Uncaged (36 page)

Twist put a hand on Shay’s shoulder, then turned away from her, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. He turned back and said, “If they are really, really smart, they sent that first message to set you up, and the second one to pull you in.”

Cruz shook his head. “No. I think he’s straight.”

Twist said, “Tell me why.”

“Because he tells us to go with the action, and no matter what, Singular wouldn’t want the action. The second thing is, if it’s a trap, it’s too easy to avoid. If they’re professionals, they’d know that. They’d be trying something more complicated than ‘Let’s meet,’ and then leaving it up to us.”

Twist: “That’s not entirely convincing. Telling us to go with the action might mean they think they can handle it. At the same time, it makes us believe that West is being straight with us.”

Shay: “But you know what? I get an answer to him, tell him that I’ll meet him. Me. Like a scared teenager. Set up a meeting in a place where they can’t hide anybody. Then Cruz and Twist actually meet him … and you guys make an evaluation. Be lie detectors—figure out if he’s lying to us.”

Cruz nodded. “There’d be no reason for them to try to grab us. You’re the one they want.”

“Except that grabbing you would give them a bigger hammer over me,” Shay said.

Twist said, “We could handle a meeting, I think. We just have to be smart about it—we need to talk it over some more.”

Given Singular’s official response, Shay knew they wouldn’t hear from Odin, and they didn’t.

They finished the last of the preparations for the sign action shortly after noon, and at two o’clock, Dum and Dee, the “movie crew,” showed up in a van to pick up all the gear. Shay gasped when she saw Dee: his face was one large bruise.

She went to him and asked, “Are you okay?”

He nodded and managed a thin-lipped smile, but he looked like he hurt, and she gave him a long, tight hug. When she backed away, he waved his arms, almost like Odin, and said in a high-pitched voice, “I’m … okay.”

The first words she’d ever heard him say. She turned to look at Twist, who shook his head and said, “One hug and he makes a speech. Hard to believe.”

Dum and Dee had scouted Mount Lee and picked out a site where they could stash the equipment. They put “Hollywood sign” in Google Maps and zoomed in on the mountain. The satellite view showed the dirt trails leading up the hill like a spider’s web, and individual clumps of brush.

“Not many people walk directly up the face of Mount Lee, though there’s actually a couple of old trails,” Twist said, tapping the map on his computer screen. “Most hikers come up the back road to the TV tower. That’s how Dum and Dee will get in, except they’ll be driving. They’ll wrap all the gear in a couple of tarps and leave it in the bush here. Off to the left of the letter H”—he tapped the screen again—“which is inside the fence. The fence is only along the road, above the sign. You’ll walk up from the bottom, where there is no fence.”

“How steep is that? Going up?” Shay asked.

“It’s steep, but it’s not climbing like you know it. You can walk up. But it’ll be dark. You’ll need your headlamps. Keep them on the red light, it’ll be enough to see.”

After Dum and Dee left, they were all restless, feeling cooped up, on edge about what they were going to do that night. Cade and Cruz decided to check out a commotion on the beach involving a couple of big video cameras, a wedge of paparazzi, and three young women in bikinis romping along the water’s edge. Shay and Twist got Diet Cokes and climbed up to the rooftop deck.

They talked about West, about the depth of his obligation to Singular for his legs. She told Twist about the college professor who had tried to extort sex from West’s sister, and West’s reaction—running the professor out of the country.

That made Twist smile, and he said, “I’d probably like the guy … but I still can’t trust him.”

Shay said, “Okay,” and the conversation drifted for a while, and they talked about Eugene, where Twist had never been, and the street culture there, and the kids at the hotel.

Finally Shay said, “You know, you have all these worries and questions about West. I’ve sort of wondered about
you
. Some of the same questions. Actually, even more questions. I know why West was working for this company, why there’s loyalty there, but I don’t understand what you’re doing at all.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust me?”

Shay said, “That’s not it. I just have questions.”

Twist said, “I answer only a limited number of questions. I’m pretty private.”

“Except, of course, you’ve got about seventy runaways who you’re involved with, which is pretty unprivate,” Shay said.

“I rent them space,” he said. “Like I told you on the first day, sooner or later, you have to pay.”

“That’s not true,” Shay said. “I haven’t been there long, and I’ve already met at least ten kids who’ve never been able to pay anything, and never will be able to.”

“Give me their names, I’ll kick them out.”

“You know their names, and you won’t kick them out,” Shay said. “I understand, just from the rumors about you, that you spent some time on the street yourself, and now you’re rich, so you decide,
Okay, I’ll help out
. A lot of rich people do something like that. Maybe not so hands-on.… But why have you gotten involved with
me
, and my problems? You’re not required to save me—but here you are.”

“What’s this thing you’ve got about sharing stories?”

“I don’t want to know that your mom didn’t nurse you long enough; I just want to know why you’re doing this.”

After a long time, Twist said, “Because a lot of what’s happened is my fault. I needed to use you, for my immigration action, and I did. You made that about a hundred times better than it would have been. Then you were famous, and Singular was able to track you. Because they could track you, they found your brother and they took him. My fault.”

“Not entirely your fault,” Shay said. “I could have said no.”

“Really? You’re on the street and you’re desperately looking for your brother, and a guy offers you a safe place to stay and some money for one easy job? I don’t think you could’ve said no. Now it’s come to this.”

“Okay, it’s all your fault,” Shay said with a forgiving grin.

“Aside from that, I hate what these guys are doing,” Twist said. “Experimenting on people? Discarding them.… And what are dogooders for if they don’t take on assholes like Singular? As far as your brother goes, I think they ought to give him a friggin’ medal.”

Shay nodded and said, “Thank you. I’d like to know how you got this way, but if it’s private.…”

“You know what I always say.”

“I do,” Shay said, and together they intoned, “Let’s not overshare.”

Cade and Cruz came back, amused by the sighting of a movie star who’d been arrested for impaired driving the week before—
impaired
meaning by both alcohol and a variety of illegal drugs—and was apparently trying to reinflate her healthy All-American Girl image by splashing around in the surf with two carefully chosen girlfriends, carefully chosen to be slightly less attractive.

The rest of the afternoon and early evening featured a series of what-ifs: What if they were seen going up the hill? What if somebody else was at the sign? What if something happened and Twist couldn’t pick them up after they fled the sign site? What if a police helicopter came before they could light the letters?

Nobody said it, but everybody thought it: what if the action was futile because Odin was already dead?

Late in the afternoon, Dum called and said that the equipment had been delivered and was waiting in the designated bush.

“He said all that?” Shay asked.

Twist said, “Actually, what he said was ‘Done.’ ”

“Remember the sequence, everything is packed in sequence,” Twist said about six times. “As soon as you get there, get to the equipment bundles.”

He ran through the rest of the action until Shay waved him off. “We got it, Twist. We got it.”

“What if there’s a cop with a dog?” Cade asked.

“Not a problem, depending on how fast or slow you are,” Shay said.

Cade looked perplexed. “What?”

“If there’s a dog, all
I
have to do is outrun you,” Shay said. “If I can do that, not a problem.”

Cade said, “Hey!”

Cruz laughed and said to Cade, “I can outrun you too, hombre.”

At eight o’clock, Twist asked, “What do you think? Are we gonna do it?”

“I think so,” Cade said, and Cruz nodded.

“Yes. We’re gonna do it,” Shay said, looking around at the other three, catching their eyes one at a time. “Let’s load up.”

They were quiet as they drove across town, fiddling with equipment. They each had a hunter’s headlamp, bought at a gun store, that offered a choice of red or white LED lights. The red lights would allow them to see, but would be less visible than white lights to anyone else on the mountain.

They were all dressed in indigo jeans and dark shirts and had daypacks between their legs. Shay’s and Cruz’s had their climbing gear, leather gloves, and one-liter water bottles, and Cade’s had water, gloves, electrical tape, and a couple of pairs of pliers in case an emergency fix-it with the wiring was needed.

They’d talked about whether they should take X, and X had sensed it and stuck close to Shay’s leg all evening, and they finally voted that X would go: he’d be no more visible than the average coyote, and there were lots of those around.

And who knew—he might provide a warning of a possible encounter with others on the hill.

Shortly after nine o’clock, they climbed a narrow road to a hairpin curve and a steep patch of dirt feeding into the trail that led up the mountain to the sign. They were in a residential neighborhood, and might be seen—a chance they had to take.

They drove past the trailhead once, looking it over. Everything seemed clear.

“Bug spray, packs, headlamps,” Twist said. “I’ll find a place to turn around.”

When they came back, he paused at the trailhead and they piled out. They didn’t slam the doors, but barely and silently latched them. The SUV’s door alarms would buzz at Twist for a while, but he’d wait until he was away from the mountain before he stopped to close the doors tightly.

As the Range Rover rolled on, the three of them looked up the hill. They knew they were at the right place, but could see nothing of the unlit sign.

“Red lamps,” Shay whispered, and they started up the hillside, pulling on their gloves, packs on their backs, with Shay and X in the lead.

There was a house down and to their left with lights in the windows, but they saw no movement, heard no voices, and in a few seconds, the dirt path had narrowed to little more than a game trail through the brush, the tan earth barely visible in the red light from the headlamps.

The preparations had been intricate, although simple enough in outline. They had glued long ropes of powerful LED Christmas lights
between clear sheets of plastic like painters used to cover furniture, but thicker. The electrical connections for the lights were all located at the bottom of the sheets. At the top of each sheet, a wooden pole was glued into a sleeve, with hooks at both ends.

Shay and Cruz would climb the backs of the letters, which were flat sheets of white-painted metal supported by scaffolding, with maintenance ladders going to the top. At the top, they’d stretch a cable across each letter and clip the two ends of the cable onto the brace bars at the sides of each letter. To do that, they’d have to toe-walk on the scaffold bars, which were only inches wide, and forty feet above the ground.

The cables, which they had precut, had carabiners wired to their centers. When each cable was in place, Cruz and Shay would drop lift lines to the ground through the carabiners, which would act as pulleys.

Once all the lift lines were ready, Shay, Cruz, and Cade would begin to lift the new letters into place.

While Shay and Cruz were attaching the cables and pulleys to the top of the sign, Cade would be moving the plastic lighting bundles into place under the sign and stringing the electric wires needed to connect the overlaid letters to a compact Honda generator.