Bombshell (Devlin Haskell 4) (36 page)

“You feel comfortable with me leaving for the day?”

He stopped hammering the typewriter keys, squeaked his chair around and nodded with a determined look across his face.

“I’d say we sent out a pretty strong message today.”

“Your broadcast?”

“Broadcast? No, you, protection. We won’t be silenced. Matter of fact it’s provided me inspiration, freedom of speech,” he said and patted the one inch stack of paper on the desk. Just like yesterday it was face down.

“Tomorrow’s broadcast?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“Farrell reads that for fifteen minutes and then you play it four times a day?”

“We do.”

“Ever think of maybe shortening it, I don’t know cutting it down to maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. Maybe play some music or something.”

“We’ve done that from time to time, or a version. We’ve had ‘America The Beautiful’ as a background accompaniment once in a while, some Sousa marches.”

“Yeah, I was thinking more like just music, maybe something popular, current, get your audience interested and…”

“Some drug culture thing, that it? You’ve been in the gutter too long, Haskell. We’re not trying to be popular, if that’s what your angle is. We’re here to tell the truth, something that often times is unpopular.” He placed some added emphasis to the
un
in unpopular.

“Well, I kind of like the gutter, to tell you the truth. But, I was thinking fifteen minutes is an awfully long time to listen to someone going on and on.”

“On and on, that’s what you think we do?”

“You know what I mean, I just wonder if you aren’t missing your mark a bit by trying to tell them too many things. You know the KISS acronym, Keep It Simple Stupid.”

“No, I guess I missed that one,” he said and squeaked around to face his typewriter, signaling the end of our conversation.

“Well, I don’t want to piss you off, but whatever you ran as your message, your word today didn’t seem to cut it. You played the thing four separate times. Fifteen minutes a crack, that’s an hour and unless you got a call center tucked away somewhere, I never heard a phone ring all day long, ever. Not trying to tell you how to run your business Thompson, that’s just my opinion.”

“That’s part of what’s gone wrong with this great nation, everything comes down to the ten second sound bite. Is that what freedom means to you, ten seconds?”

I waited for a moment, a long moment, maybe ten seconds worth.

“Nine forty-five tomorrow, right?”

Don’t miss
Bite Me
. Dev thinks he’s landed his dream job, providing security for people who don’t need any, but things aren’t always as they appear. Circumstances quickly fly out of control and Dev finds himself under the police microscope, again. Not to mention his usual women problems, or should that be women’s usual Dev problems?

Take a moment and grab another one of my books and enjoy the read and m
any thanks.

Mike Faricy