Silken Prey

sugar beets. He looked good, though he was always called David, and never Dave.
    “Tonight, anyway,” Taryn said.
    There was a
tone
in her voice and Connie instantly picked it up: “Ooo, if you’re done with him, could I have him for a week or so?”
    “Then, when you were done with him, he’d go around comparing our . . . attributes . . . with the boys in the locker room,” Taryn said.
    After a few seconds of silence, Connie said, “Wait—you’re saying that would be a bad thing?”
    Taryn laughed and said, “You’re
such
a slut. I like that.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m now walking out to the turbo after spending the last two hours at KeeKee’s. I spent four thousand, three hundred and sixty dollars on ridiculously overpriced clothing sewn by poverty-stricken foreigners. I’m all shopped out and we need to talk.”
    “I have to run through the shower and gel up,” Taryn said.
    “Fifteen minutes,” Connie said.
    “If I’m not quite ready, I’ll tell Dannon to let you in.”
    “Mmm . . . Dannon . . .”
    Taryn laughed again, pushed
End
. She switched to the walkie-talkie function and was instantly answered by Dannon. She said, “Connie will be here in a few minutes. We’ve got Push at four o’clock and Borders at five, that’ll take another hour. Then back here to dress for the party tonight. David will pick me up.”
    He said, “I’ve got the schedule,” and “Alice is in the house. Carver will be here at five.”
    •   •   •
    T ARYN WENT INTO THE bathroom and examined her eyes for circles, jumped in and out of the shower, then went to work on her face. She used only minimal makeup during the day; her natural Scandinavian complexion was good enough, most of the time.
    The problem with politics was that it went on well into the night. The night before, she’d gone to a reception in Sunfish Lake with fifty of the faithful, and it had gone late. When the party ended, a dozen of them had gathered in the homeowner’s recreation room and had gotten down to the nut-cutting.
    Her lead over Smalls was holding, and the numbers of leaners—people who were not fully committed yet, but who were inclined to vote for her—was increasing. She was going to win, and if she won, if she took off Porter Smalls, she wanted to hit Washington with a bang.
    The people in the rec room had had some ideas about how she could do that; two of them were former U.S. senators themselves.
    •   •   •
    T HEN, THAT MORNING, SHE’D been up at five o’clock, and had hit a series of assembly plants at the morning shift changes, and quickly returned to the Twin Cities for the local morning talk shows. She’d done two of them, but one was way the hell out west, and the other was almost downtown. It’d been hectic.
    After the talk shows, she spoke to the Optimist Club in Forest Lake, another short out-of-town trip. She could feel a tickle in the back of her throat, and worried that she might be losing her voice. Schiffer had given her some kind of double-secret lozenge used, supposedly, by the president, to keep the voice going. She’d pop one as soon as she was done with her face.
    Taryn looked at herself in the mirror: maybe a shadow there in the eyes, from too many twenty-hour days. Maybe from Tubbs? No: that was dwindling in the rearview mirror. She had more important things to worry about.
    And nobody had heard a thing from the cops.
    She’d been a little surprised by the campaign. She’d known politics was harsh, but had no idea exactly how harsh it was. There seemed to be one polestar, one overriding objective, one singular focus: to win. Nothing else really counted. Just winning.
    She liked that. It fit her.
    She went back to work on her face.
    •   •   •
    D ANNON HAD JUST FINISHED his backyard checks when Schiffer arrived in her plum-colored Porsche Panamera. He let her in, and she went to the living room, carrying a legal briefcase full of paper, which she began digging through. Dannon asked her if she wanted a drink, and she took a lime-water, which he got for her.
    Schiffer was a short, sturdy, dark-eyed woman, twice-divorced, with no regrets about either the marriages or the divorces. She had a degree in mechanical engineering from Duke, but after a month working for a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., she’d never again looked with desire on an open-channel crimper. One thing led to another, and at forty, she was one of the country’s best professional