Free Sleeping Dogs by Ed Gorman Page B

family life.”
    â€œHow many are married?”
    â€œWhat difference does it make?”
    â€œHow many?”
    â€œShit, I don’t know. Say, uh, four.”
    â€œFour from twelve leaves eight. Eight potential bimbo eruptions.”
    â€œThey haven’t said anything so far.”
    â€œSo far. But three weeks is a long, long time. And maybe one or two of them are mad because they wanted more than a one-night stand. It’s not very often that a woman gets to sleep with a real senator. But you blew her off. So every time she sees your face on TV she gets mad and hurt and vengeful. Most women just ride with it. They don’t want to humiliate themselves by getting caught up in a scandal. But there’s always one who’s like all those people you see on trash TV. ‘Sure I’m having sex with my mother, but I’m on TV and that’s all that matters.’ Maybe one of these eight women you feel so confident about, Warren—maybe at this very moment she’s picking up the phone and calling Lake headquarters and saying that she’s got a piece of information that’s so hot she’ll only talk to Lake himself. Remember Paula Jones, Warren?”
    â€œYou’re scaring the hell out of me, Dev. And I mean that.”
    â€œWell, you’re scaring the hell out of me, too. Right now I want to punch your face in.”
    â€œI don’t blame you.”
    â€œOh, don’t cheese this up with remorse, Warren,. You lied to me and now we’re all in trouble.”
    â€œWell, excuse me for saying I’m sorry. I guess that’s a no-no with big bad Dev, huh?”
    â€œWe’ve got Greaves—or rather he’s got us—and we’ve got to explain to the press about last night, and we’ve got a campaign to run. If
we’ve got time to squeeze it in between everything else, that is. And then on top of it all we’ve got maybe one or two women who just might like to see you take a real hard fall.”
    By this time he was pale and sweaty and a familiar tic had started working on his left eye. The tic usually appeared when stress reached overload proportions for him. He was suffering and I was happy to see it. He’d lied to his wife, to his staff, and to me. Laura had told me soon after I’d signed on that he’d gathered them all together one day and told them in a very formal way, “I am changing my lifestyle. I want to become an adult instead of this compulsive teenager I’ve been all my life.” He didn’t have to elaborate. He didn’t have to say that heretofore he couldn’t seem to keep it in his pants. They knew what he was talking about.
    â€œSo now what, Dev?”
    â€œNow we just go on and do our jobs and hope for the best. I want to see Greaves’s video, and then I want to see if I can find that makeup woman.”
    â€œShe doesn’t matter anymore.”
    â€œSure she does. If she’ll admit that Greaves or somebody else from the Lake camp hired her, we can coast the rest of the way home. We’ll wind up with a ten-point lead.”
    â€œBut what about the tape?”
    â€œSeparate issue. I’ll look at it and tell you if I think it’s been altered in any way.”
    â€œBut I’ll never be able to come up with a million dollars.”
    â€œYou won’t have to. Get me three hundred thousand in cash. I’ll bring that to him when we make the swap. He’ll piss and moan, but the sight of all that green—he’ll come around.”
    â€œGod, I hope you’re right.”
    â€œYeah,” I said, “I hope I’m right, too.”

CHAPTER 10
    Daily Double Discount was located in what had once been a two-story concrete block building belonging to the YMCA. The neighborhood had gotten too rough for the Y folks, so they’d sought safer digs.
    The interior had the eternal smell of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, that faint whiff of