Chapter 10

The more Ryan thought about it the more he knew it made no sense for him to have two residences in the Austin area. That being the case and based on how he had fixed up his apartment he thought he should be able to get top-dollar if it was rented out.

He contacted Jenny at the management office and told her he was moving out and they should look to rent this unit. Ryan asked her to come and see the unit as he wanted at least double what the going rate for rent was for units in this building. He suggested that the HR Department of large corporations in the area be contacted to see if they wanted to lease the unit since they have frequent high-profile visitors who would prefer to live in this apartment rather than a hotel room. Jenny said she would be right over.

She did come over to see the unit and agreed to do what Ryan suggested. He was under the impression by the looks she was giving the unit as well as him that maybe now more could develop between them. Maybe things were not going that well in her recent marriage. He wasn’t sure why but something was telling him he should take a pass on getting involved with her which he did.

In driving out to his ranch he was thinking that he still had some land that wasn’t productive. Ryan wanted to do something with that land but he just wasn’t sure what that would be. Maybe surfing the net would give him some ideas.

Trish had left and was in LA trying to sell a movie studio on doing a motion picture with that script. So far no luck she said but she wouldn’t give up.

In looking at the net for what to do with his land, he eliminated most of the ideas he saw posted for various reasons. The one idea that struck him as interesting was having a small orchard. He had an inkling of an idea of what he would do with most of the fruit that would be produced. What he first needed to do was to plant the trees.

Ryan phoned Norm and asked if he had a powered posthole digger and Norm said he did. He asked Norm what would be the cost of having one of his men operate it along with two other of his men for a day to plant trees. Norm gave him a fair price and Ryan said he would get back to him when he was ready to do this.

Norm asked Ryan why so many fruit trees which caused Ryan to say, “First of all, I want to have most of the land I own to be productive which is why so many trees but these trees will only take up a few acres. Secondly, this town has treated me very nicely and respected my privacy. I was thinking of some way I could contribute to the town and I can do that by donating this excess of fruit to them. They can decide what to do with it. In other words, I want to give something back to the town as this town is a nice place to live. Until the trees are producing, please keep to yourself what I just said and plan to do.”

Norm said, “Since it’s for the town, the cost of planting the trees is on me. Also, if you buy the plastic pipe I can do a trench and install a soaker watering system at the same time these trees are planted.”

Visiting the nursery in town Ryan explained to the owner what he was planning to do asking the owner to keep it confidential. The different varieties of fruit trees for this area were discussed with the result that an order was placed for two hundred and fifty trees. Ryan phoned Norm and said the trees were going to be delivered in two weeks and he would need the digger and the men.

Trish phoned him excited that a movie studio owned by a conservative media conglomerate had agreed to the production of this political motion picture. She said while the outdoor location scenes would be filmed in Washington, the indoor scenes would be filmed at studios in Virginia. She now was going to be involved in all those duties a producer needs to do and won’t be coming back to Texas for a while. He told her he missed her.

Jim approached Ryan and asked if it would be possible to add two more dogs to his allotment of four and make it a six-dog total at any one time. He said that the Customs and Border Protection Agency approached him about training drug-sniffing dogs. They would give him some drugs in small quantities for him to do this training along with a letter to him and the local authorities stating that he is authorized to have these drugs.

Since this increase in canines was for a good purpose, Ryan gave him the approval. It also gave him a feeling of being safe with these dogs on his property.

Ryan knew he was prone to having surprises in his life. One occurred when he was told that Abby was selected to play the Congresswoman in the motion picture. That could be a major problem he thought. His concern was short-lived because he was told Abby had married three weeks ago and her actor husband was also going to be in the cast. Other than that there were no major problems in making this movie which took six weeks to film.

With Trish being where the filming was done, Ryan was a satisfied man. She took care of his needs and he did his best to take care of hers. He again told her that he missed her when she was away on business.

She said that was nice to hear him say that and she missed him too. She then started to talk about the next movie she was planning to produce which was the second in the book series of Ryan being a CWO.

Ryan would get the news of the day by watching the news broadcasts on television or surfing the net and reading postings on certain websites. In addition to that, he subscribed to the digital version of an Austin newspaper. He enjoyed reading the Paul Conners column because he thought Paul told it like it was and didn’t take any prisoners when he did it. He liked reading a new column that was called, “Stirring the Pot.”

In reading the paper he also read a business column that talked about financial advisors and it mentioned Scott Martin.

He remembered that he was introduced to Scott when he was with Sharon in Belton who said she was pleased with him as her investment advisor. Trish had talked about Scott Martin visiting the studio. Ryan liked what was written in this column about how Martin operated in doing his financial advising. He phoned to see how Scott could become his financial advisor.

The information was emailed to him and after doing what was required he had a virtual interview with Scott who agreed to be his financial advisor. During the conversation, Ryan asked Scott if he could recommend a CPA to do his taxes because it was becoming complicated with the income he was now receiving from the property investing and the different States where he worked.