Charlie Biggs, who was as big as his name and built like a linebacker, held the door open for Kiki with plenty of room for her to walk under his arm. They were going into the side entrance of city hall, the door the reporters never covered. Even if someone saw them, Charlie still had lots of business with the town council even though he wasn't city manager any more, and Kiki could have been a secretary or one of the assistants in his law and lobbying firm, which was just a cover for the undeclared but his real and very lucrative business: putting the "fix" in. And besides, in a town like this the newspaper wasn't going to dig dirt. The newspaper was already losing business because of the internet and if it pissed off the local advertisers, it would fold. That would be bad for Charlie's business, though, because he liked to leverage off politician's fears of what might happen.
Kiki looked delicious, as always, her dirty blonde hair and very fair complexion in sharp contrast to Charlie's black skin and her busty but not extreme figure a model of femininity. Today she was wearing unusually modest clothes, a simple woman's business suit that played down her charms but couldn't hide the fact that she was a very attractive woman.
Charlie fixed problems that people had with the city through his network of contacts and influence. He did it because he could and because it was to his advantage to fix things for people who mattered in the town. Charlie only fought battles he knew he could win without drawing public attention. It was righteous citizen opinion you had to fear in a town like this, that and the power of the College's purchasing department and endowment trust to put its money somewhere else. Keep everything complicated, quiet, and off the record and the fine town citizens would stay asleep and everything would be cool. Things had been cool for a long time.
Charlie and Kiki were sitting in a small, old fashioned office with brown walls and some old prints of how the town looked a century ago, when the College was still small and the economy was based on farming and manufacturing. The manufacturing economy was long gone, the farms had turned to subdivisions, and local business depended on the purchases the College and students made for their business these days.
A young man, wearing a thin, out-of-fashion striped tie and a white shirt, breezed in and closed the door. "Hi, Charlie! This your friend?" He nodded at Kiki.
Charlie introduced them. The man's name was Gerald.
"You know the situation?"
Charlie knew. Kiki knew as much as she needed to know and no more, and she didn't want to know any more.
"Here's the deal. He's coming into town tomorrow and he'll stay at the Vincennes. He plans to make a final pitch to Fred on Thursday." Fred was the mayor. "If Fred turns him down again, he says he's going to go public and tell his story." Nobody had to spell out the consequences: media attention, investigations, indictments, skeletons dug up, dirty laundry aired, cozy relationships disrupted. "So," he turned to face Kiki, "do you think you can help us?"
"Of course," Kiki responded without hesitation. "If he's half the man you say he is. It takes balls to do that and if he's got those kind of balls, his balls can get him in trouble." She smiled. "Balls make men stupid around me."
The young man broke into a smile himself. "Balls he has. Brains are another story. Aston's the laziest lawyer in the tri-state area and if it weren't for his client – his one and only client – he'd be living on public defender fees."
And so it happened that two days later Kiki sat waiting at the city's international airport in the Ground Transportation area, dressed like a businesswoman, except for a skirt that was two inches too short for the normal office dress code. She was holding a shuttle ticket to the town an hour away, a suitcase on wheels by her side. There was no clue that she actually lived in the town of their destination and was not a visitor at all. She also did not act like she was waiting for a certain very handsome, somewhat vain-appearing passenger named Jim Aston to arrive. And when he did, she got into the shuttle as if she had just got off the plane herself.
She got in first, knowing that he would knock over any of the other passengers in order to sit right next to her. Within seconds he had turned on a beaming smile and charm by the megawatt, striking up a casual conversation that was anything but innocuous. Of course, each time he turned to talk to her he was rewarded by a down blouse view of Kiki's lovely pale uplifted breasts. And, of course, at first she acted like she had no interest in him at all. It helped that another passenger was trying to hit on her, too! Great luck. A little male competition always helped spark a guy's interest. But during the ride she seemed to warm up to Aston, smiling with the corners of her mouth, without looking directly at him but in his direction. By the time they reached the Hotel Vincennes, she was twirling her blonde hair and looking sideways at him and folding her arms in front of her, as if she recognized that he was a sexual threat and had to protect herself, while at the same time making it easier to look down her blouse and pushing her fine bosom up a little higher. She was sending all the right signals that she was interested.
