Uncaged (10 page)

“You’re gonna have to come over,” the boy said. “Where’re you at?”

Shay looked at the street sign and told him.

“That’s a couple miles,” he said. “Walk over to Sunset. You know where Sunset is?”

“Yes …”

“Walk over to Sunset, take a left down to Wilcox, then when you get to Wilcox, take a right and walk down to Fountain. Take a left down Fountain about ten blocks, past the Tea Leaf. We’re on the same side of the street, right at the corner. It’s the pink building. There’ll be some time-wasting slackers sitting on the porch, and maybe a couple of righteous skaters.”

He gave her an address.

“Have you got a place I can stay?” Shay asked.

“Twist’s card will get you in the door,” the boy said. “If he’s not too busy to talk to you, he might give you a room and tell you what the rules are. But it depends.”

“On what?”

“On what he’s doing. You can at least sit in the lobby.”

She walked, looking at faces as she went. No Odin.

The walk wasn’t bad, took her twenty-five minutes. She passed the Tea Leaf and saw an old pink stucco building.

The entrance to the hotel was up wide, cracked-concrete steps and through double glass doors smoky with dirt. A hole in the center of the glass in the left door looked like something made by a small-caliber bullet. A Band-Aid had been stuck on the inside of the glass to cover the hole.

Four boys were sitting on the steps, smoking. The day had gotten warmer and they were all in T-shirts, two in jeans, two in long, baggy cargo shorts. One had a well-used skateboard. They were thin and had the dry, overtanned faces of street kids.

Shay thought of the street woman she’d seen the day before,
flailing her arms and shouting at imaginary enemies. The woman had looked old, although other cues, like a healthy mop of hair, hinted that she probably wasn’t even forty. Years of outside living had wrinkled her face until it resembled a prune. These kids were young, but already had a bit of that look.

She was about to start across the street when she saw the cop car rolling down Fountain toward the hotel. She instinctively stepped back and turned, shoulders hunched, to slink away.

Walk, not run. She was in a bad spot: there was really no place to run to …

Then the patrol car stopped in front of the hotel steps and two cops got out, looking annoyed. The cop on the driver’s side opened the back door and pulled a kid out onto the sidewalk—not about her at all. The kid was cuffed and the cop was rough, banging him against the car.

The kid said, “Ooo, hit me again, Officer Friendly; it’ll make you feel like a man.”

One of the kids on the steps said, “Yeah, hit him again. He’s a master criminal.”

Shay winced: she’d always gone for a strategic meekness.

Now here was this kid, apparently enjoying himself. He was tall, long-haired, and maybe consciously cool in jeans and a pumpkinorange shirt that said
DON
’
T WORRY, BE HOPI
.

The cop was pulling him around toward the building, but the kid caught Shay in the corner of his eye and did a double take, and with the double take, he gave her a whistle she’d normally ignore. But the audacity of this boy, coming on to her while in handcuffs, made her smile back at him.

“Cade!” someone shouted. “Shut up!”

Twist was there, on the top step outside the pink building, and came down to the street to meet the cops. Cade shut up.

Twist was wearing the same bowler hat and carrying the same cane he had the night before, but now Shay noticed a limp that she hadn’t seen in the dark. She sidled toward them, hoping to catch Twist’s eye, but Twist was focused on the boy.

“What’d he do?” he asked the cops.

“Apple store at the Glendale Galleria,” said the cop who’d hauled the kid out of the car. He used a key to pop the handcuffs as he spoke. “Shut down their demos, then switched them to a porn flick that’s probably still playing, ’cause the Geniuses can’t figure out how he hacked in.”

Twist nodded. “Thanks for bringing him over. I owe you.”

The cop said, “Next time, we’ll book his butt into the Twin Towers. No more favors for this one.”

“Well, thanks again,” Twist said. “I’m serious, I owe you.”

The kid said to the cop, “Yeah, thanks for the ride, dude. Saved me the cab fare.”

Twist sank a hand into the boy’s arm and said, “Shut up.”

The cop said to Cade, “Listen to Twist, smart-ass. And if I
wasn’t
the dude, you’d be in jail.” He nodded at Twist, and the two cops got back in the car.

Twist, Shay could see, was furious.

Cade Holt was sixteen, better than six feet tall, and loomed over Twist. He wore his lank brown hair long enough to tuck behind his ears.

Despite his size, what had seemed like a permanent insouciant
grin flicked away when Twist leaned into him and said, “You jeopardize my work again, you’re out. I’m trying to hijack a whole freakin’ skyscraper and you bring in the cops? I don’t need cops. If the sign doesn’t go tonight, it doesn’t go. You’ve got one hour.”

“Jeez, dude, I’m good for it,” Cade said, but Shay could see he was worried. “I was only having fun with the Mac fanboys.”

Twist tapped him on the chest with the tip of the cane. “You brought the cops here. You know the rules.”

Shay edged closer. Twist had yet to look at her. He climbed the steps to the glass doors, a deflated Cade trailing behind. At the top, Twist hesitated, turned to Shay with a frown, and asked, “Are you coming? Or are you gonna stand there like a lamppost?”

“I’m coming,” she said.

The lobby of the Twist Hotel looked like a set from an old movie—wide, with creaky wooden floors, faded red plaster walls, big windows that looked out at nothing, with canvas drapes pulled back over bronze hooks. A massive wrought iron chandelier hung from the ceiling, but the light sockets were empty. The check-in desk had pigeonhole mailboxes behind it. Worn, mismatched furniture, couches and chairs and a few tables, were scattered across ragged Persian carpets. The place smelled of French fries and Big Macs, Cheetos, popcorn, and pizza, with an undertone of ancient cigar smoke, floor wax, and flaking plaster.

A dozen kids were lounging around, plugged into headphones, reading books, typing on laptops, or texting on cell phones. When Twist walked in, a couple of kids called, “Hey, Twist,” and a young woman with white-bleached hair said, “Cassie walked last night.”

Twist stopped. “She okay?”

“I don’t know. Her old boyfriend found her. She was crying and everything, but she said she wanted to go with him.”

“Got her number?”

“Yeah …”

“Give her a day or two, call her. If she’s not okay, we’ll go get her,” Twist said.

“Thanks, Twist.”

A pimply kid, his black hair sticking like straw from beneath a miner’s hat with a headlamp, was sitting behind the check-in desk. As they walked up, he put down a skater magazine and asked, in the high-pitched voice that Shay recognized from the drug phone, “New tenant? Gonna check her in?”

“If she wants to,” Twist said.

“Gonna check her out first,” Cade said.

Twist said to Cade, “Shut up.”

Cade turned to Shay—he’d recovered his insouciance—and said, “You don’t get any sympathy around here. You work your fingers to the bone, and what do you get?”

“Bony fingers,” Shay said. She looked at Twist. “What’s the deal here?”

Twist leaned against the desk, stretched his gimpy leg out into the air, and asked, “Still got that knife?”

Shay cocked her head, but didn’t answer.

“All right, stupid question,” Twist said. He got back on both feet and reached over the desk. “It goes here.”

He pulled open a drawer on the end of the check-in desk. Inside were a half-dozen pocketknives, three butcher knives, a martial arts baton, and two canisters of pepper spray.

Shay said, “Jeez. Nice place.”

Twist shrugged. “The kids who show up here are survivors. Survivors carry protection. The deal is, while you’re in my hotel—my house—you follow the rules.”

“Which are?”

“They’re pretty simple; you’ll get a list. One is, no weapons beyond the lobby, and no guns at all. Another one is, nothing that brings the cops. No drugs, no alcohol. And you’re required to pay. Sooner or later, you have to pay. Most people here have jobs. Do you have any skills?”

Of course she did, Shay thought. She could do all kinds of things. She just couldn’t think of any that might apply to the hotel. “I guess,” she said, uncertain. “I worked at a yogurt stand for a while.”

“You ever do any burglary?” Cade asked.

“That’s kinda personal,” Shay said, putting a little snot in her tone.

Cade turned to Twist. “She’s useless. I’ll give her some training in my spare time.”

Shay ignored that and asked Twist, “You’re not some guy who exploits orphans, are you?”

“Cade has an endless line of bullshit,” Twist said. He was drifting away from the check-in desk, leaving her there, but she tagged along.

He said, “We have a group meal here in the morning and in the evening. Food’s okay, not great. I know because I eat it. In the middle, you eat what you got. You get a room with a roommate. Bathrooms are all down the hall. I don’t know if there’s a job in the kitchen, but if there is, you can work there until you find something better. That’s about four hours a day—I pay California minimum wage.”

Shay said, “Outside, you mentioned something about hijacking a skyscraper. Are you a writer?”

Twist stopped, interested. “You know about writers? Where’d you pick up the slang?”

“I knew a bunch of them around Eugene, a couple others from Portland,” she said. Writers: graffiti artists.

“Yeah? You know Gary Keats?” Twist asked.

“I know him, but I never worked with him,” Shay said. “He did street stencils for a tree-sitting action I did with my brother.”

“That’s what we need,” Cade said, “a tree sitter.”

Twist ignored him and said, “You climb?”

“Yes. That’s how I got to know the Eugene writers. I’d help them get up to billboards, off the streets. Did a couple water towers. A lot of them, you know, the ladder doesn’t start for twenty feet up. I’d get them up there.”

Twist looked at her for a long time, maybe with a little skepticism, then asked, “If you had to get down off the roof of a building—like twelve stories—how would you do that?”

“Would there be anything to tie into at the top?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Like anything that would take my weight,” Shay said. “I’m around a hundred and ten.”

Cade, now serious, said, “There’s all kinds of stuff up there. Steel struts, door handles, chimneys …”

“Then it’d be a piece of cake,” Shay said. “Twelve stories is around … a hundred and fifty feet. I could do it in thirty or forty seconds. If I had the gear. I don’t have any gear with me.”

“How much does the gear cost?” Twist asked.

“For a building like that … three hundred and fifty dollars. Maybe four hundred, if you couldn’t get any deals,” Shay said.

“I thought it’d be more,” Twist said.

“The equipment is pretty simple, really, if all you have to do is get down,” Shay said. “A harness, some carabiners, the rope. We’re not going to be buying cams or anything.”

“I don’t know what
cams
are,” Twist said.

“Climbing tool … based on the logarithmic spiral,” Shay said. “Huh?” said Twist.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Shay.

They’d stopped in the middle of a long, dark hallway that led to the back of the hotel; the walls were a beat-up dark brown wood, warped in places, that might have been elegant a hundred years earlier. Twist scratched his neck, looking at her seriously now. “If you did something like that, you wouldn’t kill yourself? I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

Shay said, “If you’ve got the gear, it’d be as safe as walking down the sidewalk. For me, anyway. Of course, I’d need to know exactly what you’re doing. I won’t help you rob a bank.”

“Could you get the equipment in L.A.?” Twist asked. “Like, right now?”

“Sure, if I had the money. Gotta be REI stores around …”

“Santa Monica,” Cade said.

“I’m still not interested unless I know exactly what you’re doing,” Shay said.

Twist looked at her for another minute, then said, “Come on upstairs.”

“I told you she wasn’t useless,” Cade said.

Twist said, “Shut up,” then, to Shay: “The knife. The knife goes in the drawer.”

Shay was reluctant. She’d had the knife for more than a year and worried that she wouldn’t see it again if she gave it up. It had been handmade from a carpenter’s file, the previous owner had told her, ground to a wicked point and a scalpel edge, guaranteed not to be deflected by ribs or breastbone. She had to decide: she looked around at the kids in the lobby. They all looked mellow enough. She didn’t sense the fear that she often felt in street kids.

She walked back to the front desk, slipped the knife out of its sheath, and, with the kid in the hard hat watching, dropped it in the drawer.

“That’s a mean damn knife,” the kid said, surprise and a bit of respect in his voice.

“Yes, it is,” Shay said. “Keep an eye on it or I’ll have to punish you.”