Uncaged (29 page)

When it was done, they all looked at each other, and Cruz said, “They’re killing people. They’re using them like lab animals.”

Again, they all looked at each other, and they all nodded.

“Tell me more about this West guy,” Twist said. “You said you had a way to contact him. Do you think you could negotiate for your brother? To get him back?”

“I don’t know,” Shay said. “West doesn’t seem like a bad guy—but how can I be sure?”

“One problem with getting Odin back,” Cade said. He turned to Shay. “I don’t want to bum anybody out, but as the Nazis would say, ‘He knows too much.’ They might have … killed him.”

“I don’t want to hear that,” Shay snapped. “I won’t stop looking for him. If I’ve got to burn Singular down, I’ll find a way to do it.”

Twist: “Whoa, whoa, whoa …”

Shay crossed her arms, and didn’t take it back.

Cade said: “Something else. Maybe we should give these videos to the FBI or somebody—we could do it anonymously, maybe. But if we do, and the FBI starts investigating Singular, then they might try to get rid of the evidence. Like … Odin.”

“You seem pretty anxious to kill off my brother,” Shay said with a cold streak in her voice.

Cade came back with an equally cold tone: “Listen. I’m just laying out the logic. I don’t want anybody to be dead, but if we’re going to do anything, we need to think through it, and figure out what the consequences will be. If we try to sic the cops on Singular, one consequence might be that they get rid of the evidence before we can prove anything.”

Twist nodded and said to Shay, “Listen to him—because he’s right.”

Shay touched Cade’s arm, a small apology, and said, “Then we find a way to negotiate. We get Odin back,
then
we burn the place down.”

Twist rubbed his chin. “I think we need to open a line of communication. You said you had a way to contact West—a secure way?”

“That’s right … or at least that’s what West said.”

“So you tell West, ‘I got the thumb drives, I don’t know what’s on them, but free Odin and you can have them back.’ ”

“You saw what was on the drive,” Cade protested. “We’re just going to let that go?”

Twist turned to Cade with mock weariness. “If Odin could copy the drives, I’d assume that my computer staff could figure a way to do the same thing.”

Cruz was checking X’s dewclaw. The dog had been tracking blood, but the bleeding had now stopped. He gave X a forehead scratch. He asked Twist, “You mean double-cross them?”

“That’s what I mean,” Twist said.

“I hate always being the practical one,” Emily said. “How about not double-crossing them? How about if we call them up, say, ‘Give us Odin and we’ll give you the drives and you’ll never hear from us again, as long as you don’t mess with us anymore’?”

“And pretend we didn’t see what we just saw?” asked Cade.

“Do you read the headlines?” Emily persisted. “Right now, right this second, somewhere in the world, a hundred women are being raped, a hundred children are being abused or are starving to death, a hundred men are being murdered, and maybe, maybe, it’s a lot more than that. Just this second. We can’t do anything about it. Nothing. There’s nothing we can do, because that’s just the way the world is right now. This is just another example. We could walk away, and get on with our lives.”

After a moment of silence, Twist asked, “If you could make a difference, don’t you think you should?”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “I don’t have enough information. One thing I do know, for sure, is that Shay is a friend, and her brother is in big trouble, and we might be able to get him back. That’s what we should do. Get him back, worry later about saving the world.”

Cruz said, “I don’t know about saving the world, either, but I do know that Singular came into our house and attacked our friends, and hurt them, and they need to pay.”

“I think some of them might have been soldiers, the way they were organized,” said Cade. “At military school, we had these former army guys around for training. They looked like those guys—the guys who taught guns and bayonets.”

Twist was up and pacing. “All right. Try this. I don’t want to risk
the hotel, so I think we should move out, at least for a while. Shay could open a link to this West guy, and talk to his bosses. First off, tell them that we’re out of the hotel, that nobody in the hotel knows where we are.”

“I could do that,” Shay said.

“Then we see if we can get a trade. If we can get a trade, we do that—and then we talk about it. Maybe we double-cross them. Maybe we think hard about what Emily has said.”

Cade: “When you say, ‘We’re out of the hotel,’ who’s
we
?”

“You, me, Shay, and X. Emily and Cruz stay here, and they’re our contacts here in the hotel. They both have access to vehicles—Cruz, you’ve been talking about getting a decent used truck. I’ll give you some cash tonight. If we need to be moved around, or to have food brought in, you handle that. Shay, X, Cade, and I are going to hide out until we see if we can pull off the trade. If they need persuading, I’ve got an idea for a Hollywood stunt that’ll whack them upside their heads.”

“You might need a fighter,” Cruz protested. “I should go with you. If those guys come after Shay again, and the dog—”

“We might need a fighter here,” Twist said. “We will definitely need somebody to go back and forth between the hotel and hideout.”

“Where are you going to go?” Cruz asked.

“I gotta make a call,” Twist said. “If the place I’m thinking of is workable, we won’t be uncomfortable.”

They all looked at each other and finally Emily said, “It’s a plan. Those guys … I have a bad feeling that a bunch of street kids won’t be able to take them a second time.”

“Not without somebody else on our side, like the FBI,” Twist said. “Those are the kinds of options we have to explore. We have
to be old grown-ups now. Talk to the right people—if there are any right people.”

“What if there aren’t?” Shay asked.

“Well … then, I guess, the five of us—excuse me, hound, the six of us—take on the world.”

Shay had almost nothing, so packing took ten minutes. She got it all in her backpack and in a canvas tote bag that Emily gave her for X’s food, and she rode the elevator with X and Emily back up to the studio.

Twist already had a bag of clothing ready to go, and he was jamming art supplies into a valise. Cade’s computer was gone, along with all the attached equipment.

Twist: “You ready?”

Shay nodded.

“Back in a second.…” Twist disappeared into his room and returned a moment later and handed her a wad of cash. “Two thousand,” he said. “That’s the first of the payments due on the posters. I owe you another eight thousand or so, but you’ll have to wait.”

“I can wait,” she said. “This is the most money I’ve ever touched at one time.”

“You may need it. Everybody needs to carry cash. Until this gets straightened out, credit cards are forbidden.”

“I’ve never had a credit card,” Shay said.

“Good. Also, shut down your cell phone. I’ll ask Cade, but we might need to pull the batteries out of them too.”

Shay peeled off several hundred dollars and handed it to Emily. “Gets us square for all the clothes and the damaged stuff in your room.”

Emily put up her hands, refusing the money. “You might need it, and I’m okay. You’re still my roommate.”

Cade came in, carrying a green army-style duffel bag and a big computer briefcase. “I’m all set.”

Twist asked him about the cell phones, and Cade agreed that they should pull the batteries. “When we need to use them, we’ll move away from wherever we’re staying, put the batteries back in, talk, and then pull the batteries again.”

“Sounds inconvenient,” Emily said.

“We’ll get prepaid phones, like the dope dealers use,” Twist said. “We’ll use those to stay in touch with people we trust. Not smartphones—just phones we can talk with, without any GPS features.”

“Maybe a couple of phones apiece,” Cade said.

“Good thought,” Twist said.

Shay asked, “Where are we going?”

“Show you when we get there,” Twist said. He looked at his watch: 10:00 p.m., and they still had a couple of stops to make. “Let’s go. Cruz is waiting.”

“I’ll meet you. I gotta stop in the lobby,” Shay said.

Twist: “What for?”

Shay: “My knife.”

They loaded everything into the back of Twist’s Range Rover, and then Twist spent a few minutes talking with Lou and Catherine about the hotel. He told them to call 911 if the hotel came under attack again. “Tell the kids if those thugs come back, to run for it. Just get out. If they come back, they’ll be ready for anything we could fight them with.” He told them to leave the knife drawer locked.

Emily pulled Shay into an embrace. “You’ll be back,” she said with all the confidence she could muster. “Your brother can live here too.”

Shay nodded, then suddenly thought of something. “What time is it?” she asked.

Emily checked her watch. “Almost ten-thirty. Why?”

“Because in ninety minutes my big brother turns eighteen.”

Cruz drove, with Twist in the passenger seat, Cade, X, and Shay in the second row.

“First stop is the Avenues,” Twist said.

“I don’t know what that is,” Shay said.

Cruz looked at her in the rearview mirror. “It’s where I grew up. I called a couple of friends. They’re going to make sure nobody is following us. I mean, maybe they could follow us in a helicopter, but they won’t be behind us on the street. Or ahead of us.”

“Helicopter isn’t likely. Maybe a bug on the car,” Cade said.

“I got that covered,” Cruz said.

The Avenues was an area northeast of the Los Angeles downtown. Shay couldn’t see much of it because of the dark; she knew they were on the 110, because they drove past the building she’d swung
down. Five minutes north of downtown, they got off the freeway and headed into a neighborhood of small houses and lots of chain-link fences.

Cruz knew where he was going, and after taking a half-dozen turns, he pulled into a driveway and then under a carport. Cruz said to Twist, “Fifty bucks.”

Twist dug the money out and gave it to him, and Cruz said, “Just hang here,” and he got out of the truck as another man came out of a one-story house with bars on every window and door. Cruz and the man hugged, and then the man got something that looked like a broomstick with a long electrical wire trailing out the back, plugged it in, and began crawling around the truck.

Three minutes later, he was back on his feet. He and Cruz spoke for another minute, then Cruz handed him the cash and waved at Twist, telling him to get out of the truck.

Twist got out, spoke to Cruz and the other man briefly, then climbed into the driver’s seat and said, “No bugs.”

“Who was that guy?” Cade asked.

“Cruz says he’s the neighborhood cleaner. Sometimes the cops put trackers on people’s cars,” Twist said, and backed out of the driveway. “He has a little business, spotting them and taking them off.”

“Cruz …,” Shay said. He was standing in the headlights, watching them go. Their eyes hooked up, and she felt her heart lurch.

“He’ll get a ride back to the hotel,” Twist said. “Tomorrow he’s going to buy a truck, so we’ll have a backup, if we need it.”

“Where are we going now?” Shay asked.

“A twenty-four-hour Walmart to buy telephones,” Twist said. “There’s one on the other side of I-10. And then, Malibu, here we come.”

“Malibu?” She’d heard of it. Everybody had. “Isn’t that for movie stars?”

“Exactly,” Twist said.

The Walmart was a twenty-minute stop. Then they rolled across the city on a welter of surface streets and freeways, and finally down a long slope to the Pacific Coast Highway.

Shay hadn’t been to the L.A. waterfront—the whales had come ashore farther north—and she hadn’t known what to expect. What she hadn’t expected was that the famed, star-studded beach town of Malibu, at least after dark, would look like a bunch of elbow-to-elbow shacks with garage doors inches from the highway.

Twist said he’d been to the house they would be staying at a few times, but a lot of the places looked the same. He used one of the new phones to call ahead, and when he got to about the right place, he slowed down, looking for an open garage door and a mailbox shaped like a porpoise.

“There,” Cade said, pointing.

“That’s it,” Twist said. He signaled the turn, then cut across oncoming traffic and into the lighted garage. A man was standing on a set of steps at the back of the garage, and as soon as they were in, the garage door came down. They got out next to a black sports car—Shay didn’t recognize the model, but it looked exotic and expensive—and a customized candy-apple-red Ducati motorcycle that Cade did recognize: “Sweet. A Monster 1200.”

The man stepped up to them with a snarly grin.

“On the run, eh?” he said with a hint of an Irish accent, and bumped fists with Twist.

“Sean. Thank you.”

“Come on in, I’ll show you how to operate the place.” He looked at X. “Nice dog.”

X growled at him, and Shay said, “Easy.”

The house had a glass-walled living room overlooking the ocean, with a museum-quality Twist cityscape on one wall. A galley kitchen was on the street-side wall, along with a library filled with art books and a glass case protecting a collection of old Zippo cigarette lighters, most of them with military insignias. There were three bedrooms on a second floor and a circular staircase that went to the roof, where there was a deck with folded beach umbrellas.