“Of course it’s just me!” Hammer looked at the VASCAR memo again, wondering how she would handle the administration’s latest and perhaps most damaging lamebrain decision. “He’s not going to talk to me and you can stop trying to make me feel better about it.”
“Well, it’s not nice of him.” Windy put her hands on her hips. “And I hope you won’t get mad at me just because of how he treats you. It’s not fair to shoot the messenger.”
Kill the messenger, Hammer irritably thought. You shoot the piano player and kill the messenger. My God, I can’t stop thinking in clichés! And I hate clichés!
“One of the men I was dating last month told me that the only reason the governor appointed you is because he’s always getting bad press about all our highway problems and needs someone he can pass the scapegoat to,” Windy said, “and I don’t think you should blame yourself for that or take it personal.”
Hammer could not believe she had inherited such a hairball for a secretary. If only it weren’t so difficult to fire state employees. No wonder the last superintendent had retired early with a heart condition and Parkinson’s disease, but what the hell had been on his mind when he hired Windy Brees? For starters, how do you get past her name? And it should have been apparent the first time she opened her mouth that she was an embarrassment and incompetent, a perky little idiot caked with makeup who minced about, tilting her head this way and that in an attempt to appear submissive and cute and in need of powerful men to take care of her.
It was past 6:00 P.M., and Hammer packed up her briefcase and headed home. She drove through downtown feeling certain that VASCAR was going to ruin her career and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do about it. Was it merely coincidental that the very day Andy launched a website that was supposed to make the state police look good, the governor had decided to launch a program that would make the state police look bad? Was it mere chance that Andy had rather much slammed Tangier Island by indicating that it had once been a nest for pirates, and now the governor was going after the Islanders? Not to mention, she was desperately short of helicopter pilots and the few troopers left in the aviation unit needed to spend their time looking for criminals and marijuana fields, as opposed to tracking speeders on a tiny island or elsewhere.
Hammer brooded about Andy as she continued working herself into a state of fulminating paranoia. She should never have allowed him to write his Internet essays uncensored. But that had been part of the agreement.
“I’m not doing it if you edit me,” he had told her last year. “One obvious reason for anonymity is that no one knows what Trooper Truth is going to say or has any control over it, otherwise the truth would be lost. If you read my essays before they’re posted on the Internet, Superintendent Hammer, then I know very well what you’ll do. You’re going to start worrying about criticisms, blame, and political problems. That’s what bureaucrats focus on, unfortunately. Not that I’m calling you a bureaucrat.”
“Of course that’s what you’re calling me,” she had said, deeply offended.
And maybe he was right, Hammer dismally thought as she followed East Broad Street toward her restored neighborhood of Church Hill. Maybe she was turning into a bureaucrat who was far too consumed by what people thought and said about her. What had happened to her firm but diplomatic way of dealing with complaints and demands from the public?
She called Andy on her cell phone. “We have a potential emergency,” she told him. “The governor wants to put speed traps on Tangier Island and all hell’s going to break loose.”
“I heard about it,” he said.
“How?” She was startled.
“I wish you had said something to me,” Andy added in frustration as he sat in front of his computer, going through the hundreds of e-mails Trooper Truth had gotten so far this day. “I didn’t even have a clue until Miss Friend sent me an e-mail. I may need an assistant. I’ll never keep up with all the mail I’m getting,” he declared as his computer announced you’ve got mail! four more times.