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 ofthis 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.