| |
Ernie Turpin said, “Want some help?”
Marlin handed him the bolt cutters. “Can you go down to that utility gate and cut the lock off, if there is one?”
“You bet,” Ernie said.
“And there’ll be a second gate in the inner fence,” Marlin said. “We’ll need that one open, too.”
“No problem,” Ernie said, and he walked south along the fence line.
Marlin shook the bucket filled with cattle cubes and the nilgai looked at him.
Marlin shook it again and the nilgai took a few slow steps forward, nose low, sniffing the air.
“Attaboy,” Marlin said.
Three axis deer nearby were watching intently.
Marlin tossed a couple of cattle cubes on the ground, and the nilgai quickly approached and began to gobble them up. The axis deer trotted toward Marlin.
He raised the bucket high and shook it hard for several seconds, so that any animal within a hundred yards could hear it. Many of them could also see the nilgai eating, and that was a signal in itself. A dozen animals began to walk or trot toward Marlin from all directions. That movement in turn spurred more animals to take notice and begin to hurry toward Marlin. They didn’t want to miss out on the food.
“You’re a damn genius,” one of the Blanco city cops said over the radio. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
Marlin walked backward along the grassy shoulder, keeping an eye on all the animals, and tossing a few cubes now and then to prevent any animals from getting too close. Within thirty seconds, he was leading a parade of exotic deer, antelope, goats, sheep, and various other ungulates.
Here came a camel and a pair of llamas and some blackbuck antelopes. By the time Marlin reached the small utility gate, Ernie Turpin had it wide open, and Marlin proceeded through it, and then through the inner utility gate, followed by thirty or forty animals in a surprisingly orderly procession.
Ernie Turpin closed the inner gate behind them.
Now Marlin was in the front portion of the zoo, a fenced area of about one hundred acres, which was essentially an enormous holding pen with suitable ground cover for grazing. Scattered clumps of oak trees provided shade, and the animals had access to several water tanks, or what some folks would call ponds or small lakes. Here, a variety of species mingled together—not unlike the savannas of Africa, but without any predators.
Marlin was elated to see dozens of animals still inside this pen, which meant there were probably very few animals still running loose outside the zoo.
“I guess that’s how you do that,” a Blanco city cop said on the radio.
Max, the trooper, laughed and said, “The Pied Piper of Blanco County. I hope somebody got that on video.”
“See how some of the mortar between the rocks is crumbling?” Billy Don said. “What we’re gonna be doing is chiseling some of that out and replacing it with fresh mortar. Depending on how that goes, we might need to replace a couple of the rocks here and there, but we’ll try to avoid that if we can.”
“Okay, cool,” Garrett said.
They were standing in front of a ranch entrance with twin limestone columns on either side of the gate. Nothing too fancy, but it was a nice-looking arrangement. It just needed a little bit of maintenance.
“Ever done this kind of work before?” Red asked. They were all drinking coffee. That’s what you did before working at a job site—drink some coffee and shoot the breeze a little. Everybody knew that was an unwritten rule.
“I haven’t,” Garrett admitted.
“Ain’t real difficult,” Billy Don said. “Just gotta take it slow and make sure you don’t damage the limestone.”
“I can do that,” Garrett said.
“Not as easy as it looks, in spite of what he says,” Red said.
“I’ll take it slow,” Garrett said.
“It’s not like you can just step right up and be a mason,” Red said.
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Garrett said.
“Masonry is a goddamn art form, to be honest,” Red said. “Takes a hell of a lot of skill and experience.”
“I’ll bet it does.”
“That’s true sometimes,” Billy Don said. “But this job right here is pretty simple.”
“You’ve gotta match the new mortar to the old mortar or it looks like crap,” Red said. “Billy Don’s standards ain’t always what they should be.”
“How long have you been doing this kind of work?” Garrett asked.
“A long damn time,” Billy Don said. “But we haven’t been working as much lately.”
Here it comes, Red thought. Billy Don bragging again.
“Why’s that?” Garrett asked.
“We went to Vegas a while back and I won a shitload of money at the blackjack tables,” Billy Don said. He sort of tossed it out there casually, like it was no big deal.
“Wow, that’s really cool,” Garrett said.
Red knew that Billy Don wasn’t done yet.
A truck passed on Purgatory Road. Red could hear a dog barking somewhere in the distance.
“Wanna guess how much?” Billy Don asked.
“I don’t know. Five thousand?” Garrett said.
“Nearly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Billy Don said. “Apiece.”
“Jesus Christ,” Garrett said. “Seriously?”
“Yup.”
“Damn, man, that’s incredible. You won all that just by playing blackjack?”
“Yup.”
“You must be pretty good.”
“Not to brag—”
“Too late,” Red said.
“—but I’m damn good.”
“How about you?” Garrett said to Red.
“How about me what?”
“You play blackjack?”
“I ain’t got time for card games,” Red said. “Reason I got half the winnings is ’cause half the money he started with was mine.”
“See, we won fifty grand in a pig-hunting contest,” Billy Don explained. “Then we took that to Vegas and used it as our grubstake.”
“A pig-hunting contest?” Garrett said, grinning, amused by the idea.
“Well, it was more of a bounty situation,” Billy Don said. “This kid died in a motorcycle wreck when he hit a wild pig, so his daddy wanted some of them pigs wiped out. So he caught a pig, tattooed its ear, then turned it loose and said whoever killed it would get fifty grand.”
Garrett was nodding. “Jeez, that’s brilliant. So everybody was shooting pigs left and right, hoping they’d get the one with the tattoo.”
“Damn right they was,” Billy Don said. “People were coming from all over for a shot at that pig. Put a serious dent in the pig pop’lation around here.”
“So which one of you shot the pig?” Garrett asked.
Which was a whole other story in itself. The truth was, some lowlife East Texas hunters had shot the pig, but they were cheating assholes, so Billy Don stole the pig and Red acted as his getaway driver.
“It was a team effort,” Red said.
All this talk about money in front of a stranger was making him nervous. He still had well over $100,000 stashed in an 800-pound gun safe in his closet, and the damn thing was like a miniature Fort Knox—fireproof, waterproof, and burglar-proof—but you never knew when some scheming hitchhiker might pull a gun and force you to open it.
So Red added, “We took all that money and put it in the stock market.”
Good to put that out there before Billy Don could open his fat mouth and reveal that they kept the cash at home. Normally Red would’ve said they’d stuck it in a bank, but he hated banks, and he couldn’t even stand to lie about putting money in a bank. Banks were for suckers who didn’t care if they were used as pawns in a system run by rich people. Of course, the stock market wasn’t much better, but Red liked the idea of being someone who owned stock. Sounded impressive.
“That’s cool,” Garrett said. “I’ve never put any money in the stock market.”
Well, that’s a big surprise, Red thought. “It can get sort of complicated,” he said.
“My dad was a financial adviser, so I learned a little about it,” Garrett said. “I just never had any money of my own. What did you invest in?”
“Huh?”
“I was just wondering what you invested in.”
“Mostly conglomerations,” Red said, using a word he’d heard before. “And acquisitions.”
Garrett gave him a funny look. “So did you buy individual stocks or mutual funds?”
“Both of ’em, I think,” Red said. “I don’t really remember, ’cause I had somebody like your daddy help me out.”
“Making any money?”
“Yeah, a little. Not a lot. You know what? We should probably get to work.”
By the time Marlin exited through the outer gate, traffic was moving again—slowly, but moving. He walked back to his truck on the highway shoulder and grabbed some binoculars. He climbed into the bed, then stepped on top of the metal toolbox mounted directly behind the cab.
Better view from up here. He raised the binoculars and scanned the horizon in every direction. No more loose animals that he could see, but he would need someone from the zoo to conduct an inventory. Problem was, the zoo was closed on Wednesdays.
But where was the owner, Albert Cortez? He lived in a cabin to the rear of the property. Marlin didn’t know the man well, but he knew that Cortez’s life revolved around the zoo. Marlin had attended the grand opening thirteen years earlier and Cortez had struck him then, and later, as an intelligent man with a deep passion for animals. As a result, he’d run this place with the welfare of his menagerie as his top priority.
In other words, Albert was a damn good guy. He wasn’t in it to get rich, which wasn’t likely at $8 a ticket. He was in it to teach people about fauna from around the world. The slogan of the zoo, painted on the sign right out front, was “Bringing the whole wild world to Blanco County.”
Unfortunately, Marlin’s gut told him Albert wouldn’t be making an appearance anytime soon—because he was probably lying in the grass while Henry Jameson, the crime-scene technician, took photos, examined the body for injuries or wounds, collected any available evidence, and tried to establish the victim’s identity.
Accident? Natural death? Murder?
Marlin had to set those thoughts aside and focus on the task at hand. His work wasn’t done here yet.