For as long as Kevin Kerney had known him, Johnny Jordan had been nothing but trouble. But it had taken a long time for Kerney to realize the downside of being Johnny’s friend.

Memories of Johnny flooded through Kerney’s mind on a snowy April afternoon after he returned to police headquarters to find a telephone message on his desk from his old boyhood chum. Johnny was in Santa Fe, staying at a deluxe downtown hotel, and wanted to get together for drinks and dinner that evening.

Kerney stared out his office window at the fluffy wind-driven snow that melted as soon as it hit the glass. He’d last seen Johnny well over thirty years ago at the memorial services for his parents, who’d been killed in a traffic accident the day Kerney had returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam. Johnny had shown up at the church late, accompanied by a good-looking woman twice his age, with his left arm in a cast-broken in a fall he’d taken at a recent pro rodeo event.

He remembered Johnny waiting for him outside the church, standing next to a new truck with the initials JJ painted on the doors above a rider on a bucking bronc. Dressed in alligator cowboy boots, black pressed jeans, a starched long-sleeve white Western-cut shirt, and a gold-and-silver championship rodeo buckle, he’d flashed Kerney a smile, led him away from the truck where his lady friend waited, and offered his condolences.

“It’s a damn shame,” Johnny said with a shake of his head. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Eventually, I suppose,” Kerney replied.

“But not yet,” Johnny said.

“Not yet.”

They caught up with each other. Johnny had been rodeoing since graduating from high school and had become a top-ten saddle bronc rider, while Kerney had finished his college degree and gone off to Vietnam as an infantry second lieutenant. Johnny’s parents, Joe and Bessie, who owned a big spread on the Jornada, a high desert valley straddled by mountains in south-central New Mexico where Kerney had been raised, had sold out and bought another ranch in the Bootheel of southwestern New Mexico. Joe had left his job as the president of a local bank in Truth or Consequences to take over a savings and loan in Deming.