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“Hear me out—”
“Five. Four.”
“The photographers following you have gotten out of hand,” he said. “And I’m here to give you a chance to clear the air. I swear, once you do that, the photographers will leave you alone.”
Alone? Alone was good. Alone was heaven.
“You stopped counting, so can I assume you’re interested?”
“You can,” I said, lowering the Mace. “Aren’t you usually a city hall writer?” I asked. “The identity of my baby’s father seems a little beneath you. Because it’s not Carter O’Neill.”
“I was pretty sure.” His smirk made my skin crawl.
“So…there’s not much else to talk about.”
“You could talk about Carter,” he said, and something in his voice, the electric expectation on his face, made me nervous.
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I know you don’t have insurance and having a baby is expensive. I’d be happy to pay you—”
“For what exactly?”
“For…” He sighed. “I don’t know, whatever you might find out about Carter. About his family. His mother.”
I nearly dropped my bag.
“Are you asking me to spy for you?”
“I’m asking you to do your civic duty.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry. But, wow, that’s…ah…that’s a stretch. Civic duty?”
“Look, Carter O’Neill is up to no good. His whole family is involved with this gem theft—”
“He’s a good guy,” I said, not entirely sure why I needed to defend Carter. Maybe because he defended me to the photographers the night of our date. Or maybe because he looked so alone inside Mama’s. Or maybe because I was a total sucker. “I mean as far as city officials go, he wants to help—”
“Himself,” he said, his puppy dog eyes growing razor sharp.
Everything in me recoiled, shrinking away from the man, and he must have sensed it because he stepped away.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he said, that charming half smile back on his lips. He nodded down to the card in my fingers. “If you want all this to end, just give me a call. I’m sure you don’t want it to get worse.”
The threat hung in the air like a bad smell and I watched him wave and walk away. That man was a snake, and as bad as my life was right now, I wasn’t going to make it worse by lying down with snakes.
8
CARTER
“The mayor would like to see you,” Gloria, my receptionist, said as I stormed past her desk early Wednesday morning.
“He’s in already?” I asked, wishing I’d had a bit more time for damage control this morning before meeting with Bill. On the front page of today’s paper, Jim Blackwell had done his best to make the donation from Lafayette Corp. seem like the administration was selling its soul. And I was the devil sealing the deal.
“He’s been here since seven,” Gloria whispered. “His assistant said he’s ticked with a capital t.”
“Great,” I muttered. I tossed my raincoat and briefcase across the small couch inside my door and headed back out toward the office at the end of the hallway.
“Good luck,” Gloria called out after me.
“Thanks,” I muttered. I was going to need it.
Julie, the Mayor’s assistant, winced when she saw me. “Go on in. He’s expecting you,” she said.
I took a deep breath outside the door, feeling as if I was about to face a firing squad.
“Mayor?” I asked, stepping into the elegant inner office. The desk, the shelves that lined all the walls, were made of thick, polished oak and the sun bounced off them and made the whole room glow with a warm light.
The river and the highway flowed past the windows.
It was a beautiful room to be fired in, if it came to that.
“Morning, Carter,” Bill said, spinning in his chair to face me. In the early-morning light, the mayor looked his age—which was closer to seventy than anyone wanted to admit.
But his eyes were still sharp and his mind the sharpest this city had seen. He’d served as mayor for two terms in the eighties and had run again after the Marcuzzi administration, in an effort to pull the city back from the brink. Now, he was a year away from the end of his term.
“Sir, I assume you want to talk about the article regarding the Lafayette deal.”
Bill flipped over the front page of the paper spread across his giant desk. “Jim Blackwell is riding you hard these days, Carter.”
“I know,” I said. “But the deal is clean. Lafayette is clean.”
“I know, son,” he said with a sigh and a small smile. He stood, his thin body outlined by the sun like a halo. “I know. You know. Eric knows. The city knows. There are always going to be naysayers. Always going to be articles. It’s the way it is.”
“So…?” I tried to find a point in this.
“I’m leaving after this term. I’m done. Too old for this nonsense.”
I’d known as much, but the words had never been said out loud. “The city will miss you,” I said, and Bill laughed.
