A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [95]
…O’Connell suspected of sodomizing sheep.
…Quinn’s Mexican wife cavorted with drug kingpin.
…marital infidelity.
…hit-and-run charge covered up.
…tried to give state park concessions to Jap companies.
…caught in woman’s rest room.
…non-churchgoer.
…satanic rituals on ranch during full moons.
…666 tattooed on his penis.
…O’Connell ranch a transit point for Mexican illegals, who are sold to farms for eight hundred dollars a head.
…often seen in the company of Jewish money lenders.
…son, Duncan, a campus radical and suspected gay.
…daughter, Rae, badly retarded.
Maud took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “You know what we’ve got here, King?”
“Well, he refuses to answer these charges publicly.”
“Well, fathom that. I said, do you know what we’ve got here?”
“What?”
“A shithole, and we’ve just poured six hundred thousand dollars down it. Your stupid campaign is only making people flock to him.”
“This stupid campaign has worked time and time again,” King argued.
“Can’t you even understand a man who can’t be intimidated!”
“You go with what works,” he answered reactively. “Our education programs have always been successful. Be patient, because eventually some charge is going to stick to him.”
“I’ll tell you what’s stuck. AMERIGUN and The Combine are stuck with a fucking Democratic liberal for the next four years.”
“You were the one who signed off on this Colorado strategy,” King retorted.
“Well, it’s not working,” she grunted. “Close down the Denver operation, phone banks, ads, talk show and media handout sheets, and slink off quietly.”
King pounded his little fist on his desk and wheezed in discomfort.
“As of now,” Maud said, “The Combine wants you to plan a post-election party for O’Connell. Our thinking is that we should move our 2003 convention from Dallas to Denver. What I mean is, we come in blazing and go after the legislators. We bring in Hank Carleton and every kid who ever owned a squirrel gun who has risen to fame. We bus in demonstrators from Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, et cetera, et cetera. We show them how unpleasant life is going to be if gun-control shit is enacted. Your campaign has got to have smarts this time, King!”
“Convention in Denver. You bet it will!”
Maud unzipped and popped open her alligator/lizard/twenty-four-carat gold-trimmed briefcase and tucked in her papers. “Battlefield, Denver 2003. Concentrate your plans on the legislature. I want everything run through me for approval.”
Maud consumed another belt of rye and said, “Ahhh.” She didn’t move. It wasn’t all over. The phone rang mercifully. It was for Maud. Probably her lesbian bitch partner, King thought, or maybe she’d brought a pretty boy to oil himself up in front of her.
“My granddaughter,” Maud said after she hung up. “We’ve a long horseback ride in the hills tomorrow. Ow-ee, I’m getting a bit of a buzz. I’ll bet you’d like me to drive off one of those curlicue roads back to Washington.”
“No such thing, Miss Maud. Do we have any more business?”
“Yeah,” she said, “we’ve got to do something about this fucking magazine,” she said, reaching to an end table and throwing a half dozen copies of Weaponry on his desk. She read the covers: “357 Sig, Colt 380, AR–15 keeps gaining fans despite media attacks, Springfields, H&K USP .45 ASP, Savage, how to carry concealed, protecting freedom, more guns less crime. And on page five the smiling face of King Porter on his continuing ‘to the bunkers’ sermon, rewrite one hundred and twenty. ‘We’re under siege, clean decent Americans are being stripped of their birthright by the United States government in defiance of our forefathers who gave us the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment,’ cha, cha, cha!”
Everything that could stretch and stiffen did so inside King Porter.
“Here’s a good one,” Maud said, “God made man. Guns made man equal. Guns are the legacy of liberty.”
“Just because…just because our magazine doesn’t feature a naked woman on the cover!” he cried.
Another belt of rye. “Hell, no, there’s no naked women.