“You’re welcome, Kevin. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
Although I can see from the hard, cold glint in Susannah Evans’ blue eyes that she’s anything but happy to be sitting here talking with me. Especially in person.
But we’re live, and we’re both on our best behavior.
Frankly, I can’t blame her. Not after my run-in eight years ago with her friend and former running mate, Governor Owen Taylor, during his campaign for his first term.
I never should have let the producer in my ear override my good sense that day. It was a shitty question, a stupid question, and I knew better. I hadn’t meant to ask it, not really. But I was sick from food poisoning because of bad sushi the night before, was working on a migraine and couldn’t clearly read my notes, my head was screaming at me, my mom had literally just died of cancer the week before…
And because I was trying to listen to Taylor, and listen to the producer’s voice in my ear at the same time, with a miserably throbbing headache to boot, I stupidly parroted the question my goddamned producer dumped in my ear before I’d really thought about it and processed it.
Yeeeeaaah.
Admittedly, not one of my finer moments.
Add to that the mega-ration of shit I later received from my father over flubbing it and not hammering Taylor harder.
I finally got the bastard—the producer, not my father—fired by the network for that goddamned stunt. I’d been trying to get rid of him for months, and that was the last straw.
Hell, if I could get the network to fire my father from my life, that’d be amazing and worth every ounce of bullshit I put up with from my employer.
Worse? They still didn’t want to fire the guy, at first. The only reason they fired him wasn’t because of what he did, but because even our own viewers rightfully skewered us, and we were the laughingstock of every damn network.
Even Fox News clicked their tongues at us.
That’s when advertisers threatened to pull their dollars, and FNB finally caved and released a statement blaming him and terminating him.
It was cheaper than letting me go and paying out the remainder of my contract. Especially when the rest of my crew all publicly stepped forward to support me and verify my account of the events, and then some angel anonymously released the full tape that recorded the producer yelling at me.
Doubly especially since I’d tried to get another anchor to handle the interview, but the network brass overruled me and insisted I do it despite how horrible I felt and my life circumstances.
All that was on the tape, too, which had been running before I sat down with Taylor.
When the public learned not only was I sick, and in massive pain, and grieving my mom’s death, the pendulum of opinion swung back hard and heavy in my favor.
I’d only been at Full News Broadcasting for a couple of years at that point, and was still naïve enough to think I could create positive changes there to shift their coverage back toward center and help boost ratings. Admittedly, it was a helluva scoop, landing an interview with Owen Taylor after that school shooting.
Until I flubbed it worse than the Buccaneers on any given Sunday. It was literally the only time I ever felt thankful that Mom died, so she didn’t see me do that.
She would have loved me regardless, I know she would have. She would have talked me through it, hugged me, offered me that limitless love and pride she’d always been imbued with.
I’m pretty sure it was Lou who released the tape with the audio from the producer on it, the one that saved my ass and my job. When I asked him if he did it, he smiled and shrugged, but would neither confirm nor deny.
Doesn’t matter who, I guess. They saved my career, as well as helped win me even more viewers.
Owen Taylor got me back but good, though, four years later. I thought all was forgiven and I was being handed a scoop when I got to be the first anchor to interview Taylor and Evans early the morning after Taylor’s re-election. The walk-and-talk wouldn’t be long, just a preliminary clip we could run until we tagged them later in the day for our scheduled formal sit-down.
A sit-down that had been delayed and rescheduled several times over the previous week by Taylor’s ball-busting chief of staff, Carter Wilson.
Who also happens to be Susa Evans’ husband.
I got my walk-and-talk, all right.
Except I was left slack-jawed, as well as lambasted by network brass only an hour later, when a widely smiling Evans and Wilson went on Tampa’s WFLA morning show, alongside Governor Taylor, and broke the news that she and Wilson were expecting their first child.
Oh, and she finally officially confirmed she’d be running for governor at the end of Taylor’s second term.
It gave the local NBC affiliate the political scoop of a lifetime. Especially considering that, only months earlier, Evans had barely survived a plane crash and shipwrecking that literally killed half the Southeast’s governors and lieutenant governors, cruelly and forcibly shuffling the political hierarchy in those states forever.
Also, considering it was a given Evans would run for governor at the end of Taylor’s second term, because term limits meant he couldn’t run again, it was still a scoop because she officially announced it there first.
Fuck me.
Yeah, I guess I deserved it.
I sent Dad’s calls immediately after to voice mail and deleted the messages without listening to them because I knew he was blasting me, too.
I’d provided one more disappointment in a lifetime of them, I suppose.
Due to a lot of groveling on my part, I’m Evans’ first sit-down interview early this Wednesday morning in Tampa, following her landslide victory last night. She killed it, too, a fifty-five point victory that will rightfully shake both major parties to their foundations before pundits finish processing all the numbers. Independents such as Taylor and Evans can no longer be dismissed as lucky flukes. She and Taylor both have won incredible victories, especially considering they’re Independents.
Not that the idiots in either major party will take heed. They’ll wring their hands and revert to the same ole bullshit in four years.
I’ve interviewed Evans’ father several times during my career. Benchley Evans is a former Florida state senator and a state GOP political bigwig. The man is a ball-buster, and I was supposedly on his side, politically.
I can tell his daughter didn’t fall far from the same tree. If my balls aren’t crushed by the end of this interview, it’ll be a miracle.
Her friend and Florida’s current governor, Owen Taylor, is equally difficult to interview, although that’s mostly my fault because of how I bungled my interview with him. Said interview which had followed on the heels of a school shooting shortly before he won election to his first term.
I do take a little satisfaction in the fact that my former producer ended up having to move to Brazil and manage soccer game coverage because not a single damn network in the States would touch him once they learned what happened.
And Draymond Garcia, Evans’ chief of staff, is every bit as much of a bastard as Carter Wilson.
Garcia allowed me this interview under strict conditions, obliquely reminding me of the journalistic ratfuck they subjected me to four years earlier. He also hinted I would only get this one chance to make a halfway decent impression with the woman and return to their good graces, or my network would all but lose our press credentials with this administration for the next eight years.
In other words, they were done putting up with our shit.
Again, I cannot blame them in the slightest. After eleven years stuck in this thermonuclear circus of a network, I’m just about done putting up with our network’s shit myself. Not that I can publicly admit that to anyone.
If I didn’t need the goddamned job so fucking much, I’d leave.
Unfortunately, I have a contract that says I’m stuck here for at least another two years, unless they fire me or decide to let me go early
. The list of fireable offenses is a very short one, but also one that would guarantee I’d either end up in jail on the back side of events, or unemployable by any other network.
There’s not a snowball’s chance on the sun that they’ll willingly release me from my contract early. I have the highest-rated show on their network.
If I choose to leave before my contract’s up, I can do that, sure. Problem is, I have a non-compete clause that means until my contract’s term expires, I won’t be able to get an on-camera network job anywhere in the US, unless it’s for the Golf Channel or Animal Planet or something. Or, I’d have to take an anchor position at some little tiny local backwater independent TV station for a fraction of the pay.
Before I came to work at FNB, my previous agent died. The agency I ended up hiring for my first contract negotiation with FNB was competent. But the agent who’d repped me left and went independent before I was due for renewal. Since I was repped by the agency, I let them assign me someone else to negotiate the renewal.
How was I to know there’d be a difference in representation?
Guess I got cocky, but I was in the middle of covering a series of contentious midterm elections at the time and honestly didn’t want to focus on contract negotiations. By the time I realized what I’d signed, it was too late.
I drag my mind back to the present. I’m aware of Garcia positioned off to the side, out of the shot but in my peripheral vision. As he watches us he stands with his feet shoulder wide, arms crossed, and a stony look on his face that could easily be him channeling Carter Wilson. I know there’s a connection between the men, something about Garcia’s older brother having served in the Army with Wilson, but I haven’t had time to research that tie yet.
It’s on my to-do list. I want as much deep background on Garcia as I can get, in case there’s anything I can use to help me suck up to him, or possibly strong-arm him, either way.
At this point, I don’t care.
“Ms. Evans,” I say, “you’ve already stated you would continue down the same path regarding education reform as your predecessor, Governor Taylor. That you will be enacting more programs to help improve graduation rates…”
I sense her relax somewhat during our interview as she realizes I’m not going for a gotcha.
I’m no idiot. I want these people to like me. I’m not happy with this network, but if I can drag them kicking and screaming toward more centrist political views, even a little, I know our numbers will climb once more. That’s why I’m going out of my way to present the incoming governor in as positive a light as possible, finding points that even most hard right-wingers can agree on with liberals, like education, infrastructure, and emergency preparedness.
Right now, we’re hemorrhaging viewers, especially in swing-state Florida. If the tallies from this election—which resulted in wins for a record number of Independent and third-party lawmakers not just across the Sunshine State but throughout the country—don’t shake up the network, then nothing will. Especially when looked at from the perspective that more voters than ever are either registering with smaller political parties, or switching from D or R to I. So much so that, here in Florida, there is now a large and vocal non-partisan grassroots movement to end the state’s closed primary system. They have a good chance of getting a ballot referendum passed and adding it to our state’s constitution.
Yes, I said “our.” Because I’m a native son of this batcrap crazy peninsula, which makes it even more imperative to me personally that I don’t piss off this fledgling administration before they take office.
Now if the network will actually let me do my damn job, instead of trying to force me into bullshit tabloid territory, I might have a chance to redeem their brand if I can get enough of the other anchors on my side. I’m not the only one tired of their bullshit, but I’m also not the only one with a non-compete clause.
We’re all on a sinking ship. Unless I can get everyone to start bailing with me, we’re all going to drown.
* * * *
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Description
He doesn’t know how to let go…
I was a husband, a father, a politician. Now, I’m just lost.
Maybe they can help find me, I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be found.
Maybe the devastation that is my life should be allowed to crumble and decay.
There is no comfort in a funeral dirge, no solace in empty words spoken to me.
There is no release from this hell but death, and I can’t do that yet.
I don’t know how to let go.
But…maybe they can help me hold on.
* * * *
Chapter One
Now
A finger pokes me dead center in my forehead, insistently tapping and waking me up. For the briefest of moments I think it’s one of my kids, until I remember my youngest is now in college and lives on campus in a dorm.
And I know it’s not my wife’s finger, because she’s—
I force an eye open to see Casey standing there at the side of my bed, a cup of coffee in her hand. She’s staring down at me with that cocky head tilt she has, along with the disapproving smirk I’ve been graced with countless times over the decades we’ve known each other.
She’s my best friend, and my wife’s best friend, but worse?
She’s my chief of staff.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I grumble.
“Wake-up call. I knew you’d ignore the phone.”
Damn her, she’s right.
“How’d you get in?” This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation.
Far from it.
That she still has it with me proves to me she does, in fact, love me.
Sort of.
“I’ve had your key and alarm code for years, George. Duh. You really are a shit-for-brains before coffee, you know that?”
“If you know me as well as you claim to, you know that.”
She sets the mug of coffee on the nightstand closest to me before she walks over to the window. There, she throws open the black-out curtains, flooding the dark sanctuary of my bedroom with harsh early morning light and making me groan again as I clamp my eyes shut against it.
“Wakey wakey, Governor Forrester,” she sing-songs in a waaaay too cheerful tone for this obscene time of morning on a…
Fucking Saturday.
“Why do I put up with your shit?” I grumble.
“Because I’m your chief of staff, asshole.”
“Why are you my chief of staff, again?”
“Because I’m the only one who’ll put up with your shit, George.”
Damn her, she’s right.
Again.
“Why are you waking me up?”
“Because I’m the only one—”
“Who will put up with my shit. Right.” I crack an eye open.
She’s still smirking. “Ah, lookit that. And they say you don’t know your head from your ass.”
“Who says I don’t know my head from my ass?”
“Well, me, for starters. Get up.” She heads for the door.
“It’s Saturday, Case. Why are you waking me up on a Saturday?”
“Because you have campaign prep, Governor. If you want to remain the governor of Tennessee for a second term, get your ass out of bed and get in the shower before I ask a couple of really gorgeous, hunky state troopers from the EPU to come in here and dump you in the show
er for me.”
“I really think you’d do that.”
She turns at the door. “You know I would, Governor. Move. Now. I expect you downstairs in fifteen, showered, shaved, and dressed in a tie and jacket. You’ll want your overcoat, too. It’s chilly. Tick-tock, motherfucker. Clock’s running.”
She slams my bedroom door behind her.
Dammit.
“You made coffee in my kitchen?” I yell after her.
“You’re welcome, Governor,” she calls back.
I sigh and force myself to sit up. If I don’t, I’ll fall asleep again, and I wouldn’t put it past Case to do exactly what she threatened.
During my first campaign for the state senate, she dumped a glass of ice water on me one morning in a hotel room to wake me up for a Sunrise Rotary breakfast.
Bitch.
I reach for the coffee and take a sip, smiling. Perfectly prepared, of course.
Damn, I love that woman.
* * * *
I drag myself out of bed and don’t bother throwing on a robe. It’s late January, but I keep the temperature set to a comfortable seventy-two at night when I’m home. Now that I live alone, I sleep naked all the time and don’t bother locking my bedroom door. Hell, half the time when I’m home I’m walking around naked.
That’s on Case if she walks in without calling first and sees anything she doesn’t want to. Considering she’s known me since college, she’s gotten glimpses here and there when Ellen and I were dating.
After I use the bathroom, I start the shower and stand in front of the mirror over the sink while steam slowly swirls around me. I didn’t drink anything last night because I knew today would be an early one, but my eyes still look bloodshot.
Pet: A Governor Trilogy Novel Page 19
