Bad to the Bone

  With gratitude, for Wendy Loggia,

  always steady at the helm.

  The kind of person my great-grandfather

  would have hired in a Hollywood second.

  Kiley McCann

  Kiley McCann looked up at the giant H in the Hollywood sign, which loomed above her head. Instead of feeling thrilled, she just felt nervous.

  “We shouldn't be doing this,” she muttered as a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter buzzed by in the distance, the whop-whop of its spinning blades cutting cleanly through the air as it sped west toward Beverly Hills. The “this” to which she referred was being inside the fenced area around the famous white letters, high in the Hollywood Hills, because being inside the fenced area was most definitely illegal.

  Her friend Lydia Chandler smiled beatifically “We're doing it as we speak, sweet pea,” she drawled in her faint Texas accent. “Just relax. I know it's hard. High anxiety runs in your family.”

  Esme Castaneda's dark hair brushed her shoulders as she looked around, cautious as always in an unfamiliar place. “Kiley's just being rational. If you don't want to get arrested, rationality is good. And I definitely don't want to get arrested,” she added.

  “Y'all, life is too short to stress,” Lydia insisted as she spread her arms wide. “The City of Angels is at your feet. Just look at it!”

  For a brief moment, Kiley took her friend's advice and gazed out from their perch above Los Angeles. It was a rare smog-free late-summer day in Tinseltown, thanks to a gusty onshore breeze; the view stretched from Alhambra in the east all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the west, with downtown L.A., Koreatown, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Santa Monica in between. Off in the distance were the oil refineries and bustling harbor of Long Beach. How clear was it? Kiley could make out the long line of passenger jets coming in over the city in preparation for their landing at LAX.

  I was on one of those planes, she thought, not that long ago. She'd arrived with a tattered backpack, her neurotic mother, and a whole lot of dreams. And now, she lived here—as nanny to the children of a famous rock star. She had friends—Esme and Lydia, who were also nannies. And perhaps most unlikely of all for a pretty average girl from small-town Wisconsin—at least, that was how she saw it—she had a famous boyfriend, a model/actor about to shoot his second film.

  Kiley would have taken a moment to relish all that, along with the spectacular view, except that said view was so very illegal. Well, not the view so much as the shady perch from which they were taking it in. Lydia had coaxed them through a small hole in a protective fence topped with barbed wire, and dozens of large signs reminded them that what they were doing was against the law: NO TRESPASSING! TRESPASSING IS A CRIME AND YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST BY THE LAPD!

  Kiley gulped, realizing that she and her friends were not the first people in Los Angeles to be tempted by this very place. The police probably had cameras set up in the hillside brush just to catch people like them, and were probably on their way right now. Great. She'd always wanted to see what a Los Angeles lockup was like from the inside.

  Not.

  “Just ten minutes,” Lydia was assuring her as Kiley looked cautiously at Esme. Esme had grown up in Echo Park, a tough, gang-riddled Latino neighborhood in East Los Angeles. She had more experience with the LAPD than anyone ought to have. Her ex-boyfriend, Junior, had been a gang member.

  If it was okay with Esme, she'd stay. Otherwise, Kiley would obey her clutching stomach and be outta here. She cut her eyes at Esme. “Well?”

  “Y'all aren't chicken, are you?” Lydia asked innocently.

  “Oh please, chica, do not try to psych me out,” Esme snapped. She sighed, then added, “Ten minutes, it's fine. We're not a high police priority. But we shouldn't stay more than that.”

  Lydia punched the air with happiness, and Kiley wondered if Lydia had, in fact, psyched Esme out. If there was one thing Esme wanted to be in this world, it was tough. Strong. Fierce. All this Kiley knew.

  “So,” Lydia began, “let's review. A week ago, we said we'd meet up here and talk, because we all had big things to decide. Now, here we are. Which means it's time to spill. Who wants to spill first?”

  Kiley leaned back against one of the walls of the giant H and folded her arms, hoping that her body language said that she didn't want to talk first. Where would she even start? She was nothing more than a semi-cute girl from La Crosse, Wisconsin, one size bigger on the bottom than on the top, with auburn hair and a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. She'd come to L.A. to take part in a television reality show that would select the next nanny for the aging rock star Platinum and her three kids by different fathers (no one knew who those fathers were, and what with her being famous and rich, speculation about the baby daddies only increased Platinum's cachet). The TV show had tanked before it ever made it on air, but Kiley had been hired by Platinum anyway and installed in a gorgeous guesthouse behind Platinum's huge Bel Air mansion.

  Over the course of the summer, she'd taken care of Platinum's kids, begun a romance with a gorgeous male model named Tom Chappelle—his near-naked torso adorned numerous city billboards in an advertisement for a famous brand of underwear—and been the star witness at Platinum's trial for reckless endangerment of her own children. That case had been tossed just before it went to the jury when the drugs and drug-taking paraphernalia that were key evidence disappeared from the evidence room at police headquarters. The judge had had no choice but to free the rock star, albeit with the pronouncement that in his humble opinion, she was incredibly guilty on every count.

  Now Kiley was at the start of senior year at Bel Air High School, with the goal of applying that fall to be part of the freshman class at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography down near San Diego. Scripps was the real reason she'd even tried to become Platinum's nanny. With in-state tuition, going there was a possibility. As the out-of-state daughter of a Wisconsin brewery worker and his diner-waitress wife? Ha. She couldn't even afford books and supplies.

  She had no doubt about the best part of her summer—aside from meeting Tom. It was having become best friends with Lydia and Esme. She knew they were an unlikely trio, though all three of them were nannies for rich and at least semi-famous Hollywood families.

  Lydia worked for her aunt Kat Chandler, a former professional tennis player who until a week before had been the longtime lesbian lover of her then domestic partner and former tennis rival, Anya Kuriakova. They'd had two children via artificial insemination, Martina and Jimmy. Last week, Kat had discovered that Anya had been cheating on her … with a guy. That was the end of their relationship. It was a remarkable story, but even more remarkable was that Lydia herself had spent the last eight years in the Amazon rain forest, where her parents—former rich Texans—were medical missionaries in a small village of primitive Amarakaire tribesmen. Lydia was bilingual, in English and Ama. Of medium height, with choppy blond hair, petite features, and an enviable figure, Lydia dripped cool despite—or perhaps because of—her unconventional upbringing. She'd met a great guy over the summer, an aspiring scenic designer named Billy Martin. Lydia wanted nothing more than to continue to lead the Bel Air lifestyle to which she was rapidly becoming accustomed. For now, she was a senior at Bel Air High School with Kiley.

  As for Esme, the backstory was no less unlikely. A little taller than Kiley with thick, glossy dark hair, penetrating dark eyes, and lush curves, Esme was the daughter of a Mexican couple who had crossed into America without papers and were now the caretaker and housekeeper for famous Hollywood producer Steven Goldhagen and his second wife, Diane. Esme was a talented tattoo artist who'd recently opened her own studio in Century City. During the summer, she'd been hired to be the nanny for Steven and Diane's two newl
y adopted Colombian twins, Easton and Weston. That was fine, except she'd fallen in love with the Goldhagens' actor son, Jonathan. When Esme and Jonathan had a falling-out, Esme had resigned herself to focusing on her tattoo business. Her parents had wanted her to stay in school—she was supposed to start at Bel Air High School with Kiley and Lydia, and her mama and papa wanted nothing more than for her to be the first person in their family to go to college. But Kiley knew that Esme was now getting six, seven, eight hundred dollars, sometimes even more than that, for a freehand tattoo that she could do in two hours. When they were poolside at the country club, actresses and models approached her without being prompted, basically begging for a tattoo, willing to pay any price to be at the top of her list.

  That had to be tempting, Kiley thought. As Hollywood nannies, they were all making five hundred a week, plus room, board, and a nice car to drive. (Except for Lydia, who didn't have a license. BMWs and Mercedeses weren't big in her part of the Amazon, and the only real road was the piranha-infested Rio Negro.) To make fifteen hundred bucks in a night for doing body art? Kiley couldn't imagine.

  “Come on, come on,” Lydia urged, pulling Kiley out of her musing. “Time's a-wasting. Who's going to be first? Kiley, you have to tell us what you've decided to do with Tom. He's supposed to go away to Russia to do this movie. Esme, are you going back to work for the Goldhagens?”

  “What about you?” Esme shot back. She was wearing flip-flops, cut-off jeans, and a blue tank top. Her beautiful tawny skin glistened in the warm afternoon. “You met that guy Flipper last weekend, but I think you're still in love with Billy. What are you going to do?”

  “I'll go second,” Lydia pronounced. “Kiley?”

  Kiley gulped. She hated being put on the spot. “I'll go third.”

  “You guys are wusses,” Esme said. “It's not that big a deal. Okay. I wasn't sure until right now. But you've inspired me. I know I won't see you hardly at all if I live in the Echo and just go to my business. If I go back to the Goldhagens' to work, we can hang a lot more. So I think I'll go back.”

  “All right!” Lydia shouted, and threw her arms around Esme. “You're going back to the Goldhagens' and you'll go to Bel Air High with us and—”

  Esme held up a palm to stop Lydia midsentence. “Wrong. I'm not going to that tight-ass rich kids' school, ever.”

  Kiley frowned. Esme was so smart. And her parents had sacrificed so much so that Esme could go to college and succeed—how could she possibly let them down by dropping out?

  Esme squirmed away from Lydia, who had issues with personal space in the sense that she didn't recognize that such a thing existed. Lydia's sensibilities had been honed in the rain forest among primitive tribesmen who were a lot more touchy-feely than … well, pretty much everyone. In fact, Lydia had related that the Amas cupped other males' scrotums when meeting them for the first time. It made Kiley glad to be a girl.

  “But school,” Kiley began tenatively. “If you don't finish—”

  “Why should I finish?” Esme interrupted. “I make more money now doing tattoos than I ever could, even if I went to business school, which I never would. What's the use of high school?” She said these last two words as if they were somehow polluted.

  “Your parents won't be happy.” Kiley knew how much the Castanedas longed to have Esme finish her education.

  “My parents don't have to live my life. I do. What about you, Lydia?” Esme turned to her blond friend. “How's high school so far? Broken any hearts lately? Has Billy called you? Or maybe I should ask if you've called him?”

  Lydia laughed. “I just love how you cut right to the chase, Esme.”

  “There's no time to screw around. We've got about three more minutes before we get out of here.”

  “Oh poo,” Lydia scoffed. “High school is fine. Easy. Kat took the kids up to San Francisco for a while, so I've got the place to myself. And no. I haven't called Billy.”

  “Has he called you?” Kiley asked. She knew Billy and liked him. Not only did he look like Tom Welling from Smallville, but he was also a true gentleman.

  Lydia hitched up her red and white shorts, which bared the tops of her hip bones and were much shorter than Esme's. With the shorts she wore a U2 T-shirt. Kiley figured the shorts were by some famous designer, as Lydia knew and cared about such things. Of course, her friend couldn't begin to afford clothes by famous designers, so she “borrowed” things from her aunt's closet.

  “No phone calls in either direction,” Lydia continued. “And you know what? It's fine.”

  “Really?” Kiley asked.

  “Sweet pea, there are just too many hot guys in this town to be so limited. I mean, I've only had sex with two of them and one doesn't count.”

  Kiley knew Lydia didn't want to talk about her very ill-advised one-night stand.

  “I'll go out a few times with Flipper. Or maybe some other boys. I'm seventeen! I don't think I'm made to settle down.” She turned to Kiley with piercing green eyes. “Your turn. And don't dodge. What are you gonna do about Tom when he's in Russia?”

  Kiley knew she had to respond. Her friends had been so honest about themselves, and she wasn't sure what was even going on with Tom. After a small part in the summer blockbuster The Ten, he'd been offered a major role in Kremlin Cowgirl, a Russian-American coproduction about a young Russian entrepreneur who opened the first country music honky-tonk in Russia. In the movie, Tom was to play a young cultural attaché at the American embassy who befriended Boris, the entrepreneur. Dolly Parton was also involved in the project, and Tom's love interest was Chloë Sevigny who played an American expatriate.

  The problem was, Tom's departure for Russia kept getting postponed. Originally, he was supposed to leave the previous Monday. Then it was Wednesday. Now, his plane was to leave in two days. In some ways, this was worse than him just leaving in the first place.

  “What I want to know is, are you and Tom going to see other people?” Lydia asked bluntly.

  Esme nodded. “How long is the shoot?”

  “Seventy days.” Seventy days, thought Kiley That felt like an eternity.

  “Enough time to get into plenty of trouble,” Lydia observed. “I'd need about seventy minutes.”

  “Not helpful,” Esme chided. The sun was a little lower in the sky now; she backed away from the rays, up the hill a little bit.

  “I agree. Because I don't know what to do.”

  Kiley felt anxiety well up in her throat. Tom was a great guy. If you took away his amazing looks—his chiseled chin, blue eyes, tousled sandy hair, and a body like a professional athlete—he was just a boy from Iowa whose parents grew wheat and corn and who was used to waking up before sunrise to care for the cows and horses. But taking away his amazing looks was like taking the smile away from the Mona Lisa. That was to say, impossible.

  “Well, don't fret, Kiley. You'll figure it out,” Lydia assured her. “And if you don't you can always pass Tom over to me. I swear, he's the hottest guy I've—”

  “Attention, attention!”

  A metallic voice, obviously amplified by a bullhorn, boomed out over them.

  “Shit,” Esme said. “Why did I ever listen to you, Lydia?”

  The sinking feeling in Kiley's stomach reached oceanic depths. There could be no doubt who was responsible for the bullhorn voice. But if there was, the next sentences confirmed it.

  “Attention, attention! This is the Los Angeles Police Department. You are trespassing on city property. Come out immediately, with your hands up!”

  “What do we do?” Kiley hissed, frantic.

  Esme's eyes met hers. “We do what the man says. We do it slowly, and we do it now.”

  Kiley watched as Esme held her hands high over her head and started back up the narrow dirt path to the hole in the fence. Then, she did the same, with Lydia following.

  There had been a lot of firsts for her here in Los Angeles, and now she was about to rack up another one. Her first arrest.

  Esme Castaneda
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  Esme eyed the two young cops. The scowls on their faces said they meant business. One was tall and blond with high cheekbones and thin lips; the other was a few inches shorter, with dark hair and the square jaw of a superhero, or, this being L.A., an actor who played a superhero. If one had been Latino, maybe Esme could have done the “Yo, homey” thing in Spanish, and tried to talk them out of arresting her and her friends. But they were both gringos, so she didn't stand a chance.

  Why had she let Lydia talk her into something as stupid as going inside the fenced-off area? Her life was a series of near misses with law enforcement. She'd taken a stupid chance. And for what? To prove that she wasn't chickenshit? Just when she'd finally made the decision to go back to the Goldhagens'. Just when her tattoo business was taking off. Everything would be ruined over this stupid, stupid decision. Plus, her parents were going to kill her.

  “Did you girls not see the signs?” the shorter of the cops barked. “No Trespassing means no trespassing!”

  “We're really sorry,” Kiley whispered. It was clear to Esme she could barely get the words out of her mouth.

  “Save it,” the taller cop snarled. “Sorry is no excuse. You girls are in big trouble.”

  Double shit on a shingle. Well, Esme was not about to crawl. Whatever happened, happened.

  “Is it a felony?” Kiley squeaked.

  “What, you think this is some bullshit little misdemeanor thing like jaywalking, missy?” the gruff cop spit.

  Lydia blew her shaggy blond bangs off her forehead with a puff of air. “Dang, it's hot out. So wait, a misdemeanor is the not-so-scary one and a felony is like real, real bad? Because I always get them mixed up. Like felony and fun start with the same letter? So I always think that's the one that isn't some big-ass deal.”

  The shorter cop glared at her. “Are you effing with me? Because you do not want to eff with me.”

  “She's not from around here.” Esme defended Lydia automatically, although she didn't know why she was being so charitable. This was all Lydia's fault.