Uncaged (41 page)

“What are they gonna do?” Shay asked.

“What’d they do at the hotel?” Twist asked. “They knocked your door down. They’ll grab you, throw you and the dog in the van, get out of here. C’mon. Let’s move. Call Cade and tell them to stay away.…”

They ran down the stairs, and Shay punched in Cade’s number. Twist was on his phone too and Shay asked, “Who are
you
calling?”

Twist looked at her and said flatly, “Oh my God, the house is on fire.”

“What?”

The 911 operator came up and asked, “Is this an emergency?”

Twist shouted, “Oh my God, there’s been some kind of an explosion. It smells really bad and there’s fire all over the place, I think somebody had a meth lab, call the police, these houses are on fire.”

“Sir, are you in danger?”

“Not me, it’s three or four houses down.…”

He gave a nearby address east on the highway, toward Santa Monica.

The operator said, “Are you saying it’s in Malibu?”

“Yes, yes, Malibu. On the ocean. Oh my God, it’s like we’re burning out the movie stars, oh my God, there’s a burning man.…”

“Sir …”

Twist screamed, “I gotta go. I got a Rolls, I gotta get it out of the garage.”

He hung up and then asked Shay, “Cade?”

At that instant, Cade answered and Shay said urgently, “Singular is here in Malibu. You and Cruz stay away, we’ll call you.”

She hung up and looked at the front door, expecting to see it explode inward. Twist had gone to a closet and dragged out a huge suitcase. “Get the guys’ stuff from the bedrooms, throw it all in here. And all the computer stuff. Don’t pack it, just throw it.”

“Do we have time?”

They could hear sirens, and not far away. “They’ll wait until they see what the sirens are about.”

“Then what?”

“Then we run,” he said. He had that odd, happy smile, like he’d had the night he, Dum, and Dee had broken the two thugs in the alley.

“Not a game, Twist,” she said, and ran to the kitchen for her knife.

They hadn’t been in the house long enough to really spread out. In two minutes, they’d packed up, dragged the suitcase out to the garage, and thrown it in the back of the Range Rover.

Shay climbed into the passenger seat; X, in the back, licked her ear.

Twist said, “They’ll see us as soon as the garage door goes up, so hold on: I’m coming out of here in a hurry.”

Lots of sirens now, and close by.

Twist: “You ready?”

“Let’s go,” Shay said. In the backseat, X turned to look out the rear window.

Twist pushed the button on the garage-door remote and the door started to lift. They were parked facing in, and Shay turned in her seat as Twist shifted into reverse, and she blurted, “Stop. Don’t go.”

Twist was looking in the rearview mirror. “Ah, crap. Outsmarted myself.”

The arrival of fire engines, ambulances, and police cars a block away had created an instant traffic jam just feet from the garage door. Although the far lane was clear—and no cars were coming from the other direction, either—the near lane was blocked by a red Jaguar convertible driven by a young blonde, who was fixing her matching red lipstick in the sun visor mirror as the car idled.

“Give me a second, I’ll ask her to move,” Shay said. She jumped out of the car and ran out to the Jaguar.

“We’ve got an emergency,” she called to the woman. “We’ve got to get out. Could you move over to the other lane?”

“No, I can’t. Can’t you see what’s happening?” the woman said. “Everybody’s got a problem.”

“But …”

“There are fire engines and everything.”

“We want to go the other way.…”

“Tough luck,” the woman said, and dabbed at her lips in the mirror. “Now stop bothering me.”

Shay glared at her for a moment, then went steaming back into the garage, where she’d seen a couple of baseball bats, a glove, and a ball. She grabbed a bat and went steaming back outside and said, “Now! You’ve got three seconds to get out of my way, or I start swinging. If Mr. Disney doesn’t get to his doctor in the next five minutes, we will sue you and you’ll spend the rest of your life driving a bicycle.”

The woman’s eyes had gone round and she said, “Wait, wait.” Then: “Mr. Disney?”

“Move the fucking car!” Shay screamed.

“All right, I’m moving.…”

Shay ran back and jumped in the Range Rover with the bat, and Twist, when he saw the Jaguar moving, backed into the gap, then
around into the outbound lane, then jammed it into drive and hit the gas.

“What’d you tell her?” Twist asked.

“That you were Walt Disney and we had to get Bambi to the vet,” Shay said.

“Looks like Bambi’s going to the vet in a convoy,” Twist said. “They’re right behind us.”

Shay turned again: the BMW was fifty feet behind them, and the two vans were behind it. She could see faces through the BMW’s windshield; nobody she recognized—two hard-looking men in sunglasses.

“What are we going to do?” Shay asked.

“Give them an automotive demonstration,” Twist said. “Can you get X in your footwell? Push the seat all the way back.”

“I think so.…”

She tugged the dog into the front seat—he was happy enough to join them, but less happy about dropping down into the footwell. X was large enough that there was barely room for Shay’s legs around him.

“Keep him there,” Twist said. “We’ve got a turn coming up, and then we’re going up the hill, and then we’re going to show these guys the difference between a genuine off-road vehicle and a Beemer, the Beemer basically being a good car for taking the dog to get washed. Let’s hope they don’t know that.”

Twist looked a little different behind the wheel. “I didn’t know you’re a car guy,” Shay said.

Twist laughed. “I’m not. I wouldn’t know a Chevy from a John Deere. I got the free off-road school when I bought the car. Then I
brought it back here in the hills a couple of times, just to try it out. I know this place.…”

They were going down the Pacific Coast Highway at a hundred miles an hour. The BMW was staying with them, though the two men that Shay could see in the car’s front seats were looking grim. One was on a telephone. The vans had fallen back.

“Now hold on,” Twist said.

They were approaching a narrow notch in the Malibu bluff. Twist braked hard and the BMW handled that without a problem, closing up to within a couple of car lengths, and then they were climbing the bluff. A sign flashed by:
LATIGO CANYON ROAD
. The BMW stayed with them up the blacktop road, staying close through the curves and humps, past narrow gated driveways and lush, overgrown yards.

Then it closed up until it was only a few feet behind them. “They might try to bump us,” Twist said. Again, the happy smile.

They were coming onto a straightaway, and he jammed on the brakes while moving to the center of the road. The BMW handled that, too, but almost tapped the back bumper.

Twist accelerated again, the BMW staying farther back, and then they were over the top, and the world began to change around them from oceanside lush to near desert. “Vans are gone,” Shay said. She’d braced her feet against the dashboard to give X more space in the footwell. “You’re driving like a maniac.”

“So’s the other guy,” Twist said. “Now shut up and let me concentrate. I’ve got to find this one turn.…”

They went through a half-dozen radical switchback turns—radical for their speed, anyway, and a truck that was modestly piglike in its handling—and then into a more densely populated, well-watered neighborhood, and Twist muttered, “It’s right here … somewhere. Where is it?”

Down in the footwell, X rumbled.

“What are we looking for?” Shay asked. The BMW was still right behind them.

“This one road …”

“The guy’s on the telephone again,” Shay said.

“Hope he’s not talking to a helicopter.”

Another mile, then even more, and then Twist said, “There it is. That’s it. The blue house. I’m pretty sure.…”

They took a left onto a narrow street, and then through a subdivision; a man was out on his lawn talking to a guy in a red shirt, and they both turned to watch as the two cars rocketed by.

“Watch for kids, watch for kids, watch for kids.…”

More turns, and then Twist said, “We’re good, we’re good, there’s that old farm kinda place.…”

They went past the old farm kinda place, and more houses … and then the houses ended. So did the blacktop, and they launched onto a trail of mixed gravel and dirt, throwing up a dust cloud behind them.

“Still coming,” Shay said.

“Gotta keep them coming fast … there’s this arroyo up ahead … dry, lots of round rocks.”

“They can’t handle rocks? They’re doing good so far.”

“It’s not the rocks they can’t handle, it’s the road.… Not if you don’t know it.” Twist took a couple more turns and said, “Get a grip on the dog, this is gonna be rough.”

Shay got hold of X’s collar and pushed her nose next to his and said, “It’s gonna be okay, boy, maybe, if Twist’s boy hormones don’t wreck us. You can bite him if we get away.”

The dog gave her a quick lick and then another throat rumble; he was with her, but he wasn’t exactly sure that they were doing the right thing.

Twist said, “Here it is, and here we go.”

The trail ran next to the arroyo, where earlier four-wheelers and other thrill-seeking drivers had beaten out a path through the rocks.

Twist shifted left onto the rocks, and the Range Rover began bounding like a three-ton rabbit but managed to stay upright. The truck was throwing up less dust as it pounded across the bare rocks, and the BMW began moving up as the driver’s visibility improved. Twist’s speed had dropped from forty or fifty miles an hour to the thirties, and then the twenties, and the BMW was almost on top of them, and Shay said, “They’re coming! What’re we doing? What are we doing?”

“We’re about to go around a wicked curve,” Twist said. “Here it is.”

They went right. Behind them, the BMW found itself on an outside-banking curve that wanted to throw the vehicle off the road to the left, into the arroyo. The arroyo had dropped three feet below the level of the road, so if they went off, they’d take a terrific drop.

“If they stay on the road …,” Twist said. The BMW driver tried to do that, but the road grew increasingly banked, and the wrong way. “He’s either got to take the jump, which will wreck him, or stay with the road, which will roll him … or stop. He should stop. Give it up, guy, give it up.…”

The BMW didn’t give it up, and then, suddenly, it rolled, tumbling like a boulder into the arroyo, stopping with its wheels straight up in the air. Twist kept going for two hundred yards, then slowed. “Are they getting out?”

“Don’t see anything,” Shay said. They sat for a moment, then Shay saw movement at the back of the BMW. “Somebody’s getting out. Somebody’s—Twist, he’s got a gun.”

Twist hit the gas, and the Range Rover rumbled up the rocks. “He’s going to shoot us.”

But he didn’t. They were on the tooth-rattling rocks for another quarter mile, then turned back onto the dirt road.

“Now. Let’s see if they’ve got somebody out in front of us,” Twist said. “They shouldn’t, because they don’t know the mean backstreets of Malibu.”

They rumbled along the dirt road for a few more minutes, then onto a much better road, though still dirt; twenty minutes after that, they poked the nose of the Range Rover out onto a paved road.

“Not out of the woods yet,” Twist said. A battered Xterra went by, carrying two blond guys with four surfboards on the roof.

“I have no idea where we’re at.”

Twist smiled at her. “We’re about ten miles, give or take a landslide or two, from the real California.”

Shay: “The real one? I thought I was in the real one. What’s the real one?”

“It’s called the Valley. You can put the dog in the back.”

After another long, rambling drive along Kanan Dume Road and then Mulholland Highway, they rolled up a ramp onto the 101 Freeway.

“This car is way too expensive to ditch,” Twist said. “We’ve got to hide it, and there’s no better place to hide it than a busy parking lot. I don’t want to get towed, either. We need a place where it can sit for a while.”

“How about an airport?” Shay suggested. “Long-term parking?”

Twist looked at her and said, “You really do have a criminal mind. That’s perfect. I know just the one. We dump it at Bob Hope in Burbank, and Lou can pick it up in a week or so, when things quiet down. Get on the phone, call Cade and Cruz. We’ll meet them there in an hour.”

“And then …”

“Sacramento.”

They left the truck in an economy lot off Winona Avenue and took a shuttle to the airport; the shuttle driver was not excited about X, but Twist said, “We’ll
really
appreciate it if you just let us ride.” He poked a ten-dollar bill at the driver, and it instantly disappeared.

Cruz and Cade were waiting when Twist towed Sean’s giant suitcase through the main entrance. “We’re in short-term parking,” Cruz said. “You have any problems?”

“Pretty routine,” Twist said.

“Nice scenery between Malibu and the 101,” Shay added.

“We were freaked,” Cade said. “We thought you guys were in trouble.”

“Hey, she was with me,” Twist said.

They headed north in a two-car convoy. Neither Cruz’s used truck nor the Camry they’d bought from Cruz’s connection could be counted on to be completely reliable, and if one of them broke down, the other would be there to help. Cade would drive the Camry, with Twist trying to get some sleep in the back.

Shay would go with Cruz, because X fit best on the narrow backseat of the truck.

“Before we leave town, we should check GandyDancer and tell West we’re okay,” Shay said.

“And tell him that we’re headed to Sacramento, but not exactly where—we want to make sure it’s not a trap, so we’ll want to look around when we get there,” Twist said. “If we meet, it’s on our ground, not his.”

“If we’re that worried, we should pull the battery on Shay’s phone,” Cade said. “If he’s lying to us, they could track it when he calls.”

“It’s supposed to be for emergency contacts,” Shay said. “It already saved us once.”