The Voter File

by David Pepper

  So not only had I gotten screwed, I was barred from talking about how I’d gotten screwed.

  “Tori, you called me. You wanted to tell the story. So please don’t act like you’re doing me a favor.”

  She drew a deep, harsh breath before walking again. “I shared it with you out of trust. And out of a belief that you’ll do something with it. I have a stake in your ability to get it out there.”

  “Or what? You’ll call someone else? I hate to break it to you, but no one else is going to call you back.”

  “You never know. I’m persistent.”

  That didn’t matter, but it wasn’t worth arguing.

  “Tori, let me assure you I can do something meaningful if there’s a story here.”

  “So is that permanent?”

  “Is what permanent?”

  “Not being on the air at Republic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they fire you?”

  “All I’ll say is that we mutually agreed that it was time for me to move on.”

  Her lips opened, but no sound came out. Then: “Well, how are you going to do this story, then?”

  “If it’s a story, and it justifies coverage, we can get it out there.”

  I was holding back again, but not for legal reasons. More like pride.

  “How?” she asked, her head cocked. Her confidence in me was waning rapidly. “Do you have another television gig lined up?”

  “I’m barred from working anywhere else. In television, at least.”

  I had also signed a brutal noncompete. But even without it, in the incestuous and risk-averse world of cable news, being axed doomed me anyway. There were few places to go, and none would take a chance on a bad apple.

  Two large white birds swooped in and landed only yards from us, then stood upright in the river’s placid waters.

  “Herons?” I asked, impressed by their intense concentration as they stared straight down.

  “No, egrets. They’ll stand there forever until a fish comes along.”

  “Ah, patience. What a virtue.”

  “Patience? More like determination.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, chuckling.

  We started walking again.

  “So how will you get this story out?”

  “Remember the Youngstown Vindicator?”

  “The Vindicator?” She threw her arms in the air.

  “Yeah. You know—the newspaper you were so excited about in the car?”

  “You’re back with them now?”

  “Let’s just say they’ll run any good stories I come up with.”

  Tori scowled, not buying it. Smart woman.

  “What the heck does that mean? Are you on their staff again?”

  “I’m not. But we have an understanding. When I generate good stories, they’ll run them.”

  “Sounds like a fancy term for freelance.”

  The word hit me like a linebacker’s helmet to the sternum. I’d been in professional denial since I walked out the doors of the Vindicator a week earlier, never categorizing the arrangement in my own mind. To me, “freelance” had always meant unemployed, like people who call themselves consultants even when they have no clients. But I couldn’t argue with her terminology.

  “You can call it what you want, Tori. Good stories will be rewarded lucratively.”

  She stopped again, so I did as well. Her blue eyes stared right at me. She was studying me. Figuring me out. Then, for the first time since I’d met her, Tori frowned.

  “And that’s why you returned my call,” she said, more quietly than her previous sentences. Not a question but a declaration. More to herself than to me.

  Without any heads-up, she took off briskly back for her apartment, forcing me to jog to catch her.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked once I drew even.

  She kept walking in silence.

  “Tori?”

  She trudged quickly forward but answered. “You need a story. Just to make money. And you have no others. So after you ignored me, I became your only option.”

  We walked past the egrets, their eyes still fixed downward, their long legs planted exactly as they’d been before.

  “Spare me the ‘listening to the common folk’ reporting approach, Jack. You ignored me when you were a big shot and only called me now because you’re desperate.”

  I tried to respond, but no words came to mind.

  She’d figured it out.

  Figured me out.

  CHAPTER 11

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  You’re on in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”

  Even as her producer counted down in her ear, the concentric circles of the camera lens merging as her photog zoomed in, Cassie Knowles struggled to focus.

  Jack Sharpe’s departure may have given her more airtime and a hefty raise, but working at Republic hadn’t been the same. Yes, Cassie got to cover politics at the White House and Capitol Hill, the dream assignment of most journalists. But that day-to-day tussling took away from the investigatory work that was her life’s purpose. Even worse, without Jack, the mission of the place had changed. The passion was gone, hers included.

  Plus, her new beat placed her on the front lines of partisan rancor. Ever since Janet Moore had been elected president—ending a twelve-year span of Republicans in the White House—a handful of extremist groups rallied against her every move. And the narrow Republican majority in Congress—backed by big money, they’d hung on to the House and Senate despite Moore’s big win—caved to that right-wing grassroots fervor, blocking the new president’s agenda. When Moore had pushed laws reforming immigration and battling discrimination, the opposition scuttled them all. And her populist economic agenda was buried in committee, going nowhere.

  Cassie’s job was to cover every scene of this drama. Not at all what she’d signed up for when Jack coaxed her to leave the Boston Globe for Republic’s new investigative unit.

  So here she was, a prop in front of the Capitol, covering a looming government shutdown. For the second time in a month.

  “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . You’re on.”

  “Thanks, Chuck,” Cassie said, forcing the smile she’d spent weeks practicing after management told her to perk up both her expression and her wardrobe. “The story is the same today as it’s been for months. No progress. No compromise. Lots of name-calling. And very little sense of how they’re going to avoid a shutdown this time.”

  The wind had gusted all day, so she’d pulled her hair back to keep it from blowing around. But the breeze also drowned out Chuck Massa’s next question.

  “Say that again, Chuck?” she said, jamming the earpiece deeper into her ear.

  “Do you know if the president called any of the congressional leaders today? Is she willing to compromise to keep the shutdown from happening?”

  Her head flinched at the odd take.

  “Chuck, the president would say she’s compromised a lot already, cutting things she wouldn’t have dreamed of cutting on Inauguration Day. But to answer your question, no. I don’t think she called them today.”

  “Doesn’t a shutdown risk her whole presidency? She promised to work across party lines to fix problems. But that’s the opposite of what she’s doing.”

  Cassie balled her fist, smiling through clenched teeth. The aggressors in the shutdown fight were clearly the new Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, led by Speaker Elmore Paxton of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. When he’d taken the job, diplomacy exited the building, replaced by an eagerness to go to war over everything. He didn’t care if the government shut down. As he’d told her off the record days ago, it would prove his point that government didn’t do all that much anyway. People wouldn’t miss it, so he could starve it.

  But here Chuck Massa w
as blaming the president, picking a side in a way that Jack never would’ve. But she didn’t want to openly disagree with the anchor on air.

  “It’s not clear who the blowback will hit hardest,” she said, opting for the most tepid response possible. “It’s not good for the president or the Republicans on the Hill. But of course she can’t be happy about any of this. At this point her agenda is dead.”

  “It sure is.” Chuck sounded a little too pleased.

  “But this new leadership team has hardly let her out of the gate. I guess the American people will have to sor—”

  “That’s all the time we’ve got, friends. Back after a break.”

  “You’re clear,” the producer said.

  She reached up to remove the earpiece, when a steely voice bellowed through.

  “Don’t you ever fucking do that again,” Chuck Massa said, dropping his cheesy broadcaster baritone for his more gravelly alto.

  “Do what?”

  “Undermine me live, on-air. Never again.”

  “Okay.”

  She removed the earpiece so he couldn’t get another word in.

  Her heart skipped a beat. But as she stepped away from the camera and put her white opal stud back into her nose, a grin flickered across her lips.

  She’d never been chided like that before—by Chuck or anyone at Republic. But if her pushback had added balance to his one-sided bullshit, it was well worth the tongue-lashing.

  CHAPTER 12

  APPLETON, WISCONSIN

  Tori and I reached a truce.

  I wouldn’t tell her a thing about my departure from Republic as long as I spilled the details on my Vindicator deal. And I learned quickly that this literature major and data geek would’ve made one hell of a reporter.

  “Why didn’t they hire you back?” she asked as she unlocked the door to her apartment.

  “If it’d been up to my old boss, I’m sure they would have.”

  “Is Mary Andres not there anymore?”

  She even knew my old editor’s name.

  “Oh, she’s there all right, but on a very short leash.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Surprised your Googling didn’t discover this,” I said, feigning disappointment.

  The Vindicator had been bought out eight months before by a private company that was gobbling up midsized papers all over the country and chopping them up into pieces. In and around Ohio, they’d bought papers in Akron, Canton, Wheeling, and Erie, and more recently Youngstown and Columbus. Their cookie-cutter model squeezed profits out of the dying business, cutting the length of the papers and printing them on tabloid-sized paper. They centralized much of the content and many key functions, laying out all newspapers at company headquarters in Philadelphia, miles from anyone who knew anything about each town.

  I explained this all to Tori. “You can kiss goodbye real investigations as well as most editorial boards, cartoonists, and columnists—so the personalities of these papers are basically gone.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “And an invitation for corrupt local government. But all that cost cutting also means no money for reporters with actual experience, like yours truly.”

  “So they wouldn’t hire you back despite your national profile?”

  “Mary argued that I was worth it, but I don’t fit their model. Too costly when they can hire kids out of college.”

  “Rough.”

  “Humiliating. Here I’ve generated the best two scoops in the paper’s recent history and I can’t even get my old job back.”

  “Two scoops. I knew it!”

  She didn’t miss a beat.

  “See how much I trust you?”

  “Yeah,” she said dismissively. “So how’d the freelance gig come up?”

  “Mary and I brainstormed about it, then she went to bat for me. Told them that if anyone had the chops to deliver major, moneymaking scoops, it was me. And ultimately they bought it.”

  “And what are the terms?”

  I leaned back, defensively.

  “Tori, I’m not going to get into—”

  “Jack, this was our agreement. Nothing on Republic but the details on the Vindicator.”

  I reconsidered. Confiding in her was somehow putting me at ease.

  “They told me I could eat what I killed. ‘Get big stories. We’ll pay you for them.’ And there are bonuses based on clicks and any increase in paper sales.”

  Her face twisted as if she’d swallowed sour milk. “Is that even ethical? It sounds like a recipe for sensationalism and bullshit reporting.”

  “Young Tori, that horse left the barn years ago. Everything’s about clickbait these days.”

  “Right, but not where the reporter gets a bonus. That’s a really perverse incentive.”

  My initial reaction as well. But a man’s got to survive.

  CHAPTER 13

  PRICE, UTAH

  I’m not sold yet. Tell me more.”

  Thea Pappas was a stubborn woman, so she’d uttered those sentences many times over the years. According to her parents, long since passed, Thea’s stubborn side had first emerged in her early years of competitive riding. No matter how many times she’d been thrown off Thumper, her chocolate-brown Hanoverian, she’d climbed back on. Thea and Thumper went on to win the Utah girls’ jumping championship three straight years.

  But Mom and Dad had always reminded her that her stubborn streak hadn’t started with her. It came from a long line of sturdy Pappas stock who’d shipped out from Greece in the late 1800s to mine coal deep in eastern Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Many had settled in Carbon County.

  Eating bagels and sipping coffee, Thea and the bearded dark-eyed man studied each other—only miles from those now-shuttered mines. The man maintained a neutral expression, but Thea assumed he was not accustomed to rejection. Not with the amount of money he was offering. He spoke fluent English, but with an accent she didn’t recognize.

  He replied confidently, as if she’d just agreed to a deal. “We think you’re a strong bank with a robust brand, so we don’t want to change what you do or who you are. Athenia will still exist but would benefit from the heft of our national infrastructure.”

  It was her pint-sized papou, her granddad, who’d decided there was no future, at least for him, in mining. But he did perceive opportunity in the emerging diaspora of Greek families, who lived separately from the Mormon culture that otherwise dominated rural Utah. So with a small loan and a cadre of initial customers comprising family and friends, he’d founded the Athenia Bank of Utah. The first branch, in Price, had prospered from the outset. The family business grew steadily into a medium-sized regional bank with twelve branches across eastern and central Utah and an intensely loyal customer base.

  “And who are you?” Thea asked.

  “We’re new to America. But our investors have utilized an ambitious model in eastern Europe to great success and want to import it here.”

  Eastern Europe? Not what she expected.

  “So you’d keep my employees and the current branches intact?”

  “Absolutely. And we hope to get back into markets you had to leave after 2008. You still have a strong brand in those communities. Then we go bigger.”

  “And how are you going to do that? I got crushed in those places. BankUS and FirstAmerica are too strong.”

  When she’d taken over the business fifteen years back, things were already going south. At its peak, Athenia was the largest bank in Price, Park City, Ogden, and other Utah towns. But starting with Ogden, branches of the nation’s biggest banks had moved in, marketing aggressively for new customers and adding ATMs everywhere. Then those same large banks had bought up other community banks, transforming friendly rivalries with like-minded locals into fierce competition against out-of-town behemoths.

  O
f course, those same national banks had sought Athenia as well. But that’s where the Pappas genes had kicked in. Papou and her parents had worked too hard to build Athenia up to let it become another cookie-cutter branch of a national bank with no connection back to the community. And as she watched other community banks get acquired, that’s exactly what they had become, with half their hometown workforces let go.

  But, over the long run, the business wasn’t working. Twelve branches had decreased to eight, and after the 2008 crisis they’d shrunk all the way to four, confined to Price and Ogden. And while the big banks adjusted to the new regulations that had followed that crisis, the burdens were heavier on smaller banks like Athenia.

  Like her grandfather, Thea was stubborn but not stupid. So when a broker from Manhattan had called with an especially rich proposition, she’d agreed to take the meeting. At least to hear him out.

  The bearded man put down his coffee cup and leaned forward.

  “Our investors are willing to lose money at first. This is a long-term plan. They want to get in the market, build a base across the country with strong regional and local banks like yours, and position themselves for steady growth.”

  Thea crossed her arms. It sounded nice—but naïve.

  “I admire the vision. But I’ve got to tell you: the big banks are so dominant, something major would have to change for that strategy to work.”

  “We understand the challenges. It is a risk the buyer is willing to take.”

  She remembered Thumper. Getting knocked off. Climbing back on. She could do it back then, young and full of energy. But things were different now. Other people were relying on her. Her employees would fare better within a robust national structure as opposed to a small family bank’s dwindling footprint. And her family would profit as well, particularly with college around the corner for her kids.

  “Like I said, I’m skeptical. But have your lawyers call my lawyers and let’s talk specifics.”

  CHAPTER 14

  APPLETON, WISCONSIN