Uncaged (13 page)

“Acrophobic lamppost,” he said. “If I remember right from the fire marshal, it’s six steps to the roof, so go ahead and get set up. If you need any help, I’ll send someone. Otherwise, I’ll be waiting for you on the ground.”

“Got it.”

“One other thing—”

The Cat in the Hat looked at her, suddenly serious, and in his expression, Shay felt something almost … parental.

“Twist,” she said, “I won’t kill myself.”

He gave her a small salute and turned to leave. “See you down there.”

“Momentarily,” Shay said to his back, then turned and climbed the fire escape. Stepping onto the roof, she startled some pigeons into flight. The birds landed a few feet farther along the roofline and went back to hunting and pecking their way through an insulating layer of white gravel. Tangles of old cable wires ran in all directions, and swarming yellow jackets moved in and out of a nest that was
growing on the rim of a satellite dish. The whole roof smelled of hot tar.

Shay looked down and caught Emily’s wave. Emily was only vaguely interested in the climbing; she was much more interested in the climbing outfit she’d styled for her from her ragbag, which was a turquoise tank and formfitting indigo-wash stretch jeans.

It was now six o’clock, and a scrim of smog on the horizon kept Shay from seeing the Pacific to the west.

On a clear day, Twist said, she should be able to see the Santa Monica Pier and the rugged Malibu coast beyond. To the southeast, much closer in, Shay got her first look at the downtown skyline and found it, for a city built on theatrics, pretty boring: a basic bar graph of ten or twelve rectangular skyscrapers and one standard-issue sports arena. Somewhere out there was the building they were targeting.

Somewhere out there was Odin.

Focus.

Shay looked around for an anchor and found one on a steel support leg for the building air conditioner. She wrapped one of her nylon tie straps around the steel leg, slipped the rope through the tie-strap loops, tested it for strength—the air conditioner it was supporting probably weighed five tons, so strength was not a problem. She tied into the rope, then carried it to the edge of the building and dropped it over.

On the ground, fifteen kids from the hotel, along with Dum and Dee, were looking up at her. She waved, and saw Twist emerge from the building. He turned to look up, and she smiled to herself: time to prove the girl from Oregon did have some useful skills.

Stepping boldly onto the parapet, Shay put her weight on the
rope, turned away from the crowd, and stepped backward into air until first her right boot and then her left found their spots on the coarse stucco wall. Relaxing into her harness, she began “walking” down the wall.

Nice and easy, that was her plan. Don’t scare Twist with Spider-Man speed, just take a leisurely stroll down his building. As she passed a window on the fifth floor, a girl watching TV locked eyes with her in shock; Shay waved as she descended out of view.

She was almost to the bottom when she glanced down and saw a scrum of boys waiting for her with raised arms. Twist had assigned spotters?

She swung right to avoid the intercept, but the boys moved with her, and suddenly one of them was pulling her down into his arms.

“Gotcha,” the boy said, as though she needed rescuing. He was a tough-looking Latino kid, with a swirl of black ink peeking out from the collar of his T-shirt.

“Put me down!” Shay protested, and pushed against his hold on her rib cage. “C’mon, let go!” He set her down like he might plunk down a shovel, and she angrily backed away.

Twist limped over and said, “That was brilliant.”

“What are these guys doing?” Shay snapped at him. “If I’d fallen, I would have hit them like a meteor. Did you think they were going to catch me?”

“Ah … I don’t know what I was thinking,” Twist said. “It just seemed like a good idea.” He looked up the face of the building, then back to her. “But you’re right. You came down fast.”

“No, I came down slow, because I didn’t want to scare you,” Shay said. “I can come down fast if you want me to.”

Twist nodded at her confidence. “Good. The building tonight is nearly twice as high. Does that make a difference?”

“It’ll take longer to get down, but that’s it. A rope’s a rope. After you get thirty feet off the ground, height doesn’t matter anymore. You fall, you die.”

“That doesn’t worry you?”

“No, because I know what I’m doing.” Shay was pulling down the rope, and when the far end of it slipped free of the nylon loop on the roof, she said, “Watch it!”

The rope fell at their feet and she began gathering it in, looping it around her arm. When it was neatly tied, she asked, “We good?”

Twist laughed and then nodded. “We’re good. By the way, meet Cruz—I’ll let him apologize for plucking you out of the air like a beach ball. He’s going with us tonight.”

Cruz nodded at her, maybe annoyed at her reaction to his help. He had a thick wedge of glossy black hair and dark, unreadable eyes. He was standing next to Cade, shorter than Cade by a couple inches, but more muscular, with wide shoulders and square hips. He was dressed in a Dodgers shirt and neatly pressed jeans.

“I apologize for listening to Twist. That won’t happen again,” he said. A little smile now, and Twist didn’t tell him to shut up.

Cade leaned toward Cruz, looking at Shay as she turned away from them, and muttered,
“Esta bien pechocha.”

Cruz said,
“Olé.”

Shay caught it, turned back, looked from one to the other, and said, “What did you say?”

Cade shrugged with mock innocence and translated: “ ‘The barn is painted red’?”

Shay said, “Careful,” and walked away.

The demonstration done, the group trailed back into the building. In the lobby, the kid behind the desk said, “Hey—you in?”

“I’m rooming with Emily,” Shay said.

“Don’t sniff too hard, you’ll get an antique up your nose,” the kid said. He held up an index finger, meaning
Wait one
, dug in his desk, and came up with a sheet of paper. “The rules.”

“The rules.” She glanced at it, found a short list, like the Ten Commandments.

“Yeah. Violate the rules, and there is one penalty,” the kid said. “You’re out on your ass.”

“Okay …”

“He’s not kidding,” Emily said.

Emily led the way to the interior stairs, and as they climbed them, she explained that at one time, the Twist Hotel Rules hung in the lobby, but the adults who wandered in—cops, social workers, city inspectors, insurance agents—couldn’t handle the implications. Now newcomers got a flyer when they checked in.

Shay ran through the rules:

As a foster kid, Shay understood them instantly: they were pure crowd control.

“We’re lucky we can have the Internet,” Emily said as they paused on a burgundy-carpeted landing. “Twist’s afraid that it’s turning us all into zombies and porn perverts and celebrity worshipers. In his dreams, we’d all be reading art history or knitting bottle warmers for Third World babies.”

She had been living at the hotel for almost two years, Emily said as they headed up the stairs again.

“Can’t even have a boyfriend, huh?” Shay said. She’d never had time for a serious boyfriend. There had been two possible candidates in Eugene. So much for that.…

“Depends on how you define
boyfriend
,” Emily said. “I asked about the no-sex thing, and Twist said he didn’t have anything against sex, but when you start allowing sex on the premises, the boys start fighting, the girls start feuding, and the whole place gets crazy. And if somebody is underage, it could bring in the cops. The same thing with drugs. It’s crazy enough without that stuff. He says the one big basic rule is, nothing that makes the place crazier. If you do stuff that attracts the cops, like Cade did today, it makes the place crazier.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Shay said. “Actually, it makes sense.”

“Well … until you fall in love. Real love,” Emily said. “Then you might want to get together with somebody. If that happens … Twist will kick you out. He can be a mean little bastard. He just won’t take the hassle.”

“Why does he do it at all?” Shay asked.

Emily shrugged. “Supposedly, he was a street kid himself. That’s
pretty much the sum total of what anyone knows. Oh, and that he sells those paintings up in his studio for about a million dollars.”

“A million dollars?”

“Okay. Not a million, but a lot,” Emily said. “When he got rich, the story is, this place was a flophouse, and he bought it with the idea that he was going to build free studios for street artists. Instead, it got taken over by kids.”

“Except that he still makes the rules,” Shay said.

“Yup, and keeps the twins around to enforce ’em, if they need to.”

The twins …

Shay had seen what they were capable of in a dark alley against a couple of knife-wielding thugs. She wasn’t sure how she felt about running into them in a hallway on her way to brush her teeth. “So … are people around here afraid of them?”

“No, they’re not bad guys, as far as I can tell,” said Emily as they walked out on the fifth floor. “A little strange, but that’s no big thing around here. I’ve never heard either of them talk. They’re musicians. Trumpets, the Tweedle Brass. They’re the house brass at the Bridge, this hot studio over in Glendale.”

Shay shook her head. “Stranger and stranger,” she said.

Emily stood up, stretched, and said, “Listen, I’ve got to work. I found three little paintings today, on copper, a Western artist. I paid eight dollars each. I’ve seen the painter’s name before. I need to look him up.”

When Emily had gone, Shay got her laptop and walked out to the Tea Leaf. She’d decided against using the hotel’s Wi-Fi, because the address might be tracked.

She got an iced tea, took it to a table, went online, checked Odin’s Facebook account, and found it empty. Went to her
SEND
page and dropped yet another note, telling Odin where she was. Why didn’t he call her? Was Rachel isolating him?

What if he’d been hurt?

She turned away from that thought and spent some time considering Twist and his hotel. She Googled him and found six thousand entries under “Twist, artist,” mostly copies and recopies of gallery schedules and show announcements. There were a few stories from newspapers and magazines about his social activism and his social style of painting. She found no indication of a first name—or, for that matter, a real last name.

Twist
was apparently it.

Odd. Judging from the kids she’d seen around, and their independent attitudes, she thought Twist was probably all right. But definitely odd. When she’d exhausted the online Twist research, she packed up her laptop and headed back to the hotel. As she was crossing the lobby, having nodded to the desk kid, she spotted Catherine, the woman who ran the kitchen. “Twist said you might have a job for me?”

“There’s already a waiting list,” Catherine said. “But it’s Twist’s call. I’ll ask him. Give me a couple minutes.”

Shay dropped into one of the beat-up overstuffed lobby chairs to wait. Cruz came through the door carrying a bundle of six long boxes bound together with tape. He looked around, took off his sunglasses, walked over, put the bundle down. The bundle hit with a thunk—it was heavy. “You ready for the big show?”

“I will be,” she said. “I’m waiting to see if I’ve got a kitchen job.”

He grimaced and dropped into the next chair. “If you gotta do it, you gotta do it. I did. It’s bad. You always smell like a stewed tomato. Even when they’re not stewing tomatoes.”

“What do you do now?” Shay asked.

“Twist found me a job on a golf course. Five in the morning until eight,” Cruz said. “I cut the greens, mow the fairways. Then I go to school. One more year.”

“I don’t know about golf,” Shay said.

Cruz said, “Neither do I—I know about cutting greens and mowing fairways. Seems weird, chasing a little white ball around, but a lot of rich people do it. Movie stars and stuff, and they take it seriously.”

She waited for Cruz to ask where she was from, but he never asked, nor did he ask why she was on the street. Hotel etiquette? She wasn’t sure. He did say that he’d seen a sign for part-time help wanted in a car wash, but she shook her head and said, “I’d rather do the kitchen.”

“Gonna smell like a tomato,” he said.

“Better than smelling like a radiator,” she said.

Catherine came back, nodded to Cruz, and said to Shay, “I talked to Twist. He said you’ll be working up in the belfry, so you don’t need the kitchen.”