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double-wide circular drive made out of pink flagstones from Arizona and a large flagpole where Old Glory snapped back and forth in the swirling desert winds—until it butted up against a high security fence at the end. A quiet residential street edged his property, as straight a line as any urban planner could draw, a sun-smoldered asphalt moat dividing his plush bluegrass from the great nothing on the other side.
    You could see the nothing. There was a whole lot of it. Rocks, dirt, tumbleweeds, and bits of paper blown by the wind, a line of telephone poles receding into the vanishing point, and, if you squinted, distant train tracks heading north. A million miles of brown that ended flush with Jack’s sprinkler-soaked grass.
    He smiled smugly and lit a cigarette. He knew it was bad for him, one of the many culprits that caused his stroke, but, fuck it, he only needed a couple of drags, just to get his bowels moving. One of the good things about always having a hard-on, you wake up ready to take on the world. Jackwanted to get to the office early this morning. He’d been reading
Daily Variety
and had come up with an idea. He had work to do.
    Providing the food and beverage service—it was called production catering—for movie and TV shoots is always an iffy proposition. In the good times, when you were feeding hundreds of cast and crew members at seventeen bucks a head for months at a time and you had three or four trucks rolling out on different shows, you could make a couple million bucks a year. And because of an arrangement with the Teamsters, where most of your cooks are paid hourly as if they were truck drivers, it was almost all profit. In the lean times, when months would go by without as much as a car commercial coming through town, it sucked. You still had to make loan payments and pay insurance on the trucks, and those babies were worth about a quarter million each. Jack knew that the key to success was to keep as many trucks working as possible. It didn’t matter if it was a huge star-studded feature film or a crappy commercial for dog food.
    Jack had made a habit out of expanding his business into areas without too much competition. There was no way he was going to break into the business in L.A. or the Bay Area. Those markets were supersaturated. He’d had high hopes for Seattle when he moved into that market two years ago. It had been easy to muscle out the little guys there, really just a couple of roach coaches run by some grunge-rock schmos. They didn’t have the connections, the guts, or the wherewithal to keep Jack out.
    But Seattle wasn’t such a hit. Most of the film and TV work went up to Vancouver, where the studios got a 30 percent discount on every dollar they spent, courtesy of theCanadian government. Seattle, except for a couple of low-budget horror films, had been a loser, a slow bleed on his cash flow. He’d managed to pick up the occasional shoot in Portland, but it wasn’t the bonanza he’d hoped for. Then he’d chanced upon an article about the Teamsters in Honolulu.
    The islands were hopping with work; they always had been. Dinosaur movies, Vietnam jungle flicks, and then you had the whole
Beach Blanket Bingo
thing with teenagers shouting “Surf’s up!” and racing off with big slabs of wood under their arms. Jack had always liked those movies: cute chicks with big hair doing the Watusi in front of tiki torches. Maybe they’d make a comeback. And then there were the TV shows like
Hawaii Five-O,
another of Jack’s favorites, and the commercials; dozens of zippy new pickup trucks from Japan were filmed careening through the mud every week on Oahu.
    Jack knew he had to move fast. There was only one production catering company on that island. With so little work in the rest of the country, it was only a matter of time before someone else got the same idea.
    ...
    A young man, looking like a slightly haggard Bible salesman,