Nothing but Trouble (10 page)

Kerney nodded.

Julia stepped to the three-quarter-ton. “Good. Follow me home. My parents can’t wait to see you. Mom’s in the kitchen cooking up a storm for you. You were always the one friend Johnny had that Mom favored the most. Me too.”

“Why didn’t I know this back then?”

Julia grinned as she climbed into the three-quarter-ton. “I’ve often wondered that myself.”

The drive to the ranch headquarters was a straight shot to low, grassy hills that rolled on toward the mountains. Four houses, all of them white pitch-roofed structures with screened front porches painted in green trim, sat in a large grove of shade trees within easy walking distance of a horse barn. A water tank, windmill, and feed storage bins stood behind the barn next to a large metal shop and garage. Everything about the place was spic and span. Even the heavy equipment parked outside the garage was lined up in a neat row.

Julia stopped in front of the largest house in the compound, a long ranch-style home with a big picture window that looked out on the porch. She led him through the unoccupied front room, a comfortable space filled with art, books, and easy chairs, to a spare room, and left him there to change his shirt. When he returned to the front room, Joe and Bessie greeted him, both smiling broadly.

Bessie wiped her hands on her apron and gave Kerney a hug. She felt like a feather in his arms, so tiny now and stooped of shoulder. The top of her snow-white head barely reached his chest. Joe Jordan’s handshake was hearty and firm. He also was white haired, but still ramrod straight and lean. Wire-rim spectacles sat low on the bridge of his nose, and his face was wind-burned a deep red, accenting the furrows of crow’s feet at the corners of his blue eyes.

Julia stepped out of the kitchen holding a tall glass of water, which Kerney gratefully accepted and quickly drained.

“Since I found him on the ranch,” Julia said with a grin, “can I keep him?”

“Not from the looks of the wedding ring he’s wearing,” Joe replied with a laugh as he herded Kerney into the kitchen.

At the kitchen table Bessie passed around a platter of sliced cold beef, a basket of hot fresh biscuits, a bowl of sauce for the beef, a salad, and a pitcher of lemonade. She’d set the table with her best flatware and linen napkins.

Over lunch Joe questioned Kerney about the fatality on the highway. He answered but left out the gory details.

Joe shook his head as he cut a small piece of beef and dipped it in the dollop of sauce on his plate. “Those Mexicans are so damn poor, not even the fear of death stops them from crossing the border. A neighbor south of here found two dead bodies on his land just last year. A young woman and a middle-aged man.”

“I guess it isn’t a problem that’s going away anytime soon,” Kerney replied.

“Not in my lifetime,” Joe said. “Best we can do is try to keep them off the ranch. Walt Shaw does a pretty good job of that.”

The conversation switched to old times on the Jornada, and they reminisced and caught up. Kerney learned that Bessie had survived breast cancer, Joe had undergone a hip replacement, and Julia was divorced and now dividing her time between the ranch and her house in Tucson.

Kerney told them about Sara and Patrick. Only Joe and Bessie seemed genuinely pleased to hear him talk about his family.

Julia changed the subject as soon as politely possible. “Johnny says you’re ranching up in Santa Fe,” she said.

Kerney noticed the hint of a scowl cross Joe’s face at the mention of his son’s name. “Only in a small way,” he replied. “I’ve partnered with a neighbor to raise and train cutting horses.”

Joe nodded as he passed Kerney the platter of meat. “If you can pay the bills, there’s no better life than ranching.”

“True enough,” Kerney said.

Bessie smiled appreciatively as Kerney forked another slice of beef onto his plate. “I can’t resist your cooking,” he said to her.

After lunch Julia took Kerney on a tour of the ranch headquarters, the sun hot against their backs, the ground warm underfoot. Under a shade tree in front of Julia’s house, Kerney asked if she and Johnny were planning to keep the ranch in the family.

“It’s all mine,” Julia said. “That’s why I’m here so much of the time now.”

“Well, I guess Johnny has his own life to lead.”

Julia leaned against the tree and laughed. “It’s not that, Kerney. No matter how much he makes, money runs through Johnny’s fingers like a sieve. He’s always been that way. Daddy has bailed him out financially time and time again and has never once been repaid. So the deal is, I get the ranch, Johnny gets his debts forgiven, and we divide up what’s left equally.”

“That sounds fair.”

“Johnny doesn’t think so. That’s why he got the production company to film on location at the ranch. He figures the payment Daddy receives will change his mind about cutting him out of the ranch. It won’t.”

“I hope it doesn’t cause you any problems.”

Julia waved away Kerney’s concern. “Johnny will move on to some other scheme. He always does. Come on, I want to show you my little casa.”

The inside of Julia’s house was done up in light, cool shades of beige and ivory upholstered furniture. A choice collection of Navajo textiles, including a large chief’s blanket, were displayed on the living room walls. Kerney could tell that the house had been gutted and completely renovated. A stacked-stone fireplace divided the living room from the dining area, and the kitchen was ultramodern. A professional chef’s stove beneath a copper range hood stood at one end of the room, surrounded by maple cabinets with black marble countertops. A large antique drop-leaf table sat in the middle of the kitchen.

Julia’s master suite contained a king-size four-poster bed and a large Oriental rug that complemented the floral draperies. An alcove with a built-in desk served as a small office and reading area.

In the guest room on the opposite side of the house, Julia said, “Why don’t you come back here after your meeting in Playas with those Hollywood boys and spend the night? I’ll fix you a good meal.”

“It’s kind of you to offer,” Kerney said, “but we’re due to get an early start in the morning to scout all the locations.”

“The first few stops are here on the ranch,” Julia said, “at the rodeo arena and then on the route Johnny’s picked for the cattle drive.”

She stepped close to Kerney, rubbed his arm, and smiled coquettishly. “I promise to kick you out of bed in time for you to make it to work.”

Kerney took Julia’s hand off his arm and patted it. “It’s a delightful invitation, but not a good idea, Julia. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She smiled to hide her disappointment, escorted Kerney to the front door, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and watched him walk to his truck. He cut a handsome figure in his jeans, long-sleeved cowboy shirt, boots, and hat. He was six foot one, square shouldered, blue eyed, and had a cute, firm butt and the most absolutely beautiful hands she’d ever seen on a man.

Both her ex-husbands had been studs in bed, but totally amoral, charming alley cats. She wondered why it had taken her so long to learn the difference between men and boys. She’d hoped to find Kerney in an unhappy marriage and susceptible to the possibility of an affair that might lead to something more. But so far it didn’t look promising.

She waved as Kerney honked the horn and drove away, thinking that he’d be back for three weeks when the film started shooting. That would give her plenty of time to test Kerney’s matrimonial fidelity.

Kerney arrived in the town of Playas ahead of schedule and used his spare time to take a look around. What he saw amazed him. Although he knew Playas was a virtually abandoned, modern company town, it was quite another matter to see it.

The two-lane road into town was paved, and just on the outskirts were two churches, baseball fields, a swimming pool, and a recreation center. The road looped around a grassy knoll dotted with trees that formed the gateway to the town, where a single-story apartment building with a covered portal faced the parklike setting.

Beyond the town a sweep of low hills rose up, rock strewn, barren, and steeply sloped. Backed against them the town looked out at a dry, glistening white lakebed in a broad valley that stretched to the Animas Mountains. The word for beaches in Spanish was playas, and the dry lakebed looked exactly like a pristine sandy shore without any water.

Playas was a bit of suburbia transplanted in the middle of the desert. A raven flew overhead and Kerney thought that from a bird’s-eye view, with its paved streets, Santa Fe-style houses, and modern commercial buildings, it could have passed for a bedroom community outside any major southwestern city. At ground level things didn’t look so normal. On street after street abandoned, weather-beaten houses with cracked stucco, warped garage doors, faded trim, and blank windows looked out on weed-infested front yards peppered with dead trees and shrubs.

A few occupied houses stood out here and there with grassy lawns and shade trees in full green color. Cars were parked in driveways, front doors were cluttered with children’s toys and bikes, and there were curtains in the windows. On a street at the top of a small rise the occupied houses were larger, lawns bigger, shade trees more numerous, and the views of the valley spectacular. Kerney figured it to be the neighborhood where the mining company honchos had once lived.

The commercial area of town contained buildings that had once served as a mercantile store, medical clinic, post office, bank, community center, and an indoor recreation complex. As a cop Kerney could see the endless possibilities for using Playas as an antiterrorism training center. It would serve perfectly for any number of training scenarios, such as massive house-to-house searches, SWAT-team helicopter incursions, bomb-squad disposal operations, hostage-negotiation situations, sniper training, and any number of high-risk police, fire, or medical emergencies. In many ways the town reminded him of a much larger version of Hogan’s Alley, a self-contained, fully functional village on the grounds of the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, which was used to train agents in crime-scene scenarios.

He made a mental note to talk to his training lieutenant about getting sworn personnel enrolled in the program once it was fully operational. He stopped at a sleek, stepped-back stuccoed structure with multiple entrances and a flat roof, where several semitrailers were parked. A group of men were unloading construction materials. On the lawn in front of the building two workers were planting a large carved wooden sign that read:

TOWN OF COUNCIL ROCK MUNICIPAL OFFICES

Council Rock was the name of the fictional town in the screenplay, which meant that Playas was already being dressed up as a movie set.

Kerney approached the men who were installing the sign and asked where the production team was meeting. One of the men pointed across the way to the community center, which Kerney found to be locked. He looked through the glass doors. Two long folding tables sat pushed together in the middle of the hall, surrounded by chairs. There were plastic coffee cups, water bottles, soda cans, and documents on the table, but no one inside.

He hung around and watched a crew of men use portable scaffolding to attach new signs to the stepped-back building. Over the next twenty minutes they transformed three doorways into entrances to the Council Rock mayor’s office, municipal court, and police headquarters.

Four black full-size SUVs pulled up to the curb in front of the community center. A dozen people piled out of the vehicles and walked quickly to the community meeting hall entrance. Kerney spotted Johnny Jordan in the middle of the pack, talking animatedly to a tall man carrying a thick three-ring binder and wearing chinos, athletic shoes, and a brand-new straw cowboy hat perched on the back of his head. He tagged along and got close enough to hear the two men exchange heated words about some proposed script changes.

Inside the community center the debate continued as the group took their seats around the tables. Unobtrusively, Kerney stood by the door and watched.

“I want that damn copper smelter in the film as the location for the climax of the chase scene,” the tall man in the new cowboy hat said.

“The climax occurs at the rodeo arena,” Johnny said, looking agitated. “We agreed on that when we finalized the script.”

“We can change the damn script,” the tall man said, as he flipped through the pages of the binder. “For Chrissake, that’s what writers are for. I want the copper smelter for the climax. All that industrial stuff sitting in the middle of a desert is visually stunning. Plus, it makes a great juxtaposition between the cowboy culture and modern society.”

“The brawl at the rodeo arena is the climax,” Johnny shot back.

The tall man stared Johnny down. “Here’s the way I see it: We keep the script as it is right through the scene where the cops scatter the cattle with police helicopters and the rancher hightails it off BLM land through the mountain pass. But instead of having the cops bust them later in the day at the ranch rodeo, we keep the pursuit going to the smelter, where the cops find the cowboys gathering up the strays. We’ll have cowboys on horseback chasing cows in and out of the buildings, cops chasing cowboys on foot and with squad cars, and a brawl that ends in a standoff when the rancher decides to call it quits before anyone gets seriously hurt.”

The tall man turned to a man with glasses on his immediate left, who was studying papers on a clipboard. “Costwise, can we do this?”

“If we drop the rodeo scenes completely, we can.”

“I’ve got world-class champions signed on to this film, expecting to showcase their talents,” Johnny said.

“Maybe they still can,” Kerney said.

All eyes turned toward Kerney.

“Who are you?” the tall man asked.

“Kevin Kerney. I’m one of your technical advisors.”