Free Hostile Witness by William Lashner

they can drag me through their mud, hell let them. Let them. I got enough to kick their butts halfway to Jersey and still become mayor. They all think I’m doing this with mirrors, my numbers rising like a rocket ship, my fund-raising shooting through the roof. Over two million in the last year for CUP, my group, not to mention the fat stream of donations I have going for my youth treatment centers. And let me tell you something, I got some big guns giving, sure, but I get more ten dollar donations, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, more than anybody. Nobody understands it. Nobody. I was just a normal political hack like every other slob in City Hall when Nadine died, just another grubby councilman looking for his piece of the pie. But when she died, when they killed her with their poisons, murdered her, fuck. Fuck.”
    He slammed his cigarette into an ashtray and lit another with his gold lighter. Leslie Moore drained her glass of champagne and reached for the bottle herself. There was a long silence. The Moores’ daughter, Nadine, had died of an overdose of barbiturates, it was in all the papers five or six years back, a teenager still when she started playing around with a dangerous crowd, experimenting with whatever was available. And then one night at a party, after too much cocaine and too many of the wrong pills, she collapsed and died. Moore was on the evening news, crying first and then shouting about vengeance, railing at the drug dealers who were destroying the city’s youth. A few weeks later he started his campaign to wipe them out, neighborhood by neighborhood, crack house by crack house. There were marches, there were raids, there were mysterious fires and unexplained deaths. He had started a war.
    After a drag from his cigarette, Moore continued. “I’ve been building my new coalition day by day. I speak in theneighborhoods, I do the good work, I open the athletic centers, the shelters, my youth treatment centers, but it’s not the speeches, it’s not the buildings, it’s not the programs that draw my support. These people, they look into my eyes and you know what they see?”
    “Their taxes being raised,” said Prescott.
    Jimmy Moore laughed, a genuine, head thrown back laugh. “My lawyer the Republican wouldn’t vote for me on a bet, I know that.”
    “I can’t vote for you,” Prescott said. “I live in Merion.”
    “Of course you do. But I didn’t hire you for your vote. I hired you because you’re going to kick the government’s ass.”
    “We’ll do what we can.”
    “No, you’ll do what you have to. But let me tell you, Bill. What the people see in my eyes is real. It can’t be faked. You won’t find a white politician in the entire country with the following I have in the black community and that’s because they know the pain I’ve felt, they know the hate I feel, they know I will rid them of their greatest threat or die trying. What they see is my passion.”
    He leaned over and draped one of his thick, tightly clothed arms over his wife’s shoulders.
    “It’s no different than what I felt when I first saw Leslie, standing in that crowd outside the schoolyard, with her little Catholic school skirt and her saddle shoes. She was so shy, she was, hiding out at the back of the group, unable to meet my stare from the other side of the fence. I was in my football uniform when I first saw her, on the practice field, and my passion spoke and I knew. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way. Not her mother, not her little private school boyfriend with the fancy sweaters. Nothing.”
    “And nothing did,” said Leslie Moore without even the hint of a smile.
    “That’s right,” said Moore. “Remember the flowers and jewelry and poems, those marvelous rich poems?”
    “Cribbed,” said Mrs. Moore’s sister, Renee. “You couldn’t even write your own love poems to Leslie.”
    “I was not as sharp with words in my youth as I have since become,” said Jimmy. “And John Donne