He’d had the Harley longer than he’d known Ezra. From before a recruiter convinced him boot camp was a better bet than trying to talk his way out of the debt he owed a local dealer. It had been the only thing he’d left in Louisiana that he’d bothered to go back and get.
It got treated better than Clay treated himself. He definitely didn’t drive it under the influence. Ezra knew that, and he gave a brief nod of acknowledgement as he turned his attention back to the party that idled around them. Men and women in sedate cocktail outfits sipped champagne and traded gossip in arch voices as they waited for the big event.
“Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that?” Ezra grouched. Then he changed the subject abruptly. He wasn’t good at apologies. “What about your boyfriend? Did he agree to do his job or not?”
“Grade’s not my boyfriend,” Clay said. He picked his tumbler back up, the crystal heavy and slick in his hand, and took a drink. “Just someone I fuck occasionally.”
Ezra reached out and plucked a flute of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray. He took a sip as he asked, “So? What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know,” Clay said. He’d never really thought about it before. “A conversation?”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
The string quartet tucked into the corner of the room let the music fade down into silence and sat back in their chairs. A man in a well-tailored suit stepped into the middle of the room and clinked a spoon against his champagne glass for attention.
“Should I be jealous?” Clay asked quietly. The rest of the room and out into the hall went quiet as the other guests turned obediently toward the sound.
Ezra snorted and tilted his head back as he drained the champagne. “Yeah,” he said, a sarcastic lilt to his voice. “Ever since Janet divorced me, I’ve really missed having someone’s hand in my wallet.”
Now that he was the center of attention, the man in the nice suit fumbled briefly with his spoon before he tucked it awkwardly into his pocket.
“Thank you all for coming tonight,” he said, his voice pitched to carry, “but I know that none of you came to see me. So let’s raise a glass to the woman of the hour…”
Clay tuned him out. “I’ve bad news for you about that,” he said in an aside to Ezra.
“Keep it to yourself.”
The man lifted his wine in a toast as he announced, “Judge Charity Parker.”
Judge Parker strode through the crowd, hands up to acknowledge the polite applause and a few cheers provided by her guests. She was a fat woman in her fifties, but she didn’t play into any of the stereotypes people would assign her demographic. There was nothing soft, cuddly, or fun about Charity Parker. She was all gloss and hardness, from her bob of expensively maintained highlighted blond hair to the gray leather stilettos that took her up to six feet tall.
There was a three-step flight of stairs up to the patio doors that led out to the garden. Charity stopped on the second step and turned to face the crowd.
“Well, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…” Charity paused long enough to get her laugh. She lifted her hand just as the chuckles started to ebb so she could claim credit for the silence. “Seriously, though, and thank you to my nephew for such a lovely introduction, we all know why we’re here, so I won’t beat around the bush. After two years in the circuit court, some soul-searching, a lot of hard conversations with my family, and a little Dutch courage…”
She raised her glass in a toast to the room. Clay drained the last of his whiskey and waited for it. The murmur of amused appreciation from the guests died down, and Charity smiled at them.
“I’ve come to the decision that not only do I have the passion and drive for it, but I have a unique opportunity to represent and advocate for the people of this county,” she said. “That’s why I intend to run for the Kentucky Supreme Court and will be announcing my candidacy next week.”
Clay ran his gaze over the crowd to see if he could pick out the plants with their cued-up applause. He’d been trained for this. Well, to pick out the body in the back of the crowd just about to turn into a mob. The one who was either too clean or too dirty, who didn’t have any friends to try and shush him, and who would fade back into the alleys the minute the bottles started to fly.
If only it had been this easy when he was in Afghanistan.
The woman in the blue dress who’d tucked her clutch under her elbow to free up both hands to clap a second before it was due. Toward the back of the room, an older man in an expensively understated suit slid his phone into his pocket just in time to respond to the announcement. A handful of younger guests—mid-twenties to early thirties, either dressed like TikTok influencers or their grandparents—tried to rouse a cheer to go with the applause in perfect unison.
“You’ve got my vote!”
“Charity begins in Kentucky!”
It wasn’t subtle, but it worked. The effusive response from a few spots in the crowd prodded the more sedate guests into following suit. The cheers died down pretty quick, but there was a good ripple of applause and a generally positive murmur of support afterward.
They probably wouldn’t be so supportive if they knew about the dead bodies under their feet. People expected public figures to have skeletons in their closet, but corpses in the wine cellar was a different thing altogether.
Nobody liked a wet scandal…
That was a lie. Everyone loved a wet scandal. That was the problem. Charity could probably make any charges go away if she pulled a few strings, but she couldn’t stop Jessie Lowry in the laundromat from running her mouth.
With that hanging over her, suddenly Charity Parker wouldn’t be such a valuable asset to the people willing to bootstrap her into power.
