The Governor's Wife (2 page)

Think, Lindsay, think!

They would take her, but he would come for her. She was still his wife. Her husband had his faults—he was unfaithful, he was ambitious, he was a politician—but he was no coward. He would come for her. But how would he find her in Nuevo Laredo? Among five hundred thousand people living in five hundred square miles. A sprawling, lawless city controlled by drug cartels. And beyond the city lay the vast Chihuahuan Desert. She would be swallowed whole across the river. He would never find her.

Unless.

She grabbed the satchel and rummaged inside until she found her cell phone. She always turned it off when she arrived at the clinic each day because there was no phone service in the
colonias
, landline or cell. She now turned the phone on. The battery registered full. He had found her here on the border that first time when the Rangers had tracked her cell phone with GPS. He could find her again—if she had her phone.

But El Diablo's men would search her and take the phone.

If they found it.

There was only one place they wouldn't find it.

She pushed the volume button to mute the compact cell phone then pulled up her dress and reached down inside her panties and between her legs and pushed the phone into her vagina. Then Lindsay Bonner waited for them to come for her.

And prayed her husband would.

Bode Bonner woke next to a naked woman who was not his wife.

His wife was out of town, so Mandy had snuck upstairs the night before. She was twenty-seven; he was forty-seven. She made him feel young.

Alive.

Vital.

Relevant.

Sex with a younger woman allowed him to forget—at least for a few short moments—that he was a middle-aged man with his best years in the rearview mirror.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

But Mandy was. Her beautiful backside was to him. He slid his hand down her smooth side and over her round hips and firm bottom and down between her legs. She stirred and groaned.

"I'm sleeping."

"Don't mind me, darlin'."

He reached over to the condom box on the nightstand and shook it, but nothing came out. Damn. He turned back to his aide and inhaled her scent. Her bare bottom beckoned to him, and his body responded. At his age, he hated to waste an erection, especially since he often required a little help from the Viagra prescription. She had said he didn't need to wear a condom, that she was on the pill and unconditionally devoted to him, politically and sexually. Aw, hell, once wouldn't be a problem. He pushed into her from behind.

"Governor, you're an animal."

He growled and bit the back of her neck.

The sign on the closed door read: THE GOVERNOR'S OFFICE.

Inside, Bode Bonner sat behind his desk flanked by Texas and U.S. flags on tall standards while Lupe ran the boar bristle brush through his thick blond hair then shielded his eyes and sprayed shellac until his hair could stand tall against a Texas twister. Guadalupe Sendejo was a squat, middle-aged Mexican national who had been in the Bonner family service since she was five. She now served as Bode's personal valet, ensuring that his hair was sprayed, his shirts starched, his suits pressed, and his boots polished. He had brought her over to Austin from the ranch four years before when he had won reelection and the job had taken on a more permanent feel. She held the mirror so he could examine her work, but the mirror caught Jim Bob's amused expression from the other side of the desk. Bode nodded at Lupe.

"
Muy bueno. Gracias.
"

Lupe grabbed the brush and hair spray and shut the door behind her. Bode sipped coffee from a mug with an image of his smiling face and
Bode Bonner for Governor
stenciled on the side and stared out the second-story windows. The stark white, Greek Revival-style Governor's Mansion and grounds occupied an entire city block at the corner of Eleventh and Colorado in downtown Austin, as it had for one hundred and fifty-five years. Sam Houston himself had sat in this office and gazed out those windows, which now offered a prime view of the pink granite State Capitol sitting catty-cornered across Eleventh Street. The Capitol dome glowed in the morning sunlight just as Jim Bob's bald head glowed under the fluorescent office lights. Add in the pasty skin and pockmarked complexion—the man's got a face like a bowl of oatmeal—and James Robert Burnet looked more like a registered sex offender than the ace political strategist for the governor of the great State of Texas. Bode exhaled loudly enough to get his attention.

"What's wrong now?" Jim Bob said.

At first Bode wasn't sure Jim Bob was talking to him. His strategist had an earpiece that looked like a hearing aid on steroids wrapped around his ear, a newspaper in his lap, and an iPhone in his hands. His head was bent over, and his fingers fiddled with the phone like a squirrel with an acorn. Jim Bob texted on his cell phone more than Bode's eighteen-year-old daughter, and he carried on phone conversations while also conversing with Bode, which annoyed the hell out of him. Bode addressed the top of Jim Bob's bare head.

"You talking to me?"

"No one else in the room."

"Then stop texting and talk to me."

"I'm not texting. I'm tweeting."

"Tweeting?"

"On Twitter."

"Tweeting on Twitter—that's what I'm paying you to do, play on your goddamn phone?"

Still talking to the top of his head.

"You're paying me to win elections, and social networking is another way to connect with voters. Grass roots. So I tweet for you."

"What am I … what are you tweeting?"

" 'Nine
A.M.
and at my desk working hard for the people of Texas.' "

"And they believe that?"

"Your three thousand followers do."

"I've got three thousand followers? Hey, that ain't bad."

"Obama's got ten million."

Bode sighed. "Figures."

Jim Bob punched a button on his phone as if firing off a nuclear bomb then raised his head and eyed Bode over his reading glasses.

"Okay … so what's wrong now?"

Like a mother to her child who had come home from school with hurt feelings.

"What makes you think something's wrong?"

"Because you're frowning. Which I find hard to believe, given that you just had sex with a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old girl. If I had been so lucky this morning, you wouldn't be able to slap the smile off my face for a month."

Bode tried to block the image of Jim Bob and Mandy having sex from his mind.

"How'd you know we had sex?"

"Because that gal's just naturally horizontal."

Bode's thoughts drifted back to that morning in bed. He had tried to satisfy his need for excitement with his young aide, but after a year the initial thrill of sex with Mandy Morgan had waned. Sex was much like big-game hunting in that regard. Bode's gaze turned up to the stuffed animal heads that adorned the four walls of his office: axis and mule deer, elk, Catalina goat, red stag, Aoudad sheep, impala, pronghorn, Corsican ram, sable, and his favorite, the wildebeest.

"Remember when I bagged the wildebeest?"

"I do indeed," Jim Bob said.

Bode and Jim Bob had hunted together since middle school.

"A thousand feet out, one shot to the head." Bode held an imaginary rifle, sighted in the wildebeest head through an imaginary scope, and squeezed an imaginary trigger. "Boom."

"That was a good shot," Jim Bob said.

"That was a great shot."

The memory of which almost brought a smile to Bode's face. Almost. But after killing so many creatures, the thrill of the hunt had also waned. The hunts had all started to seem the same. Like sex. There were only so many positions and places to have sex, just as there were only so many creatures to kill. Hunting. Sex. Football. Politics. He had always found fulfillment in those manly pursuits. But now he found himself searching for something more. There had to be something more. He sighed.

"Why am I in this office?"

"It's the Governor's Office. And you're the governor."

"But why am I the governor?"

"You're a Republican in a red state."

"No—what is my purpose in being governor?"

"To get reelected."

Jim Bob choked back a laugh.

"Wait, I lost count—is this your third or fourth midlife crisis this term?"

Jim Bob shook his head then tossed the newspaper on the desk and gestured at the headline:
BET ON BODE
.

"You're a hard man to please, Bode Bonner. You just won the Republican primary with one hundred percent of the vote, and you're not happy?"

"No one ran against me. Where's the thrill of victory in that?"

The State of Texas had held the Republican and Democratic primaries the day before. But Republicans didn't fight each other in March, and Democrats didn't win in November. The Democrats hadn't won a statewide election in Texas in twenty years. They were that incompetent. That irrelevant. And outside of Austin and a few border counties, statistically insignificant, as the pollsters say. Texas glowed bright red from Amarillo to Brownsville, Texarkana to El Paso; Republicans controlled all three branches of state government. Consequently, the general election was a mere formality, Republican voters rubber-stamping the Republican primary winners. Bode Bonner was as good as reelected for another four-year term. He had been declared the Republican primary winner by eight the night before (the polls had closed at seven), given his victory speech by nine (the party was over by ten), had sex with Mandy by eleven (his wife had left for the airport after his speech), and fallen sound asleep by eleven-thirty. No contest. No agony of defeat for his opponent. No thrill of victory for Bode Bonner.

"You want thrills, go ride a roller coaster. You won. That's all that matters. Like that guy said about football, 'Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.' "

"Lombardi."

"Same rule applies to politics. And yesterday goes in the books as a win. A win-win because we saved our campaign funds for the general election."

"Like that'll be much of a fight." Bode waved a hand at the newspaper. "Even the Austin paper figures me for a landslide. And who are the Democrats running against me? A Jewish ex-country-western singer who dresses like Johnny Cash and sings like Dolly Parton. A goddamn serial candidate. He's run for damn near every state office except dogcatcher. He's a political punch line." Bode threw his hands up. "Where do they get these people? For Christ's sake, Jim Bob, I'm up fourteen points in the polls."

"Eighteen."

Bode sat up.

"You got the new poll numbers?"

"Yep."

"Did I make the nationals?"

"Nope."

Jim Bob pulled a thin black notebook from his briefcase—a notebook he guarded with the same paranoia as the army officer guarding the president's case containing the nuclear launch codes—and flipped open the cover.

"But you're kicking ass in Texas. Fifty-nine percent favorable rating across all registered voters—that's your all-time high."

"What's the breakdown?"

Jim Bob turned the page. "Anglo males, seventy-one percent favorable. Anglo females, sixty-two percent. African-Americans, seven percent. Mexican-Americans, four percent." He looked up. "NASCAR dads and soccer moms, they love you. Not so much the blacks and Latinos." He chuckled. "Hell, just be glad the Democrats are running a Jew instead of a Latino. There's not but a dozen Jews in Texas, but there's ten million Latinos."

"You don't figure they'll vote for him, do you?"

He could hear the hint of worry in his own voice.

"Not a chance."

And that was the fear of every Republican politician in Texas: Would the Latinos vote? They never had before, but no Republican wanted to be the one who finally brought out the Latino vote—for his Democratic opponent.

"They're waiting for their savior … and they'll still be waiting come election day," Jim Bob said. "They won't vote."

"Thank God."

Every Texas politician understood a simple electoral fact: Anglos occupied the Governor's Mansion by the leave of Latinos.

"One day," Jim Bob said, his voice taking on that familiar professorial tone—

James Robert Burnet held a Ph.D. and taught a class on politics at the LBJ School; consequently, he was known in Texas political circles as "the Professor."

—"there'll be a Latino sitting in your chair, that's a fact. But not on my watch."

For the last decade, ever since Karl Rove had decamped to D.C. with George W., the Professor's opinion on all things political in the State of Texas had been considered gospel. So Bode Bonner breathed a sigh of relief: no need to fret about the Latino vote, at least not in this election. That settled in his mind, his thoughts quickly returned to his midlife crisis.

"My life peaked when I was twenty-two and playing strong safety for the Longhorns. Been downhill ever since."