Read Online Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Linwood Barclay
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the mayor’s nose, instead of just bloodying it.
I got my job at the mayor’s office a little over six years ago and spent four with Randall Finley before starting my own business. Working for the mayor wasn’t all that bad a job. The money was reasonable enough. There wasn’t a whole lot of heavy lifting, unless you counted getting the mayor into the back of his car when he was tanked. And being a bodyguard for Randall Finley wasn’t exactly like a presidential assignment. You didn’t walk around with a wire in your ear, whispering things like “Blowhard is on the move” to fellow agents. Just as well, too, or I’d have had to get myself a two-hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses, and I’ve always been the kind of guy who buys them from Rite Aid.
Sure, Finley had alienated most of the unions in town, mocked them, accused all of their members of sitting on their collective ass. Promise Falls, with a population of forty thousand, wasn’t the biggest city in New York State, but you still needed a fair number of people to keep the water running through the pipes, staff the fire department, and collect the trash, and Finley had managed to get under the skin of all of them at one time or another. And there weren’t many on the city council who’d piss on Finley’s head if it were on fire, but still, the guy was an unlikely target for an assassin. You had to get him through the odd picket line, the occasional protest outside city hall, but nobody was scoping him out with a rifle from the top of the observatory (if we’d had an observatory). I got plenty of free meals out of it, all the banquets the boss had to go to, and he rubbed shoulders with the mildly rich and famous when they came to town on official business. Once, when Promise Falls had been chosen for a movie shoot, I got within five feet of Nicole Kidman. The mayor shook her hand and, even though I was standing right next to him, he neglected to introduce me. I was the hired help.
I’d known long before that my boss was a complete dick. I think that sunk in about an hour or so after he hired me to drive for him, when, while we were stopped at a light, a homeless man approached the mayor’s window for some change. Finley buzzed down the window and, instead of tossing the guy a quarter, said, “Here’s a tip, pal. Buy low, sell high.”
The incident where he wandered into the unwed mothers’ home and threw up all over the front hall carpet was a little more spectacular than his usual stunts, but still very much within his range of talents. Yet it wasn’t that hard to account for his popularity. He had that “average guy” thing about him. He’d rather be duck hunting than attending the opera. One might have thought, in a town that supported a college and had its share of snooty intellectual and artsy-fartsy types, Finley would have limited appeal, but a majority of Promise Falls’ regular residents, the ones unaffiliated with the college, saw him as their guy, and voting for him was a way to stick it to all those campus snobs who thought they were better than everybody else.
Yet Finley was politically savvy enough to know how to play to the university crowd as well. Thackeray College, while small, was highly regarded across the country. Over the years, the annual literary festival Ellen organized had attracted the likes of Margaret Atwood, Richard Russo, and Dave Eggers and drew several thousand tourists to town, and Finley wasn’t about to mess with that. The local merchants—who’d managed to hold on in the face of Wal-Mart—depended too much on it. He was always there for the official opening, and it must have killed him to take second billing to Thackeray president Conrad Chase, whose ego gave Finley’s a run for its money. Chase considered himself right up there with the stars the festival managed to score, having had a bestseller eight years ago, a critically acclaimed one-hit wonder he’d been unable to repeat. The onetime English prof
I got my job at the mayor’s office a little over six years ago and spent four with Randall Finley before starting my own business. Working for the mayor wasn’t all that bad a job. The money was reasonable enough. There wasn’t a whole lot of heavy lifting, unless you counted getting the mayor into the back of his car when he was tanked. And being a bodyguard for Randall Finley wasn’t exactly like a presidential assignment. You didn’t walk around with a wire in your ear, whispering things like “Blowhard is on the move” to fellow agents. Just as well, too, or I’d have had to get myself a two-hundred-dollar pair of sunglasses, and I’ve always been the kind of guy who buys them from Rite Aid.
Sure, Finley had alienated most of the unions in town, mocked them, accused all of their members of sitting on their collective ass. Promise Falls, with a population of forty thousand, wasn’t the biggest city in New York State, but you still needed a fair number of people to keep the water running through the pipes, staff the fire department, and collect the trash, and Finley had managed to get under the skin of all of them at one time or another. And there weren’t many on the city council who’d piss on Finley’s head if it were on fire, but still, the guy was an unlikely target for an assassin. You had to get him through the odd picket line, the occasional protest outside city hall, but nobody was scoping him out with a rifle from the top of the observatory (if we’d had an observatory). I got plenty of free meals out of it, all the banquets the boss had to go to, and he rubbed shoulders with the mildly rich and famous when they came to town on official business. Once, when Promise Falls had been chosen for a movie shoot, I got within five feet of Nicole Kidman. The mayor shook her hand and, even though I was standing right next to him, he neglected to introduce me. I was the hired help.
I’d known long before that my boss was a complete dick. I think that sunk in about an hour or so after he hired me to drive for him, when, while we were stopped at a light, a homeless man approached the mayor’s window for some change. Finley buzzed down the window and, instead of tossing the guy a quarter, said, “Here’s a tip, pal. Buy low, sell high.”
The incident where he wandered into the unwed mothers’ home and threw up all over the front hall carpet was a little more spectacular than his usual stunts, but still very much within his range of talents. Yet it wasn’t that hard to account for his popularity. He had that “average guy” thing about him. He’d rather be duck hunting than attending the opera. One might have thought, in a town that supported a college and had its share of snooty intellectual and artsy-fartsy types, Finley would have limited appeal, but a majority of Promise Falls’ regular residents, the ones unaffiliated with the college, saw him as their guy, and voting for him was a way to stick it to all those campus snobs who thought they were better than everybody else.
Yet Finley was politically savvy enough to know how to play to the university crowd as well. Thackeray College, while small, was highly regarded across the country. Over the years, the annual literary festival Ellen organized had attracted the likes of Margaret Atwood, Richard Russo, and Dave Eggers and drew several thousand tourists to town, and Finley wasn’t about to mess with that. The local merchants—who’d managed to hold on in the face of Wal-Mart—depended too much on it. He was always there for the official opening, and it must have killed him to take second billing to Thackeray president Conrad Chase, whose ego gave Finley’s a run for its money. Chase considered himself right up there with the stars the festival managed to score, having had a bestseller eight years ago, a critically acclaimed one-hit wonder he’d been unable to repeat. The onetime English prof
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