“They’re organic.”
She looked at the pack. “You smoke cigarettes called ‘American Ghost’? Jesus, Mike. Organic
“Feeling better?”
“No!”
“Oh.”
She stabbed the cigarette to death in the ashtray. “Mike, I’m working for the White House.”
“It’s an
“It’s the
“It’s their money we’re spending. It’s their money I’m giving you. They are paying for our
Trix found my eyes. “—that
“Yeah. So you said. What happened?”
“The guy couldn’t get on the ballots. Had worse problems than Nader. Spent a lot of money, but it all fell apart. Indymedia called it Bush Envy. See, what threw people was that he had no experience at all, in anything. He made Ross Perot look like JFK, you know? No one knew what made him think he could win. But, what I’m now thinking
“Yeah.”
“Hold on.” I quickly lit myself a cigarette. “You’re a bit ahead of me. Mentioning him running for office, that put up the red flag, because it’s the first political connection to the book I’ve had so far. But you think it could actually leverage someone into office?”
“Don’t know. I mean, if your guy honestly believes it’s full of…what? Precepts by which America can be healed? If your guy believes it, maybe someone else is crazy enough to. A book that can save America, signed by all the Founders…”
“…hell. That’s interesting. That’s really interesting. We need to get on a plane.”
“Hell, yeah,” she said.
Chapter 20
At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.
“My asshole boyfriend’s in San Antone,” she slurred, pressing the plastic handle, sticky with beery sweat, into my hand. “Take over the plane, drop it on the fucking Alamo.”
Trix and I dropped the things into the nearest wastebasket. I looked back to see a team of cops lay into her with batons. “I’m white, you bastards!” she yelled, until one of them shot her with a Taser. The cops gathered around and silently watched her flop around on the floor like a fish out of water.
“Just another day out at the zoo,” Trix whispered. “Keep walking, Mike.”
Chapter 21
Bob Ajax was waiting for us in the arrivals lounge at the San Antonio airport. Huge and fifty, with a grin like he’d just cheated God out of his savings.
“Mike Mc fucking Gill,” he bellowed. “Man, you’ve lost weight. New York City must be killing you.”
“Look at your goddamn stomach, man. You eat your last wife or something?”
“Bastard. And I see you’re hanging out with a better class of person these days.”
Trix read him in a second and gave him a sexy crooked smile. “Trix Holmes. Mike’s assistant.”
“Hell. I could use an assistant like you.”
“You couldn’t afford me, Bob.”
Bob laughed out loud. He’d always liked women who’d talk back to him just a little bit. “Girls with balls” were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. He’d heard of a place in Iceland where troublesome women were in fact drowned in a freezing bottomless well. Bob had once gotten inhumanly drunk and attempted to dig such a well outside the office in Chicago, using a stolen pneumatic drill and, in the final moments of his excavation, the head of a passing police officer. I helped him keep his job in the aftermath, and we’d been solid friends ever since.
Bob was still driving the same car: an immense, battered old Lincoln Continental that was held together by spit and a prayer. He slung our bags in a trunk already half-full with, in Bob’s words, “tools of the trade,” and then wrestled himself behind the wheel.
“One of those things looked like a harpoon, Bob. You do much whaling in San Antonio?”
“It’s a Persuader. Punches out door locks. Tool of the trade. You see the big black tube next to it?”
“Yeah.”
