The Zoo Job Page 4

  “I’m very good at what I do, Ms. Brillinger.” Then the slightest of smirks played on his lips. “Plus, I got an e-mail yesterday from Zoë Kerrigan.”

  Letting out a breath, Marney chuckled. “So you’re not psychic. That’s good—the way the Kerrigans talked you up, I was starting to wonder. You must be Nate Ford.” She offered her hand, which he shook. She glanced behind her at the now-empty booth he’d been in. “I hope my staring didn’t chase that woman away.”

  “It’s okay. She just figured you were my next client.”

  Marney snorted. “I’m not even sure I’m your next client.”

  Cora came over and provided Nate with a shot glass filled with Irish whiskey. Nodding to the bartender in gratitude, he took a quick slug. “Usually when people get to the point where they come through that door, they’re at their wit’s end and have tried everything they could. Have you tried everything you could to save your zoo?”

  Defensively, Marney asked, “How do you know the zoo needs saving?”

  “Because I looked you up, and you’ve been working for that zoo—which has been in your family since it opened in the nineteenth century—since you were a teenager. Because Zoë mentioned that the zoo was in trouble, a fact backed up by the zoo’s financials, which are pretty dire. And because your Web site lists an indefinite postponement of the opening of your black rhino exhibit, which you’ve been hyping for the last two months.”

  Marney let out another breath. “Yeah.” She finished off her second Scotch and waved at Cora for a third. “You’re right, the zoo’s hemorrhaging money right now. Crappy economy, small zoo, off the usual beaten tourist paths . . . It’s been a perfect storm of suck. Plus, we haven’t had anything new in ages. My father was the general manager before me, and he really didn’t do much with the business. I took over after he—he died . . .” She trailed off.

  Cora brought her Scotch and she sipped it. “I’m sorry, I just—let’s just say I’ve got some complicated feelings about my father, and leave it at that.”

  Nate tensed for just a moment and glanced over at the unoccupied stool at the end of the bar where his father used to hold court.

  Marney went on. “Anyhow, after my father’s heart attack, the first thing I had to do in my new position as general manager was bring the zoo into the twenty-first century: more up-to-date signage, some interactive displays, more merchandizing. Plus, we needed some new animals. We got some aye-ayes from Madagascar, and that gave us a membership and attendance bump for a year or two, but it’s flattened out again.

  “So three months ago, I started up a correspondence with a priest in Malani. He said he’d be able to sell us two black rhinos. We don’t have any rhinos, and the black rhinos are endangered. He was giving us a male and a female that we might be able to breed—that might help us get into the Save Our Species program, and maybe some government money, as well. Worst case, we get some new animals in the mix.”

  Cora wandered by, looked at both drinks, and noticed that Nate had not, as yet, finished his Irish whiskey. That would be for later, after the client was done filling him in. “So what happened?” he asked.

  “I sent him two hundred thousand dollars, he said the rhinos were put on a ship called the Black Star bound for Boston. My guys went to Boston and met the Black Star, and no rhinos. Reverend Maimona assured me that he put them on the Black Star—but it turns out there are about fifty ships with that name.”

  “Somebody pulled a fast one?”

  She shook her head. “Not the reverend. He actually gave me proof that he put the animals on the Black Star—photos and such. But it wasn’t the same ship that pulled into Boston.”

  “He still could be part of the deception.”

  Marney didn’t look comfortable with the idea that she’d been conned by a man of God, which struck Nate as charmingly naïve. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, the only way spending two hundred grand on these animals was going to be worth it was if we actually, y’know, got them. And the money’s just . . . gone.”

  Ford frowned. “Aren’t you insured?”

  “Yes, we are. By your former employer, actually.” She smiled at Ford’s double take. “I looked you up, too. You were an investigator for IYS up until about four years ago. Then you went completely off the grid. Except a couple years ago, when Matt Kerrigan realized that his employers at First Boston Independent pocketed the bailout money they got after the crash in ’08 and were in bed with the Irish mob. After they tried to kill him, you took down the Irish mob, took down the president of First Boston, and got the Kerrigans a nice nest egg.”

  Nate just nodded. Given how much Zoë had told him in her e-mail about Marney, it wasn’t surprising that she had been equally forthcoming to Marney with what she knew about Nate and his crew. After all, she was a teenage girl.

  He did, however, take a sip of his whiskey before asking, “So why not report the loss of the rhinos? You obviously have proof that you were the victim of a fraud.”

  “If I report it, we’ll get the money back, but our premiums will go through the roof. No, actually, they’re already through the roof—this will make them hit the stratosphere. My father wasn’t always the best at following safety regulations, and one of our bears died when a support strut broke. It almost killed a visitor, too, and we had to settle with her family.” She shuddered. “We can’t really afford our policy now. If I report this . . .”

  Nate nodded. “What does your board of directors say?”

  She shrugged. “They’re just writing it off as a loss. And there’s one other problem.”

  “Reverend Maimona didn’t obtain the rhinos legally?”

  Marney squirmed a bit on the stool and sipped more Scotch, which was all the answer Nate needed. “I’m afraid I—well, I didn’t ask a lot of questions. If I report this—to IYS or to Interpol or whoever—they will ask questions, and I’m not sure the zoo would come out unscathed.”

  Nate contemplated his whiskey for a moment. Marney had provided all the particulars, and now he had to ask the most important question of all: “What is it you want my team to do?”

  Marney blew out a long breath, briefly puffing her cheeks. “Honestly? The only way the Brillinger Zoo survives after this is if you can find the rhinos. The exhibit opens, we get press and publicity, I apply for a government grant or three, and our animals don’t get sold off to the highest bidder. The lucky ones would get bought by another zoo—but the highest bidder would probably be some rich asshole who likes exotic animals but doesn’t actually know how to take care of them.” A look of disgust formed on her face, and she washed it away with the rest of her Scotch.

  “After the thing with the bear, we needed money quick. We had three polar bears—Huey, Dewey, and Louie—so my father decided to sell one of them. Some rich guy in Montana always wanted to have a polar bear for his estate, even though he had no clue how to take care of him, so he paid half a million for poor Louie. In less than six months, Louie was dead.” She palmed a tear off her cheek. “He was only four—he should’ve lived another fifteen years at least, and that old bastard . . .”

  While Nate was no kind of animal lover, that type of cruelty due to ignorance never failed to stick in his craw. Putting a comforting hand on Marney’s shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not letting that happen to the rest of them. Plus, who knows where those black rhinos are? There are less than five thousand left in the world, Mr. Ford. The year I was born, there were almost fifteen thousand. We can’t afford to lose any. One subspecies of black rhino has already been declared extinct, and the other three aren’t that far behind.”

  “All right, then.”

  Marney blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “We’ll help you. We’ll get you your rhinos, and we’ll save your zoo.”

  “Just like that?”

  Nate
felt his lips curl upward a bit. “Just like that. We’ll be in touch.” Then he gulped down his whiskey in one shot and went over to talk to Hardison and Parker.

  * * *

  Marney watched as Ford walked to the other end of the bar. The bartender came over to take his glass away, and Marney asked her, “What just happened?”

  “Nate said he’ll help you. That means he’ll help you.”

  “Okay.” She shook her head. “I’m not even sure I want his help. I just came here to talk to him, to see what he offers. Now . . .”

  Nodding, the bartender said, “That’s Nate. If it means anything, he’s never failed yet. He even saved this bar once. Him and his team, they’re the best.”

  “Hope so.” Marney sipped some more of her Scotch. “I just—I don’t know what I’ll do if the zoo goes under. I grew up in that zoo, and I always knew one day I was going to run it. It’s practically synonymous with the town, with my family—with me. I don’t have anything else.” She shook her head and chuckled. “I guess I am okay with him taking the job. But I didn’t even get to tell him how much it means to me to—”

  Putting a hand on hers, the bartender stared right at Marney with her green eyes. Marney returned the gaze, realizing that this woman cared deeply for Nate Ford—and also thought very highly of him. It was half of the look that she usually wore on her face when she thought about her father—the caring-deeply part, since he never gave her reason to think highly of him. The bastard died before she could resolve her ambivalence.

  “He knows,” the bartender said. “That’s why he took the case. He only helps people who genuinely need it.”

  “Looks like I do.” Marney gulped down the last of her Scotch. “Time to hit the road.”

  “You’re not driving, are you?” Cora asked.

  Marney shook her head, an action she immediately regretted, as it made the room swirl. “No, no, no, I’ll catch a train to Fitchburg, and I’ll be sober by the time I get there to drive back to Brillinger from there.” She thought back over what she’d just said. “Certainly more sober than I am now.”

  “You want me to call you a cab to take you to North Station?”

  Opening her mouth to say she’d be fine taking the T, Marney thought about it for several seconds and then said, “Yes,” rather than risk nodding and causing the room to twirl again.

  As the bartender pulled out a cell phone, she walked over to what looked like an espresso machine. “I’ll make you some coffee—on the house.”

  Retaking her bar stool, Marney said, “Uh, thanks?”

  “You’re Nate’s client,” Cora said, as if that explained everything.

  And maybe it did.

  Marney just hoped that Nathan Ford lived up to the hype. After all, the last time several people told her something was a sure thing, they were assuring her over and over that obtaining two black rhinos would absolutely save the zoo . . .

  THREE

  NOW

  “Okay, Hardison, run it.”

  The woman who generally referred to herself as Sophie Devereaux watched as Hardison, in response to Nate’s request, clicked the remote, and several images appeared on the giant screen that took up the bulk of the east wall of the lower level of Nate’s two-level flat. Each new image appeared in sequence slightly off-kilter from the previous one, giving the two-dimensional impression of a three-dimensional stack of files. Sophie had always found it curious how computer programmers tried so hard to create the illusion of their paper analogues—using file-folder images to indicate directories, even calling them folders, while word processing programs tried at least on the surface to imitate the typing of letters onto a piece of paper. And here, Hardison was opening windows that were “stacked” like papers on a desk.

  Some images, she easily recognized. For example, the home page of the Brillinger Zoo Web site was clearly labeled as such, and she knew a map of Africa when she saw one. Others Sophie knew were generally financial statements and records, though the images piled on too quickly for her to see whose financials they were. Hardison also called up a YouTube page, but again the images came up too fast for Sophie to see what the subject of the video was. There were recent photos of, respectively, a blond-haired white woman, a black priest with a monk’s fringe of hair but a bald crown, a dilapidated building, a ship in a port with the words BLACK STAR emblazoned on the hull, some wild animals, and a dark-skinned man in a military uniform. Sophie also spied a sepia-toned image of someone in late-nineteenth-century clothing that was sufficiently accurate that she supposed it was probably scanned from an actual century-and-a-quarter-old photograph, as opposed to a re-creation.

  “Which one’s the mark?” she asked.

  Nate surprised her by saying, “None of them. We don’t know who the mark is, because we don’t know who stole the black rhinos.”

  That got Parker’s attention. “How do you steal a black rhino? Much less two?”

  “Very carefully, I would think,” Nate said with the head tilt he often affected. “The point, though, is that the zoo needs those black rhinos. Hardison?”

  Even as Sophie listened raptly to Hardison explaining the history of the zoo—the sepia-toned photo was the zoo’s founder, Thomas Brillinger, an ancestor of the blonde, Marney Brillinger, who was the current general manager of the zoo and also the team’s client—she watched the others’ reactions.

  Parker only half paid attention to what Hardison said, which was not unusual—the thief’s eyes were focused on the part of the screen showing wild animals, prompting a grin. Fortunately, it was Parker’s happy grin, which they’d been seeing more and more of lately. That was infinitely preferable to the grin she’d often worn in the early days after Nate gathered them all together in Chicago and they set up shop in Los Angeles. That grin tended to appear on Parker’s face half a minute before something blew up. That grin was generally the precursor to utter chaos. That grin frightened the hell out of Sophie.

  Over by the kitchen, Nate was looking around the room. His eyes locked with Sophie’s, and she gave him a smile, prompting him to quickly look away, which, in turn, prompted Sophie to stifle a sigh of annoyance.

  It was absurd, was what it was. Everyone on the team knew that Nate and Sophie were “friends with benefits.” Sophie had never heard this term until Hardison used it, and it sounded distinctively American to her ears, at once euphemistic and derogatory in its yoking of romance with capitalism. Nate told her once that he’d always thought of this kind of relationship as an excuse to either avoid commitment or justify bad behavior. But it wasn’t bad behavior—yet there he was, looking away guiltily as if he’d done something horribly wrong. The same man who regularly led them on jobs that involved repeated law breaking, which he did without blinking an eyelash.

  Cursing the part of Nate that was still a bloody seminary student, Sophie looked over at Eliot, who sat in the easy chair. (Hardison kept insisting on calling it “the comfy chair.” Sophie wasn’t sure what bothered her more, Hardison making Monty Python references or doing so with a truly atrocious attempt at a British accent.) Eliot was chewing on a sandwich that he’d arrived with in a brown paper bag. It was mortadella, sliced extra thin, from a salumeria he liked, with lettuce, mozzarella cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette.

  Sophie noticed that Nate, after looking with an almost longing expression at Eliot’s sandwich, then retreated to the kitchen. He immediately started checking the cabinets, only to find the seemingly endless supply of horrendous junk food and undrinkable orange libations that Hardison kept in Nate’s duplex. It bitterly amused Sophie that Hardison had more food in Nate’s flat than Nate himself did.

  “On top of everything else,” Hardison was saying as he clicked the remote to zoom in on one of the financials, which turned out to be a loan agreement, “they’ve taken out a buncha loans, which are gonna default if they can’t pay in a year.”

>   That got Nate to temporarily abandon his quest for food. “Why so soon a default?”

  “Too big a risk, especially after the thing with the bear.” Hardison clicked again, bringing the YouTube page to the fore. He started the video, which was shaky and pixelated, indicating that it was made with a cheap mobile phone; it showed people running about and screaming, and a bear visibly trapped under what looked like a large plank of wood.

  Sophie winced, and she noticed Parker doing the same. Even Hardison got a queasy expression, prompting him to stop the video before it was completed.

  Though it was obvious, Sophie felt the need to say out loud, “That’s awful.”

  “Marney’s father didn’t do the best job of caretaking,” Nate said drily.

  Hardison nodded. “Yeah, but after he died of a heart attack a couple years ago, she got everything all back in order—barely. Problem is, zoo’s hangin’ by a thread. The black rhinos were gonna be the big thing, but they’re gone.”

  “Now, what doesn’t make sense here,” Nate said, “is how blasé the board of directors is about this. They’re having trouble making their insurance payments now, so reporting this to IYS—”

  That brought Sophie up short. “IYS?”

  Nate waved her off and said exactly what he shouldn’t have said and yet exactly what Sophie knew he would say: “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  Turning to stare at her, Nate said slowly, “No, it doesn’t.”

  That was Nate’s I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it voice. Sophie replied by saying, “All right,” in her we-will-talk-about-this-later-whether-you-want-to-or-not voice.

  She’d had a hell of a time getting Nate to recognize that voice.

  Nate started pacing between the desk and the screen. “Marney’s not reporting it because it’ll hike their premiums even higher, and the zoo will probably go under.”

  Hardison clicked another of the financial reports to the fore of the screen. “Nate’s right about everything he just said except the word ‘probably.’”