“There?s nothing wrong with ambition,” I said. “It?s all in how you handle it.”
“And just what do you know about how I handle things?”
“I know that Raines was a clone of the old guard. I think when the opportunity presented itself, you
saw yourself as a harbinger of the new. Dunetown was growing, and suddenly you had a chance to
revitalize the town—before the track was even finished. After all, tourist trade was booming; the city
was growing faster than flies in a dung heap. What you needed was to pump fresh money into the
system that had been passing the same old tired bucks back and forth for centuries. Then a windfall
blew your way. A chance to develop the beach with new hotels, condos on the waterfront,
subdivisions in the swamplands. Dunetown to Boomtown, courtesy of Sam Donleavy.
“Except the dream turned into a nightmare. Dunetown became Doomstown, because the opportunity
was spelled T-a-g-l-i-a-n-i. “You?re ploughing old ground,” he snapped, culling off the sentence.
I ignored him and kept ploughing.
“And when you found out you were in bed with La Cosa Nostra, you had to make one helluva
decision. Tell Raines? Risk his wrath? Or ride it out? What did you have to lose? Tagliani was
reclusive, his people were running legitimate businesses, everything was coming up sevens for you, so
why rock the boat, right, Sam?”
He hadn?t moved. He was twisting the cheroot between his lips, staring straight into my eyes.
“So far, nothing you?ve said is incriminating, immoral, or illegal,” he said.
“Right. But you forgot one thing—the Golden Rule of Findley. They didn?t give a doodly-shit
whether it was immoral, illegal, incriminating, irregular, or anything else. „The unwritten rule of
Findley was that Harry was going to be the next governor and your job was to cover his ass, not
grease your own. You fucked up, Sam. When you made your deal with Tagliani, you jeopardized
Harry Raines? political career and padded your own, and that was an error Raines would never
forgive. It was imperative that Tagliani?s real identity be protected, not for him, but for you. You
needed to keep that power until you established your own power base. Then the war with the
Taglianis broke out and you ran out of time. Like I said, the power is given and the power is taken
away.”
“Nobody has taken anything away from me!” he said, rising up as though he had grown an inch.
It was time to go for the jugular.
“That?s a lie,” I said. “You committed the big sin. You betrayed Raines? trust. He knew Seaborn was
too naive to get as deeply involved as he was on his own, and he really didn?t have any hold over
Seaborn, anyway. But you? You he had by the short hairs. Harry was the only person in the world
who could destroy you, and he was going to do it. It wasn?t the killer who said You?re finished? to
