Outrage (19 page)

They called Twist and Cade, retrieved the escape rope, came down off the roof with the ladder, and ran around to the back of the building, where Twist was pulling up, with Cade a hundred feet back in the truck. Shay jumped into the Jeep, and Twist pulled away, with Cade and Cruz right behind them.

“You remember that truck when we raided the Sacramento prison?” Shay asked Twist, her voice pitched with excitement.

“Yeah, the one bringing in the food.”

“I didn't pay much attention at the time, but it said something like
KENDALL'S KATERING
on the side, with
K
s. Well, a Kendall's Katering truck pulled into the back of the building over there. What are the chances that it's a coincidence?”

“Slim and none, and Slim is outta town,” Twist said, pounding the steering wheel with his hands. “It's gotta be Singular.”

“Now the question is, how do we get in there?”

“I don't think we do. Get in there, I mean,” Twist said. “I've got another idea.”

“The one you wouldn't talk about?”

“Yeah. Because it's imprudent, preposterous, and highly flammable.”

At the motel, Twist said, “The underlying fact is, we can't get in there. So we make them come out. Or we get someone else to go in. Or both.”

Cade lifted a finger. “Um, Twist—”

Twist said, “Shut up for a minute. I drove down 99 and took a close look at the fence around that place. It's not much. If you hit that fence with a big enough truck, you'd knock it flat. If you hit it in the middle, you'd be looking at that big glass front door. You could drive a truck—if it was big enough—right through the front doors.”

“Then what?” Shay asked. “We yell at them to surrender?”

“No,” Twist said. “We throw a bomb at them and let the cops and the fire department clean up.”

“What?” the other three asked all at once.

Twist: “Listen. We get a truck. We make some Molotov cocktails. You guys know how to make Molotov cocktails, right?”

Cade said, “Some Beefeater gin, dry vermouth, maybe a twist of lemon…”

“That's a martini, you decadent little punk,” Twist said. “A Molotov cocktail is made with gasoline and engine oil, mixed in a bottle, with a rag tied around the neck of the bottle, which is the fuse. You light the fuse and throw the bottle, it breaks, the fuse lights the gasoline—”

“But, Twist, if we burn the place, we could incinerate the people we're trying to save,” said Shay.

“No, no, no. We call the cops, tell them there's been an explosion at the Singular building, that people inside are hurt. At the same time, we drive the truck into the fence and throw the Molotov cocktails out the windows into the
parking lot.
No one gets burned. Then we drive the truck into the lobby. Doesn't have to be fast, put it in the lowest gear with a brick on the gas pedal. The cops are there in two minutes, the firemen get there a minute later. They see these big fires and the ass end of the truck sticking out of the lobby. Big hole in the front of the building. One of us calls the fire department to say there are a bunch of illegal immigrants in the basement. Somebody else calls the TV stations. The police have to go in and search the building. It's too bizarre not to. Once the cops find the prisoners, the jig is up. They're done. Can't hide it.”

Cruz shook his head and said it was crazy, and Cade said he thought it could work, and then the three men all waited on Shay, who said, “It's both things. It's crazy and it could work. But where would we get a truck like that?”

Twist picked up a copy of the local newspaper, called the
Record,
folded it back to the classified ads, and pointed to a circled ad.

Mack Ten-Yard dump truck. 1976 DM 685, 6/6 manual, 230,000, runs good, Jacobs brakes, newly serviced, fair rubber, everything works, but sold as is. Scale weight 23,000 empty, $5000, call Rod Jurondick at O'Hara's.

“We've got the cash,” Twist said. “And Cade, master prep-school car thief, can drive anything.”

“That's true,” Cade said.

“What if there's a guy right inside the glass door with a machine gun?” Cruz asked.

“That would be a problem,” Twist admitted.

“I don't think there is anybody in the lobby. The lights were all real low,” Shay said. “If we crashed through there, but were going slow and jumped before it was all the way in, anybody inside would have a lot more to think about than running out to catch us.”

Twist was pumped by his plan, twirling his cane between his hands. He said, “It's still a risk, and we have to admit it. But the way I see it, Cade drives, I ride shotgun, Cruz and Shay drive our getaway vehicles….”

“No. Cade drives the Mack, you and Cruz drive the getaways, and I ride shotgun—me and X,” said Shay. “If there's trouble, I can run faster than you, and X, well, you had to see X at Dash's house to know what I'm talking about. If X thinks I'm in trouble, then even a machine gunner would have a problem.”

For once, they didn't argue. The plan felt right. They all nodded at each other, and Cade said to Twist, “Get ready to lay down your money, O rich person.”

Shay said, “We have to work out the sequence just right: attack, call the cops, call the fire department, call the media, one-two-three, really quick sequence. Then we call Odin and press restart on Mindkill. The video of Fenfang, the X-rays, the secret stuff from Dash's place, and the videos of Dash and Janes…”

Twist: “What about the photo of the vice president with the North Koreans?”

“I'd hold that back until the world believes, then put it out there,” Shay said, and slung her arm around X. “That'll be the cherry on the cake.”

Twist nodded. “Let's call Odin and tell him to be ready.”

They were up at nine o'clock the next morning. Shay woke to a knock at the door and found Twist standing outside. “I'm going to a bagel joint. Give me your order.”

She ordered two Diet Cokes and two cinnamon-raisin bagels for herself, then went to get cleaned up. When she got out of the shower, she noticed in the cracked motel mirror that her black hair was showing glints of red, as were her eyebrows. Not much yet, but the hair dye, which had been only semi-permanent, was beginning to fade.

She wasn't too unhappy with that; she missed her red hair, and not only the color, but the length of it. The dye she'd combed randomly through X's coat was holding up, since he wasn't standing in a daily shower. She realized X hadn't had a bath in all the time she'd known him.

“C'mere, boy,” she said, and he trotted over from where he was lying in the bathroom entrance. She stuck her nose in his neck and gave him a smell test and declared: “Fresh as a month-old daisy.”

She got dressed, gave X a couple of cups of dry dog food and a small can of meat. When he'd finished gulping it down, she washed the bowl, said, “You're excused” when X burped, and then took him outside for a walk.

As she returned to the motel, Twist got back with the bagels. He was starting to feel the stress. “It's like this every time. We get close to doing something, and I get cold feet. Every time. We do it anyway. It's killing my feet.”

“We'll worry when that
doesn't
happen,” Shay said.

When they knocked on the guys' door, Cruz was on the phone with Rod Jurondick: still speaking English, but with a just-arrived Mexican accent. “Then,” he said. “We will see you at noon.”

He hung up, checked the time on his phone, and said, “We've got two and a half hours to chicken out.”

“Time to eat, talk, and shop,” Cade said.

“What are we shopping for?” Shay asked.

“Cruz needs to become your typical underpaid, overworked, undocumented yardman,” Cade replied.

“Yes, but I am eager to move up,” said Cruz. “I will leave my puny pickup behind, and I will have a dump truck.”

They went to the Goodwill. An hour later, Shay was a little embarrassed by the fact they'd built themselves a stereotypical illegal immigrant gardener, complete with a wide-brimmed straw hat and stained blue cotton work trousers. Cruz thought it was hilarious and walked around speaking with a terrible fake accent until Twist told him to knock it off: “You're gonna screw us up.”

Cruz said, “Ho, seeeñor, hi don' theenk so. Hi theenk hi fool anybody….”

“Twist's right. You're gonna screw us up,” Shay said.

Cruz wriggled his eyebrows at Shay and said, “Ooooh, señorita, you have zee vaary nice maracas, you know what hi say?” He held up a hand, and Cade, who was dressed in worn jeans, a faded Fender T-shirt, and a backward L.A. Dodgers hat, slapped it.

Cade and Cruz took the pickup over to Rod Jurondick's house, a low pink concrete-block rambler, neatly kept with a flagpole in the front yard. A little girl was playing on a Big Wheel in the crescent-shaped driveway, and an orange-and-white Mack dump truck sat at the curb.

Twist and Shay hadn't expected to go, but they were both so curious about the truck negotiation that they'd followed in the Jeep, with X in the back, and parked half a block away to watch.

Cade pulled up in front of the house next door to Jurondick's, and he and Cruz got out of the truck and started up his driveway. The little girl abandoned her Big Wheel and ran to the front screen door. “Daddy,” she called out, “they're here.”

Jurondick came out of the house, and Cade and Cruz spent more than half an hour crawling over the truck, starting it, driving it around the block. Finally, they went into the house with Jurondick. “I think they bought it,” Twist told Shay.

“Took them long enough.”

“Wanted it to feel real,” Twist said.

A couple of minutes later, Cade and Cruz came out of the house, Cruz carrying some papers, and Cruz got in the pickup and Cade got up in the dump truck and they drove off down the street.

“Step one,” Twist said to Shay, and followed after them.

Cade parked the dump truck on the street outside of the motel. “Jurondick was a nice guy. He made us promise to take care of the ‘Mighty Tonka' he always wanted as a kid.” They all looked at the beat-up old truck. “Hope he doesn't watch the news when this thing busts through the building, 'cause, man, the dude's gonna cry like he's three all over again.”

They did a number of things during the afternoon and evening to prepare for the attack: They went to one Walmart and bought a two-and-a-half-gallon gasoline can and a small bag of quick-setting patching cement. At another, they bought two cans of engine oil and two bungee cords; at a third, they bought four big Ball jars, the kind used for canning vegetables, and a pair of rubber kitchen gloves.

They filled the gas can at a Shell station.

Cade spent an hour in the truck, working out the best way to anchor the steering wheel with the bungee cords so that, after he jumped out, the truck would continue straight ahead. The bag of patching cement was molded around the gas pedal to hold it down, then sprinkled with water to make it retain its shape. Cade would drop it on the gas pedal and let the truck drive itself.

They cruised the Singular building twice, and Cade drove around the building in the dump truck, which they thought would be safe enough: who'd suspect that they'd arrive in a dump truck? He reported two cars and a panel van in the lot behind the building; they'd seen three other cars parked in front.

“Not enough cars,” Twist said. “That's a big building for six cars.”

“Probably nobody in there but the prisoners and the guards—there weren't that many cars at Sacramento, either,” Cruz said.

At nine o'clock, as it was getting dark, they brought the gas, the jars, and the motor oil into a motel room and, being careful not to spill anything, filled the jars with a mixture of gasoline and oil—X sniffing the air like they were in a bakery—and screwed the lids on tight.

“The gas sets it off; the oil keeps it going for a while,” Twist said.

When that was done, they tore up the old cotton shirt that Cruz had worn to Jurondick's house and tied the rags around the jars.

“Just before you go crashing through the fence, Cade pulls over to the side. You unscrew one of the lids, dip the rags in the gas, then screw the lids back on. When you crash the fence, you light up the rags and throw three of the jars out the window—as far away from the truck as you can,” Twist said. “The fourth jar, you keep in the cab, and after you jump, if you can, you throw that jar back into the cab, hard as you can, so it breaks. We want a fire in the cab when it goes in. Not enough to set the building on fire, but enough to distract anyone inside until the fire department gets there.”

“You really think that's necessary?” Shay asked.

“Yes. After Singular identified Cruz with his DNA, I read up on it,” Twist said. “Fire kills DNA—even a little fire.”

They took the Molotov cocktails out to the Mack truck and wedged them behind the passenger seat.

“What are they going to light the fuses with?” Cruz asked.

Twist's face went blank for an instant, then he grinned and said, “Holy cats. We forgot to get a lighter.”

“That would have been a bummer, getting there and no match,” Cade said.

Shay looked at Cade and Cruz and asked, semi-seriously, “Do you guys feel like criminals?”

“I do,” Cruz said.

“I'm getting there,” said Cade.

“We're not criminals, we're outlaws,” Twist said. “There's a critical difference.”

“Sounds right to me,” said Shay, and off they went for Bic lighters to ignite their homemade firebombs.

Twist and Cruz went out first, in the Jeep, ferrying Cruz to the Unclaimed Freight building. He'd carry the ladder and one of the video cameras they'd used on the Dash and Janes raids. He'd film the attack and the response, and be in position to warn Cade and Shay if something looked bad on the approach.

Twist would get in position to make the pickup.

They'd all be in touch by walkie-talkie.

When Cruz was settled on the roof, Twist called: “Go.”

A heavy chill crawled along Shay's arms as they drove over to the Singular building. She wasn't superstitious, but something felt wrong to her.

She let the premonition go and asked Cade, “What do you think?”

Whenever he spoke to her, he tended to smile, because that's what he did. But as he worked up through the gears in the big truck, he glanced at her, unnaturally serious. “I don't know. This is a tough one.”

X was on the floor by Shay's feet, and he, too, seemed to be looking at her with an unusually serious gaze: he knew something was up. She'd recharged him that afternoon, and he was primed to run.

Cade said, “You still got the spirit rock? You might give it a rub.”

“Yeah, I…” Shay dug in her front pocket, then in the other one, and the back pockets, and she blurted: “It's gone! The rock is gone!”

“Back at Danny's? Or the motel?”

“No, I always keep it in my pocket. I gave it a rub before I went over the wall at Dash's place, and that worked out….Where is it?” She was patting her pockets again, digging into them, looking for it again.

“Hope this isn't a bad omen,” Cade said.

Not much traffic. Cade didn't say much more until: “Cop.” A police car rolled by, going the other direction. Kept going. A minute later, he said, “Twist is right behind us.”

Shay put the walkie-talkie to her face, clicked it, and asked, “Clear?”

Cruz came back: “Yes.”

“Then we're going,” Cade said, sounding grimmer than his face looked. They were on the frontage road, south of the target building. Cade braked, and for an instant, Shay, forgetting, thought something had happened, but Cade glanced at her and said, “Bombs.”

Right. The Molotov cocktails were her responsibility. She turned and fished the four jars out from behind the seat, and as Cade idled the truck at the side of the road, she unscrewed the top of one of the jars, and the air inside the cab was instantly infused with the odor of gasoline and oil. She carefully dipped the rags on each bottle into the gasoline, then screwed the lid back on and said, “Go—and when you take the jar from me, don't fumble it or we die.”

“Got it.”

Cade reached down and grabbed the ends of the bungee cords that had been fixed to supports in the back of the seats. Another car came up from behind them, honked, and went on by. They were no more than a hundred yards out when Cade said, “I'm shifting down. The weight is right by my foot, push it over.”

Shay reached down, found the cement weight, pushed it toward the gas pedal. When Cade lifted his foot, she pushed it onto the pedal, and the truck's engine groaned against the lower gear and picked up a little speed.

They were fifty yards out, twenty yards, and then Cade said, “I'm turning in and going down another gear. Start lighting up the jars. There'll be a bump, so be careful.”

Nothing like in the movies: nothing fast and furious. The truck was behaving more like a snowplow, moving slow, but with a heavy authority.

“Here we go,” Cade said, and they plowed across the verge of the highway, over a curb. The truck shuddered when they hit the fence, knocking it down; the steel bars of the fence tore along the fenders and made a screaming, ripping sound, but the truck kept plowing forward. X struggled to get up out of the foot well, but Shay shouted, “No! Down!” and he shrank back. She used a Bic lighter to ignite the rag wick on the first of the jars, and then the second one, small flames licking up the glass sides.

She was holding them in her gloved hands, the rubber kitchen gloves, and Cade was chanting “Go, baby, go” to the truck. They lurched into the parking lot, and Shay threw the first jar out the window, and it landed and shattered with a flash of flame ten feet tall, and she handed the second jar to Cade and said, “Don't drop it, don't drop it,” and he backhanded it out his window, and another haystack-sized flame blossomed in the parking lot.

“Unlatch the doors,” Shay said.

Cade had hooked up the bungee cords that would steer the truck straight ahead, and now he made a few last-second adjustments as they advanced across the parking lot straight toward the front doors of the building, moving at a walking pace. Shay unlatched her door, then lit the last two Molotov cocktails. She threw one of them out her window and handed the other to Cade, who shouted, “Get out now! Get out now!”

She pushed the door open with her knees and was out, with X behind her. She was supposed to run immediately, without looking back, but instead, she slowed to make sure the truck was on course. A fourth explosion bloomed in the cabin of the truck—Cade had thrown the last bomb—and Shay, feeling the heat, turned and ran.

As soon as the first Molotov cocktail exploded, Twist, who was holding one of the cold phones in his hand, punched in 911 and said, “There's been a big explosion in a building down on 99 by the airport. Man, there's just a huge explosion….Man, something just blew right into the building….It looks like a tank just hit the building.”

The 911 operator said, “Sir, you say there's been an explosion. Exactly where—”

“I don't know!” Twist shouted. “I'm on 99 down by the airport and—Man, another one just went off! It's like bombs are going off here. You'll see them, you'll see them!”

He could hear the operator talking to someone, and then she said, “Sir, we're getting more reports now, could you—”

Twist hung up.

From the roof across the street, Cruz was talking excitedly, in broken English, to another operator. “
Mucho
explosions, is
infierno
! Bring fire trucks….Me, I'm going!”

Twist was talking to a local TV station, screaming about explosions and tanks, as he drove the Jeep toward the first rendezvous with Shay. He'd pick up Shay and X first, then Cade, who was supposed to run to the opposite corner of the parking lot. They'd decided to do it that way because they didn't know where the Molotov cocktails would spray the gas, and thought it best for the two runners to run straight away from the truck, rather than having to weave through the fires.

Shay sprinted across the parking lot, down to the far south corner, and saw the Jeep rolling onto the shoulder of the highway. She slowed when she got to the fence, changed direction until she came to a stout evergreen tree, stood on a branch near the base, got a foot on top of the fence, and vaulted over it. X, behind her, watched her go, then ran in a quick circle and hurdled the five-foot fence, clearing it by a foot.

Shay looked back: the lot was brightly illuminated both by the regular overhead lighting and by the fires. No sign of pursuit:
it had worked.

Cade jumped from the truck when it was no more than six feet from the front door and rolling free and true. He lifted the final Molotov cocktail and hurled it through the truck's open door at the metal casing around the shifter.

The bomb exploded, and he hesitated, watching the truck as it bounced over a low step, then hit the front door, knocked it down, ripped some aluminum window supports off, and kept grinding into the building, with broken glass raining down on the dump bed.

He turned and ran along the front of the building to avoid the fire in the parking lot, and never saw the Singular man coming.

He was hit below the waist in a classic football tackle and went down on the hard asphalt. The tackle knocked the breath out of him, and as he was gasping for air, somebody else hit him in the back with a fist, below the rib cage, maybe breaking a rib, and he was stricken with a paralyzing pain, and then he was hit again, by somebody who knew what he was doing, then somebody shouted, “Lift and run. To the van. Everybody out, everybody out….”

Somebody else shouted, “We've got sirens….Get out….”

Cade was being carried by at least four men. He groaned with pain and somebody said, “Shut up, you little asshole,” and then he was thrown into a van. A door slammed and the van took off, felt like it bounced over a curb and then was running fast. Cade tried to pick up his head, but a man behind him swatted him down and said, “Stay down or I'll break your neck.”

Cade felt like his back was on fire, but he could also feel, under his chest, the lump of the walkie-talkie. His hands were still free, and he pulled them up under his chest and cried, “You hurt me, I didn't do nothin'.”

“Shut the fuck up,” and the man slapped the back of his head, hard, and Cade felt his top teeth cut into his bottom lip. He managed to get one hand on the walkie-talkie, and he clicked it rapidly, then held down the transmit button.

“I didn't do nothin',” he cried. “Don't hurt me, man, I was just walking across there lookin' for a place to sleep, man, don't hurt me….Just let me out, let me out of the van….”

Twist had pulled to the side of the road, and when he saw Shay vault the fence, he popped the door on the Jeep. X jumped inside, followed by Shay, who shouted, “Okay!” She pulled the door shut and turned to Twist, who wasn't accelerating away toward the Cade pickup but was shouting “What? What?” into the walkie-talkie.

Shay heard Cruz shouting back, “They got Cade! They got Cade! There are people in the parking lot, Singular is in the parking lot….I can't see them anymore.”

“Cade?” Shay cried. “Oh my God!”

The fear choked her heart, and Twist gunned the Jeep past a half-dozen cars that had stopped to watch the fires. When they got to the spot where they were to meet Cade, there was no sign of him or anyone else. Twist raced to the back gates, but everything looked normal there.

“Stop! Let me out,” Shay shouted. She put a hand at her hip and felt the gun butt there: she hadn't told Twist.

Twist wasn't having it. He gripped her arm and shouted, “No!”

Just then Twist's walkie-talkie erupted with a burst of call-clicks. “There he is,” Twist said.

Then Cade said, “I didn't do nothin'. Don't hurt me, man….” And finally: “Let me out of the van.”

“Shit!” Shay cried.

The transmission ended, and Twist called back to Cruz: “What can you see? Where's the van?”

Cruz answered back, “Nothing. I don't see anything.”

They were moving fast now. Shay said, “Give me the walkie-talkie.” Twist handed it to her, and she said, “Yard Guy, we're coming to you.”

A police cruiser flashed by, lights and sirens. Then another, and farther up the highway, they could see what had to be a fire truck, and maybe more cop cars, all headed toward them. They pulled onto the shoulder, and the fire truck went by, then another cop car, and an ambulance, and yet another cop car. Nobody paid attention to them, good citizens getting out of the way.

Shay said to Twist, “We should go up on the roof with Cruz; we need to see what happens.”

Twist thought about it for a second or two and then nodded. “You're right. If the cops take a bunch of prisoners out of there, we've got some leverage to get Cade back.”

“Yes!” Shay said.

They left the Jeep in a tight little residential area a few hundred yards away from the Unclaimed Freight building. The fires at the Singular building couldn't be seen from there, and there was nobody in the street.

They locked X in the Jeep and walked and then jogged back to the Unclaimed Freight building. Cruz was huddled by the base of the building with the ladder, and a moment later, they were all on the roof, crawling toward the parapet that faced the Singular building.

The scene across the way certainly suggested a disaster, cop lights and fire trucks and ambulances and, as they watched, a white media van slowing and then spewing out a cameraman and a reporter.

But no parade of rescued Singular experimental subjects. In fact, they saw nobody coming out of the building except firefighters and policemen. The fires in the parking lot were extinguished, and firemen were dragging hoses out of the building; the truck had been doused as well.

They watched for twenty minutes, the time crawling slowly by, waiting…and nothing changed. The firemen were cleaning up, hosing down the burn spots on the asphalt parking lot, washing away the residue from the Molotov cocktails. Cops wandered in and out of the building, and then one of the cars took off, lights flashing, for another part of town.

“What happened?” Cruz asked finally.

Twist said, “It was a trap. It was a trap and we walked into it.”