Chapter Three
Trusted Partners
His people were everywhere.
Not always smart people. Smart people can become a problem. Silas preferred useful people. People who nodded at the right moments. People who understood that loyalty was better than competence because competence sometimes reads the documents.
There was Harold at the permits desk, who could lose an application in a drawer so deep it needed its own zip code. There was Ginny on the board, who never saw a conflict of interest because she had trained herself not to look directly at one. There was Merle the contractor, who always submitted the cleanest bid because he already knew what the dirt looked like. There was the local paper, which covered every ribbon cutting like Moses had come down from the quarry with a grant agreement carved in stone. And there were the meeting minutes.
The beautiful, delicate, mysterious meeting minutes.
Sometimes they appeared. Sometimes they did not. Sometimes they appeared so late they qualified as local history.
Sometimes the minutes said “discussion was held,” which in North Swervin’ meant anything from “nothing happened” to “somebody lit the Constitution on fire and used the ashes to stamp an invoice.”
Silas appreciated vague minutes.
Vague minutes were not a bug in the machine.
They were grease.
The machine ran best when the public could not tell whether something had been approved, postponed, amended, tabled, whispered, buried, resurrected, or quietly dragged behind the building and shot.
Citizens would ask questions.
Silas had answers.
“Why did that contract go to him?”
“He has experience.”
“Why wasn’t that posted?”
“We’re working on improving communication.”
“Why are the records missing?”
“They are available upon proper request.”
“Why does the same little circle keep ending up around the money?”
“We value trusted partners.”
Trusted partners.
That was one of Silas’s finest phrases.
It sounded professional. It sounded stable. It sounded like the sort of thing a man in a quarter-zip says while standing next to a chart.
But in North Swervin’, “trusted partner” usually meant somebody who knew where the bodies were buried and had agreed not to landscape the area.
