“Please, Governor!” Trader cried out. “Don’t kill the messenger. I’m not the one leaking all this classified and embarrassing information onto the Internet!”
“I certainly know that.” The governor weakly seated himself behind his desk and motioned for Trader to take a chair and lower his voice. “Whoever Trooper Truth is, he’s at least a writer.”
“Now, I take that very personally,” Trader said. “That was naughty, naughty to insult me that way. I think you should apologize for wounding my creative sensibilities.”
“The only thing creative about you is your rendition of the truth,” the governor retorted. “And if I weren’t so preoccupied with important matters, including my health, I would catch you in your lies more often and do something about it.”
“How is your health?” Trader sweetly asked.
“Did you bring me this latest essay?”
Trader unfolded the printout and smoothed it open on the ink blotter. The governor was silent for many long minutes as he moved his magnifying glass over Trooper Truth’s words and grunted now and then and made other inarticulate sounds of disapproval, surprise, and constitutional discomfort.
“There’s only one thing to do,” he decided in his most sovereign tone. “We’re going to have to find a special operative who will finger this Trooper Truth scoundrel and bring him to justice.”
“Bring him to justice for what, Governor? I don’t believe he’s committed a crime.”
“Why, I believe he might just be guilty of treason, don’t you? Isn’t he sticking his nose in state business and referring to my policies as being idiotic? Furthermore, I don’t appreciate this tireless obsession with pirates, when we’ve been working so hard to play down that problem. Now Blackbeard’s even dragged into the fray and is on everybody’s mind.”
“I know, I know.” Trader couldn’t have agreed with him more as he gleefully thought of his Captain Bonny website. “We certainly don’t want the public thinking that Blackbeard was welcome in Virginia or was ever even in Virginia, not even once. What we need to do is emphasize that Blackbeard and North Carolina were as thick as thieves, and it was our own Governor Spottswood who . . .”
“You know how I feel about Spottswood!” the governor blurted out as his submarine went on alert. “I don’t want him getting any more credit than he already has, do you hear me? I have to live with his alleged descendants, and I’m sick and tired of being invited to their plantation pig roasts and shad roe plankings and hearing endless apocryphal stories about Governor Spottswood, who was probably a blowhard with gout and the clap.” The governor pulled out his railroad watch again. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you drop by the mansion for supper and we’ll discuss this further and come up with a plan?”
Andy already had a plan, but he feared Hammer was too riled up to listen, as he watched her storm out of her car and stride through the Ukrop’s parking lot in his direction.
“Unplug the website immediately,” she said as she yanked open the door of his unmarked Caprice. “That’s it] You’re totally out of control. Am I to believe you’ve been doing undercover work on Tangier Island and you never bothered to let me know? And what awful thing turned up at your house last night?”
“I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about my secret mission. But I was afraid you’d try to stop me,” he replied calmly. “And you can’t unplug a website. I could close it down, but you don’t want me to do that, trust me. There’s too much at stake.”
“The only thing at stake right now, it seems to me, is my career and good name and the life of a dentist,” she retorted.
“A scoundrel of a dentist. You should see the chart I looked at! And what about Popeye?” Andy asked.
Hammer’s grief resurfaced and silenced her.
“I believe there was a lot of premeditation involved in her dognapping, and therefore it is most likely the work of someone who has something personal against you,” Andy told her.
“That could be half the universe,” she dismally replied.
“This isn’t about money, not directly,” he said. “If it was about a ransom, you would have been contacted long before now. I think someone has something pretty nefarious up his sleeve. And I’ve been getting some clues because of Trooper Truth–e-mails that are suspicious. I believe if I continue posting my essays and following every lead I can, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and a lot of other things. And I swear to God, if Popeye is alive, I’m going to find her for you.”