Hot Start by David Freed Page A

Walton around town. Rancho Bonita isn’t exactly London. You can’t go anywhere, really, without running into somebody you know.
    He was flanked by what I assumed were two of his aides. Both were young and blonde, wearing skirt suits tailored midthigh, and heels. Walton’s blue-and-yellow striped tie was loose at the collar and the sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled above his elbows—both sure signs that he’d decided to seek reelection and was out campaigning early. Rolled shirtsleeves and a loosely cinched tie tell the voters that the man they sent to Washington is working tirelessly in their behalf. Walton had that look about him as he nodded his head in adamant agreement with whatever Stan was spouting.
    “Hey, Logan,” Stan shouted, “come meet your congressman.” Stan loved nothing more than debating politics with anyone unfortunate enough to engage him in conversation. I sighed and walked over.
    “This is Cordell Logan. He lives in the garage back behind Mrs. Schmulowitz’s place with the nuttiest cat you ever saw.”
    “Congressman.”
    Same blue eyes. Same bleached teeth. Carefully coiffed hair, graying at the temples. An earnest, approachable face that fell just short of handsome. Walton looked much like he did in his group sex photo, only clothed.
    “Call me Pierce.” He shook my hand a little too enthusiastically, like he was trying to sell me something. “Hot enough for you out here today, Cordell?”
    “More than hot enough, Pierce. I just saw two trees fighting over a dog.”
    He laughed the way politicians and television news anchors do, like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard, even if it wasn’t.
    “Gotta remember that one,” Walton said, turning to his aides, who were both laughing too, though not quite so effusively. “Write that one down, will you, Gina?”
    “Got it.” She jotted a note in a binder bearing the congressional seal.
    “I was just telling the congressman how we fix the deficit,” Stan said. “Gotta cut big government, cut all these taxes, get all the welfare queens off the public dole and back to work.”
    This from a man who’d spent twenty years getting paid by the taxpayers to sit on his hind end swilling endless cups of coffee in some moldy back room of Rancho Bonita’s main post office branch, whose lifetime pension and health benefits were paid for by Mr. and Mrs. America.
    “Whatever you say, Stan,” I said.
    Walton told us how much he enjoyed being back in his home district while Congress was in recess and “touching base with the real people who matter most.” He was going door-to-door, he said, to better understand the concerns of his constituents. Were there any issues I felt like he needed to discuss on my behalf with the president of the United States once he got back to Washington?
    It was hard not to think of him in that photograph, all in flagrante delicto, as Caesar once might’ve described it. Tempted as I was to delve into his relationship with the late Roy Hollister, I didn’t. Standing on the steps outside crazy Stan’s house wasn’t the appropriate time or place.
    “Actually there is one thing,” I said.
    “Absolutely.” Walton glanced back at his note-taking aide. “Gina, take this down.”
    Her pen stood poised as Walton turned back to me, wearing one of those overly earnest, I’m-Here-to-Listen-Please- Vote-for-Me faces.
    “What I’d really, really like,” I said, “is for the president to intervene in Major League Baseball and outlaw the designated hitter rule. Pitchers may be pitchers, but they’re also baseball players. Allowing somebody else to hit for them is ridiculous. People have gone to Gitmo for less.”
    He laughed like he wasn’t sure whether I was being serious or not, and promised to express my concerns to the president at the appropriate time. We both knew he was being patronizing.
    I walked to my truck and drove to the county jail to see Dino Birch, wondering how much the congressman would