St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

captured his face on film.
    “Prepare to take off,” he shouted into the cockpit.
    The pitch of the engines increased.
    “Get those men,” he told the rebel officer. “Bring me their film and I’ll give you two artillery pieces and a helicopter gunship. Do you understand?”
    The officer grinned. If the Siberian would pay a million at first offer, he’d pay more on the second. “I’ll get the film. Then we’ll negotiate.”
    The aircraft doors slammed shut as the plane accelerated down the dirt strip, scattering rebels like dust.

3
    Five years later
    Near Phoenix, Arizona
Late March
Thursday
8:30 A.M. MST
    K ayla Shaw walked out of the little adobe house and put the last of her mementos into the Ford Explorer. It wasn’t much of a load, really. Some photos, her grandmother’s prize bridle, her mother’s barrel-racing trophies, her father’s favorite hunting rifle. Small things rich with memories. After work, she’d come back and pack up her clothes.
    Technically the place was hers to use for another month, but it felt melancholy to be a tenant rather than an owner.
    As Kayla found a safe spot for the small, unframed landscape painting she carried, she remembered her excitement at discovering the piece in a garage sale. It had been just after her parents had died, when she’d been making the difficult adjustment from beloved child to adult orphan. Something in the painting of a predawn forest had whispered to her of time and loneliness and the faintly shimmering hope of a sunrise that might be more imagined than real. When she’d turned the painting over and seen “Maybe the Dawn” written on the back, she’d known she would buy it.
    She touched the name slashed in the lower left of the painting. “R. McCree.” The artist had helped her through a bad time. She’d been looking for his—or her—paintings ever since, but hadn’t found any.
    Leaning against the cool metal frame of the vehicle’s door, she glanced around at the ten acres of Dry Valley Ranch that had been her home for her whole life. The adobe walls of the house were the dusty color that came of age and Arizona weather. Sun had turned the timber fence of the corral a lovely shade of gray. The lean-to barn looked lonesome and enduring, like a windmill at a remote cattle tank—like the windmill that still supplied water to the house and corrals.
    Ten acres of memories.
    Sadness curled around her with the cool morning breeze. She hoped the new owner would love Dry Valley as she and her parents had. She hoped, but she didn’t know. She’d sold the ranch to someone she’d never met, never seen, and knew only through his agent.
    “Change, change, change,” she said, pushing her dark hair away from her eyes. “Hello, good-bye, hello to something new. And good-bye, always good-bye.”
    Despite her lingering sorrow, Kayla knew that selling the little ranch was the right thing to do. The grazing leases on federal lands had lapsed long ago. Without the leases, there was no way to make a living. Even one cow would starve on Dry Valley’s ten acres. The ranch was a tiny piece of desert at the farthest fringe of Phoenix’s urban sprawl. The house was as spare as the land and needed expensive repairs. Yet taxes had steadily risen as the county assessor reappraised the ground for its potential, instead of its reality.
    Good-bye, ranch.
    Hello, career in private banking.
    Too bad she really wasn’t happy in her work. But every request she’d made to transfer out of private banking had been met with a polite, firm refusal.
    It was enough to make a girl think of hitting the road.
    I’m not a girl. I’m an adult. Lots of people don’t like their jobs, but they suck it up and get the job done anyway.
    “Think of tomorrow as going to another continent,” Kayla told herself. “Everything fresh and undiscovered.”
    The thought of distant horizons made her restless. Her job as a private banker was demanding, often fascinating, but it didn’t ease her wanderlust.
    Okay, so don’t think about new continents and of years backpacking around the globe. I’m an adult now, with an adult’s responsibilities.
    Grow up.
    Kayla slid into the driver’s seat, made sure that the pile of escrow documents she’d signed earlier wouldn’t spill off the passenger seat, and admired the check clipped to the big folder. As a private banker she’d handled much larger checks, but none of them had been her own. Her clients’ money was just