Uncaged (37 page)

They’d had two more complicated problems to work through.

The first was that if the police arrived shortly after the sign was turned on, the cops could quickly kill it by pulling the connection to the generator. The goal was to keep the sign lighted for news cameras as long as possible. Twist’s solution was inspired by art.

“Back when electronic art was big, a guy here in Los Angeles came up with a sculpture that involved bent glass rods coming out of a light box. When you turned it on, it looked like lightning strikes,” Twist said. “We’ll put those under the sign, and when you
get close, it’ll look like high-voltage lightning is shooting through the brush under the sign. The cops won’t mess with it until they can get a specialist electrician up to look at it … or until the gas runs out on the generator.”

The second problem was how to keep the police away from the sign long enough for Shay, Cade, and Cruz to get the letters up and working. Twist had an answer for that too. The road to the top was blocked with a locked steel gate at night. Twist would drive to the gate and simply add his own lock—a heavy chain with a massive padlock designed to defeat bolt cutters.

“Simple, but effective,” Cade said.

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this action for years,” Twist said. “I just hadn’t thought of anything I really, really needed to say.”

As Shay, Cruz, and Cade climbed the hill, Twist found a place to park in an affluent neighborhood where the Range Rover would feel at home. Shay would call when they were ready to start lifting the letters, and then he’d go up the hill with his gate chain.

Everything was on the clock. They had a maximum of forty-five minutes to climb up to the sign, thirty-five to forty minutes to scale the nine letters, secure the plastic sheeting, set up the lightning boxes, and, with fifteen minutes left before L.A.’s eleven o’clock news, flip the switch on the generator—

And run.

The climb was a tough one: Mount Lee was a mountain, but a mountain of rough dirt with embedded rock fragments. They could walk, mostly, but at a few washouts, they had to go to all fours.

X turned out to be a gift: he was visible in the red light and moved slowly ahead on his leash, picking out a route. He seemed to sense where they wanted to go, and he sniffed at the air and turned and watched and led the way up.

The night was warm, and they were all sweating in their long sleeves and long pants. They stopped twice to drink from their water bottles, looking down at Hollywood below them, the lights stretching away across the Los Angeles Basin, with an inky spot below and to the west: the Hollywood Reservoir. Lavender, sage, and eucalyptus scented the air. There was little traffic noise; they could hear a couple of horses whinnying back and forth at a stable half a mile away.

They had one encounter on the way up: the ghostly flash of a coyote pack cutting across their path. X had had their scent almost from the beginning of the climb, and when they were within ten yards, he growled a warning, pointing with his nose, throwing a glance back at Shay, then looking forward again.

Shay risked a quick flash with the white LEDs and caught the yellow eyes of the coyotes, like road-sign warning reflectors. They pulled back and paused, three thin, flea-bitten things that looked more curious than menacing. Young coyotes, maybe siblings, with patchy, gray-brown fur and large, cartoonish ears.

X lurched toward them, restrained by his leash, the low rumble in his throat not a fight call, but a warning. The coyotes looked him over for a second, then moved away in the dark. Shay went back to the red light.

“Well done,” Shay whispered to X, and ruffled his neck.

“Thirty-four minutes,” Cade whispered from behind.

They picked up the pace.

They weren’t talking much by the time they got to the sign. The trip up the hill had been tough, and if not for the gloves and long-sleeve shirts and jeans, the brush would have torn them up. Twice they’d hit pitches so steep that all of them slid back down the trail, grabbing bushes and protruding rocks just to stay upright.

They finally saw the pale, white-painted
D
looming overhead, and Shay whispered, “Before we get too close, let’s take a minute to get our heads together.”

They found a shelf in the dirt, six feet long and a couple of feet wide, sat down, and looked out over the city. “Pretty,” Cade said. “Be cool to come up here with a camera.”

A moment later, Cruz said, “It’s so quiet.”

“And that’s good,” Shay said. “Listen …”

They listened, and Cruz said, “I don’t hear anything.”

“So it’s time to go,” said Shay. “Not a word now. Turn the headlamps off.”

For a sign as huge as it was,
HOLLYWOOD
looked almost fragile in the night. They crossed behind the
D
, then walked across the hillside to the bush where the equipment packs were hidden. There were lights at the top of the hill, at the TV or radio tower or whatever it was, but they saw nobody. Moving slowly in their dark clothes, they were all but invisible.

They’d talked all afternoon about possible problems with finding the equipment, but they’d looked at the Google Earth photos for so long and talked so much about angles off the
H
that they went directly to it. The bundles of gear were well to the side, where they wouldn’t be found by casual intruders. Cruz and Cade pulled them out as carefully as they could, while Shay looked up
in the dark for the security cameras that were mounted at the tops of the letters. She whispered, “I don’t think anyone knows we’re here yet.”

“The longer, the better,” Cruz whispered.

“Okay. Keep moving slowly, and stay in the shadows and behind the brush as much as we can,” Shay said. “We need to change the plan: Cruz and I will help take the letter bundles and the equipment out to the sign to get the heavy work done. I don’t think they’ll see us until we start climbing.”

The whole setup went so well that Shay could hardly believe it. They pulled the packs apart and made sure that each of their LED-lighted letters was placed beneath the correct
HOLLYWOOD
letter. With all the gear in position, Shay took out one of the clean phones and texted Twist: “Ready to climb. See any problems?”

A moment later, an answer flashed on her screen: “Nothing. Will lock gate. Close to schedule. Go.”

Shay took a deep breath and said to Cruz, “Think about your feet. Use your hands to balance. Be sure you’re tied in, don’t be afraid to fall, but stay up any way you can.”

“I will.”

She turned to Cade and said, “Since we’ve got the letters in place, you’ve got more time. Don’t hurry with the lightning boxes and all those glass rods. Be cool. Take your time. Get it right.”

He nodded.

“And remember,” she said to both of them, “the worst thing that could happen is if one of us gets hurt. We’d have to give ourselves up. I don’t know what would happen then.”

“You guys be careful,” Cade whispered. “And, Shay—take this.”

He reached around Cruz and palmed her the Hopi stone. Shay nodded back at him, and pushed it down her front pocket.

They moved sideways back to the sign. Shay tied X’s leash to a support at the bottom of the sign, and he whined once at her, a mild protest.

“Only for thirty-nine minutes,” she said.

Shay waited next to the dog, stroking his head, as Cruz worked his way across the hillside to the letter
D
. When he was ready, he gave her a flash with his headlamp, and they both turned on their red lights and began climbing the ladders behind the letters, carrying the support cables and lift lines with them.

When Shay got to the top of the
H
, she tied in. She could no longer see Cruz, and concentrated on clipping one end of the support cable to the right end of the
H
. That done, she walked across the back of the letter on the narrow scaffolding bar, pulling the support cable behind her; the sign felt surprisingly rough under her gloves. She got to the other side of the
H
and clipped the support cable to the bar on the other end. Moving back to the middle of the
H
, she reached over the top of the letter, threaded the lift line through the carabiner at the middle of the support cable, and dropped the lift line, which Cade would clip to the lighted-letter sheet.

Done with the first letter, she edged back to the ladder, untied, and carefully climbed down to the ground. There, she backed far enough away from the sign to see the letter
D
, but she couldn’t see Cruz.

She had to assume that he was working. If something had gone wrong, he would have called out. She scrambled over to the first
O
and, before she began climbing, checked the time. The climb and the work at the top had taken eight minutes, a little longer than she’d hoped, but it had gone so well that she couldn’t see how they could improve the time much.

She picked up the support cable and lift line for the next letter and began climbing.

The first indication that they’d attracted attention came when Shay was working on the second
L
. A man’s voiced crackled from an unseen loudspeaker.

“ATTENTION. YOU ARE TRESPASSING IN A RESTRICTED AREA AND ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST. LEAVE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY. POLICE ARE RESPONDING.”

Cade called, “Gotta hurry now.”

And Cruz: “I’m going too slow. Shay, you have to hurry. I am only on the second
O
.”

Shay called back, “I’m on the second
L
, so we are doing good. We thought they would see us before now. Just be careful.”

“I am being careful.”

Shay dropped the lift line off the second
L
, climbed down the ladder, and moved to the
Y
and started climbing. Then they got the second indication that they’d attracted attention.

A man called from the top of the hill, “Hey, you guys. Get out of there. The cops are coming.”

Cade called, “Who are you?”

“I work at the radio station. They called and told me to tell you to get out of there.”

“We’ve got a permit. Tell the police to look at the permit. We’re shooting a couple night scenes here for Disney.”

There was a moment of silence, then: “You’ve got a permit?”

“Yes. With Disney,” Cade repeated. “Tell the cops to look for a Disney permit. Just take a minute to check. They don’t want to mess with Disney.”

“All right. I’ll be back.”

Shay had frozen on the ladder, but then heard what sounded like the man walking away, on gravel. She hurried to the top, clipped her cable to the sign, and threaded the lift line through the carabiner and climbed down.

She got to the bottom and could see Cruz moving across the top of the
W
, their last letter. He fumbled with the clip, got the cable tight, then moved slowly to the middle of the letter and threaded the lift line through. That done, he moved back to the ladder and climbed down.

“Harder than I thought,” he said, slapping his hands together.

“I think that guy’s gone,” Shay said. “Let’s start lifting.”

They went to the
H
, where Cade was already lifting the plastic sheets with embedded lights up the face of the letter.

“I got all the electrical stuff hooked up, except the connections at the bottoms of the letters,” he said. He was breathing hard: he’d been running back and forth across the hillside, snaking wires through the brush. He’d had to reposition the generator, and the thing was heavy. “You guys lift the letters and tie them off, I’ll start connecting cable.”

The loudspeaker was back:

“ATTENTION. TRESPASSING IS A MISDEMEANOR PUNISHABLE BY A HEAVY FINE AND A JAIL SENTENCE. MOVE AWAY FROM THE SIGN IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU
DON’T MOVE AWAY FROM THE SIGN, YOU WILL BE ARRESTED.”

The blaring voice went on for a while, but Shay stopped paying attention.

The two of them worked together, across the face of the Hollywood sign, hoisting each letter into place by pulling on the lift lines. After making sure each sheet was straight, they tied off the lift lines on the scaffolding. The work was hard, because of the brush tangling up everything, and the sheets were heavy.

They’d gotten to the
W
, with Cade hooking up the plug-ins at the bottom of each sheet, then taping them to make sure the connections wouldn’t break loose. They’d started lifting the
W
when the support cable popped loose at the top of the letter and the sheet slid sideways and then hung there, folded across the left side of the
W
.

“Ah, damn, I knew I did that too fast,” Cruz said, looking up at the dangling sheet. “I gotta go back up.”

Shay said, “I’ll go—I’m a little quicker. You guys get the other sheets up.”

She ran around behind the sign to the ladder and went up. At the top, she tied in and walked across the support to the left side, where the cable had held. She got hold of it, but when she tried to pull it across the top of the letter, the weight of the dangling sheet was too much.

Cade and Cruz had just finished hauling up the last of the other letters. She called down, “You guys have to lower the sheet to give me some slack cable to work with.”