The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  “We have to work twice as hard now,” Marshall said. “That Charlotte Gallagher money is everywhere online, in social media. We have to make our own oxygen.”

  Rock winced at a crick in his side—the night’s injuries were coming back as the booze wore off. “Somebody needs to take the lot of her Smart gizmos and drop ’em in bathtubs.”

  “Most are waterproof.”

  Rock grunted. “Then drop her into a bathtub—after a few wallops.”

  “I keep a notebook of options for Charlotte Gallagher—I’ll add another entry,” Marshall said. “The more pressing need, though, is to tarnish Owen Gallagher. The left’s donor class is uniting around him. That sense of inevitability is gathering. Every day, he looks more like the nominee.”

  “Democrats,” Rock scoffed. “They just love picking their loser ahead of time.”

  “Indeed. Though Owen Gallagher might not lose.”

  “Come off it, the guy’s nothing. He was governor of New Hampshire—weakest governorship in the country. Couldn’t have let himself out of a jaywalking ticket.”

  “He’s currently polling seventy-eight percent among independents.”

  “They met him last Wednesday. There are Roombas smarter than this guy. All he is is hair and a throaty chuckle.”

  “Presidents have ascended with less.”

  Rock smirked. True enough.

  He had actually spoken at length with Owen Gallagher at some bipartisan blah-blah symposium years ago, and immediately written him off. The guy thought “single-payer” meant you couldn’t put kids or a spouse on your health plan—and now the Gallaghers, the self-anointed champions of thoughtful political discourse, wanted to run him for 1600?

  “There must be dirt on him.”

  Marshall folded his veiny wrists in his lap—a pair of hairless rats. “We’ve looked. Thousands of dollars on oppo research. Tens of thousands. You can bet Joan Gallagher’s done likewise—they wouldn’t be trotting him out if he wasn’t clean.”

  Again, the old man’s analysis was on point. The coming presidential election was the Gallaghers’ big shot. The Pruitts were sidelined with a Republican in office—the man who’d beaten their man in the last cycle.

  That primary loss had been bitter. Rock’s uncle, Mark Easton, had emerged from the Choosing, partly owing to his different last name—incumbent fatigue was heavy, predisposing voters against another Pruitt presidency. Mark ran a by-the-numbers campaign. He made no mistakes. Unless you counted being caught on a hot mic saying, “They want to pick a dick just to make a point? Then they’ll pick a dick,” which Rock didn’t.

  He simply lost.

  In the post-mortem at the family compound in Louisiana, Jonathan Pruitt had delivered a sermon about their having lost the moral high-ground. They’d waded too deep into the muck in pursuit of victory. They should have let the dick be a dick. (Not his words.) They should’ve hewed close to the Pruitt brand.

  Hence Theresa Velasquez being in favor. And Rock being out.

  “What do you have in mind?” Rock asked now. “Plant something? Gin up a protest?”

  He thought of Johnston, the Mory’s bartender—that idea of finding slaveholders in the Gallagher family tree.

  “Possibly,” Marshall said.

  “Did the boys ever dig up a transcript of those Trotsky comments Joan Gallagher made at the fundraiser in Berkeley?”

  “They did,” Marshall said. “We have an open dossier—it could help in the general. But accusing the Gallaghers of being socialist at Yale? They’d probably get their name on a chapel, too.”

  “Fair enough. What about pinebox?”

  Marshall reared back in his wheelchair. “Not pinebox—not now. It’s not ripe.”

  “Not ripe? We’re talking about a presidential election, how much riper does it need to get?”

  Rock had gotten himself worked up—defaming Gallaghers did this to him—but Marshall Pruitt was the picture of composure.

  “Take the long view,” he said. “Pinebox will bury the Gallaghers, once and for all. But it needs the proper stage. It needs the proper moment.” He sniffed the stale tomb air. “For now, it stays in our pocket.”

  Rock shrugged. Marshall was the maestro—if he said pinebox needed to stay under wraps, then pinebox had better stay under wraps.

  “What then?” he asked. “You’re thinking of a smaller-scale scandal? Some kind of disruption?”

  “This is college. Crazy things happen on college campuses.” Marshall nodded toward the reader’s severed head. “For the right sort of crazy, the reward could be substantial.”

  Rock bore into the older man’s eyes. “Substantial like Virginia?”

  Marshall Pruitt shifted his jaw from right to left, tapped the sharp point of his chin, and instructed his men to escort Rock back to his dorm.

  Now in boxers, flip-flops, and vintage 1992 T-shirt depicting Harvard cheerleaders orally engaged with Yale football players, Rock left his entryway for the Silliman College kitchen. Gongs clattered inside his head, and the cotton in his mouth kept swelling. He scratched himself liberally.

  He stole from a perfect matrix of washed juice glasses, stuck the pilfered glass under a dining-hall OJ udder and filled it halfway. Walked the OJ to the caterer’s tent and nabbed a bottle of champagne, popped the cork, and—as some administrator walked by giving him the stink-eye——filled to the brim with foamy, pink-tinged gold.

  Boom. Mimosa.

  What, he pondered, was Marshall Pruitt capable of? Doubtless he could put Rock’s name in for consideration for Virginia. Rock felt certain he would. When the rest of the clan had shunned Rock after the death of Derek Dickerson, Marshall had stuck by him. Marshall had given Rock his start in Southeast Asia. Years later, he’d funneled soft money to Rock’s House campaign when no other Pruitt had a dime for him.

  Still, his sway with Johnathan Pruitt was debatable. Marshall was like the chained minotaur in the castle dungeon—they’d let him out for bacchanalia or bloodsport, but they weren’t asking his opinion on peasant tax rates.

  Rock thought, and drank, and drank more, and thought and drank at the same time, and finally decided sabotaging the Gallaghers’ naming ceremony was a worthwhile endeavor. Even if he got zip out of it.

  It just needed doing, like a pinata needs a bat to the belly.

  Standing in boxers in the Silliman quad, Rock whipped out his cellphone and dialed Yanni Jovanovic. The provocateur answered on the first ring and heard out Rock’s rambling foreword in full, five minutes, before saying a word.

  “Slavery, you want?” he said.

  “Or worker exploitation, or carbon footprint,” Rock spitballed. “We’re going for hypocrisy. Beyond that, I’m not picky.”

  There was a pause, which Rock presumed to be Yanni tapping away at one of the dozen laptops he sat among in his unkempt patch of Seattle incubator space.

  Rock had seen the place once, when they were deep down in the gutter, hanging some transgender-bathroom assault story around Joan Gallagher’s neck. What a hole. You needed waders if you wanted to escape without being covered in Cheez-It dust.

  “Meh…first pass, I’m not seeing much,” Yanni said. “If I’m going to start a fire, I need a little smoke to work with.”

  Rock swigged mimosa between his cheeks. “Okay. Okay, what about a more surgical strike? Any slime floating around on Owen Gallagher?”

  “That guy is pretty boring. Isn’t that the whole point of him?”

  “That’s why slime’s important. Tell me some guy who brags about his manhood on tape banged a porn star? So what. But if Owen Gallagher bangs a porn star, Mr. Squeaky Clean? Now we’re in business.”

  “I don’t think he banged a porn star.”

  “Yeah, I get he hasn’t banged a porn star!” A woman holding hands with a boy roughly Rock Junior’s age glared—Rock tugged his crotch at her. “So we pay somebody. We find a nanny or house sitter who left on bad terms. Then she goes on 60 Minutes and claims intimate knowledge of his
genitalia.”

  Yanni responded with his geeky hiccup of a laugh. “Not bad. I could set some balls in motion, but the problem is time. Isn’t the event Sunday?”

  Rock winced. Social media had sped up the game, but Yanni was right—a fake affair would take more than two days to engineer.

  “Work up some hit pieces on your side, but don’t deploy. Lemme do some work here. See what I can manage on the smoke front.”

  He swiped away Yanni’s call and dumped the last of his breakfast cocktail down his throat.

  There was a pile of fat pastel chalks near the Silliman master’s office. He grabbed the darkest-colored piece, donned shorts, and took out up College Street. Every ten-odd sideway panels, he stooped and scrawled a message.

  DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY SLAVES OWEN GALLAGHER’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER OWNED?

  (Rock didn’t.)

  Then:

  RESOLVED: POLITICAL DYNASTIES = PATRIARCHY.

  He considered calling that one good but decided subtlety was not his friend now and added, THEREFORE “GALLAGHER” COLLEGE = PATRIARCHY.

  Rock took special joy in channeling and manipulating the far left, in turning their jaw-quivering outrage back against itself. Nobody could ever be as pure as them, least of all privileged folks like the Gallaghers.

  Once he had graffitied a good swath of campus, Rock hit a copy store. He slopped up a few flavors of inflammatory flyers using their anonymous computers and printed three hundred each. He roused several homeless men along Chapel Street with twenty dollar bills, instructing them to paper every bulletin board in sight.

  The indigent were an agile, capable workforce. Rock had used them variously before and enjoyed their give-and-take now, carrying two dozen donuts into a bar and splurging for pitchers once the job was done. The homeless stank, but they had spirit. They were beyond kowtowing to authority and couldn’t be bullied like regular members of society. Rock respected that.

  From the bar, Rock hiked out to the new college—soon to be Gallagher College—on the edge of campus. The construction was a striking mix of Gothic and modern, white stucco with fine stonework and chunky, character-rich windows. Naturally it hit all the “green” checkboxes, solar panels on the roof, low-flow faucets. If you tried throwing a plastic straw in the trash, Rock figured a robotic arm descended from the ceiling and swatted you in the face with pictures of asphyxiated sea turtles.

  He approached the gate. He tried his reunion badge on the card reader, but it flashed red.

  A maintenance man inside was carrying an armful of extension cords.

  “Hey!” Rock called. “I need in.”

  The man looked behind him as if Rock had been talking to someone else. “Can I—er, help you?”

  “For your sake, let’s hope,” Rock said. “I need to check things over for Sunday. Now the ceremony is occurring in the main courtyard, that correct?”

  The man flubbed an answer, re-gripping his cords.

  “Forget it,” Rock said. “Just lemme in, I’ll figure it out.”

  He shifted from foot to foot, exuding impatience.

  The man walked over with a thick expression and pushed open the gate. “Your, um, event badge should’ve worked on—”

  But Rock was past him, breezing through a fifteen-foot archway, striding over clipboards and safety goggles to the courtyard.

  The space, bounded by dorms up all four sides, was majestic—as though the architect had squeezed two city blocks into one. Decorations for Sunday’s ceremony were underway. White folding chairs. Bunting featuring the new college crest, a female figure holding black and white scales. At the sight of it, Rock laughed and gagged in the same breath.

  A podium stood atop a temporary stage in one corner of the courtyard. Rock saw from ten yards out that it was no schmoe podium.

  Here was a broad, substantial piece of equipment. Its build quality was exceptional, big honking microphone and some alloy made to resemble wood for the cameras.

  Rock walked up the stage to examine it. The interior of the podium, the inclined surface you looked at while speaking, resembled the deck of the USS Enterprise: teleprompter screen, thumb-stick control, various dials, gauges, and buttons.

  Across the top, a placard read SmartPodium.

  Of course.

  Rock tapped the teleprompter, and the screen changed from a screensaver to a document titled Schedule of Events.

  3:00 — Kalifa Babajide

  3:10 — Lisa Vance

  3:20 — Joan Gallagher

  3:30 — Owen Gallagher

  Rock felt his gut jump and instinctively uppercut the air in front of him.

  The dumb-ass is speaking.

  This definitely raised the mischief quotient. Thinking this smarty-pants gizmo might even have Owen Gallagher’s speech preloaded, Rock tapped the screen again—right on the dumbass’s name.

  A dialog appeared asking for his username and password.

  Rock filled his cheeks and looked skyward. If I had the IQ of a carrot like Owen, what would I pick for a password—

  “Who let you in here?”

  The voice yanked Rock from his musings. He turned and lo and behold, there she was: the Queen of the Universe.

  “Why, Charlotte. Lovely to see you.”

  “Who let you in?”

  He raised his badge. “I’m a Yalie, same as you. Remember? Jamie and I were classmates?”

  Charlotte Gallagher didn’t flinch at the mention of her dead brother. Ice-faced, she blew by Rock to examine the SmartPodium. She traipsed her fingers protectively over its screen, as though worried he might have left some bodily secretion.

  What a wildcat. Chic, chin-length roan hair. Cheekbones that could’ve cut diamond. Smarter than any three people you could name, and knew it.

  “I was here four years after you and Jamie,” she said. “They wouldn’t have graduated you then—or now. Different times, different sensibilities. Progress.”

  “Yep, Yale’s all about progress. Now there’s #metoo, right? How fun this campus must be.”

  “I’m sure it’s a downer for prolific abusers like yourself.”

  Rock grinned. Damn, was he hard. One long step forward and it’d poke her in the belly button.

  “That’s one tight ship you’re running.” He nodded to the SmartPodium display. “Ten-minute blocks? Shouldn’t you leave a little space for that renowned Gallagher flair?”

  He caught her sighing and remembered that New Yorker profile about her efforts to impose discipline on her clan. Whereas the Pruitts tightly coordinated their message and efforts, the Gallaghers were known for going off-script and making reckless mistakes. No fewer than five recent Gallagher candidacies had ended in scandal.

  To be fair, the Pruitts had played a role in a few.

  “Speaking of clan norms, shouldn’t you be wearing pants?” Charlotte crinkled her nose without looking at his shorts. “What would Jonathan Pruitt say?”

  “Jonathan says nothing to me, if he can help it.”

  The billionaire—sixth on last year’s Forbes list—grinned herself now. They were standing very close. Her tongue shifted behind her lip, and she pivoted in a way that made her shirt’s stiff white fabric stretch across her breasts.

  Is she doing this to me on purpose?

  Rock was absolutely out of his head. He glanced around to see where the maintenance man was. Could they sneak down to the boiler room? Commandeer an empty dorm?

  “Ugh, don’t even think it,” Charlotte said, looking green. “I shouldn’t have let you this close. Now I need a shower.”

  Apparently not on purpose.

  She continued, “What are you doing here, Rock? What sort of foulness are you cooking up?”

  Shower. Foulness. Rock would be lucky if it didn’t happen right now in his shorts.

  He said, “I’m just curious what profound thoughts the Gallaghers plan to share with the larger Yale and New Haven communities. For example, will the allegations of slaveholding be addressed?”

&nbs
p; Charlotte’s face went from nauseous to bored. “That dog’s not going to hunt.”

  “Why? Because all your Smart devices will suppress the story in their owners’ newsfeeds?”

  It was well understood that SmartWidget—which had started with internet-of-things devices and grown into watches, personal assistants, everything—filtered the news it presented to its massive user base. “Unvarnished, personalized intelligence,” they called it, but of course, it was hyper-varnished. Anything the Southern Poverty Law Center pooped out got through, but never a byline from the Heritage Foundation or AEI.

  “Go. Now.” Charlotte swiped her podium’s screen, some intricate pattern that turned it off. “Find some dark, wet place with spores of mold and decomposing bacteria, and just sort of melt in.”

  She began walking away.

  Rock called, “Please keep talking—please?” He laid a fingertip on the screen. Nothing happened. “Well, have a great weekend! I’m in Silliman College, room 321 if you need company. Must get lonely at the top…”

  She twisted back with an expression like a vegan being force-fed sirloin steak, and disappeared.

  Rock felt revived walking out of the new college. It was nearly noon, the sun straight overhead, and his forty-two-year-old bones had new life.

  Direct engagement with the Gallaghers did this—made him feel fine and mighty and healthy, no matter what he’d been putting in his body in the hours before.

  He winked at girls walking with boyfriends. He saw a kid in a beret staple a theater flyer over one of his, and promptly ripped it off and threw the crumpled pulp into the street.

  He called Yanni.

  “Find any smoke?” asked the provocateur.

  “Forget smoke,” Rock said. “Owen Gallagher is giving a speech here, Sunday. I want it carried by as many livestreams as you can call in. I want steelworkers in Pennsylvania to see it. I want the Pope to see it. Everybody.”

  Chapter 6