who was more partner than employee after years working together. “We’ve never had anything like this,” he said.
“Rain happens.”
He glanced over his left shoulder and smirked. “I’m not talking about the rain. What in the hell are we doing here?”
Riley’s brows rose in surprise. This was the closest to an admission of error she had heard from the ever-confident Ryan since they’d met. “Are you feeling okay? You’re not really getting introspective on me after all these years, are you?” Riley put a hand on Ryan’s arm and turned him to face her. “You know the rules. Hell, Boss, you wrote the rules. We come in, we do the job. Win or lose, we do the best we can with what we have and that’s that. No emotions, no regrets.”
Ryan smiled thinly. “Did I really make you that cynical?”
“I’m really not, not like you,” she said. “If I was I wouldn’t have Nick waiting for me when this is done.”
“You’re really choosing this moment to harp on me again for not settling down with someone?”
“Not at all. But sometimes having a better half keeps a person from making a stupid decision, like coming across the country to get the wrong candidate elected.”
“That’s what I have you for,” he grunted.
Ryan turned back toward the half-empty auditorium, Riley following suit. “The rain’s going to screw with our numbers.”
“It happens.”
Riley took a look at the man standing beside her. He looked as he always did on Election Night. A tailored black suit accenting his trim 6-foot-2 frame, pinpoint white button-down shirt and, on this evening, a violet paisley tie. Power comes from the man, he always told her, not the tie. Straight brown hair suspended with product and combed up and to the right. Not the slightest hint of a five o’clock shadow appearing on his square jawline.
But, despite his usual outward appearance, something was different. This was the fourth election cycle they had worked together, and it was the first time she had seen Ryan melancholy as they awaited results. Even with defeat certain, he always had been able to draw energy from the end of the campaign, like a high-schooler on the last day of school. As she watched him, a single, unexpected bead of sweat rolled from his forehead, down his nose and dripped onto his tie.
“Ryan.”
He lifted his chin slightly in response.
“Seriously, are you feeling okay?”
“I’m just tired, Riley,” he said. “I’m very, very tired.”
***
Several hundred feet away in an auxiliary building, Merrick Ogden Comstock IV was holding court to a select group of advisers, friends and general hangers-on.
“The first thing I’m gonna do in the Senate is ban this shit,” Comstock said, lifting his champagne glass and smashing it to the floor. He reached into a jacket pocket for his once-full flask of whiskey, took a long pull and passed it to the handful of men standing close to him.
“A man deserves a decent drink,” one said with a smile.
“Goddamn right,” Comstock agreed. “Especially after a pooch-screwing like this.”
Comstock traced his family’s roots in Alabama back three decades before the Civil War. He himself had already served four terms in the Alabama Legislature, three in the House and one in the Senate, before deciding it was his time to move into the big leagues, the United States Senate. There were four things that Merrick Ogden Comstock the IV loved above all others—bourbon, women, Crimson Tide football and the sound of his own voice. Only the latter would prove to be a significant barrier to victory.
Three months earlier, the candidate had been speaking to a crowd on a sweltering day in Montgomery when a man near the back of the group held aloft a tattered Confederate flag. Ryan spoke into his Apple watch and security slowly made their way over to the man, asking him to lower the stars and bars. Comstock, seeing the movement in the crowd, stopped in the middle of his stump speech on Washington gridlock and pointed.
“Hey there, leave him be,” the candidate said. The two security guards stopped, and Ryan’s heart felt like it did as well. “Sir, my great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy fought under Hood and Lee for Alabama, and I couldn’t be prouder of it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that our heritage is something to be afraid of. You hold that flag high and wave it proud.”
Ryan blanched. The Civil War and the lost cause certainly weren’t among his talking points for Comstock. Within two days, that nine-point lead was down to five.
Ryan, Comstock and Comstock’s chief adviser, Marianne Jewell, met that night and reached an agreement that the candidate would stick to his script no matter what. No one had sent that message to his supporters. At Comstock’s next stop, a half-dozen stars-and-bars were waving at different places in the crowd. At the next, more than a dozen. While his numbers among the so-called Independents were sliding into oblivion, his overall percentage started to stabilize. Not a politician for nothing, Comstock abandoned his script entirely and started ad-libbing about “our heritage” being under attack, and crowds that had started to become far less diverse ate up every word of it. Soon his speeches devolved into rhetoric that would have been expected in the early 1960s.
Amazingly, only Ryan and Riley seemed to be concerned about the direction the campaign had taken, not to mention the political toxicity that would attach itself to anyone who had been part of it.
“If he doesn’t cut this shit out, I’m outta here,” he would tell Jewell.
“There’s the fucking door, carpetbagger,” she replied, knowing full well it was too late for Ryan to pull the abort handle. All he could do was go invisible as much as possible. No television appearances in defense of his candidate, no newspaper interviews either on or off the record. Work quietly to distance himself and his firm with comments on deep background from well-disguised sources, never from himself or Riley. And most importantly, get his own talking points straight for when this train wreck came into the station, whether it was successful or on fire.
Jewell, naturally, shared none of Ryan’s concerns as she looked at Comstock on this long-awaited election night and smiled proudly. He was a true son of the South, carrier of a proud heritage that was slowly being stripped in a new age of political correctness. If people didn’t understand that, the hell with them. And that could go double for Ryan, the carpetbagger from somewhere out West who hadn’t set foot in the state until his first check cashed.
“Word is the turnout wasn’t that great because of the storms,” one of Comstock’s cronies said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Comstock said with a wave of the flask. “These people know me. Hell, they’d cross a flooding Tallapoosa to make sure I’m in DC protecting them from all those crooks.”
Jewell walked over to where Comstock stood, took the flask out of his hand and took a quick sip. “We know they did, Merrick. The tallies will show it soon.”
***
In truth, Ryan was feeling much more than tired. Walking the fifty feet from the side of the stage to the small room he had commandeered as his office, he became short of breath. Ryan sat in one of the well-worn blue recliners and put his hand to his chest, his heart racing as he consciously tried to take a series of deep breaths to bring his body back under control, Riley close on his heels.
“I swear,” he said quietly, “I’m not going to let this bastard be the death of me.” He just might, a small voice said inside his head.
Stress was part and parcel of his job. Long nights ended with a quick drink of whatever was handy and a sleeping pill or two to battle the ever-running dialogs and to-do lists running through his head. Mornings began with several cups of coffee to shake off the hangover from the sleeping pills. An accelerated heartbeat was less a cause for concern than just another Monday.
But this? It felt as if one of the elephants in the Republican motif in the auditorium had come to life and sat squarely on his chest.
Imagine the headlines if you keel over right here, the voice said. Hotshot carpetbagging campaigner dead at 48.
Shit.
“Riley,” he said between gulps of air. “Find me a doctor. Quickly.”
***
When Riley and the doctor came into the room, Ryan was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall and legs straight out in front of him. He had loosened his tie and unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt. His suit jacket was folded neatly on a nearby chair.
“Ryan!” she shouted, crossing the room in three strides and kneeling down beside him, the EMT close behind.
“It’s just fatigue,” he said unconvincingly. A loud crack of thunder boomed through the building, causing all three to jump and drawing a mix of gasps and cheers Ryan could hear through the wall.
“Did you fall, sir?” the EMT asked.
Ryan shook his head and looked toward Riley. “We lose anyone yet?”
“Not yet,” she said. “I think they feel safer in here than out on the roads right now.”
“How bad is it?”
“A couple of inches of rain. I’m told that’s a drizzle around these parts.”
Ryan smiled and started a laugh which turned into a cough. “I don’t suppose we can send Comstock out for sandwiches.”
Riley took his hand and laughed.
The EMT stared at his watch as he took Ryan’s pulse, then reached into a medical kit for a blood pressure cuff.
“How does it look?”
“Just breathe normally, sir.”
“Like I haven’t been trying to do that for the last twenty minutes.”
Riley placed a finger on his lips. “For once, shut up.”
The EMT wrote down the numbers and started asking Ryan a series of questions—did his left side hurt, was there any numbness in his fingers or toes, was he dizzy, did he feel nauseated. As Ryan was answering no repeatedly, Riley’s phone rang. She stood quickly and moved to the far side of the small room. The first results, Ryan thought. He half listened to the EMT talk about his pulse of ninety-something and his blood pressure of 150 some-odd over some other number also over 100 as he watched Riley’s expression turn grim. “Text what you have,” she said quietly and walked back to Ryan’s side.
“The rain keep our people home?”
Riley forced a smile she didn’t feel. “It’s not important,” she said, “it’s still early.”
“Sir, I think we need to get you to the hospital.”
Ryan shook his head with effort. “Not a chance. We’re not done here yet.”
“Ryan...” Riley said.
“I said we’re not done.” He looked the EMT in the eyes. “Is it a heart attack?”
“I can’t be certain.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t guess, sir.”
“Then I’ll guess for you and say no,” Ryan said, slowly rising to his feet and shuffling to the recliner. “I don’t care what we need to do, but I’m not leaving this building with one percent of the precincts in and an auditorium full of people.”
“Half full,” Riley corrected him.
Ryan shot her a pained glance. “Remind me to fire you before I die.”
***
Nearly 300 miles to the south, Ronny Rounds was wishing he had the opportunity to fire someone. Rounds was a fishing magnate from Bayou La Batre, hard against the Gulf of Mexico, and traditionally one of the largest donors to the Republican Party in the state. Merrick Ogden Comstock IV was his own pet project, an old-fashioned water carrier who would head to Washington, enjoy the perks of being a senator and never forget the man who got him there when a favor might be needed.
It was Rounds who had personally hired Ryan based on his reputation within Republican campaign circles, flying him to Alabama on his private jet. Rounds knew Ryan had never worked west of the Continental Divide but, after all, politics was politics.
“What do you know about Alabama, Ryan?” Rounds had asked at that first meeting.
“They tend to win a lot of football games, Ronny.” Ryan had never met the man but, at this stage of his career, he was well past the days of using words like mister and sir, especially when the caller flied him cross-country just to talk.
“That they do. Now tell me what you really know.”
“Honestly, Ronny, just what I read in the papers and hear on the coconut telegraph. It’s on the wrong side of the Mississippi.”
“I see.” Rounds leaned over his desk, the blue waters of the Gulf fading into a gray horizon behind him. “What exactly would it take for you to cross the river?”
As the early reports from around the state came in, Rounds was ready to send Ryan back across the Mississippi as fast as possible. A local, he fumed, would have handled the whole stars-and-bars thing without a blink. It was their history, for Christ’s sake. And when Comstock decided to pretend he was George Wallace and paraphrase the state’s most famous politician-slash-segregationist?
“Let us ride to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South,” Comstock said at a rally in Huntsville ten days before the election. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line on the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and say... Alabamans first now, Alabamans first tomorrow and Alabamans first forever. God bless you and God bless the great state of Alabama.”
Rounds wished he had thought of it himself. Sure, Wallace had distanced himself from that line and others before he passed into the great beyond, but hell, Rounds’s own daddy had made a point of teaching him this little bit of state history. “Never forget the pride that is being an Alabaman,” he told Ronny.
Ryan Williams? He had wanted to “walk it back,” whatever the hell that meant, explain that Comstock was just pledging to take care of his own back home, like these yokels from Dixie didn’t already understand Comstock’s point.
Yes, Comstock fell in the polls, but that was what happened when you tried to apologize for being a proud son of Alabama, Rounds thought.
Proof of the damage done by Ryan was being delivered to Rounds with each update showing Comstock trailing by one to two percentage points, not just in the baby blue, less than purely conservative stripe of counties across the state’s middle. Even down here on the Gulf, where Comstock vowed to help the shrimping and fishing industries once he got to office, the margins were either thinly in favor of Comstock or moving in the wrong direction.
It was time, Rounds thought, to find someone’s ass to chew.
