The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear Read Free

Book: The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear Read Free
Author: Stuart Stevens
Ads: Link
and sing “Kumbaya” out by Lake Pontchartrain at sunset. Hell no. He was elected to play the tough guy, the enforcer who was brought in to bring a little order to a place where cops were hiring themselves out as hit men in their off-hours. Nobody thought he was nice when they voted for him, and by God he hadn’t let anybody down yet.
    Simmons had become my personal hero when he was a state legislator and introduced a bill requiring every woman in New Orleans to carry a gun. This truly was a different kind of Democrat. The proposed legislation had followed a spate of particularly brutal carjackings of women at red lights. The bill hadn’t passed, of course, but a compromise piece of legislation made it perfectly legal for any citizen to use deadly force against a carjacker. Within the first forty-eight hours, a twenty-one-year-old secretary blew the face off of one carjacker, and an eighty-one-year-old man shot another in the ass as the poor fellow tried to flee down Rampart Street after he saw Grandpa had a sawed-off shotgun under a huge muffulleta from Mandina’s on the passenger seat. The elderly man was considered a local hero until two weeks later, when he walked into his stockbroker’s office and put two twelve-gauge slugs into his young broker for not getting him out of Apple before the Crash. But then a lot of brokers were getting shot right after the Crash.
    When it looked like the Site Selection Committee was leaning toward picking New Orleans, I’d done everything I could to squash the idea. Nobody could figure out why I was against it, and a lot of people thought I was just being modest. After all, I was a local hometown boy made good, the son of a famous civil rights journalist, which had double currency in the Republican Party, which was desperate for some credibility on that front. I’d be returning home in at least quasi-triumph, the guy who had saved Vice President Hilda Smith’s campaign, brought her back from near death in New Hampshire to a few delegates shy of winning the nomination. I was helping beat back Governor Armstrong George and the barbarians at the gate, and everybody agreed my Pulitzer-winning father, Powell Callahan, would have been so proud. If only he hadn’t drunk himself to death. No, they didn’t say that. But I did, that and a whole lot more. New Orleans was the last place on earth I wanted to come back to. Yes, it was my hometown. People knew me there, had known me all my life. And that, of course, is why it terrified me so much.
    —
    It was thirty-six hours before the convention opened. A real convention, like the one everybody had been dying for since Al Smith won it on the thirty-sixth ballot in 1928 and Ford snatched it from Reagan in 1976. That was what a convention was supposed to be—a deliberative body, by God, not a made-for-television spectacle.
    I hated it.
    Any campaign manager would. It was a horrifying idea to roll into a convention and not have the entire process rigged gavel to gavel. This was simply unheard of. Leaving a decision as important as selecting a party’s nominee to the collection of hungover party hacks, weirdo activists, political groupies, and small-timers who comprised the delegates at any convention was an affront to the very concept of modern politics, a process designed to ensure that a powerful few would manipulate a disinterested many. That’s how the system worked; everybody knew that. This was America, for heaven’s sake, where no one was particularly interested in parties—the political type, anyway—and everybody knew it didn’t really matter who won. That was the genius of the American political system.
    But this time, it did matter. The country was in crisis. The Republican Party had watched a president, nominated just four years earlier in a hail of glory and promise, melt like an ice cream cone on a New Orleans sidewalk. Now the party faced what was being called the most fundamentally different choice in its history:

Similar Books

The Vault

Ruth Rendell

The Christmas Carrolls

Bárbara Metzger

Prospero's Half-Life

Trevor Zaple

The Carbon Trail

Catriona King

Basic Training

Kurt Vonnegut

Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Matthew Woodring Stover; George Lucas

The Daffodil Affair

Michael Innes

Lemonade Sky

Jean Ure