Outrage (8 page)

Each of the two cars carried a phone that they believed was safe to use, especially if they stayed away from key words like
Singular
or
Shay
or
Odin
or
Twist,
words that a big intelligence agency might be able to pull out of the air and attach to a phone number.

Odin also worried about voice recognition and suggested that only Cruz and Cade make the calls because he didn't believe Singular would have identified either of them.

“Gonna be a long haul, man,” said Cade, who was sitting up front with Twist driving. “Fourteen hours, if we don't stop.”

“My leg won't last that long,” Twist replied. “I'll need to get out and walk a couple times.”

From the back, Odin asked, “What happened to your leg?” as he unfolded a road map they were using instead of the phone GPS.

“Broke it,” Twist said in a tone that suggested end of story. At least it did to Cade, who looked over his shoulder at Odin and gave him a quick headshake, but Odin was lousy at subtext. He instead persisted:

“An accident, one presumes? Car? Ski jump? Banana peel? The limp appears to me to be a minor hitch in the ball and socket….You really need the cane?”

Twist checked Odin's reflection in the rearview mirror, and Odin sort of smiled at him. That got him: a bruised and sincere kid. He decided not to bite his head off.

“I can manage without the cane if I have to, but it relieves some pressure along an old fracture. There are some secondary uses for a gold-weighted cane, which Cade will likely, behind my back, explain later. Okay, then? Let's drive.”

Odin nodded in the mirror and said, “Give me one of the phones. We paid for some data on that, right?”

Cade fumbled in his pockets, then passed it back. “Watch out for key words.”

“Not gonna use many words,” Odin said. He turned the phone on, typed with his thumbs for a few seconds, waited, got into another rush of thumb-typing, then waited some more. Cade said, “You've been on that for a while.”

“Not giving anything away, though—went through Sweden to AfghanistanBananaStand, and…we're in.”

“In what?” Twist asked.

“Nevada DMV. The winner is…Jerry Kulicek….Let's see if we can find his photo….And there we are.”

He passed the phone over the front seat to Twist. “This the guy you gave five hundred dollars to?”

Twist: “That's him.”

Odin said, “Saving his name, address, car tag numbers, license plates. With this, we can get anything we want.”

“How about a phone number?” Twist asked.

“That, too, but it'll take a little more research than I want to do on a cell phone. We can get that when we're done with Janes.”

The sun was dropping low in the sky, south of Hoover Dam, when Shay woke up from a hard nap, feeling unprepared.

“If I'm going to threaten a U.S. senator with a gun, I need to look like I know what I'm doing,” she said, squeezing the pillow from Cruz to her chest. “Plus, I should probably learn where that safety thing is. You know, learn how
not
to shoot somebody.”

“You've never handled a gun?” asked Cruz, draining a can of Coke and holding his highway speed to a law-abiding seventy-five.

“Nope.”

“Then we best find ourselves some wide, wide open space,” he said.

They were over the Nevada border and fifteen miles into Arizona Red Rock Country, where about the only living things were lizards, buzzards, and small packs of bony wild horses. Cruz swerved off the highway at the next exit—one shuttered gas station—and took another quick turn down a ranch road that showed a thin sheen of gravel over the tan desert soil. Fenfang and X, dozing beside each other in the backseat, felt the change of texture and woke up.

“Where are we?” Fenfang asked.

“Out in the desert,” Cruz said. “We're going to shoot the gun.”

“Why?”

Shay turned her head. “In case I ever have to.”

Two or three miles in, Cruz found a shallow arroyo with a cut bank that would work for target practice. He drove on for another mile, making sure that they weren't close to a ranch house, then turned back to the arroyo, and they all climbed out. As X sniffed around for the perfect place to pee, Cruz walked his Coke can down the arroyo maybe twenty feet and braced it against the weedy bank.

Then he went to get the .45 from the truck, a chunk of black steel that smelled of oil and something else, something sharper and metallic. West had given him the gun in the minutes before the raid on the Singular prison, and while he'd pulled it out of his waistband when the gunfire between West and a guard erupted, he hadn't fired it. Instead, at West's urging, he'd pulled Shay out of the building to safety—and been left to wonder if he might have saved them both if only…

Back to the gun:

“These are very simple machines,” he said, holding it up in front of the girls' faces. X stood between Shay and Fenfang, looking up at the gun, his head cocked to one side. “There's a barrel, there's a chamber to hold the bullet, there's a hammer that hits the firing pin that hits the primer, which is a little metal button on the back of the cartridge, and that shoots off a spark that fires the gunpowder that shoots the slug out the barrel.”

The butt of the gun held a magazine, which in turn held seven cartridges with copper-plated slugs that each had a bowl-shaped indentation in the tip.

He popped a cartridge out of the magazine and showed them the primer, the small round silver cap in the center of the back end of the cartridge. “The firing pin hits this, and boom.”

“But they're safe to handle?” Shay asked.

“Sure. You could walk around with them loose in your pants pocket and it'd be really weird if one of them went off—not that I think you should do that,” Cruz said as he thumbed the cartridge back into the magazine. He smacked the magazine back into the grip.

“You hold the gun with both hands,” he said. “Think about pointing it, rather than aiming it. Think about pointing your finger.”

He gave the gun to Shay, who pointed it at the can. “Not as heavy as I thought it would be,” she said. She touched the trigger with her index finger. “Shoot now?”

“No. This kind of gun you need to cock before you can fire,” Cruz said. He took the gun back and showed them how that was done, pushing the slide back so they could see the cartridge ready to load into the gun's firing chamber, then letting the slide slam forward.

“Now it's loaded and ready to fire.” He pointed the gun at the can and said, “Click off the safety here….” He did that. “And fire….”

BANG!

The shot was loud, and Shay and Fenfang both jumped. They saw a puff of dirt as the slug hit a few inches left of the can. X snorted at the faint odor of gunpowder, then set his eye on Shay, as if trouble might be coming.

“After the first shot, the gun loads automatically, which is why they call it an automatic,” Cruz said. “It's ready to fire again. You can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, until you run out of ammo.”

He pulled the trigger.
BANG!

He missed the can again, but was close. He asked Shay, “You ready to try?”

“Yes,” she said.

He clicked the safety on, she took the gun, and he stood behind her, wrapping his arms around her, adjusting her grip. “Look down over the barrel, but don't worry so much about aiming. Just point it at the can. Click the safety off.”

She did, and he said, “It's hot, it's ready to fire. Pull the trigger when you're ready. Don't yank on it, just squeeze….”

BANG!

The gun jumped in her hand…but not that much. She had it back on target in a half second and pulled the trigger again.
BANG!

They had two boxes holding twenty cartridges each. Shay had found them in West's Jeep, stashed under the seat. Cruz suggested they hold back one box, “just in case.” Shay found she liked the rush of trying to hit the can, and wondered if twenty shots would be enough “to get good.”

“Shay,” Cruz said with a smile that was just a little condescending, “you're a certified badass, but you're not going to hit the can on your first time out. No offense.”

Shay was neither offended nor deterred; she just lined up her next shot. After a couple more rounds, the bullets hitting high and wide on the bank wall, Cruz showed her how to pull the magazine and unload the auto-loaded shell that was already in the chamber.

He then had her reload the gun, jack a shell into the chamber, click off the safety, and fire. And do it all again. And again. And again. Shay didn't hit the can, but she was hitting within a few inches of it a lot of the time. She paused to rest her arms for a bit, and Cruz walked back to the Jeep for a bottle of water.

Fenfang grinned at Shay. “You are becoming like a cowboy.”

“Cowgirl,” Shay said. “You wanna try?”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized their stupidity: Fenfang, the girl without a mind of her own, could certainly not be entrusted with a loaded weapon. Dash might ambush them.

“Ah, I…,” Shay stammered.

Fenfang put up a hand to stop her. “I understand,” she said.

Shay was relieved to hear that, but it wasn't only out on a shooting range that she and Cruz might need to be on the lookout for Dash; it could be at Dash's house itself. Shay thought about that for a few moments and said, “Maybe what we need is a code word, something you could say, or some answer you could give, when we really need to be sure you're…you. Would that be okay with you?”

“I think that would make us all feel better. We make a code in my language because this lady does not know Chinese…only maybe some Spanish.”

“That sounds smart,” said Shay, and they quickly settled on a simple exchange they would rely on anytime Shay or the others felt a need to check Fenfang's ID:

“Are you okay?”

“Háixíng.”

I am okay.

When they were down to the last seven cartridges from the first box, Cruz had Shay fire three shots quickly, trying to repoint after each shot. With the next three, he had her pull the trigger as quickly as she could: the shots were all over the place. “If you take just one extra tenth of a second to steady yourself, you'll shoot a lot better than when you're just pulling the trigger as fast as you can,” he said. “If you ever have to pull the trigger, remember that. You probably won't, but try.”

“I'll do that,” Shay said.

From behind them, Fenfang said, “You should practice once with your words, too, Shay. When you make the lady think you will shoot her—so she will do what we want.”

“Good idea,” Shay said. Back at the hotel, she and Twist had written scripts for the two groups to follow when they confronted Dash and Janes. Clicking on the safety, she handed the gun back to Cruz, who put it in his waistband, and they started from the top.

“Give me the gun,” Shay said in a stone-cold voice.

Cruz pulled the gun out and handed it to her. Shay thumbed off the safety with a dramatic flourish, held the pistol upright in front of her face, and took aim.

“What are you doing?” Cruz asked in mock alarm.

Shay shook her head and lowered the gun. “The line is, ‘What are you going to do?' ”

“Sorry….What are you going to do?”

Shay widened her stance and again took aim. “I'm gonna kill the bitch. Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”

BANG!

The can flew through the air like a hockey puck.

Feeling slightly more prepared, they continued south to Kingman, Arizona, stopped to use the bathrooms and buy water and some snacks, and then headed east on I-40, rolling along at an efficient eighty miles an hour. The Jeep wasn't the most comfortable vehicle in the world, but out in the desert, it felt seriously competent.

They passed the time explaining the word
snack
to Fenfang, in both verb and noun forms.

“So I snack on a snack?” she asked.

“Yes,” Shay said. “My brother once said he felt a little snacky—meaning he wanted to snack on a snack.”

Cruz said, “You can get snack cakes…so that's like an adjective. If you're feeling a little snacky, you could snack on snack-cake snacks.”

“Could you snack on a dinner?”

“No, because a dinner is a meal…so you eat a dinner. Of course, you can also eat a snack….”

Cruz and Shay traded off driving every couple hours. Whoever wasn't driving sat in the backseat with Fenfang to help her if she had a seizure and monitor her for signs of Dash. They were nearly nine hours out of Vegas without a seizure, and all of them were starting to privately brace for trouble.

As they approached the lights of a huge casino at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, X, sitting up front with Cruz, suddenly stood, leaned over the seat, and pointed his nose at Fenfang. She was in the midst of telling Shay and Cruz about Internet blackouts by the government in China, and how she and her university friends got around them, but the dog's nose, two inches from her own, made her stop.

“Don't be rude, X,” Shay said, and pushed him back over the seat. Fenfang resumed speaking, but the dog came back at her with his nose, sniffing at her. Suddenly Fenfang stiffened, and then her eyes rolled up and she started to thrash.

“She's seizing!” Shay said, and threw herself across Fenfang, trying to hold her away from the hard surfaces in the car, things that could hurt her. Fenfang's back arched, and she began to rhythmically shake as Cruz pulled to the side of the road.

When the Jeep was stopped, Cruz knelt on the front seat and asked, “What can I do?”

“Nothing, unless…she gets out of control, but I think I have her….”

Ninety seconds after the seizure started, Fenfang began to relax and her eyes opened, and she said something in Chinese and looked at Shay as though she didn't recognize her. She turned her head away and said something else in Chinese, then turned back to Shay and said, “Shay?”