"You talking to me?"

"No one else in the room."

"Then stop texting and talk to me."

"I'm not texting. I'm tweeting."

"Tweeting?"

"On Twitter."

"Tweeting on Twitter-that's what I'm paying you to do, play on your goddamn phone?"

Still talking to the top of his head.

"You're paying me to win elections, and social networking is another way to connect with voters. Grass roots. So I tweet for you."

"What am I… what are you tweeting?"

" 'Nine A.M. and at my desk working hard for the people of Texas.'

"

"And they believe that?"

"Your three thousand followers do."

"I've got three thousand followers? Hey, that ain't bad."

"Obama's got ten million."

Bode sighed. "Figures."

Jim Bob punched a button on his phone as if firing off a nuclear bomb then raised his head and eyed Bode over his reading glasses.

"Okay… so what's wrong now?"

Like a mother to her child who had come home from school with hurt feelings.

"What makes you think something's wrong?"

"Because you're frowning. Which I find hard to believe, given that you just had sex with a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old girl. If I had been so lucky this morning, you wouldn't be able to slap the smile off my face for a month."

Bode tried to block the image of Jim Bob and Mandy having sex from his mind.

"How'd you know we had sex?"

"Because that gal's just naturally horizontal."

Bode's thoughts drifted back to that morning in bed. He had tried to satisfy his need for excitement with his young aide, but after a year the initial thrill of sex with Mandy Morgan had waned. Sex was much like big-game hunting in that regard. Bode's gaze turned up to the stuffed animal heads that adorned the four walls of his office: axis and mule deer, elk, Catalina goat, red stag, Aoudad sheep, impala, pronghorn, Corsican ram, sable, and his favorite, the wildebeest.