Uncaged (45 page)

“No doubt,” Thorne said. “He took one in the gut, but if they’d gotten him to the medical center … He was in shape.”

Sync slapped Thorne on the arm and said, “Good man. I’ll go talk to the police. You’ve got a heavy bonus coming your way. So does Jackson. I mean
heavy
.”

“I appreciate it, but I tell you, we’ve got to walk careful. We gotta get the basement cleaned out. If Shay Remby produces her brother, or this subject that they took out …,” Thorne said. He was talking so fast he was spitting. “Or if they just call the cops in the next fifteen minutes and say, ‘Look in the basement.’ We’re still out on the ledge.”

“We’ve got the PR people already working on it,” Sync said. “The goddamned Remby kids … Let’s go. Let’s go. Show me this cop I’ve got to talk to.”

“Confusion,” Thorne said. “Remember, everything is confused. We don’t know what, or why, or what’s going on. We want information from
them.…
”

Shay had no idea where the others were, but she remembered what Twist had said:
Get away from here
. She picked a freeway, the first one she came to, and turned onto it, hoping against hope that she’d spot the others.

She did not.

“We’ve got to find a place until we can get in touch,” Shay said to the dog.

She didn’t know how to work the Jeep’s nav system, but she fiddled with it, and when it came up, she found that she was back on I-5 and traveling south, back the way they’d come about a million years earlier—or a few short hours in real time. Back toward L.A.

The gas tank was half full. She wouldn’t make it to L.A.—she wouldn’t even try. She needed to find a place in the area, needed a place to think.

She especially had to think about West. What would he do, and what would the Singular people do with him? Would they make a deal? Could West claim that he’d been kidnapped? That seemed unlikely—he’d shot one of Singular’s guards.

If he was still conscious when the police got there, it was possible the authorities were already ransacking the lab, that it was all over, that Singular was going down.

In which case she should probably be calling the police, as should Odin, and the Asian woman with the wired-up brain …

She wouldn’t make a move until they were all back together, until she better understood what Singular had done to her brother and the people in those cells.…

Forty minutes after leaving the industrial park, Shay pulled off the freeway and into a travel center north of Stockton.

She pushed her hair down the back of her shirt, cinched the hoodie tight around her face, went in and got a coffee and two cinnamon rolls, carried them back out to the truck, fed one roll to X, and did an inventory.

West had left a soft leather briefcase in the back, and when she opened it, she found his wallet with a thousand dollars in cash, a laptop, an iPad, and an accessory hard drive, along with a lot of personal gear—sunglasses, pens and pencils, two notepads and a legal pad, two small digital recorders.

She turned the computer on, and the first thing that came up was a password request. She turned it back off—West would undoubtedly have an unbreakable password. The iPad, however, was unprotected, probably because there was nothing on it, but it had an active Internet link. She thought for a moment, then went out to GandyDancer, found nothing, then out to her Facebook link with Odin. Again, nothing. She left a message for Odin:

Where are you?

She had no idea where the others were, except that they had fled Sacramento. She went to Google Maps to look at the Sacramento area.

Twist would make the call, but how would he be thinking? She peered at the map for a moment, confused by the possibilities, then closed her eyes, let it work through her mind … opened them again and looked at the map.

He’d stay on the interstate highways, she thought—only one set of cops, the highway patrol, and no reason for the highway patrol to be curious. If they got off the interstate, they’d have to worry about local police as well.

So they’d probably stay on the interstate—but which one?

Back to the map: They could have taken I-80 southwest to the San Francisco Bay Area, or northeast toward Lake Tahoe and Reno, Nevada. Or they could have taken I-5 north to … nothing big until they got all the way back to Eugene. No, Eugene was unlikely—it was too far away, and there’d be too many people who could spot either her or Odin. I-5 south was also unlikely: nowhere large to hide, until they were all the way back to L.A., where hundreds of people knew Twist.

She looked back at the line of I-80 connecting Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Singular would have a lot of resources in the Bay Area. Maybe fewer in another state.

Reno? That seemed like the best bet, but who knew if Twist would use Shay’s kind of logic? They could all wind up under a bridge in Yuba City.

On an impulse, she checked for TV news stations in Sacramento and found a sketchy report of a shooting at a building in the River Park Industrial Zone. No details were available, but two men had been taken to UC–Davis’s trauma center.

Then her eyes snapped to her own name, drawn like a magnet: “Sacramento police are looking for two young so-called ecoterrorists, the brother-and-sister team Odin and Shay Remby, believed to be involved in a raid on a research lab in Eugene, Oregon, last month, in which a young woman was shot.”

Shay clicked on the link to the story’s continuation and found a photograph of herself taken by her last foster father, Clarence
Peters—her red hair hung around her shoulders like a wreath—and Odin’s senior yearbook photo.

She felt as though a hand had wrapped itself around her heart and begun to squeeze. The police were looking for her and Odin? What had Singular told them? What about West—hadn’t he told them what was happening in the basement laboratory? There was no hint of that in the TV report.

She fought down the panic. Now what? Nobody to talk to, no way to find out where the others had gone.

Hunted by the police …

She’d been with Twist when they’d located the no-questions-asked mom-and-pop motel the night before. She knew how to do that, how to look for a crummy motel. First she went back to the iPad, looked for a nearby chain drugstore. She found a Walgreens, drove there, and bought Clairol Nice ’n Easy hair color, a comb, and some shears.

A half hour later, she spotted the motel she wanted, a place where they wouldn’t call the cops about anything unless they found a body under a bed. The motel was much crummier than the mom-and-pop of the night before, this one with a rawboned desk clerk who suggested that she might qualify for a free room.

When she walked out of the motel two hours later, taking a stained towel and a long rope of red hair with her, she was a different person, not anything like the red-haired, camera-friendly Shay Remby who’d wall-crawled the building on the 110 or lit a new sign over Hollywood.

She looked like a punk, pale skin and chopped black hair, like somebody who should have a Tiny Terror guitar amp stowed behind the rough-looking black-and-gray wolf that sat beside her.

She got back in the Jeep and found a Starbucks. She didn’t go in; she could get the Wi-Fi from the parking lot.

This time, she scored.

On the GandyDancer site, an obscure statement:

The number on the curb plus 109
.

Obscure to everyone but Shay and Odin. When they were young teenagers, they’d temporarily lived in a house with a 666 address, the number of the beast. Odin had been amused; Shay had been vaguely frightened by it. Now she added 666 and 109 in her head and came up with 775. She Googled it and, along with a variety of other things, learned that it was the area code for Reno.

The fear that had clutched her heart released just a bit. But where was the rest of the phone number?

She went to her Facebook link with Odin and found another Odin-only line.

Add El Primo Primo to the following number …

There followed a seven-digit number. And El Primo Primo was 3,631, a number that had frightened Odin, as 666 had frightened Shay. Thinking about prime numbers was one of Odin’s pastimes, and 3,631 was a prime. It was also the ages of their mother and father when they’d died.

She added them, and now had a new seven-digit number to add to the area code she already had.

But no phone. The iPad had Internet access, but no voice capability.

Not a problem anymore, not in America, not if you have money in your pocket, and she had West’s wallet.

If she could just get them all back together, they could work this out: Odin, Twist, West, Cade, and Cruz. If they could just get back to the Twist Hotel.…

She drove north until she spotted a Best Buy. With a new phone in her hand, she punched in the number. It rang once, and then somebody picked up. Said nothing.

After a few seconds, Shay said, “Hello?”

“You coming, or are you gonna stand out there like a lamppost?”

The fear let her go, and she sagged into the phone.

Twist.

“I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.”

Lights. Everywhere.

She couldn’t believe it: they were staying at a shabby casino motel, under a two-story-tall pair of blinking red dice. GPS and a three-hour drive had gotten her to Reno, and now Twist, on the phone, guided her in. “We told them we had a handicapped woman and we needed to be on the first floor, somewhere quiet. We’re on the back of the motel, room seventy—look for the truck.”

The truck and Camry were parked side by side, and Shay fit into a slot next to them. She grabbed West’s briefcase from behind her seat, then leaned over and smooched X on the nose. “We’re back with the pack.”

Twist was waiting at the door; he took her in, said, “Good God, you’re so different. It’s like seeing the night after knowing the day.”

She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a hard squeeze, and she touched the faces of both Cruz and Cade as she went by, into the room, and knelt by the first of two twin beds, where Odin was sprawled on his back, his head up on two pillows. X came up and licked his hand. She asked, “How are you?”

“Better. Lots better,” Odin said. His voice was stronger. “They were trying to wear me out. They just about had me. Sleep is bringing me back.”

There was a high-pitched gasp, and Shay looked over at the other bed: the Asian girl was curled on her side, eyes closed, shaking uncontrollably.

To Odin: “What’s happening? Do you know?”

“I don’t know
why
, but I know it happens every few hours, then it just stops,” he said. “She says it feels like bugs are crawling through her body.”

“Bastards,” Shay said.

“She’s had it a lot worse than I have,” Odin said. “We’ve been talking about what to do.”

Shay stroked Odin’s arm and continued staring at the girl, thin as a stick figure in the gray hospital smock, chains around her waist, wrists, and ankles, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead to her quivering lips. And her head … all the wires. They had to get her out of there—but rescuing her wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

Twist was standing beside her now and Shay looked up at him and asked, “West—do we know how he’s doing? I saw a report that said two men were taken to a hospital—”

Twist shook his head.

“We have to find out,” she said. “He can testify against them, but—”

Twist placed a hand on her shoulder.

“He’s gone, Shay.”

For a moment, she didn’t understand. Couldn’t possibly fathom—he’d saved her brother’s life. He’d saved her own.

Shay stood up and Twist said, “His father’s done some interviews with reporters. Singular has put out a press release saying that they think he led some animal rights radicals in an attack on the lab. They said he may have helped organize the attack on the lab in Eugene too, that he may have been involved with them for a long time.
They’re saying that the Remby activists might have been involved in the raid, but they’re not sure of that.…”

Shay’s face was like a stone. “He’s dead. We know that for sure?”

“His father identified him. Said he didn’t know how West could have gotten tied up with radicals. Said he was a hero in Afghanistan …”

“He was shot in the legs, which wouldn’t kill him, and in the side—he believed he’d be okay if he got to the hospital,” Shay said.

“That’s not how it worked out,” Cruz said quietly.

Shay took a step back from the three men and said, “No. He’d been wounded before. He knew what he was talking about. They murdered him.”

“We can’t know that—” Twist said.

“Believe me. They killed him,” she said. “I owe them one dead man.” She looked at her brother and the shaking, mutilated girl. “More than that. They’ve got more than that coming.”

Twist: “Shay—”

She drew X to her side and said, “C’mon, boy, we’re gonna take a walk.”

As she stepped toward the door, Cade asked, “Where’re you going?”

“Ten minutes to walk my dog, okay?” she snapped, without making eye contact.

She grabbed a key to the room and the door slammed behind her. The men just looked at each other.