Free The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols Page A

calling from, and I’m really sorry…”
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” Devine said. “No sweat. Everything is under control.”
    *   *   *
    Five men were seated around a large oval table in a conference room off the governor’s office in the state capitol. There was the governor himself, a tall, heavily built man with small nervous eyes that never really looked at anybody and a cowboy twang when he spoke, a successful rancher who had parlayed a number of hunches into some successful oil interests, and close—but largely disguised—ties to several big-time land developers who were moving into the state. He walked slowly and spoke slowly, and almost everything he said publicly was bland, or a cliché, or just plain stupid. Yet, though ridiculed by the press and slandered unmercifully by his enemies, he had come out on top in a very crooked election and he could control a political machine better than any person in the state had ever controlled one, and he was worth over four million dollars.
    The other men with the governor in the room were the state engineer, Nelson Bookman; a lawyer from the state engineer’s office named Rudy Noyes; a short swarthy aid to the governor—his bodyguard, actually—called Myron Cloon; and an undercover agent for the state police. The agent, Kyril Montana, was a tall, sunny-looking Anglo with straw-colored hair and wide blue eyes, an all-American nose, straight thin lips, and an athletic physique. He had a nice smile, a pretty wife who had been runner-up in a state beauty contest fourteen years ago, and two good-looking kids. Kyril Montana wore a neatly pressed pink shirt, a bolo tie, beige, tapered western pants, and cowboy boots, and he carried a pack of filtertip cigarettes in his shirt pocket over the heart. In overall appearance he came on like a young, good-natured cowboy. He had been a cop for over fifteen years, however, and he was very sensitive to police work and to people’s attitudes about the police. He was not a gung-ho cop; he wasn’t quick to make an arrest, or to pull a gun, or to nail people just on general principles. He had done several stints on the narcotics beat at the state university, mingling with kids, acting like a student, drawing up detailed lists of drug users and their connections, but he had never set up a massive bust of psychedelic dopers or pot smokers. Even when there had been political pressures to arrange something that would grab headlines and squash longhairs for a while, Kyril Montana had played it cool, had kept maneuvering through the drug subculture hoping to nail the hard-drug pushers and suppliers, and he had usually managed to keep his superiors off his back until he finally had one of the big fish, until he finally had tiptoed through the smack or cocaine hierarchy to a source. Then, as quietly as possible, he had set up the bust, and more often than not it was so clean and so quiet that hardly anyone realized what had happened, the agent receiving no publicity at all. Occasionally he had been called off assignments when his superiors felt he was proceeding too cautiously. But the agent took these periodic lumps without comment, and in this way he had survived. He was a good cop, a cynical but not unhappy man. He liked his children and was true to his wife. With her he rarely talked shop. They played golf together and went out often—to movies, to the theater occasionally, to triple-A baseball games, and to the state university football games. Their sex together wasn’t that imaginative, but it was all right, still satisfying. They were a clean-cut couple with clean-cut kids, a suburban house with a water sprinkler on the manicured front lawn and a small pool in back, and the agent himself was a clean-cut professional cop who managed to keep his work surprisingly free of depressing fuckups.
    The state engineer, Nelson Bookman, and his personal special assistant,