He shot her a glance. “What do you care?”
Michelle, who’d been grinning at him, now looked flustered. “I, I don’t care who you lust after. That’s your business.”
“That’s good to know, because I’m really into lust privacy.”
There was an awkward silence as they drove along.
Michelle was racking her brains for some other line of questioning and gratefully pounced on it. “But you were gone from the Service long before her husband ran for the Oval Office.”
“He was also a U.S. senator before that.”
“But what’s the connection with the Service? Or did it not have anything to do with that?”
“It did. And it didn’t.”
“Great, thanks for clearing that up.”
He remained silent.
“Sean, come on!” She slapped the steering wheel in frustration.
“This can go no further, Michelle.”
“Yeah, I’m a real blabbermouth.”
“I’ve never told anyone this. No one.”
She glanced over at him and noted the grim expression. “Okay.”
He settled back in his seat. “Years ago I was working presidential advance team duty in Georgia. I went out to have a late bite to eat with another agent. He left to get back on shift but I was off for the night. I took a stroll, scoping out the place, with an eye to doing some recon for trouble spots along the motorcade route. I’d been walking around for about an hour. It was maybe 11:30. That’s when I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Dan Cox.”
“The president?”
“He wasn’t president back then. He’d just been elected to the Senate. If you recall, he served a full term and then a couple years of his next before running for president.”
“Okay, you saw him, so what?”
“He was in a parked car in an alley, dead drunk, with some chick going down on him.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“You think I’d make that up?”
“So what happened?”
“I recognized him. He’d actually been at a briefing we did for the local officials in anticipation of the president coming to town.”
“So what was he doing getting ‘serviced’ in an alley by a woman who wasn’t his wife?”
“Well, I didn’t know it wasn’t his wife at the time, but it was still dicey. He was in the same political party as the president and I didn’t want this to make waves before the man came down. So I knocked on the car window and flashed my shield. The chick jumped off him so fast I thought she was going to go right through the car roof. Cox was so wasted he had no idea what was happening.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I told the lady to get out of the car.”