Chapter 34
COLT
The afternoon sun was doing its best to cook the sidewalk as I came down the steps of City Hall. I slid my sunglasses on and pulled my keys from my pocket. The meeting had gone the way I needed it to go. The details were boring and I had better things to think about.
Like the reason for the sore hamstring and bruised knees. I didn’t go for a run because I slept in and I figured I’d had a good workout the night before.
I was halfway down the block when I heard my name. Not someone calling my name because they wanted to say hello. It was shouted as a curse, not a hello. I braced myself as I turned around to face my fan club.
There were four of them. Three men and a woman. I recognized one of the men as a guy who ran a bait shop near the marina. The woman I didn’t know. The other two men I’d seen around town but couldn’t put names to them. None of them looked particularly pleased to see me.
I stopped walking and took my sunglasses off. They were going to look into my eyes when they spoke to me. It was the least I could do. I had a long way to go to show them I wasn’t the asshole they thought I was.
“Mr. Anderson,” the bait shop guy said. His name came to me after a second. Denny. Or Danny. Something with a D. “You got a minute?”
“I’ve got several,” I said.
He looked at the others and then back at me. “You know what Judd Mathers has been doing?”
I kept my expression neutral because it truly was anyone’s guess about what he was doing. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“He’s been sending people into our businesses,” the woman said. She was maybe forty, dark hair. She looked pissed. At me.
“For what reason?” I asked.
“Offering deals,” Denny or Danny said. “Perks. If we endorse the port. If we put up signs, talk it up, tell our customers it’s a good idea. They’re offering advertising partnerships and vendor contracts. One guy over on Marine said they offered to pay off his lease for two years.”
Oh, he was playing dirty. A snake in the grass. Did they realize it? Did they know he was playing them?
“When did this start?” I asked.
“Few days ago,” the third man said.
I exhaled slowly through my nose. No, I had not known, but I wasn’t surprised.
That was exactly the kind of move Judd made when a frontal assault stopped working.
He found the people who might be willing to bend and he made it worth their while.
I knew that’s how he made things happen when he faced opposition in other areas. I wasn’t going to watch it work here.
“I want you to know something.” I looked at each of them, making brief eye contact. “I pulled my investment from the port project. I paid the penalty. I’m done.”
“We heard that,” the woman said.
“Then you also know I’ve been in contact with the other investors trying to convince them to do the same thing,” I said. “I’m not going to stand up here and tell you I’m the hero of this story. I brought Mathers here and that’s on me. But I am working to fix it.”
“Fixing it doesn’t stop him from buying people off,” Denny said.
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.” I looked down at the pavement for a second and then back up at them. “Did anyone take his offers? Maybe those are the folks you should talk to next.”
“A couple are considering it,” the younger man said. “Hard to know for sure. People aren’t exactly advertising it.”
That was going to be a problem. A fractured community was harder to rally than a unified one. Judd knew that. That was the whole point of the exercise. He was going to pick them off one by one.
I looked at them and knew it was time to make a stand.
“Now’s as good a time as any,” I said.
Denny looked at me. “For what?”
“To make a statement.” I glanced around the block. There were people going in and out of the hardware store across the street. “You want to counter what Mathers is doing? Let’s take the air out of it right now.”
“You serious?” the young man asked.
“Dead serious. I’d like to make a statement and I want the whole world to hear it.”
“I’ll livestream it,” he said. “I’ve got twelve hundred followers and half of them are locals.”
It wasn’t exactly a press conference. I wasn’t ready for a press conference.
Normally, this kind of thing was set up by my publicists.
Lawyers decided what I would say. It was all about saying the right things without crossing lines or making promises.
But I didn’t have the luxury of time and I wasn’t interested in tiptoeing around the mess I’d made.
“Do it,” I said.
He opened his phone, tapped a few things, and then pointed it at me. I barely had the chance to glance down and see what I was wearing. Not the typical press conference attire.
Too late to back out now. We were live.
I didn’t look away. I looked directly into the camera and thought about Summer. I was doing it for her.
“My name is Colt Anderson. Most of you in Surfside know who I am and why I’ve been here. I came to this town as a partner investor in the proposed port development project. I want to be direct with you about where things stand.”
I paused. Just a beat.
“I have withdrawn from that contract. I am no longer an active party in the construction of the port, the modification of the marina, or the proposed development of the commercial headquarters on Front Street.” I let that sit for a second.
“I am not neutral on this matter. I am directly opposed to it.”
The woman next to Denny made a small sound. I kept going.
“I came into this project the way I come into a lot of things. I looked at numbers and projections and I got excited. I didn’t stop to think about the people underneath those numbers.
The families. The businesses that have been here for generations.
The coastline that doesn’t belong to anyone with a checkbook, no matter how large that checkbook happens to be.
You guys have been protecting this place for longer than I’ve been around.
” I took a breath. “Someone very important to me finally got me to open my eyes and see things from where she was standing. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. ”
I didn’t say her name. I didn’t need to. Anyone in Surfside who’d been paying attention could probably guess. And if she happened to see my impromptu press conference, she’d know. That’s all that mattered.
“I want to say something to the people of this town who showed up at that protest, who made noise and got into the fight even when it felt like nobody was listening.” I looked briefly at the four people standing around the phone before looking back into the lens.
“You kept me accountable. And I am grateful for that, even when the methods were a little hard on my paint job.”
The group laughed, which kind of told me there were plenty of people in town that knew about it and probably even knew who did it. They could keep their secrets.
“Your work is done,” I said. “You’ve done what you needed to do. You woke somebody up. I’ll carry it the rest of the way from here. That’s my promise to you.”
I gave it one more second, then nodded once at the camera. The young man lowered the phone.
Nobody spoke for a moment. They all stared at me and I wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t contemplating my demise.
The woman spoke first. “You mean that?”
“Every word.”
“Alright,” she said. Like that settled something for her.
Denny extended his hand. I shook it and felt like I had just won the lottery. Better than the lottery. I won his respect.
“We’ll be watching,” he said.
“I’d expect nothing less,” I told him.
I wasn’t ready to call them friends, but I realized it had the potential to become trust if I held up my end of it. That was going to take time and I understood that.
I put my sunglasses back on and said my goodbyes and walked back to the Mercedes. I put the phone on the seat beside me and exhaled through my nose.
I turned into the drive and sat in the car for a moment. When I stepped out, I couldn’t help but stop and look at the scratch on the door. Scratch was a generous term. It was a gouge.
I went inside and found Cody in the kitchen making what appeared to be an extremely ambitious sandwich. He looked up when I came in.
“Dad called,” he said.
“I figured.” I opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. I stood there with the fridge door open for a moment, the cool air hitting my face.
“Judd’s going to come at you hard,” Cody said.
“I know.”
“You ready for that?”
I thought about it. The professional fallout was already in motion.
There would be people in our industry who heard about the video before the day was out.
There would be calls I’d have to take and explanations I’d have to give and some of those conversations were going to be uncomfortable.
There were relationships that might not survive it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Cody looked at me like he thought I was crazy, his sandwich momentarily forgotten. Then he nodded like he accepted what he saw. “Good,” he said and went back to his lunch.
I closed the fridge and leaned against the counter and thought about what I actually needed to do next.
The legal angle on the Front Street properties was going to take time to fully develop.
I needed to get my own lawyers looking at those covenants before Judd’s people found a workaround.
I needed to keep working on the other investors.
And I needed to talk to Summer.
There were a lot of decisions that had to be made and she should be part of the process.
“So, I’m thinking I should leave the Porsche in the garage,” Cody said around a mouthful.
I smirked. “Probably.”
“When you going to get the car fixed?”
“I’m going to let it sit for a bit.”
“Why?”
“A reminder.”
“It’ll rust, especially in this environment.” He was right.
“I’ll call a body shop.”
“Should we prepare for eggs next? You wore them so well last time.”
I laughed. “Little brother, they’re going to love us. It’s the big bad wolf we need to be prepared for. And I don’t think he’s going to be tossing eggs at us.”