The Candidate Read Online Free PDF

deserves this. He’s the best candidate by far.”
    “Yeah. But it all changed in Mount Pleasant. That was a very scary moment,” Lauren said.
    “Were you there?”
    Lauren nodded. She noticed Mike’s interest pique like he had suddenly extended radio antennae from his head. She smiled inwardly and told him how she had been in the sparse crowd, absent-mindedly checking emails, when she heard Christine scream. Then it was chaos. She crouched down, unsure of what was going on; her ears ringing painfully from the single shot.
    “Did you see the woman with the gun?” Mike asked.
    “I saw her get arrested. Two cops dragged her out. She didn’t say a word. She was just blank, like she was high or something. I looked right into her face, but she just stared past me. It was spooky.”
    She shivered at the thought, partly just to hold Mike’s attention, but also from the memory itself. Since then, she dreamed of the woman several times, always remembering how roughly she was dragged away, and her black, dense eyes, impenetrably staring out at some distant vision. The woman’s face was like a statue’s, sculpted out of unmoving rock.
    Lauren snapped herself out of it and shrugged. “It’s amazing to think some crazy like that could get so close to a candidate. But, hey, this is Iowa. It’s all about pressing the flesh and getting out there with the people.”
    Mike laughed.
    “Yeah. But not quite like that.”
    “Still,” Lauren said. “Hodges is not the only one to benefit. My blog has seen traffic go up nearly a 100 times since the shooting. I might even be able to start earning money from this thing.”
    “But what about the woman?” Mike asked. “Did you get any sense of where she was from? Who she might be?”
    Lauren stopped. Suddenly she felt she was the subject of an interview. She paused and ignored the question. “So, Mike. On the record, tell me about why Senator Hodges attacked Governor Stanton in the debate last night?”
    Mike laughed. He looked at Lauren, saw her brown eyes widening innocently behind her blond fringe.
    “I gotta go, Lauren,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”
     
    * * *
     
    DRIVING AWAY from Iowa City and back down the long, straight overly familiar freeway to Des Moines, Mike could not stop thinking about Lauren. Or the feelings of guilt he had whenever he felt attracted to anyone other than Jaynie. Even five years after their divorce and Jaynie’s continued run-ins with drugs, Mike still wasn’t over her. He felt no clean break, just a ragged emotional tear. He couldn’t believe it could take so long to get someone out of your system. It was as if their time together left them embedded in each other’s flesh, picking out the hooks one by one.
    He gripped the car wheel and kept driving, striving instead to think of what Lauren said about the night Hodges was almost killed.
    “ She was just blank. ”
    That seemed to fit with everything else he heard. The shooter was an anonymous space. A nothing. A void. All the press coverage about the event didn’t add much to the original police line. She was a kook, a nut, a roamer with no identity. Getting a gun was not hard in these parts, even for people like that. And wanting to kill a presidential candidate was hardly an original ambition. No, it was Hodges’ heroism that was the story. Not the shooter. Now profile after profile looked at Hodges’ service in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. His climbing of the career ladder right up to General, before breaking into politics rather than retire into the comfort of being military top brass.
    Mike rubbed his eyes. This drive back to Des Moines was becoming increasingly dangerous because of the little sleep he was getting. With relief he finally pulled into the parking lot of the Embassy Suites and walked through the lobby. He wanted to go straight to bed but as he waited at the elevator he heard a familiar peel of raucous laughter from the bar area. He walked over and poked his