Uncaged (11 page)

The kid said, “Ooooo …” but flashed her his best grin.

At the back of the building, Twist, Shay, and Cade walked by double doors that were swung open to a loading dock.

Three kids used hand trucks to move commercial-sized packages of food—sacks of flour and potatoes, rice, ketchup—down a corridor into what must have been the kitchen. Shay could smell the food being cooked, and the usual stinks that surround a food operation: old potato peels, a hint of rotten eggs.

Past the open doors, they stepped into another hallway and were facing a freight elevator. Twist lifted one door by a canvas strap, pushed the bottom door down, and they stepped inside. He pulled the doors shut and pushed a button marked
PH
. Penthouse? The
old machine groaned all the way to the top. Twist said, “Don’t worry, perfectly safe, guaranteed by the state,” and, halfway up, “I live here.”

Cade propped himself against the elevator wall between Shay and Twist and asked, “So … you new to L.A.?”

“Never mind,” Twist said.

“Hey, I was thinking I could show her around,” Cade protested.

“I know what you were thinking,” Twist said.

The top floor of the hotel was almost wide open, probably a hundred feet long and nearly as wide. One end was closed off with an interior wall: Twist’s living quarters, Shay guessed.

The other three walls were cut through with small windows, once the windows of hotel rooms. The ceiling was supported by vertical steel pillars, which were painted a flat, industrial gray.

Part of the roof had been removed and replaced with a glass skylight. Five oversized easels and three paint-spattered office chairs were positioned under the skylight, along with a long wooden table covered with jars holding paintbrushes, tubes and buckets of paint, and all the other detritus of a professional painting studio. Four of the easels had paintings under way, odd, twisted, but mostly realistic images of people on the streets of L.A.

To the left, as they entered, several desks were covered with computers and imaging equipment, including Epson and Canon digital projectors and an old Kodak slide projector. A half dozen couches and easy chairs were scattered around the floor, as were three sixty-inch television screens, stereo equipment with oversized speakers. In a long, open space between the painting area and the computer equipment, a huge piece of gray canvas tarp, the kind used to make tents, was partly unrolled on the floor.

Twist, Shay realized, was an artist.

Not a graffiti artist, but the kind who sold his work in galleries. Jones had told her that he was rich.…

A middle-aged Latino woman with a puffy face sat on one of the couches, watching an
Oprah
rerun on a sixty-inch television screen. She was wearing red stilettos and a pink housecoat over what appeared to be nothing else.

Twist said to her, “You can take off, Maru. I got the pose down, or close enough.” He took a couple of bills from his pocket and passed them to her. She took them, said, “Good luck tonight,” and clip-clopped across the room to a mirrored dressing screen, her ill-fitting shoes and thick ankles visible from the other side.

“We’re making a political poster,” Twist told Shay. “We’re going to hang it from the top of a building over the 110.”

“What’s the 110?” Shay asked.

“The freeway through downtown L.A., where the courthouse is,” Cade said.

Twist added, “We’ve got to go tonight. We’ve got the newspeople ready, we’ve got a guy who’ll let us inside, and he might be moving to a new job. So we gotta go. We climb up the stairs to the roof and hang the banner over the edge right after it gets light. The problem is, the building maintenance guys’ll tear it down in fifteen minutes. If the news choppers show up, we’ll get that exposure, but it’d be nice if we could keep it up there longer—you know, so the rushhour drivers can see it. Which is where you come in. If I believe you about the climbing.”

“What’s the poster?” Shay asked.

Twist walked over to the blank canvas and prodded the edge of it with his foot.

“The new L.A. County prosecutor is this hot ’n’ sexy publicity hound who’s trying to drive out the Latino illegals any way she can,” he said. “I’ve made a cartoon.…” Twist pointed at the canvas on the floor. “Digital Boy is supposed to be projecting it to scale so I can repaint it. It’s complicated because we don’t have enough room for a full projection, so we have to move the canvas under the projector.”

Cade had sat down at a computer desk, and by looking over his shoulder, Shay could see an on-screen cartoon that had been divided into small chunks for projection.

The cartoon showed a nearly naked comic-book female villain with large, globular breasts, pointing a .45 automatic at the back of the head of a kneeling immigrant figure whose hands were clasped in prayer. The figure was only
nearly
naked because she was wearing red stilettos and a red Nazi armband dominated by a black swastika.

“A very good likeness, if I do say so myself,” Twist said. “You have a problem with it? The politics?”

“No,” Shay said. “There was a girl in my class who’s lived here since she was two years old. She’s not really Mexican, but they’ll send her back if they catch her mother. She can’t even speak Spanish.”

“There you go,” Twist said. “It’s a disaster.”

“So why do I have to come down off the roof?” Shay asked.

“It’s the silliest thing, but we couldn’t figure it out,” Twist said. “We unroll the canvas down the side of the building and run for it. If we close the roof door from the inside, even if we lock it or chain it, they can use simple tools to reopen it—you know, a metal saw. If we could chain it up from the roof side, they couldn’t get at it. I mean, they could get at it eventually, but it’ll take a long time. But how do we lock it from the roof side and then get off the roof?”

Shay smiled. “Gotta go over the side.”

“That’s right,” Twist said. “That’s impossible for me. I get a nosebleed looking out a second-story window. Byte Boy isn’t any better.”

“I’m some better,” Cade said. “I don’t get the nosebleed until I’m up four floors.”

Twist said to Shay, “If I believe you about the climbing …”

“Get the equipment and I’ll climb up and down your building right here,” she said.

Twist studied her for another moment, then nodded. “Okay. Which means a trip to REI. I’m gonna put you in a room with a girl named Emily. One useful thing about Emily is that she has a truck. She’ll take you where you need to go.”

He turned back to Cade. “Cade, call Emily. Tell her to get up here.”

Cade said, “One minute. I’ve got the first segment coming up. Get the shades.” At the computer, Cade wasn’t the kid he’d seemed to be in the street: he was focused, efficient, intent.

Twist walked over to one of the pillars, which had a series of switches mounted on a metal panel. He began throwing switches, and blackout shades rolled down the windows and across the skylight. In less than a minute, the room was dark, except for the light from computer screens and the LEDs glowing on all the electronic equipment.

Cade tapped some computer keys and an overhead projector winked on, throwing one section of the cartoon onto the canvas.

“Let’s drag the canvas,” Twist said.

The canvas had been lightly marked into squares, and they moved it around until the projected fragment of cartoon precisely filled the upper-right square. Twist looked at it for a moment and made some minute adjustments. “That’s not terrible,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s, like, perfect,” Cade said.

Twist asked Shay, “What do you think?”

“Looks fine to me—except I would have made the armband black and the swastika red, instead of the other way around. That’d make the swastika pop more.”

Twist said, “Huh,” then walked over to the painting table and removed his bowler hat like a bullfighter flinging off his cape. It was the first time Shay had seen him bareheaded. His dark brown hair was combed back from his forehead in a slight pompadour and trimmed neatly around his ears and neck.

He picked up a jar full of new black Sharpies and, handing one to Shay, said, “You can help trace until Emily gets here. Cade, call Emily.” Then he plucked out a pen for himself, dropped onto his hands and knees, and went to work.

Tracing the cartoon wasn’t difficult, but the canvas was so large that it took time.

Cade had divided the original cartoon drawing into twenty-eight segments, then scaled them to perfectly fit the canvas when projected from the eighteen-foot ceiling. They’d trace one segment and then move the canvas and do another.

As they worked, Shay fended off casual-sounding questions from Cade about her background. She’d grown up in Eugene and been placed with foster parents when her mother died, she revealed, and little more. “I have one more year of school, but I can’t do it there,” she said.

“We can fix that,” Twist said. “Cade can come with you.”

Cade said, “Man … you know how I get along with schools.”

“It gets easier the further along you go,” Twist said. “Middle
school is the toughest. High school is easier. College is even easier, and grad school, I’m told, is a walk in the park.”

Twist stood and walked around the canvas, judging the transfer. “It’s gonna work, if Adobe Boy hasn’t messed something up; if it all fits.”

“It’ll fit,” Cade said. “Though if you’d spend a few bucks on decent equipment, it’d be easier.”

“Money, money, money,” Twist said. He sat back down and said to Shay, “Cade doesn’t look like it, but he’s a little rich kid. He’s used to the best equipment.”

“Really,” Shay said. She looked at Cade for a moment and then said, “I can see that. Probably belongs to a country club somewhere.”

“Thrown out of six private schools,” Twist said. “Been to summer school in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin … Madrid, I think.”

“Four schools,” Cade said. “And Istanbul.”

“Ran from the last school. A military school, where they teach kids to march. Showed up here with ten thousand bucks’ worth of computer and camera equipment in a stolen car.”

“Excuse me?” Cade said. “That’d be a stolen Porsche 911 4S.”

“I stand corrected,” Twist said. Back to Shay: “We got the Porsche back to the owner, and Cade’s been our computer guy ever since. He’s almost competent.”

“My brother’s a computer guy,” Shay said to Cade. “Kind of a genius, actually. You have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nada,” Cade said. “My parents realized one was too many and sent me off to boarding school when I was six. The only person who missed me was the nanny they fired.”

“Said his first word in Spanish,” Twist said to Shay. “The nanny was Guatemalan.”

“Yeah, I’m bilingual,” Cade said. “Of course, the schools all wanted French and Latin and screw the Spanish …”

Twist said, “Aw, you’re bringing a tear to my eye. Exiled to a resort for kids where they only taught you French …”

Cade lifted his head and said with a little chill in his voice, “You oughta quit now, Twist, because you’re talking out of your ass. You don’t know.”

After a moment of silence, Twist nodded and said, “You’re right.”

“Dude,” said Cade, and they continued working side by side, following the contours of the drawing with the Sharpies, throwing the pens into a garbage can when they ran out of ink.

They’d been working for forty-five minutes when the door opened and a chubby young woman with a severe black pageboy came in. She was wearing a frilly blouse open to show some cleavage, a short skirt, and white patent-leather boots. She was chewing gum.

“What’s up?” she asked Twist.

Twist, still tracing, said, “Emily—this is Shay. She’s your new roommate and she’s helping us out. She needs to get to Santa Monica to buy equipment for tonight. We wanna borrow your truck.”

“Sure, fifty cents a mile, no problem,” Emily said.

“You can take it out of your room rent, which I’m increasing fifty cents an hour,” Twist said.

“Like I said, I’m happy to provide the truck at no cost, ’cause you’re a pal,” Emily said.

Twist looked at Shay. “You can take off. This’ll be done in ten minutes.”

“That’s okay,” Shay said. “I’ll stay until it’s done.”

Twist pitched an empty pen over his shoulder and said, “In case you didn’t understand, I’m paying you to go get the equipment.”

“Oh.” She sat back on her heels.

Twist stood up and fished some bills out of his hip pocket. “Here’s five hundred. I want to see some change.”

As he handed it to her, Shay said, “Money, money, money,” mimicking his comment to Cade. Cade snorted and Twist himself laughed.

“C’mon, roomie,” Emily said, motioning Shay to her feet. “Time’s money.”

“Money, money, money,” Cade said.

They walked out to the staircase, and as they pushed through the fire door, Emily’s eyes cut toward Shay. She sniffed, and Shay caught it.

“I know,” Shay said. “I need a shower.”

“We’ve got time for a shower. I’ll dig you up some clothes, and we can get rid of those.”

Shay looked down at herself. “Get rid of them? What’s wrong with them? I know I need to find a Laundromat.…”

Emily said, “You look like a lumberjack, sweetie. You see a forest outside?”

“It’s the way I dress,” Shay said.

“That can be fixed,” Emily said. “You just have to concentrate.”

Down the hall on the fifth floor. Unlike most of the rooms, 510 still had its original silver-plated numbers.

“Home, sweet home,” Emily said with a grin.

She pushed the door open and Shay’s heart sank. The room looked like the back end of a loaded U-Haul, stuffed almost floor to ceiling with … everything.

“It’s the only suite on the floor, with this sitting area,” Emily said with pride, despite the fact that there was no place to sit. “Wangled it out of Twist a few months ago ’cause, well, I needed the space for my business.”

“Cool,” said Shay in the most neutral voice she could muster. “What’s your business?”

“I’m a picker. I go around to estate sales and flea markets and find stuff that’s more valuable than it looks. I sell it to people who can sell it for even more. Antique shops and so on,” Emily said. “The sucky economy means there are tons of great scores out there.”