I’d met Jeff Thorndike once at a fundraiser Arch hosted for his last campaign. Thorndike had started adult life as a trial lawyer. Midcareer, he’d tried a case against a company that made cigarette lighters. A three-year-old girl had taken her mother’s lighter off a table and leaked fluid all over her arm and down to her torso before managing somehow to spark the flint wheel and light herself on fire. Thorndike won a massive settlement for the family and forced the company to redesign their lighters with one of those annoying safety locks. The case garnered enough attention from the media to make him a regular on nightly news broadcasts. Before long, he was showing up on the cable networks as a “legal expert.” Someone in Hollywood liked the stern, serious look of his high forehead and hooded brow. He ended up with a two-decade career as an actor playing generals and admirals, district attorneys and judges.

Thorndike looked and acted the part so well that he made an easy transition into the real thing. Despite not having practiced law for twenty years nor having run for any public office whatsoever, he won election to the US Senate by twenty points. He’d done nothing remarkable as a senator; in fact, his most notable accomplishment seemed to have been having the poorest attendance record of any sitting member of Congress.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is he going to run for president?”

“He’s stepping down,” Arch said. “He’s not even going to finish his term. There’s going to be a special election.”

“Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” Arch said. “His son’s death hit him hard.”

“I didn’t know about that.”

“Heroin,” Arch said. “Can you believe it? The kid had just graduated from Georgetown Law. Apparently, he got hooked on painkillers he’d been prescribed after knee surgery. That sort of thing is getting awfully common, you know.”

“What,” I said. “Upper-class junkies?”

“It’s no joke,” Arch said. “Anyway, Thorndike said he’d been planning to retire for a while.”

“So you’re running,” I said.

“You bet.”

“Isn’t that a big jump?”

“Not when you’re following a guy who got elected without ever having held public office before.”

“Sure,” I said. “But he’s older. And he played a senator on TV.”

“Yeah, well, I’m gonna play one on TV too.”

“Who do you have to beat?”

“The Democrats are putting up Cole Bridwell, but I’m not worried about him. The big fight will be the primary.”

Coleman Bridwell had run unopposed in the last two congressional elections, but his district was Nashville, an oasis of moderation in a desert of conservatism. Nashville was split with a leftward tilt, and Memphis was still solid for the Democrats, but the rest of the state was fire-engine red.