Different Dreams (3 page)

“Never thought about any of it, did you?”

Malou didn't disagree—the truth was too obviously written on her face to attempt a lie.

“Didn't think so. Your type never does.”

“My ‘type'?”

“Okay, those of your ‘socio-economic status.' Those of you from the creamy top of the middle class. Correct me if I'm mistaken.”

Malou didn't. Child of the suburbs, her father a university professor and mother a pharmacist, she couldn't. Indulged, an only child, she
had
existed all her life at that creamy top. “Well,” she shot back, stung again by the acuity of his perceptions, “correct
me
if I'm wrong, but judging from your car, clothes, and speech, you haven't exactly led a life of deprivation.”

“You're wrong,” he stated flatly. The only elaboration he offered was, “Cars, clothes, even speech can be acquired if you want them badly enough.” Abruptly he changed the subject. “What would one of”—he pointed to the group of monkeys hovering nearby—“your little buddies sell for?”

“As a laboratory animal?” Malou choked out the
words. If she hadn't been sure Landell could find his answer in five minutes without her help, she would have refused to answer. But he could. “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

He nodded. “Fifteen hundred. Not a spectacular return, but enough to balance off some of Stallings's debt.”

“You can't be thinking what I'm afraid you are,” Malou said, her very worst nightmare about the troop's future coming to life—the nightmare that all the families would be torn apart and the monkeys sold to labs.

“What? That I might be so unspeakably callous as to want to make back a fraction of the money I've already lost? Yes, believe it or not, that's what I want to do.”

Malou turned away, unable to face him with the look of sick shock on her face.

“Though it's absolutely none of your business,” Landell informed her, “I'll tell you anyway. I got beat on this deal. Beat bad. Stallings, wonderful humanitarian and friend to monkeys everywhere that he might have been, skinned me on the loan I made to him. He represented Los Monos as a going concern, turning a healthy profit every year. He made off with roughly five times what this place could ever conceivably be worth, sunk it into that duster, then died and left me holding the bag.”

“How very discourteous of him.” The ice in Malou's voice fairly cracked in the heat.

“So the pretense of cordiality shatters,” Landell observed. “And all because I'm not willing to fill in for
Stallings as troop benefactor to the tune of a few hundred thousand a year so you can play Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey down here.”

Malou was stunned and angered to hear the names of her two childhood heroines on Landell's lips. Stunned that he even knew of the existence of the two women who had rewritten the book on primate study, and angered that he used their names with such cynical contempt. “Those two scientists have added immeasurably to our knowledge of primate behavior.” Malou couldn't help the note of prim outrage that tightened her voice. If she'd given in to her true emotions, she would have wept right there in front of this odious Cameron Landell. “If I can make even the smallest fraction of the contributions they have, I'd be delighted to ‘play' them for the rest of my life.”

“You'd better start thinking about doing it on another stage,” Landell told her. “Because I've made all the contribution to monkey study I intend to. This whole fiasco has blown up at just about the worst time imaginable. I needed Stallings to pay back that loan with hard cash and healthy interest so that I could cover my own debts. Not that I expect you to care, but I have two very short weeks before my banker expects me to start paying off the largest note he ever allowed me to put my hands on.”

Malou looked away, unwilling to face Landell or the
troubles he was telling her of. She had enough of her own.

He took his hat off and slapped it against his thigh in a gesture of annoyance. “Prepare to start dismantling this operation, Ms. Sanders. I'm selling out to the highest bidder who comes along, and if that happens to be a laboratory, so be it.”

Malou bit down hard on the inside of her mouth. She would not cry. Not now. She had to think. To do something. To stop him. A chaotic jumble of ideas churned through her mind. She blurted out the first one she could articulate.

“I won't let you do it,” she threatened. “I have friends, reporters. If you try sacrificing the troop to your greed, I'll plaster the paper with stories about you slaughtering innocent animals, wasting a priceless research resource.”

“So, you plan on adding monkey murderer to my list of credits. A bold threat, Malou, and not a particularly wise one. You've got a lot to learn about the delicate art of negotiation. For starters, it doesn't flourish among heavy-handed threats. I think I've seen enough. I'll be in touch with you about closing the place down and shipping the animals off. If you really care about them, you'd be wise to hunt up a few new homes that are to your liking.”

He strode off without a good-bye. His clipped gait now seemed almost forcefully brutal, but it was herself
that Malou derided. She
had
been heavy-handed, and now it was too late to know what might have happened if she had been more reasonable, more open to compromise. The SUV had faded to a bloodred drop against an immense, sun-bleached background by the time Malou slumped down onto a rock.

Several juveniles cautiously approached her. Soon they were scrambling over the rock she sat on, touching her hair and clothes. As usual, though, it was her binoculars that fascinated them most. They were forever entranced by anything shiny and metallic. Anything that glinted in the sun. She felt a tiny furred paw hesitantly reach up and touch the tear shimmering on her cheek.

Malou smiled wanly at the little face lifted up to hers, just a figure-eight of deep pink inside a furry ruff. There was so much she'd never be able to make them understand, so much she never wanted them to
have
to understand. A glimpse of Jezebel crouching down to slurp a drink out of the pond reminded Malou that she still had to find the flighty monkey's baby and see if she could prod Jezebel into taking up her maternal duties. With a great heaviness weighing her down, Malou stood and set off to scout the backcountry where Jezebel might have borne her infant.

Before she'd taken two leaden steps, Malou sighted Kojiwa returning to the troop. At first, Malou couldn't believe what she was seeing. That dark spot on his chest,
that couldn't be . . . Malou grabbed for her binoculars. It was! A tiny newborn with the characteristic chocolate brown fur of the macaque infant was clinging weakly to the old fellow. He'd found the baby that the ditzy Jezebel had abandoned.

Kojiwa delivered the baby to Jezebel, transferring the infant to his mother's chest, where it began to suck greedily. In the instant that the baby faced toward her, all Malou could register were two huge eyes staring helplessly out at a new and scary world. She christened the baby Bambi and entered the name into her census book.

Malou's joy at the baby's discovery was short-lived, however. She wondered darkly about what, precisely, the infant had been saved for.

C
ameron Landell was thirty miles
outside of San Antonio before he stopped seething long enough to glance down at the speedometer and register the fact that he'd been speeding. He eased his foot off the accelerator and tried to remember the last time he'd been so provoked. Anger was a luxury he almost never allowed himself. It was a self-indulgent emotion that clouded perceptions and dimmed judgments. He could not afford to let his business judgments be either clouded or dimmed.

He'd let that happen once and look what it had gotten him. A monkey ranch, of all the bad jokes. And now, today, he'd finally gotten to the punch line—Malou Sanders. For the hundredth time, Cameron berated himself for letting the old man bamboozle him. Undoubtedly, he snorted to himself, Stallings had acted out of all the same self-righteous impulses that guided the infuriating Malou Sanders. For a fraction of a second, a memory of
wheat gold hair dancing in the sunlight frisked across his mind. Cameron chased it away, tension gripping him even tighter around the neck and shoulders.

He glanced at his watch and relaxed a bit. His anger-quickened pace would put him into San Antonio in plenty of time for the closing. He even had a few spare minutes to drive by Landell Acres. He turned off on the loop that circled the sprawling city and headed west. A few exits later he got off and pointed the SUV in the direction of his new development. At this point it was only row upon row of stick-figure houses, the bare bones of their frames outlining the structures they would become. The car moved slowly along dusty strips of future roads. Cameron couldn't bother with a full inspection. He checked in with his foreman, Virgil Yates.

“Yessir, Mr. Landell, the Public Works inspector's already been by, checked out all the new utility cuts and approved every one of 'em.”

“Good work, Virgil. Keep on it. And mind those trees we marked,” he cautioned his foreman, indicating the live oak trees with strips of orange plastic tied around their trunks. Roads serpentined around them.

“Count on it. We won't so much as scrape the bark on any of them big boys.”

As Cameron headed out, a battered minivan pulled up at the entrance to the development and two young
women and a man emerged. From the back of the car they unloaded signs that read, “Save the Golden-cheeked Warbler” and “Stop Landell Acres!!!” Cameron sighed at the familiar sight of the protesters. Odd that they'd never once bothered to come by and discuss the plight of their beloved golden-cheeked warblers with him. Just like that woman and her monkeys, all of them had jumped at the most melodramatic solution—trying to stir up public outrage rather than the less flamboyant, but usually more effective, method of private negotiation.

Minutes later, Cameron was back on the loop heading for his appointment. A deep, strangling tension grabbed him as he contemplated the upcoming meeting. He
had
to close on that piece of land along I-35 he was selling. He hated to do it. He knew for a fact that if he could have held on to it for a few more months, it would have appreciated in value faster than the price of an umbrella on Noah's Ark.

That had been his strategy. Then Stallings had come along and he'd been fool enough to make the old man a short-term loan without bothering to check out the collateral he was offering. Never in a million years would he have guessed that Stallings, noted throughout south Texas for his honesty, would deadbeat on the loan. But he sure as hell had, leaving Cameron with what was euphemistically known as a “cash-flow imbalance.” He was
strapped. If he didn't raise the cash today to pay off the interest on the note on Landell Acres, he stood to lose everything.

If Stallings had paid off on time, he could have held on to the I-35 property
and
continued with Landell Acres. But all that had changed. Now, rather than an appreciating piece of property he owned a godforsaken
monkey ranch!
Worst of all was knowing that even if he did manage to sell off the property today, it would only be a holding action. The real battle would be to get enough together to pay off that note coming due at the end of May. Desperation was a bad—no, Cameron amended his thinking—it was the
worst
position from which to bargain.

Cameron began fuming again. Not only at his own stupidity in having been duped into a bad deal, but at that woman's incredible gall, threatening to call the press on him if he did something so outrageous as attempt to recoup a fraction of his losses. As he pulled into the reserved parking space outside of his office, two images of Malou sprang unbidden into his thoughts.

The first was of that plump lower lip she'd insisted upon nibbling away at. He wondered how it would taste. And the second was of those impossibly long brown legs. How would they feel wrapped about his own?

Cameron slammed the claret-colored door and stormed into his office. This was going to be one hell of a day.

* * *

“What'd the slimewad say?” Ernie asked eagerly the instant Malou walked through the door of the research station.

Though Malou had taken a long walk through the compound trying to steady herself, her voice still trembled when she relayed the verdict. “He wants to sell them. All of them.”

“All of them?” Ernie repeated incredulously.

Malou nodded.

“Jeez, I could tell the guy was a hard charger, but Attila the Hun?”

“I told him I'd get press coverage. That the world would know what he was up to.”

Ernie nodded thoughtfully. “How'd he take that threat?”

“Not well. Not well at all. There's something dangerous about Cameron Landell. Something very unsettling.”

Ernie paused and studied Malou. He had his glasses on now. They were thick and made his eyes shrink away to two tiny raisins behind them. “Pretty ruthless guy, huh?” he finally asked eagerly. “Wouldn't hesitate to stoop to anything that would accomplish his ends?”

“Well . . .” Malou hesitated. For some reason she couldn't bring herself to agree with Ernie's blanket indictment. The coldly objective, scientifically trained part of her brain wouldn't allow it. That part of her had sensed
in Cameron Landell something far different from the cutthroat entrepreneur she wanted to believe he was. Not only that, but if she let herself think about it long enough, she feared she would begin to doubt that the danger she'd sensed pouring off of Cameron Landell had anything at all to do with the monkeys. Still, Ernie was watching her anxiously, eager for her to agree to his assessment. She obliged him. “He might,” she agreed tentatively.