Uncaged (14 page)

“The belfry?”

“His studio,” she said.

“Am I supposed to go up?”

Catherine shrugged. “He didn’t say. Anyway, you’re not in the kitchen.”

She left and Cruz said, “Come on, I’ll take you up. I do his heavy
lifting.” He patted the bundles of boxes. “Fifty pounds of canvas rolls from Artist & Craftsman.”

Twist’s studio was buzzing. Cade and a serious-looking woman whom Shay hadn’t met were on their hands and knees, painting the huge canvas with house-painting brushes. They were both wearing paper coveralls. Twist worked at a side table, mixing paint in plastic buckets.

Another woman, older, gray-haired, used a five-inch needle to sew a sleeve in the top edge of the canvas. The sleeve would take two wooden rods that would support the canvas off the side of a building, like a flag hung vertically.

Four big fans stood around the edges of the canvas, blowing air across it.

As Shay and Cruz came in, Twist looked up from the paint table and said, “Ah. Cruz and Shay. Good. We can use more painters. There are coveralls in that box.”

The cartoon looked like a panel from an early comic book, in harsh, bright colors—yellow, blue, red, black, and white. The outlines that they’d drawn that morning were all labeled with the color they would be. Cade and the woman working with him had finished about a quarter of the visible canvas.

Cruz and Shay found paper painter’s coveralls that were more or less the right size—the choices were medium and extra-large—got brushes from Twist, and went to work.

The woman introduced herself as Lou and said, “I’m Twist’s executive officer.” She had a soft accent that Shay later found out was Ethiopian.

Twist said, “Lou runs the place. I tell her what I need done, and
she figures out how to do it without pissing off any more people than necessary.”

“Which ain’t easy,” Cade chipped in.

The paint, Twist said as they worked, was cheap, but still cost more than a thousand dollars. “We want the coat of paint to be thin, but we want complete coverage. Don’t slop it on. Thin coats. Thin.”

And he was fussy about the technique: “I have a reputation to uphold.” To Cade: “Slow down, slow down. Make smooth strokes. Smooth … Look at Lou.”

Lou said, “How can it affect your reputation? This is anonymous.”

“Anonymous, but everyone will know,” Cruz said.

They were a well-coordinated crew, familiar and friendly with each other, Shay realized.

Shay was working with a pail of yellow paint, blocking the outline of the cartoon woman’s body. After a while, Cruz said to Shay, “You’re pretty good at this.”

Cade: “You
are
pretty good.”

Twist: “Cruz, Cade. Just paint. Okay?”

“Just trying to be friendly,” Cade said.

“I know what you’re trying to be,” Twist said. “Do it on your own time.”

Shay smiled to herself and kept painting.

It was almost midnight when they finished. Twist said, “Not as bad as it could have been.”

“There’s a spot,” Shay said. She pointed to one of the center panels.

“Damn it,” Twist said. “Cade, can you reach in there?”

Cade stretched across one wet panel to reach into the center, with Cruz holding his belt in the back. Cade managed to dab at a white spot showing through a blue layer.

“Got it,” Cade said. He exhaled, as though done with heavy labor, and said to Twist, “Pay up.”

Twist said, “Yeah, yeah.”

He walked around the painting. The paint they’d used was thinned acrylic. With the fans playing across it, the paint had dried within minutes of being applied. Because the painting was so large, they’d had to roll one edge as soon as it was dry. They’d never seen the entire painted panel, all at once.

Twist said, “Is the Nazi armband big enough? We want that to really jump off the canvas.”

“With bosoms like that, you think anybody is going to look at the armband?” Lou asked.

Shay had noticed that Twist had changed the colors on the armband, which was now black with a red swastika, as she’d suggested.

Twist shook his head. “Without seeing the whole thing, it’s hard to judge the impact.”

Cade: “Look at this.” He went to the computer and punched a bunch of keys. Twist’s cartoon, Photoshopped over an image of the target building, popped up on the screen.

Lou whistled. “If it looks like that in real life, she’s really gonna be annoyed. I better check the hotel permits, in case she sics the health department on us.”

Shay: “Who is she again?”

“Ann Banks—the district attorney,” Twist said with a grin. “Man, this is good work, if I do say so myself.”

Cade said, “So pay up. C’mon. I want to spend the money before the cops come.”

Twist went off to the back room and Cruz asked Shay, “What are you doing next?”

Cade, before Shay could answer: “Probably sleeping, since we move out at three o’clock.”

Lou: “Not a bad idea if you’re planning to jump off a building on the end of a rope.”

Twist came back with an envelope full of cash and began passing it out. To Shay, he said, “Two hours doing the outlines, three hours getting the climbing gear, an hour, more or less, going up and down the building, four hours here, ten hours total, at eight dollars an hour. That’s a total of eighty.” He counted out eight ten-dollar bills and handed them to her.

“Thank you,” she said. Then, “Oh!” She dug into her hip pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “We got some deals. Here’s your change—two hundred dollars.”

Twist’s eyebrows went up. “Change? That’s a whole new concept.”

He paid off Cade and Cruz, told Shay that Lou was on a regular salary, and put the rest of the money in his pocket. He said, “We move at three a.m. Do not be late. Now everybody go away. I’ve got to think.”

Emily was in bed dozing, a three-year-old copy of
Cosmopolitan
folded over her chest, when Shay returned. Shay said, “I’m going to have to pay you for the clothes a little at a time.” She handed the girl fifty dollars: “Okay?”

“You have enough to live on?”

“For a few days,” Shay said. “I think I have a job with Twist, but I’m not sure. Nobody tells you anything.”

Emily said she got up at first light. “I go to flea markets all over the L.A. Basin. If you want the good stuff, you’ve got to move early.”

They turned the lights off and talked for a while. Emily was upfront about her life: her father, she said, abandoned her mother when Emily was less than a year old. She’d never known him, and had no inclination to find him.

Her mother had had drug and boyfriend problems, and still did. “She’s only thirty-four—she feels more like a sister than a mother, especially since she wouldn’t know good advice if it bit her on the leg. Her idea of good advice is to stay away from wine in cans.”

That made Shay smile, but she felt a touch of sadness at the same time. She didn’t talk about herself, not to Emily or anybody. All she said was that her parents had been killed in accidents, and that she and a brother had lived with their grandmother until she died.

“We wound up with Child Protection—that’s when I was nine and my brother was ten.”

“Brutal,” Emily said.

“Yeah. I try not to think about the past too much,” Shay said. “We’ve been in Social Services for so long it almost feels normal.”

Emily was quiet for a moment. Then, “At least your foster parents taught you a skill. How many people can climb up and down buildings?”

“That’s right,” said Shay. “Less than a week in L.A., and I’ve already got a gig.”

Eventually, they drifted off to sleep, and an odd peace seeped into Shay’s subconscious: she was safe, among friends. She could sleep without worrying about it.…

So she was startled when, two hours in, the phone alarm vibrated
against her chest. She was wearing a man’s shirt, a loan from Emily, with the phone in a breast pocket. She killed the vibration, swiveled her feet to the floor, and dressed in the dark. She found her comb and toothbrush, and made a five-minute bathroom run. Back in the room, moving as quietly as she could, she picked up her pack with the climbing gear.

Emily said in the dark, “Be careful, Shay. Do good.”

The group was meeting in the lobby, where a half-dozen sleep-deprived kids were still working the Net with their laptops.
Like an addiction
, Shay thought. Everyone arrived within a minute or so, and Twist, the last one down, said, “I had to go back up for the key. Let’s get the stuff off the dock.”

Twist drove a three-year-old black Range Rover that had never been washed by anything but rain. The large roll of painted canvas went in the back, along with two heavy bags of chains. The wooden support rods were tied to the roof.

One of the long pieces of chain, Twist told Shay, would be used to lock the door to the roof. Several short pieces would weight the bottom edge of the banner, to hold it flat down the side of the building. “You’ll see when we get there.”

There were four of them: Twist, Cade, Cruz, and Shay. They took the 101 Freeway east out of Hollywood. More than a few motorists were taking advantage of the light traffic and speeding along at
a hundred miles an hour or more. Twist drove a steady sixty-five: “The last thing we need is a speeding stop,” he said. “Remember that when you’re planning your next crime.”

They passed the exit to Dodger Stadium, shifted onto the 110 North, and continued to the cluster of buildings that made up the Los Angeles downtown area.

The route was complicated, but Twist knew exactly where he was going: he took an off-ramp, switched down a series of poorly lit streets, and pulled into a parking lot that lay almost under the freeway, next to a short white building that smelled like baking bread.

“Nice and dark,” Cade said as they unloaded the truck. The predawn air was cool, a break from the hot days and warm evenings.

“Won’t be for long,” Twist said, looking at his watch.

“I just hope your guy is here,” Cruz said. Cruz was carrying the massive canvas. Although the poster canvas was lighter, yard for yard, than the artist canvas Twist used for his studio paintings, there was so much of it that the roll forced Cruz into a painful stoop after he got it up onto his shoulders.

Cade carried the heavier of the two chain bags, and Twist carried the lighter one with his free hand. Shay handled her climbing gear and the two support rods—the rods were long and awkward, but not especially heavy.

The limp and the cane didn’t seem to slow Twist down. He led the way over a three-foot concrete wall at the end of the parking lot, then down a dirt path and along a hurricane fence that separated the bottom of the freeway from the private land on the other side. The warm odor of baking bread had gone away, to be replaced with the stink of a wet basement.

Their target was the Secox Building, a green-glass-and-steel box that virtually hung over the freeway. They’d walked the length of a
couple of football fields, Shay thought, when Twist turned and led them across a narrow service driveway toward the back of the target building. As they got close, he took out his cell phone and made a call.

Shay muttered, “I thought he didn’t believe in cell phones.”

Cade whispered back, “Only for the cause.”

Shay suddenly thought of Odin, and the raid on the animal lab that had put him on the run.
This is the same thing
, she thought: sneaking into a building in the middle of the night, doing what felt right, but with the possibility that everything could go wrong. She was amazed at how easily she’d been recruited into the whole scheme. She really didn’t have time to go to jail, get sent back to Oregon, and make her way to California all over again.

A door popped open in the side of the building and a Latino man in a Nike tracksuit was looking out at them. He looked nervous, but said, “Hey, man,” in a thoroughly L.A. accent, slapped hands with Twist, and led the way up.

Twelve floors.

“There’s gotta be a better way,” Cade groaned. “There’s this device called an elevator …”

“Three of them,” Twist said. “With devices called security cameras.”

Cruz had to stop halfway for a breather. Twist offered to help him carry the canvas, but the narrow stairway was too awkward for that. Cruz said he was okay, he’d caught women who were heavier than that. Shay said, “Hey, am not,” and after a minute, they started up again.

The stairway ended at a locked steel door. The Latino man pulled
a key out of his pocket, opened the door, gave the key to Twist, and said, “I’m outta here. Good luck.” He headed back down the stairs.

The roof door opened out of a concrete-block shed, little more than a box sitting in the center of the roof. To one side were a series of metal structures, ten or twelve feet high, that housed heating and cooling equipment. After they came out onto the roof in a light breeze, Twist led them to the space between the shed and the air-conditioning units.

“Our biggest problem is that somebody in one of the other buildings might see us and call the cops,” he said quietly.

Shay looked around: their building was one of the shortest in the area—thousands of windows looked down on them, although only a few were lit, and she couldn’t see anybody in those. In the space between the metal boxes and the shed, they were relatively hidden.

Cruz said, “We’ve got an hour before the sun comes up.”

It took half an hour to assemble the banner. The poles went in the top sleeve and were linked together with a piece of pipe and two bolts to make one long, stiff rod. Six lengths of rope were tied to the poles through holes in the sleeve. They’d been premeasured so they could be tied to ventilation ducts coming out of the roof. Six short lengths of chain, from Twist’s bag, had to be attached to the bottom of the banner to weigh it down and keep it from flapping if the wind kicked up.

The assembly would have been simple enough—in a lighted room. On the dark roof, it was more complicated. Twist had a flashlight, but was reluctant to use it—flashlights looked too burglarlike.

By the time they finished, light was leaking over the San Gabriel Mountains to the east, and the city was waking up. Traffic was heavier, and more windows were being lit with every passing moment.