Nothing but Trouble_ A Kevin Kerney Novel - Michael Mcgarrity [59]
Kerney decided a closer inspection of the house and grounds wouldn’t be wise. Driving onto the property would raise the interest of the farmer on a tractor tilling a nearby field, or the woman across the highway hanging out the wash at the side of her house.
What he’d learned about Shaw from Gundersen was interesting but added no weight to his suspicions. A couple of hours of research into Shaw after he was back in Santa Fe might give him a better handle on the man. He was particularly intrigued by the way Shaw’s adoptive parents had died, and wanted to do a records search to see what kind of an investigation had been mounted and what the official findings had been.
Kerney left the valley wondering whether he’d be able to drop his cop mentality when he retired. He’d spent his career questioning motives, digging into dirty little secrets, unraveling crimes, probing for guilty knowledge, and holding people accountable for their wrongdoings.
Would he ever be able to step aside from the ingrained reflex he had to want to set everything right? He wasn’t sure it would be easy, but he would damn sure try. Although, so far, he had to admit to himself that he wasn’t doing a very good job of letting go.
All in all Johnny Jordan was pleased with how the scouting trip had gone. Usher loved the rodeo grounds location in Duncan, and they had worked out a sequence of shots based on the new material from the Hollywood screenwriter that gave Johnny’s clients more lines and time in front of the cameras.
Besides that, the new scenes strengthened the backstory conflict between the rodeo cowboy and his father and, as Usher put it, contrasted the hard-living hedonism of the son with the rock-solid decency of the father. Usher likened it to the clash between Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas in Hud.
Johnny also thought the brawl sequences between the cops and cowboys during the stampede at the smelter would be outstanding. About the only thing he didn’t like was Usher’s decision to cut some of the locations from the cattle drive.
After returning from Duncan, Johnny tried to get Usher to restore the cattle-drive scenes, but his pitch fell on deaf ears. He left Usher and his team, who were about to finish up for the day, went back to the apartment, and tried to call his mother at the ranch. When the answering machine clicked on, he hung up without leaving a message. He tried Julia’s number, hoping he could recruit her as an intermediary to soothe Bessie’s anger with him, and got no response.
He threw the cell phone on the couch and decided it didn’t really matter. He’d endured his father’s cold rejection for years, hadn’t been close to Julia since high school, and would probably never again need his mother’s help to get money out of the old man.
He was on the verge of becoming a major player. Foreign distribution rights for the movie had sold for big bucks, and the sports-cable-channel rodeo deal was in the bag. Sponsors were warming up to the idea of signing his clients to advertising contracts, which would put a fifteen-percent commission in Johnny’s pocket.
Entertainment-industry buzz about the movie had generated talks with a major network about the possibility of a spin-off series. It would basically be an updated version of the old Stoney Burke television drama of the early 1960s that starred Jack Lord and Warren Oates as two maverick rodeo cowboys vying to make it to the national championship and win the buckle. But now one cowboy would be Hispanic and the other a high-stakes poker player, and they’d spend a lot of time at rodeos in Reno and Las Vegas.
The positive reaction by the network bigwigs to his slightly twisted, fun-loving, rodeoing, poker-playing characters, which he’d thought up while watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN, convinced Johnny that he was going to make a killing in Hollywood. After all these years he’d finally found something