“Thanks, babe,” she said. “I’ve got an open house to check out, so I’ll be gone soon.”
“How about tonight?” she added. “There’s a game up in The Woodlands.”
“Better pass,” he said. “I’m broke until I get paid next week.”
“You know I’ll spot you,” she said, rubbing his thigh.
He better go before he succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, and to the gambling table.
“Thanks. May have to work late,” he said, patting her shoulder and getting out of bed.
She was a temptation, in many ways, he thought. Lila Jo had been separated for a few years from her husband, a busy construction supervisor, but she didn’t seem in any hurry to divorce since he still paid her health insurance. Like Travis, she was a serial mover and had resided at several different addresses in the last year. He admired her entrepreneurial spirit and acceptance of a fair amount of chaos in her living arrangements. When she saw an especially good deal on a condo or suburban ranch, she’d buy it and live there until the time was right to repaint it, stage it and sell it. She’d offered to cut him in on a deal or two, but he couldn’t afford it. As it was, he owed her a few thousand dollars, but she assured him it was no problem. He felt uneasy about it, though. He liked Lila Jo a lot and enjoyed the easy sex, but now he worried about the strings attached to their relationship.
Thirty minutes later, his mood elevated by two cups of coffee, he drove his ten-year-old Honda Accord into downtown Houston, parked in a cheap garage and walked two blocks to the Times building. He took his time. He still had a half-hour before he had to be at Annie Price’s team meeting.
Because he’d grown up in a desolate stretch of rural Texas west of Fort Worth, Travis was still enthralled by Houston. As he looked down the long streets of sleek high-rises, squat midrange buildings and dusty parking garages, he felt a thrill. He imagined the jostling diversity of humanity inside the buildings, from the starched-shirted bankers to the Gucci-loafered oil barons to the jump suited federal prisoners. He thought about the workers hurrying below him through the city’s network of tunnels, designed to shield them from the punishing heat. He knew they’d be lining up for their coffee and egg-and-cheese bagels in the subterranean cafes. Houston was a crackling city of strivers, stragglers and strays, and sometimes he had trouble figuring out where he fit in. He scanned the people on the street once more, but didn’t see any signs of anyone committing news. So he walked into the marble-fronted newspaper building and rode the elevator up to the fifth floor.
The newsroom looked like an insurance office, one that was struggling and hadn’t been updated in ten years. As a teenager, Travis had loved the movie, “All the President’s Men,” with its color-coded, accurate representation of the Washington Post newsroom. He’d expected the Times newsroom to look more like that, vibrant and buzzing with important breaking news. But the Times office consisted of a sea of gray carpet with off-white desks and low dividers. Even the conversation of reporters and editors seemed muted and mundane. Small glass offices belonging to editors ringed one wall and the access to sunlight was limited to another wall of windows. Since the Times building abutted a taller hotel that had been converted to expensive downtown condominiums, there wasn’t much of a view.
He crept in with trepidation. He should’ve stopped by the office to brief Annie the day before when he got back from the Rio Grande Valley mid-afternoon. But he and Lila Jo already had planned to go to a poker game, so he’d blown it off. He knew his editor had been forced to hustle on the story about the floater found in the ship channel.
In a conference room off the elevator, he saw her preparing for the meeting. He admired her slender figure in a sleeveless black dress. Annie always wore classy clothes that were feminine without being overtly sexy. He liked her brown-flecked green eyes and the black hair with a few silver strands she hadn’t bothered to color. He recalled the recent sheet cake celebration in the newsroom in honor of her 40th birthday. Annie had responded to it good-naturedly, as usual, but Travis could tell she wasn’t in a celebratory mood.
He knew about her storied history in the newsroom. Formerly an investigative reporter, she’d helped uncover a statewide scandal four years ago that involved two murders and a drug conspiracy to further a secessionist candidate’s run for governor. The fallout had been huge – indictments, prison, disgrace and a suicide. His friends in the newsroom teased him about having a mad crush on Annie, but it wasn’t really that. He considered her his role model and mentor. He just hoped he could get back on track before Annie found out how messy his life had become.
CHAPTER 3
Annie stood in the newsroom’s small conference room, nicknamed the rubber hose room, getting ready for her team’s weekly meeting. The dinky conference room got its moniker from its sheltered, out-of-the-way location off a hall from the fifth-floor elevator to the newsroom. With blinds lowered on the window facing the hall and a door that locked, Annie could see why reporters joked about it as a covert torture chamber where recalcitrant suspects could be beaten with a hose.
Before long, she thought, the rubber hose room will disappear into history. Like other struggling urban papers, the Times spent considerable energy looking for ways to shore up precarious finances. The latest trend was to sell downtown buildings for their high-value land and relocate the shrunken staffs of papers to cheaper digs in the suburbs. She knew it would happen in Houston before too long, because the McKnight chain had already announced its intentions. The proceeds from the sale, when it happened, would go to the corporation’s woefully underfunded pension fund. Annie believed strongly that newspapers should be located in a city’s downtown for visibility. On the other hand, maybe she’d need the healthier pension fund if she outlasted the continuing string of departures.
She put planning sheets for each reporter on the table and looked up expectantly as Travis walked in. He wore fresh khakis and a clean polo shirt, but something about his glance told her he’d had a bad night. She sensed that things were amiss with him lately, but couldn’t figure out what it was. She suspected that he drank too much, not unlike her and other stressed-out denizens of the newsroom. She also knew that he worried about money, though he’d never shown an inclination for hungering after an affluent lifestyle.
“Hey, Trav,” she said. “How was your trip back from the Valley?”
“You know that route, slow trucks and fast cars. Thought I’d never get back.”
“But the cuisine is so great,” she joked. “Did you find any barbacoa?” She knew he enjoyed the spicy Mexican meat made from the heads of cows or goats. It made her gag to think about it, but it was his favorite Tex-Mex treat.
“Nope. Strictly fast-food burgers the whole time,” he said.
“Great job on the court hearing. We managed to wrestle it to Tuesday’s page one. You see it down there?”
He rewarded her with a smile. He so badly wanted his stories on the front page that he came close to sulking when a good story didn’t make it. He worked hard, too, but her bosses often resisted her efforts to elevate the best crime and courts writing to page one.
“Thanks. Seems like I can’t find the Times in convenience stores in Brownsville any more. What gives?”
“Circulation has cut back on supplying the truck routes again. They don’t pay for themselves, as the brass keep telling us.”
“And this place calls itself a major newspaper,” he complained under his breath before lapsing into silence and sliding into a seat. She didn’t have time to worry about his moodiness.
Her three other reporters, Nate Hardin, Maggie Mahaffey and Brandon McGill had filtered in and found places at the table. She let them settle in while she went to get the refreshments she’d left on her desk. When Annie had become an editor, she’d had no
training in leadership, so she’d started out overcompensating with food. Her philosophy stressed eating together and pulling together as a team. She regularly set up team lunches, coffees and happy hours. But recently one of the top editors, in a rare lecture on management, had said assigning editors shouldn’t try to act as substitute parents for the younger reporters. Annie worried that perhaps her behavior could be construed as mothering. So she had to remind herself often not to meddle, worry, or try to solve her reporters’ problems. God knows she had plenty of issues of her own, and what did she know about mothering anyway? However, she wasn’t going to cut out the food and drink just yet.
“Hey, guys,” she said, setting a plate of kolaches on the table. The fruit-filled, doughy pastries were a Czech specialty she couldn’t resist from a downtown bakery. “Let’s get started. We need to keep it short. Who wants to go first?”
Maggie, a petite blonde who usually wore bright shades of pink, scads of jewelry and stiletto heels, put her hand up. Annie thought she did a decent job covering state politics, but couldn’t figure out how to motivate her to probe deeply into more complicated stories. She suspected that Maggie used her feminine wiles as a shortcut for working harder.
“I’m starting to look at something new I’m hearing about – the German-Texas movement,” Maggie said.
“What’s that all about?” Annie asked, making notes on the legal pad she carried in a leather folder.
“Those folks apparently are lobbying to get most of the Hill Country formally designated as German Texas, emphasizing German culture, language and traditions,” she said. “Kind of like the push for all things Gaelic in Ireland.”
“Who’s behind it?”
“The leaders are business people and history buffs from New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. As soon as I’m sprung from covering the legislature, I’m going up to the Hill Country and nose around.”
“That’s a few weeks away,” Annie said. “Can it wait that long?”
“I think so. I’m going to interview state Senator Satterfield about it next week.”
A strange look passed over Annie’s face as she heard the name of her former fiancé, now one of the most powerful state government leaders. But she quickly composed her face into a pleasant mask again and turned to Nate Hardin. Just a few years out of college, his curly dark hair and lanky figure reminded her of an overgrown teenager. He was still fairly new to Houston, a hard-working reporter and openly gay. Annie wanted to nurture his talent and couldn’t help worrying whether he’d be distracted by the attractions of the city’s numerous gay bars.
“Nate, what have you got for me?”
“Actually, boss, I might have something for Maggie on this German Texas thing.”
“You do? Spill it.” Maggie gave him the high-megawatt smile she usually reserved for influential lawmakers.
“Does the name Kyle Krause mean anything to you?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Isn’t he one of the topless club owners you’re looking at?” Annie leaned in to hear more.
“Yeah,” Nate said. “Krause runs the seven Texas Girls clubs in the Houston area. He’s one of the biggest strip club owners in town and definitely the most interesting.”
“In what sense?” Annie said.
“There are plenty of older, entrenched owners. He’s different – young, enterprising and a political animal.”
He turned to Maggie, who was taking notes. “What you said about the German-Texas movement rang a bell. Krause grew up in the heart of the Hill Country, supports politicians from there and recently wrote a big check to some German-Texas group in Fredericksburg.”
“Did you look at his campaign contributions?” Maggie asked.
Nate nodded, flipping through pages in a reporter’s notebook filled with neat, cramped writing. He found what he was seeking.
“I thought so,” he said. “Last month, he sent a $25,000 check to the German Texas Political Caucus. There may be more out there.”
“The German-Texas caucus is the group doing the lobbying,” Maggie said. “Isn’t Krause kind of a German name? Strange if there’s a connection.”
“Isn’t everything in Texas connected?” Travis asked. “Have you heard the term six degrees of separation? In Texas, it’s only two.”
“Good tip, Nate,” Maggie said, ignoring Travis’s attempt at humor. “I’ll ask my sources about the strip-club king.”
“And I’ll keep you and Annie abreast of things,” Nate winked.
Maggie groaned and Travis kicked Nate under the table, saluting his pun. Annie hid a smile.
“Kyle Krause sounds like a good profile,” she said. “Give me a memo summarizing what you’ve found and we can decide where to go from there. Travis?”
He offered a recap of the kingpin’s trial in the Valley.
“What about the floater in the ship channel, Annie?” he said. “By the way, thanks for going out there yesterday.”
“Could be nothing more than an unfortunate accident,” Annie said. “But who was she and how did she get there? Obviously, you should follow up on the autopsy. The human trafficking angle sounds intriguing. Why don’t you look for sources outside the police department, maybe folks in the shipping industry?”
“Will do, boss.”
“Your turn, Brandon,” she said. “What’s the latest on the West Texas secessionists?”
At fifty, Brandon McGill was the team’s senior reporter. Since the gutting of the investigative team, he was the nearest thing to a projects reporter. His title was general assignment reporter, but Annie tried to keep him out of the general-assignment rotation that often led to stupid stories ordered by clueless higher-ups.
“They’ve been laying low for a while,” Brandon said. “But I talked to a source today who told me there’s trouble brewing in the Nation of Texas ranks.”
“There’s always trouble in the secessionists’ ranks. What’s new?” Annie asked.
“Only that Dan Riggins and Alicia Perez have been spotted in West Texas.”
“Are you kidding?” Annie said, turning over her coffee cup. She mopped up the mess, but her hands wouldn’t lay still. “Can we confirm this?”
“Probably not,” Brandon said. “They were hanging around some of the border towns and then they disappeared, according to my source. But I’ll try.”
“Okay, Brandon,” she said. “Can you find me after lunch to map out a plan? We need to get cracking on this.”
“Did you know those two personally, Annie?” Travis couldn’t help asking. “You reported that whole secessionist scandal, but you never talk about it.”
“You guys have probably read the clips,” she said. “It was four years ago, really old news.”
“You never talk about it,” Nate said. “Tell us what really happened.”
“Well, here’s a capsule summary,” Annie said. “Dan Riggins was the leader of the Nation of Texas secessionists. He also ran the gubernatorial campaign of Tom Marr, his college buddy, and secretly used drug money to pay for it. Riggins’s girlfriend, Alicia Perez, was an assassin who murdered two people, including my friend Maddy Daniels, a Times’ investigative reporter. Perez tried to stab me and kill Mark Ingram, a Texas Ranger, when we got close to the truth. She was captured, but Riggins and the secessionist goons freed her in a terrible shootout. Perez and Riggins escaped and the Texas Rangers think they’re hiding in South America.”
“That was a crazy good series of stories you did. Those were the glory days of this paper,” Brandon said.
“Thanks. It was an exciting, but scary time,” Annie said. “Riggins and Perez have been fugitives for a long time, so w
e need to find out what’s going on. I can’t believe they’re brazen enough to cross the border.”
“What about Tom Marr, the secessionist candidate for governor?” Travis asked. “Did he go to prison?”
“No, he paid a fine, gave up politics and went back to his ranch in West Texas,” Annie said. “He believed in the secessionist cause, but didn’t know about the murders, drug smuggling and other stuff Riggins orchestrated behind his back. I think he was a decent man, just misguided.”
She checked the time. Five minutes remained before she should leave for the editors’ news meeting. She needed to wrap it up with a message that might inspire them. But she still felt rattled.
“Guys, I’m proud of what you’re doing on your projects.” She looked around the table at each of them. “I know that it’s hard keeping up with your beats. But we all know that just feeding the daily beast isn’t satisfying. You need to feed your soul with a great story.”
“You sound awfully serious,” Brandon said. “Know something you’re not telling us?”
She hesitated before speaking, but decided nothing would be gained by pussyfooting. She always tried to be honest with them.
“The usual. The paper’s had another awful quarter. There may be more budget cutting ahead. I hope our jobs are safe – for now.”
“Doesn’t sound very promising,” Maggie said, buffing a fingernail with an emery board she’d pulled from her designer purse.
“I can’t lie to you, Maggie. You guys shouldn’t count on raises when we may get furloughs before the year ends.”
She stood up, picked up the platter with leftover kolaches. She searched for some reassuring words.
“Don’t feel like our glory days are behind us. Try to carve out time each day to work on your own great story. Don’t worry about the state of the newsroom. Just focus on your best work.”
CHAPTER 4
A few days later, Annie shook hands with State Senator Sam Wurzbach in front of Treebeards, her favorite downtown restaurant. Wurzbach, a Fredericksburg legislator who spent much of his time in Austin, had called the day before saying he’d be in Houston and wanted to take her to lunch. He said he was interested in her experiences reporting on the secessionist movement. She’d quickly said yes.
Winning Texas Page 2