The Governor's Lady (23 page)

“Pickett made a mistake when he interfered last night,” Cooper said.

“But you’re the one who’ll get the blame for the mess, unless you clean it up.”

“But how? They’re practically holding me hostage.”

“Get help. Wheeler Kincaid.”

Cooper’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you know about Wheeler Kincaid?”

“I know he quit the paper and wants to go to work for you.”

“My God.”

“Wheeler and I go way back,” Mickey said. “We stay in touch.”

“So you know
why
he quit the paper.”

“Yes, and I don’t want Felicia Withers to win either. The bitch. If you’ll let him, Wheeler can help. He’s a friggin’ pain in the ass, but he knows things. If you take him up on it, it sends a signal, and it will chap Pickett and his Posse’s collective asses.” She paused. “And then there’s me.”

Cooper laughed. “Now, after all this time?”

“I can’t change the past, Cooper, but right now, I want to help. I’ve spent a lifetime learning things.” She tapped her head. “I have a lot of stuff up here.”

Cooper’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “You’ll ride to the rescue.”

“I ain’t doing much riding these days, but I can help you. Why the hell do you think I got my dying ass down here to the capital two days ago? And why did I get myself toted over here last evening?”

“So you can guide poor, dumb little me through the woods?”

Mickey spoke slowly. “You’d better get help from somebody, because it appears you’re flat on your ass and don’t have a clue how to get vertical.”

She felt a flush of anger. “Goddammit, Mother …”

Mickey dismissed her with a wave of her hand. “Cooper, go get me some coffee. Can you at least do that?”

Cooper stalked out, slammed the door behind her, descended the stairs. She paced from room to room, cursing and flipping on lights until the entire downstairs was ablaze. She ended in the kitchen, got the coffee maker going. She sat on a stool at the center island, fingers drumming on maple, heart pounding.
A deal with the devil? Yes, and I’m trapped
.

She felt utterly isolated here in this ancient, sagging place—isolated by the storm, but even more by what was going on outside, beyond her
control.
They have shut me away like a deranged old relative in an attic
.

The coffee maker rattled and hissed. She fetched a mug from a cabinet, poured a cup, sipped it black and bitter, trying to settle herself, feeling the weight of the long-neglected house around her. Then she thought,
She’s right, I’m flat on my ass. About that, she’s damn right
.

She poured another mug and headed back upstairs.

“All right,” she said, “talk to me.”

Mickey didn’t say anything for a while. She finally set her mug on the bedside table. “Did you mean it when you stood up there two days ago and said, ‘Now, we begin’?”

“I meant every word of it.”

“Regardless of what Pickett thinks?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“Then begin. If you don’t fight, you’ll just let them have it, and they didn’t earn it. You did.”

“How?”

“First, find out as much as you can about what’s going on. Don’t fly blind. That’s when you crash into something. That guy out there in California, Unruh, said, ‘Money is the mother’s milk of politics.’ Bullshit. It’s information. Intelligence.”

“This isn’t politics, Mother.”

“Goddamn right it is. It’s all politics. What the hell do you think politics is, running and winning? That’s the sideshow. The real deal is getting things done. It’s
how
things get done.”

“But I
am
flying blind. The Posse—”

“Fly over ’em.”

Cooper thought about it, and as she did, she felt something rock-hard stubborn begin to replace her impotent anger. “All right,” she said.

Cooper turned to the door. When her hand was on the knob, Mickey said, “One other thing: While you’re sorting things out, think about your father.”

And she did. She pictured him in the room down the hall in his
command post during the big snow all those years ago, moving about in his droopy, threadbare sweater as people came and went. Listening, absorbing, deciding—he had seemed so incredibly calm and sure of himself. Things had been a mess, but he got them all through it.

“You’ve got the pedigree,” Mickey said. “Use it.”

She called the number Ezra Barclay had scribbled on the back of his card.

“I’ll get there as quick as I can,” he said. “It’s pretty bad out.”

“Pick up a couple of folks on the way. Grace and …” She considered for a moment, then said, “Wheeler Kincaid. Do you know where he lives?”

There was the slightest pause on the other end. “I can find it.”

By the time she showered and dressed, they were there, Ezra’s Humvee rumbling through the gate and up the driveway, parking under the porte-cochere. They bustled in, shaking snow from their hair and coats. Ezra and Grace looked fit and bright-eyed, faces full of questions. Kincaid looked a wreck, bloodhound bags under bloodshot eyes, ancient, shapeless brown sports coat, frayed shirt, food-stained tie, rumpled pants. But he was clean-shaven and held himself erect, ignoring the wary looks from Ezra and Grace.

First, they cleared out a room on the ground floor that had been Pickett’s office, grabbing up stacks of papers, files, books, junk, piling everything on the floor outside.

When it was done, she said, hands on hips, “I’ve got to know what we’re up against out there.”

“Governor,” Ezra said, “would you like to go to the command center at Public Safety? They’ve got good communications.”

“For now,” she said, “we’ll work from here. Ezra, start calling
around—trooper posts, local police, anybody you can think of. Grace, help Ezra and see what you can find out from the media.” She glanced at the clock. Five-thirty. “Thirty minutes. Paint me a picture.” Grace and Ezra nodded. “Grace, call the prison and get Mrs. Dinkins and her crew over here as soon as it’s safe to travel. Tell them not to use the van. Ezra will arrange transportation. Mr. Kincaid, come with me.”

He followed her to the kitchen. She poured him a cup of coffee, and he took it with unsteady hands. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

“How old are you, Mr. Kincaid?”

“Seventy.”

“Have you thought about quietly retiring? Writing your memoirs? It would make quite a read.”

His mouth twisted. “If I, as you say, quietly retired, I’d croak.”

“What you said last night, some people would consider it ludicrous.”

He nodded. “Some people.”

“I’ve already got a press secretary. I’m comfortable with Rick. What do you think you could do for me?”

“Anything you want. Tell you where the bodies are buried.”

“You’ve got a map?”

He tapped the side of his head. “In here.”

“Can you protect me from Felicia Withers?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

She turned away to look out the kitchen window at the backyard, bathed in security light. The snow had stopped now. When she turned back, Kincaid was looking at her intently. “For now, help Ezra and Grace. You know a lot of people. Start calling.”

Kincaid didn’t move. “They’ve put you on ice, haven’t they?”

She didn’t respond.

“It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on.” He jerked his head in the general direction of the Capitol. “The idiot assholes down there at
the
command center
”—he spat the words—“are beginning to figure out they’ve got a cluster fuck on their hands, and you’re sitting here being spoon-fed from a bucket of pure horseshit.”

“You sure do have a foul mouth, Mr. Kincaid.”

“When I say something, people understand me.” A moment, then: “Where’s the National Guard? I didn’t see a friggin’ one of ’em on my way over here.”

Moment of truth. She either trusted him or she didn’t.

“I was inclined to call out the Guard last night, but I was … persuaded otherwise. No, that’s not right. I was countermanded.”

He started to say something but stopped himself, brow furrowed, mouth twitching. He nodded slowly. “I see.” He took a swig of coffee, set the cup on the counter, and thrust his hands deep in the pockets of the shapeless jacket. “You’ve got a big, nasty crisis. You need every resource you can get your hands on. It’s bad, and it’s going to get worse.”

“How much worse?”

“People could die. May already have.”

Her stomach turned, but she kept silent.

“This, right now, it’s not about somebody’s decision last night. It’s about whether you’re up to doing the job.”

“Mr. Kincaid, I’m going to do my damnedest to do the job. As for whether I’m up to it, we’ll find out today. People out there who need help can’t afford for me to be irrelevant.”

“I have to believe you,” he said. “I think you’ve got a chance to be different from all the others.”

“I hope so. Now, advise me.”

“Lead,” he said without hesitation. “Figure out who the good people are. I can help you do that. Take advantage of what they know, filter their advice through your built-in bullshit detector. Then tell them what you want, what you expect. Let ’em help you. You’ve got good instincts, so trust them. Don’t worry about all the other crap.”

“Such as?”

“Pickett,” he said flatly. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I do know this: The snow’s an opportunity. Go downtown and take charge and kick some ass. They’ll hear the thud all the way to New Hampshire.”

“That’s pretty much what my mother said to me this morning.”

“I know. Listen to Mickey. She knows more than the rest of us put together.”

By six o’clock, as the first glimmerings of daylight reached the edge of the trees across the side yard of the mansion, they knew: The state was a mess. It had snowed hard all night, a storm that had fooled the forecasters with its ferocity. It was an uneven blanketing. The southernmost counties had gotten as little as four inches. A good bit of the upstate was buried under eighteen. Here in the capital, a foot. Everything was paralyzed—roads impassable, power lines down, motorists stranded, law-enforcement agencies at a standstill. Cooper hunched over a legal pad, jotting notes as the others relayed what they were learning. Media outlets, their people just as snowbound as everybody else, weren’t much help. As the details added up, she felt a growing sense of the magnitude of things—not just the storm, but the larger business of what it meant to be responsible in a situation like this. Pickett and his bunch might think they were still in charge, but this was bigger than any of them—whispering instructions into their cell phones—imagined. She flipped through the legal pad—five pages of catastrophe.

“What about the National Guard?” she asked.

“A handful of units here and there on standby,” Ezra said, “but mostly sitting at home, in the same shape as everybody else.”

“Stranded,” she said.

“Useless.”

One of the telephones rang. Grace answered, then held out the receiver to Cooper. “Colonel Doster.”

Ezra rose. “We’ll just—”

“No,” Cooper said. “Grace, let’s all hear this.”

Grace put the phone on speaker.

“Mornin’, Miz Lanier. Just wanted to bring you up to speed here, let you know how things are going.”

She felt the others’ eyes on her. “I’ve been waiting.”

“Got reports coming in now. Lots of snow, up to our keisters in places. Problems here and there with roads and power.”

“Here and there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what are you doing about it?”

“We’ve got the emergency plan in full operation.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Could you give me some details?”

“Mobilizing everything. Mobilizing all our resources.”

“The National Guard?”

“Well,” he said, “not just yet.”

“Why not?”

“We, ah, don’t have the authorization for that. Not just yet.”

“All right, Colonel Doster. Is Roger there?”

“Should be back anytime now, I’d say. Just went home to clean up and get a change of clothes.”

“Well, thank you so much for your report.”

“We’ll keep you up to speed, Miz Lanier. Not to worry, everything’s moving right along. Anything you need there at the mansion, you just let us know.”