Trigger: Day 2

Word Count: 12,012

Summary of Events:

Mayor Hull held a press conference in which he read his official statement before fielding a barrage of questions from a large crowd of local, state, national, and international reporters. Later on in the day Police Chief Abbey gave twenty five media people ten minutes of his time and opened with a statement that had left even much of Kynaston shocked, except Spencer, who thought about the whole PR shambles the situation had devolved into later on . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

As it had turned out, his guess had been more right that he could’ve expected. Chief Abbey had made himself available to the media at noon and he’d been much more tight about things. Only the first twenty five media who showed up were allowed to question him, and they had only ten minutes in which to do it.

He was sure that, in Mayor Hull’s mind, those ten minutes were going to go down in infamy.

Well, actually, it wasn’t even the whole ten minutes, but one quote by Chief Abbey that he’d already seen probably two or three dozen times on Social Media.

Chief Abbey had been asked about what the police were doing to catch the robber — who was now almost universally addressed as the Billionaire Queen — to which he had replied first with a scoff, a sure sign that Mayor Hull was not going to like the response:

“Why should I care about some random punk kid robbing a bank when I’ve got tens of thousands of crooks, hoodlums, and gangsters running around this city killing each other like it’s going out of style?”

It’d been his opening response in the ten-minute segment, and it’d left the media in shock for all of ten seconds — an eternity in the media world to be sure — and their ensuing questions departed entirely from the scandalous robbery to the state of law and order in Kynaston, with the conclusion being reached that neither law nor order existed in any measurable quantity within the city.

In other words, the robbery was an everyday sort of insignificant occurrence in Kynaston. Murder, even, wasn’t shocking in Kynaston. It was rampant.

Of course, he’d known that; he was probably one of few people in the whole city — and the only one who didn’t live downtown or on the southwest side, which were the areas that were mostly populated by gangsters and poor people who might not be gangsters, but regarded the gangsters as the real rulers of Kynaston — who hadn’t been surprised by those conclusions.

Even Garland had been shocked to hear those statements from Chief Abbey, and a handful of media had rushed to Mayor Hull after they’d visited Chief Abbey and played him the interview before getting his reactionary comments, which had been shocked stammers of horror and disbelief before he’d finally told the media to leave him alone.

Shortly afterwards an emergency council meeting had been called that involved Chief Abbey and — according to the latest on Social Media — it was pushing four hours.

Based on that he was pretty sure that Mayor Hull was either upset at Chief Abbey for his comments or trying to figure out how bad things really were in Kynaston and whether it was safe to have the centenary celebrations or not — much less why he hadn’t known it was that bad until now.