Different Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    * * *
    â€œWhat’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.”
    â€œAll of them?” Ernie repeated incredulously.
    Malou nodded.
    â€œJeez, I could tell the guy was a hard charger, but Attila the Hun?”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œNot 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?”
    â€œWell . . .” 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 sensedin 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.
    â€œI knew it the minute I set eyes on him,” Ernie elaborated dramatically. “I said, here is one bad hombre who only cares about money and not at all about how he gets it.”
    â€œI’m not sure I’d go that far,” Malou equivocated.
    â€œYou wouldn’t? You heard about his latest development? His exalted Landell Acres?” Ernie asked snidely. “He put it right smack in the middle of the nesting grounds of Texas’s only native bird.”
    â€œThat’s true,” Malou allowed, “but it was inevitable that someone would build there. The city’s already pushed out to the edge of that area.” Malou couldn’t believe that she was actually defending Cameron Landell.
    â€œAnd Landell is pushing it a few steps closer to the edge,” Ernie concluded, slipping into the white lab coat he always wore when he worked. He clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth and headed to the back of the building and his air-conditioned lab.
    Malou shook her head. This had been a thoroughlyperplexing and bewildering day, and it had only begun. Though fascinated by the labyrinthine complications of macaque society, she had never been able to deal with the frustrating intricacies of human interaction. Her usual reaction to them was to escape, which is precisely what she did. She grabbed the tennis hat she wore to protect her from the south Texas sun, her notebook, and a jug of water and headed back out to the compound.
    Far down the fence line, she spotted the stocky figure of Jorge Maldonado, Stallings’s Mexican foreman. A lifetime of hard physical labor had left the foreman knotted with muscles and as weathered as the stump of an oak tree. He wore a campesino -style wide-brimmed straw hat with a small ball dangling off the back that jerked up and down as he worked on a tear in the fence. His horse, a beautiful chestnut mare, was tethered nearby.
    Though