There was a moment’s silence. Cade and Zach looked at each other, and then Zach threw up his arms in defeat.
“Two days,” he snapped, “and not a second more.”
Cade blew out his breath. “Yeah. Two days, and then…Wait just a minute.” He swung toward Grant. “What about you? Don’t tell me you’re the only one of us who gets to walk away from this mess?”
Color rose in Grant’s cheeks. “Not exactly. It seems a friend of Father’s named him guardian of his kid a couple of years ago.”
Zach and Cade began to smile. “Don’t tell me,” Cade said.
“Listen, we can change jobs, if you want. The twelve-year-old for the oil company or the Hollywood studio…?”
“No,” Zach said quickly, “no, that’s okay, pal. I’ll deal with Hollywood, Cade’ll handle Dallas” His lips twitched. “And I bet you’re going to make one hell of a terrific baby-sitter.”
Cade tried not to laugh, but a sound burst from his lips. Grant swung toward him.
“This is not funny,” he choked.
But it was, and they all knew it. The brothers began to laugh, and then they moved into a tight circle, clapped each other on the back and joined right hands as they had when they were boys.
“To the Deadeye Defenders,” they said solemnly. They grinned happily at each other, and then Cade sighed.
“Time to get started.”
Zach nodded. “Yeah. I’ll see you guys before I leave.”
He punched Grant lightly in the shoulder, snapped an imaginary right hook at Cade’s chin, blew a kiss to Kyra and made his way to his room to pack.
It was going on ten o’clock. If he was going to make that eleven o’clock flight to Boston…
Actually, it made more sense to fly straight out to California. He was halfway there already; besides, if he went to Boston, he’d only get tied up in a dozen things. And this mess the old man had created had to be dealt with now, not next week or next month.
With a sigh, he sank down on the edge of his bed and scanned the report again. Triad had been privately owned by a man named Tolland. It had never made any real money, although it had at least been able to keep its head above water. About three years ago, its puny profits had finally turned to losses.
Charles had bought the company some months ago. As for who was running it for him…Zach frowned. It was a woman named Eve Palmer, and she had to be doing a piss-poor job because Triad was in its death struggles.
Zach stuffed the report into his suitcase, locked it and reached for the phone. He’d call the office, ask for more detailed info to be delivered by courier to the airport.
While he was at it, he’d make a couple of other calls, including one to Howell telling him to pack something besides those damned dark blue suits and express them to L.A. as soon as he had his hotel arrangements squared away. And his portable computer—he’d need that, too. It was obvious, now that he’d read the report more carefully, that two days on the coast was optimistic.
But five days would surely do it. Triad was dying, and he had dealt with dying companies before, back in the early days when he’d made fast money by moving in and administering the coup de grace.
Zach picked up his suitcase, walked briskly to the door and stepped out into the hallway.
By this time next week, Triad Productions would be history.
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS the kind of day that made people happy they lived in southern California. The sky was blue, the sun was bright, and the temperature hovered in the gentle seventies.
“Fantastic,” said the tourists outside Disneyland.
“Terrific,” said the roller bladers on Ocean Front Walk.
“Awesome,” agreed the surfers at Redondo Beach.
“Rats,” muttered Eve Palmer as she sat trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Her car had not moved a mile in the past twenty minutes. The only thing moving was her temper, and it was rising as rapidly as the temperature inside the car.
Whatever had happened to simple things, like windows you rolled up and down at will? Her old Chevy had had them; you could let in air with a crank of the wrist. But this car that Charles had insisted on buying for her did not. Eve had not wanted it. She didn’t need a silver car that looked like a Batmobile, she’d told him, but Charles had disagreed.
“The head of Triad must look prosperous,” he’d said, as he’d handed her the keys to a vintage Jaguar.
The car had, at first, won her over with its simple but elegant styling. But it was also a money-eating monster, as she’d discovered last week, when the windows, air-conditioning and engine had all begun to malfunction.
A white-coated technician named Hans, looking more like a surgeon than a mechanic, had poked and prodded at its innards. Finally, in hushed tones, he’d pronounced the patient ill but repairable—to the tune of three thousand dollars and three weeks in the shop.
Fortunately for Eve, he’d misinterpreted her sudden pallor.
“If doing without your automobile will be a hardship, Miss Palmer, we can provide you with a temporary replacement.”
Eve had opened her mouth, ready to tell him that the hardship would be coming up with three thousand bucks in this lifetime, but then she’d remembered the second thing that Charles had taught her.
“Never let ’em see you sweat,” he’d said.
So she’d smiled, shoved her oversize sunglasses off the bridge of her small, straight nose and up into her blond hair and said that it just wouldn’t do, not when she was about to begin filming Hollywood Wedding.
“With Dex Burton,” she’d added, because that was an axiom she’d figured out herself. You got publicity wherever you could, and the fact that she hadn’t yet signed Dex—and probably never would—was no one’s business but her own.
Hans had almost clicked his heels with respect.
“I suppose it sounds silly,” she’d said in a way that made it clear she didn’t think it silly at all, “but the car’s my lucky charm. The repairs will have to wait until we’re done shooting.”
Hans, who’d dealt with Hollywood’s finest for years, knew they were as superstitious as his Gypsy forebears. Still, he’d permitted himself an upraised eyebrow.
“Of course, Miss Palmer. But you understand that the car will not work dependably until repairs are made?”
“Certainly,” Eve had said and driven off jauntily, as if she’d always longed to pilot a motorized sauna.
Now here she sat, the AC barely wheezing, the windows only willing to open an inch, the engine giving an ominous shudder every few minutes. Her hair was damp, her silk suit was plastered to her skin—and that wasn’t the worst of it.
This was the last day of filming The Ghost Stallion, the hideous movie she’d inherited from her predecessor. She ought to be out on location, making certain nothing else went wrong. Instead, she was going to be trapped in her office while Zachary Landon, Charles’s son, peered into cabinets, counted paper clips and tsk-tsked over every dime she’d spent.
It had been shock enough to learn of Charles’s death, but to find out that his son was flying in to check up on her…
His accountant son, the one Charles had mentioned when Eve had tried to explain how East Coast bankers had almost destroyed Triad. She hadn’t been sure a man like Charles would understand, but he had.
“Some money men have no imagination at all,” he’d said.
Eve had sighed with relief. “Exactly. Filmmaking is a unique business, Mr. Landon. Mr. Tolland tried explaining that to the bank’s accountants, but——”
“Call me Charles, please. Yes, I can imagine what you went through with the bean counters. Hell, when I think that my own son is one of them…”
“An accountant?”
“Zachary,” Charles had said, his face darkening, “in with a bunch of effete Boston jackasses instead of taking his rightful place at my side. It’s enough to send my blood pressure through the top of the tube.”
Which was pretty much what i
t was doing to hers now, Eve thought as she edged the car forward.
Charles had understood instinctively that it would take time, money and a few breathtaking risks to save Triad. His accountant son would not.
“Damn,” she said, and gave the steering wheel a sharp whack with her fist.
Traffic began moving and Eve slipped the car into gear and urged it forward. Somehow, she’d have to make him understand. If only she could get to the office before he began poking his ink-smudged fingertips into things.
The cellular phone in the console rang. Eve snatched it up.
It was her secretary. Eve listened, the expression on her face going from concern to dismay to despair. “Are you sure, Emma? Must I really go out there?”
Yes. She must. Eve grimaced, snapped out a few orders and slammed down the phone.
There was a problem on the set again, a disagreement between the movie’s egotistical male lead and Francis Cranshaw, its equally asinine director. She had no choice but to deal with it before she dealt with Zachary Landon.
Men, she thought in disgust, men and their damned arrogance.
An opening suddenly appeared in the next lane. Eve accelerated hard and swung into it, cutting off a black Porsche that was trying to do the same thing. The Porsche’s brakes squealed as she shot past it.
Eve glanced into her mirror as the Porsche’s horn gave a long, angry blast. She could see nothing of the other driver except mirrored sunglasses above a thinned, angry mouth and an aggressive jaw.
He said something—yelled it, probably. Eve didn’t have to hear the words to know they were not pleasant.
Too bad, she thought. With a little smile of grim pleasure, she stepped down on the gas and left the Porsche and its driver engulfed in a cloud of black smoke.
* * *
Zach let out a string of words that should have turned the air blue. It had been a woman driving the silver Jaguar—he’d just had time to see the bright gold hair before she’d left him eating dust.
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel of the Porsche. For one wild moment, he fantasized about speeding up, forcing the silver car onto the shoulder of the road, hauling out the driver and…
And what? Slugging women wasn’t his style, not even women like the one he’d spent the flight out here reading about.
Eve Palmer, he thought, and a muscle knotted in his jaw.
He sighed and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. This was not shaping up as a good day. Everything that could go wrong had, from the minute he’d hit the Denver airport. His plane had been late getting off the ground, the ride had been bumpy, and the much-touted in-flight telephone had worked only after the flight engineer had put in an appearance with a screwdriver and a roll of duct tape.
But the phone had worked then, well enough to bring Zach the information he’d needed to fill in the holes in the Triad file. What he’d learned had not made him happy.
Triad’s costs were up, its profits down, and it was easy to see why. His first guess had been right. The CEO, Eve Palmer, was about as qualified to head the company as she was to perform brain surgery.
“A woman CEO?” Cade had said, in the couple of minutes they’d had to compare notes this morning. His brother had grinned. “Yeah, I’ve got one to deal with in Dallas, too. When will these broads admit they don’t belong in business?”
Zach didn’t think that way. Women drivers were one thing, but he had no problem with women in the boardroom—if their ability was what had got them there.
And that was the problem. Eve Palmer had not climbed the corporate ladder, she’d scaled it on her back in a tangle of silken sheets. It was a mixed metaphor, but how else could you describe a woman who’d won her spot at Triad by becoming Charles Landon’s lover?
The facts were indisputable, starting with the file itself and some notes in his father’s hand.
“The Palmer woman is beautiful,” Charles had written. “Clever, and more than ambitious.”
Zach snorted. Calling her ambitious was understating it. The woman was twenty-five years old. She’d shown up in Hollywood in her teens, apparently from nowhere. Like a million other girls with a million other dreams, she’d been determined to become an actress. But she hadn’t figured on the endless supply of other Eves and Kims and Winonas who arrived on almost every bus.
Undeterred, she had taken other jobs.
She’d modeled. She’d waitressed. She’d sold panty hose and makeup. She’d been a secretary in an office and learned word processing, and in between, she’d even managed to land walk-ons in a couple of movies Zach had never heard of.
Then she’d lucked out. A temporary job as secretary to Howard Tolland, Triad’s former owner, had blossomed into a full-time position. And then Charles Landon had come along.
Zach’s mouth twisted. The rest, as they said, was history.
Whether she’d warmed the old man’s bed before or after he handed her Triad was unclear, but it didn’t matter. The file said it all. Charles had met her one day, taken her out that night. A week later, he’d moved her into the executive office.
Traffic was thinning. Zach shifted gears and let the Porsche build up some speed. Eve Palmer had to have a really special talent to have been able to play the old man for a sucker.
Maybe it ran in the family, he thought with a tight smile as he turned onto the exit ramp. Hell, he’d been taken in by a woman, too, one who didn’t care a damn about simple things like common decency and morality.
Not that it was anything personal. He was here to pull Triad back from the brink, make it an acceptable if not attractive part of the Landon package…but hey, if that meant that Eve Palmer ended up a casualty, who could blame him for taking some small pleasure from it?
All he had to do now was find Triad’s office. He frowned at the numbers on the vaguely run-down buildings that lined Sepulveda Boulevard. It had to be here somewhere.
There it was on the corner, a boxy cement building in a shade of pink so ugly it made his teeth ache.
Zach swung the Porsche into the parking area and shut off the engine. Then he stepped out onto the asphalt, grabbed his tweed jacket from the seat and headed briskly toward the front door.
Moments later, he was out in the parking lot again, frowning darkly. He’d made a point of telephoning ahead so that the Palmer woman would be waiting for him in her office. But she wasn’t. She was, her flustered secretary had said, out on location with the director, Francis Cranshaw.
“A problem came up on the set, Mr. Landon, and Miss Palmer had to go out there. She asked if you’d please make yourself comfortable and wait.”
Wait? Zach’s jaw tightened as he strode toward the Porsche. The hell he would wait. A problem on the set. Did she really expect him to believe that? Eve Palmer was either trying to avoid him or trying to bring him to heel, but he’d be damned if he’d let her do either.
It had been a job, prying directions to the set from her secretary.
“It’s a pretty remote area,” she’d said.
“I assure you,” Zach had said with what he’d hoped was a polite smile, “I’ll find it.”
He climbed into the Porsche, yanked on his mirrored sunglasses and stabbed the key into the ignition.
“Remote location, hell,” he muttered, and shot from the parking lot.
* * *
An hour later, Zach was driving down what no one in his right mind would have called a road, cursing under his breath and wondering if the secretary hadn’t deliberately sent him on a wild-goose chase.
What kind of film would anyone shoot in a place like this? For the past twenty minutes, there’d been nothing on the horizon but cactus, scrubby things he thought were trees and tumbles of reddish rock. He had not seen a car or a living soul, unless you counted a scrawny coyote that had trotted past without so much as a glance.
The Porsche whined in protest as Zach drove it across what looked to be a dry streambed lined with small rocks. If the secretary hadn
’t deliberately misled him, he thought grimly, then Eve Palmer was even more incompetent than he’d imagined. She had to be, she and her director, Frances Whatsis. Both women would be nuts to shoot a picture in the middle of——
“Damn!”
Zach stood on the brakes as a galloping white horse and its rider suddenly materialized before him. The car skidded wildly, careered across the dusty track, lurched through a stand of prickly pear and came to a sickening stop inches from a pile of huge boulders. The engine coughed, coughed again and faded to silence.
After what seemed an eternity, Zach reached out and switched off the ignition. He took off his mirrored glasses, dropped them on the dashboard, undid his seat belt and only then remembered to breathe.
The white horse was gone, racing across the barren hilltop toward the far horizon. The horse’s rider was rising slowly to his knees in the dirt.
Zach muttered, rose in his seat and vaulted from the car.
“Hell, man,” he said as he hurried toward the fallen rider, “are you okay?”
“Yeah,” the rider said, after a minute, “yeah, I’m okay. You?”
Zach laughed, but it sounded more like a croak. “Except for a pair of wobbly legs, I’m fine.”
The rider stared after the cloud of dust, all that was now visible of the galloping horse.
“Guess he’s gone,” he said unhappily.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t see you until the last minute, and——”
“What do you mean, you didn’t see?”
Zach turned around. A small crowd of people was rushing toward him, headed by a little man with a goatee and a pencil-thin mustache.
“You would have to blind not to have seen Horace!”
“Look, pal, I already said I was sorry. It isn’t my fault that——”
“What’s going on here?”
A woman was pushing her way through the crowd. Zach thought she was a woman, at any rate. It was hard to tell. She had on a wide-brimmed hat that covered her hair and most of her face, a dusty, oversize khaki shirt and a pair of shapeless jeans. The only thing about her that was clearly visible was her anger.
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