Rook (Political Royalty Book 2) by Evelyn Adams

a way to phone it in for a while so he could make his sister his priority.
    Making sure to hit the mute button first so he wouldn’t blast Becca awake, he turned on the television and surfed until he hit one of the cable news shows. He could tell before he turned up the volume that something terrible happened while he’d been asleep. God damn it. Missing Wyoming was one thing; missing a major news story was something else entirely. His editor was going to lose her shit if he didn’t come up with some kind of response from the campaign. He’d needed today to be an easy day. Straightforward delegate counts and nothing else.
    Was that too much to ask? he thought and then tempered his response when he saw the devastation on the screen. A jagged edge of concrete punctuated with twisted rebar was all that was left of where a bridge once stood. Cars dangled over the edge, waiting for the slight shift that would send them careening into the water. He couldn’t tell from the images whether the damage had been caused by a bomb, an earthquake, or something else, but whatever caused it had been devastating for the people making their early morning commute.
    Inching the volume higher, he read the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the television. Twenty-two dead and over forty wounded. Good God. The pretty blonde news anchor pressed her painted lips into a grim line as an expert on the phone talked about tensile strength, spalling, and projected versus actual maintenance schedules. So it probably wasn’t an earthquake. He wasn’t even sure they had those in Vermont. Careful not to shift the bed, he sat at the foot, close enough to hear the news without turning the volume any higher. Issuing the classic it’s too soon to know for sure disclaimer, they were calling it a structural failure likely brought on by budget cuts to routine maintenance.
    “With the sequester cuts hitting education and law enforcement, local municipalities have been forced to cut the budget wherever they can to make up the slack,” said the disembodied voice calling into the news show. “Maintenance is often one of the first places to be cut. For years, cash-strapped communities have siphoned money from maintenance line items and allocated it to more immediate needs. I’m afraid today we may have seen one of the consequences of those kinds of decisions. And probably not the last.”
    The blonde nodded stoically before throwing it back to the field reporter standing in the rain in front of a diner in the middle of God knows where. He tugged at his North Face parka, probably bought for the occasion. It certainly looked new enough. Water dripped off the brim of his hood as he talked about the small community devastated by the morning’s events. Why did they think the news sounded more authentic if the reporter delivered it standing in the rain? Honestly, it made it hard to hear, visibility was shit, and who were they trying to convince? Waterlogged reporters didn’t tell better truths.
    He’d never understood why they didn’t stay in the studio or hell, even in the diner, interviewing patrons, just not out in the weather. Television’s crazy visuals was one of the reasons he’d stuck with print journalism, despite the fact that it lost an increasingly larger share of the market every year. He appreciated the inherent impartiality of the written word. He also liked staying dry.
    “What’s going on?” asked his sister, sitting up in the bed behind him. Her voice sounded rough from sleep and for a moment he wondered if she was going through the same kind of remembering ritual he had.
    “A bridge collapsed during rush hour in Vermont.” He didn’t spout the death toll and injured statistics. She could read it herself if she wanted to know. He wasn’t going to hide anything but he wasn’t going to add to the crap either.
    “Oh God, that’s awful,” she said, crawling to the foot of the bed to sit beside him.
    He glanced from the television to