Showdown

  “Well, second thing is, I really ought to be havin’ this conversation with Bobby. Highwood’s his property now. . . .”

  Wyatt held up his hand to stop him.

  “Gene, I’ve told you. Bobby’s away in England. But he’s given me full authority as ranch manager. I’m authorized to have access to all the relevant financial information. I can bring you in the signed documents if you’d like?”

  The other man shook his head, his brow furrowing like buckled metal.

  “Jeez, Wyatt, no. That’s not necessary. I hope I can trust your word.”

  “Well, I hope so too, Gene,” said Wyatt, bristling slightly at the turn the conversation was taking. Still, there was no point falling out with such an old friend over something like this. At the end of the day the guy was only tryin’ to do his job.

  “I’ll cut to the chase then,” said Gene, looking as miserable as such a naturally jovial man could ever look. “You’re behind on the interest payments, almost six full months now.”

  Wyatt winced. “I know. But the last three months we’ve been makin’ it up. Bobby’s earnings—”

  “Aren’t enough,” said Gene. “Hank knew that he was in real danger of foreclosure last year. Now, true, at the time that extra money from Bobby persuaded the bank to hold off. The problem though, Wyatt, is that usually it’s in their—in our—interest to work something out, especially where we can see the borrower is trying to pay and has systems in place to work on reducin’ their debt.”

  “Which we do, and we have,” said Wyatt, raising his voice in frustration.

  “Maybe. But you know as well as I do, with that oil sitting there . . .” Gene left the sentence hanging. There was no need to spell it out. Wyatt knew exactly what he meant: It was in the bank’s interest for Bobby to default on his payments. That way they could gain legal possession of Highwood and, by extension, her oil rights.

  “What exactly are you tellin’ me here, Gene?” he asked him matter-of-factly. “What’s the bottom line? How much time do we have?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m tellin’ you, Wyatt. You don’t have time. Not more ’an a few weeks anyhow. The bottom line is, you need to make good on those back payments, in full, and you need to keep the interest a-comin’. One slip—one late payment—and these guys are gonna come down on you like a plague of locusts. And they’ll be bringing their drills.”

  Wyatt ran his hand through his hair slowly, squeezing his temples as if trying to dredge up some inspiration.

  “How about if we brought in a partner?” he said, remembering Bobby’s suggestion. “An investor of some kind? Somebody with cash flow.”

  Gene nodded approvingly. “That would be perfect. But, Wyatt, I can’t stress this enough to you and Bobby: Time is of the essence here. If you’ve got some white knight in mind, I suggest you get on the phone and call him. Because unless you come up with something pretty soon, my friend—”

  “I know, I know. Don’t say it.”

  “It’s my job to say it,” said Gene. “As your bank manager and as your friend. Find that money, Wyatt. Find it. Or your boy Bobby’s gonna lose that ranch.”

  Todd Cranborn stepped out onto the deck of his sprawling Bel Air mansion and gazed down with satisfaction at the view beneath him.

  Yet another brilliant, cloudless day: perfect LA sunshine. The morning mist that rolled in off the ocean had already been burned away so that it was warm enough to be outside in shorts and a T-shirt even at this early hour. Directly below the house lay the manicured greens of the Bel Air golf club, where tiny figures in plaid pants could be seen whizzing back and forth in their golf carts, too lazy to walk the hundred or so yards to the sandy bunkers and retrieve their errant balls themselves.

  Todd hated golf. To him it was like living death. The rich old men who tottered out onto the greens every afternoon made him shudder, content to fritter away their retirement years hitting a ball into a hole or knocking back bourbons in the clubhouse, anything to avoid the company of their hard-as-nails, stretched-faced Beverly Hills wives back at home. Horrific. He did, however, like living above the golf course. Homes in this part of Bel Air were some of the most prestigious and sought after in the whole of LA, for their proximity to the country club and their panoramic views across the city, right out to the ocean and, on a clear day, Catalina beyond. These homes were the best. And Todd Cranborn liked to be the best.

  Born in Boston some thirty-seven years ago, the youngest of three sons of blue-collar parents (his father, Bob, spent fifty years on the assembly line at an out-of-town plastics factory and his mother, Siobhan, was what is now euphemistically known as a homemaker) Todd made his first million, in property, before his twenty-fifth birthday. The first of his family to go away to college, he dropped out of NYU at nineteen, much to his parents’ dismay, and went into business with a local developer, buying up small units in suburban minimalls in New Jersey and leasing them out at a vast profit. Soon he had progressed to time-share condos, always focusing on volume, always at the lower end of the market.

  After a few years, he had made enough to ditch his partner and strike out on his own. With remarkable business instincts and ruthless self-discipline—he never overreached himself financially to stretch for a dream property but stuck rigidly to what he knew: keeping within his budget, borrowing conservatively, cutting his losses when necessary—he had soon netted himself a fortune in the high tens of millions.

  To his credit, the first thing Todd did when he got rich was to reach out to his family. He offered to buy his parents a new house, and dangled gifts of new cars and holidays in front of his elder brothers like Santa Claus. But, happy as they were about his success, a deeply ingrained sense of working-class pride made it impossible for them to accept his generous offers.

  Todd couldn’t understand it. Was his money not good enough for them or something? Did they hate him because he was educated? Misinterpreting their pride as straightforward jealousy and pigheadedness, he retreated, wounded, into his shell. Within a few years contact with his brothers had dwindled to cards on Christmas and birthdays. Not long afterward, it ceased altogether.

  The estrangement from his family had a profound effect on Todd. It left him with an inability to trust those closest to him as well as a passionate hatred of class prejudice in any of its forms.

  Far from hurting his career, however, his newfound bitterness seemed to spur him on to even greater heights of achievement. He expanded his business out to Florida and, later, California, where he quadrupled his wealth, thanks to shrewd coinvestments with Native Americans that enabled him to sidestep state planning and building regulations, not to mention taxes.

  “Baby? Are you out there? Where’d you go?”

  Catherine, the slutty brunette from the Valley he’d picked up at Louis Frampton’s party last night, padded out onto the deck. She was wearing one of his favorite, indigo-blue Interno Otto shirts, and her massive silicone breasts were stretching the fabric dangerously close to breaking point.

  Todd’s heart sank. Why couldn’t these girls just do the decent thing and leave in the morning? Her raspy, smoker’s voice had a practiced sexiness to it that had turned him on like hell last night, after five martinis and some truly exceptional coke. But now it grated like fingernails on a blackboard.

  “Hi,” he said coldly. “I have a lot of work to do this morning, sweetheart, so I thought I’d get an early start.” He looked at his watch and frowned. Shit. It was after nine already. “Can I get you anything?”

  This last offer was made with such palpable impatience and bad grace, it was a miracle that the girl missed it. But not being the sharpest tool in the box, she took his offer at face value and, sidling up to him, wrapped herself around him like ivy, her red-taloned hand reaching down his shorts for his cock.

  “Sure. You can get me something,” she whispered breathlessly, looking up at him with what she erroneously believed to be a sexy, come-hither gaze as she rubbed his groin. Last night he’d hard
ened to iron almost instantly at her touch. Now he was limp, bored, reactionless. Wrinkling his nose in distaste—she still smelled of sex and sweat, and the warm, fishy scent of her was unpleasantly overpowering in the still morning air—he removed her hand and flashed her a curt, businesslike smile.

  “I was thinking more in terms of a cab.”

  Todd liked sex, but he did not like women. As a rich, single guy in LA, he could have his pick of some of the most beautiful girls in America—it was one of the main reasons he had chosen to settle in this most beautiful but shallowest of cities—but rarely did he sleep with any of them more than once.

  It wasn’t just his money that had the women swarming around him like flies on shit. He was a looker too, stockily built like a boxer, with thick, wavy chestnut hair. His features were strong: solid, square jaw; a big broken nose (it suited him somehow); and a wide mouth with very thin, slightly curling lips that gave him a permanent semi-sneer. Some girls told him he reminded them of Jack Nicholson, a resemblance of which Todd was secretly very proud.

  Like Nicholson, he was a womanizer. But unlike Jack, he wasn’t the kind that adored women so much they just couldn’t seem to help themselves. Instead, his awesome sex drive was fueled by something else—anger, bitterness even—that left him with a bad taste in his mouth even after the most enjoyable of erotic encounters. He could feel it now, with Catherine. He wished she would evaporate and leave him in peace.

  Instead, offended by his rejection, she started pouting and whining like a spoiled child. It was all he could do to restrain himself from smacking her. Finally she agreed to let him call her a cab, but only after numerous assurances on his part that he would call her later once his work was finished and they would definitely hook up again soon. Did these girls really believe that shit? he wondered. It was only after she’d gone, when he sat down at the PC in his study to check his e-mails, that he realized she’d driven off still wearing his expensive Italian shirt.

  Goddamn it. Why did these stupid sluts always go for the best stuff? He really must get Luigi to put a lock on his closet door before he brought another one home.

  Glancing down his new messages—his inbox, as always, was full to bursting—he focused in on one from his lawyer in Santa Barbara and double clicked it open.

  “Fuck,” he muttered to himself as he started to read. Some of the local residents had gotten up a petition, protesting against his acquisition of some land near Buellton with a small syndicate of local Native Americans. By ensuring they had a 51 percent stake, he would be able to build the huge tracts of cheap residential units that he wanted without interference from state government. The locals rightly suspected he was about to deface their pristine valley.

  Smug, middle-class cunts. Todd had no time for these people with their committees and their envy and their small-town, middle-American mentality. If they wanted to protect the land so badly, they should have bought it up themselves. He wasn’t doing anything illegal, so they could stick their petition up their self-righteous Waspy asses.

  Reading on further, he stopped at the last paragraph of the e-mail, forgetting about the Buellton land for a moment.

  “You may or may not have heard,” it read, “but Hank Cameron finally bit the dust a couple of months ago. The Highwood ranch now belongs to his son, Bobby.”

  Interesting. Todd had had abortive dealings with Hank some six or seven years ago about acquiring a stake in his ranch. Total no go. Years later, he had run into the son out in Florida. The boy was brilliant with horses apparently, although it was his arrogance that Todd remembered him for. Bobby had looked right through him like he was nothing when they met at a party. Then later he added insult to injury by leaving with a gorgeous redhead that Todd had had his eye on himself. Needless to say, he wasn’t Bobby’s biggest fan.

  But the Cameron ranch, bursting as it was with more oil than Texas—now that was something else. What wouldn’t he give to get his hands on even a tiny piece of Highwood and her oil?

  “Before you ask, the boy’s not selling,” the message continued. “But I gather from various sources here that he’s struggling financially. There’s some talk about him training quarter horses for income, but apparently he can’t raise the cash to get started. Anyway, you asked me to keep my eye open, so I thought you’d like to know.”

  He was good, this new lawyer. Sharp. Leaning back in his chair, Todd closed his eyes and tried to picture the Cameron land. He was no nature lover, but Highwood had been beautiful enough to stick in even his memory. Unfortunately the idyll was ruined for him by the knowledge that all that untapped oil was being wasted. Just how dumb were these cowboy bastards? When he closed his eyes, he could almost smell the money burning. It made him feel sick to his stomach.

  Picking up a squishy purple executive stress ball from the desk—an eons-old Christmas present from his mother—he squeezed it in frustration. There must be some way for him to reinitiate a contact there.

  From the way that he’d ignored him in Florida, he was pretty sure that Bobby wouldn’t remember him. That gave him an advantage. As did the fact that the boy needed to raise cash for his quarter horse venture: One thing Todd had plenty of was cash. The trick would be to approach Bobby gently so as not to scare him off. Because the moment he sensed that oil was what he was after, he’d run for the hills every bit as fast as his daddy had, Todd was sure of it.

  Racking his brains, he tried to dredge up the name of Hank’s old ranch manager. Willie, was it? Or Wes? Something like that. A real, salt o’ the earth cowboy, like his boss, both of them stuck in some sentimental, working-class time warp. They had no business sense, none at all, but they also had no greed. That made them tricky customers on two counts.

  Hmmm. He’d have to give it some thought.

  In the meantime, he picked up the phone and settled in for what was to be a long day of business calls to the East Coast. The fact that it was Sunday, or that outside a jewel of a California day was unfolding around him, meant nothing at all to Todd.

  His whole life was his work.

  And that was just the way he liked it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The atmosphere at Newells in the weeks after the flu outbreak was extremely tense.

  The death of a famous stallion like Easy Victory was always going to be big news in Newmarket. Scare stories about a fatal superstrain of equine influenza soon began spreading faster than the disease itself, plunging Cecil into a state of code-red damage control overnight. He spent his days driving all over the country with his veterinary team, trying to reassure his various clients in person that his stables were safe. The long hours and intense stress involved in such a full-scale PR effort were grueling, and on the rare occasions when he was home he was unusually snappy and irritable with everyone from Linda to the grooms.

  About three weeks after Easy’s death, he walked into the kitchen looking even more strung out than usual.

  “Have you seen Jasper?” he asked Linda, cursing under his breath to see that the sugar bowl was empty and noisily opening and shutting cupboards to hunt for a new package. “He was supposed to be exercising Danny and Caligula this morning, but he’s done a runner again, the lazy little bastard.”

  “He’s at Mittlingsford I think,” Linda said calmly, retrieving the sugar from the larder and filling the bowl for him while he sat down grumpily at the table. “Julia Delaney needed some help setting up for the party, and he offered. You shouldn’t be so hard on him, you know.”

  “Shouldn’t be so hard on him?” grunted Cecil, then promptly scalded the roof of his mouth with a gulp of too-hot coffee. “I’m fighting to keep our heads above water here, Linds,” he said. “And our son would rather be folding napkins for his bloody girlfriend than pitching in.”

  Tonight was the night of the Delaneys’ annual end-of-summer party, the most eagerly anticipated social fixture in Newmarket. Linda was in a frenzy of excitement about it, especially since this year, with Jasper and Rachel walking out together, she
’d be part of the inner circle of favored guests, the ones that got to spend the most time with Sir Michael and Lady D.—or Julia, as she now knew her.

  “I can take Caligula out if you like,” said Bobby. He’d just walked in in dirty jeans and an old Lakers T-shirt soaked through with sweat after an early morning training session up at the gallops. “I’m free this afternoon, as it happens.”

  “Really?” said Cecil, perking up slightly. Bobby had been a lifesaver since the flu, pitching in well beyond the call of duty. Their earlier spat over his secret training sessions with Milly was now well and truly forgiven and forgotten. Which was just as well, seeing as Bobby appeared to be the only person who could get through to Milly at all since Easy’s death. With the rest of them she’d retreated into her shell completely, spending hours alone in her room staring into space, locked up in her own, private grief. She wasn’t even moaning about not being allowed to ride anymore, which was so deeply out of character that it worried Cecil more than anything else.

  It scared him to think that Bobby would be on a plane back to California in less than a week. If Mill hadn’t snapped out of her depression by then, he had no idea how to help her.

  Just then, Milly shuffled gloomily into the room looking not unlike a human version of Eeyore in a shrunken pair of Cecil’s stripy pajamas. With only the briefest of nods to Bobby, and not a word to her parents, she started making herself a piece of toast.

  “Ah, there you are,” said Linda briskly. Unlike Cecil, she had no time for Milly’s theatrical sulking and thought the whole hoo-ha over one dead horse absolutely ridiculous. “I hope you haven’t forgotten it’s the Delaneys’ party tonight?”

  Milly groaned and rolled her eyes.

  “Finish that quickly,” said Linda, ignoring her, “and I’ll take you into town with me. Your hair needs a trim and— Good God, darling, your feet! You look like a hobbit. I’d better see if they can fit you in for a pedicure too.”