Uncaged (16 page)

Amazing that it lasted that long, Shay thought; Twist had hoped for seven o’clock. Maybe there was something about Los Angeles that appreciated any kind of free entertainment. Shay went back to her list of animal rights groups in Hollywood.

She’d found several references to a group called HARC, for Hollywood Animal Rights Conference. Pronounced
HARK
, one story said. From the news reports, HARC seemed politically similar to Storm, and the reports were recent.…

Going to a map, she found that she was two miles away from the HARC address. Shay had never had a parent to drive her places, and only rarely had had access to a bicycle, so she walked everywhere; two miles was nothing. She packed up and started walking.

If HARC was as radical as the news stories suggested, they might well be in touch with Storm. On the other hand, Shay had learned from her tree-sitting days that the politics among animal rights and other environmental groups were complicated, often fractured, and occasionally bitter. If she walked in HARC’s door and asked for Storm, they might call the police.

Better, she thought, if she found a place where she could watch the front door. She knew several faces associated with Storm, from past news reports. If she saw one of them coming or going, she could intercept him or her on the sidewalk. Maybe even see Odin. It was a long shot, she admitted to herself, but better than running through crowds of clubbers at midnight and being chased by pimps.

She was standing at a streetlight when a guy in cargo pants and a T-shirt took a long look at her and said something to his girlfriend and the girlfriend looked, and then they drifted over. “Are you the girl, you know, who came down the building?”

Shay, shocked, said, “Uh …,” and tried to think of something coherent, but the other girl said, “You are! That was so cool. That was just so fabulous!”

Shay, still fumbling, asked, “How did you know?”

The girl’s boyfriend said, “Hair.”

Halfway to the HARC office, she walked past a truck parked in front of an apartment house:
DOS HERMANOS MOVING
. Three Mexican men were carrying a couch up a ramp into the truck, and one of them glanced at Shay and said something in Spanish.

The other two men paused to look at her, then put the end of the couch down, and one of the men clapped his hands, applauding, and the other two joined in. A fourth man appeared at the door and called
“Qué?”
at those in the truck. They shouted something back, and then the fourth man called after her—she was thirty feet down the block by then—
“Gracias, gracias,”
and joined in the applause.

Shay moved along, thinking,
Jeez. Everybody knows
. Eyes were all over her. Were they watching in Eugene? Was somebody talking to Child Protection, and was her social worker calling Los Angeles?
Turning a corner, she found herself outside a frame shop, looking at a collection of mirrors. She regretted not changing out of the turquoise tank—it was like a signature saying,
Yeah, it’s me
. She took a moment to pull her hair back into a ponytail, then dug into her pack, found a baseball cap and her last semi-clean Eugene flannel shirt, put them both on, and checked herself again.

There. Video Girl was gone.

HARC had a second-floor office in a building on a block full of pawnshops and used-clothing places—not used clothing of the kind Emily collected, but worn Levis for two dollars, good for covering your body. Shay walked by on the opposite side of the street, tried not to gawk, and decided not to go up.

A Laundromat sat on a corner, and she found that from a row of chairs in the window, she could see the doorway leading to the HARC office. Shay spotted a
FREE WI-FI FOR CUSTOMERS
sign, purchased a single-wash box of detergent from the laundry lady to get the password, and opened her laptop. Ninety minutes later, she’d seen only two people coming or going through HARC’s door. She hadn’t recognized either of them, or anyone else on the street.

Still nothing on the Facebook page.

Has to be a better way to do this
, she thought.

As she was about to leave, a man stepped out of a doorway down the street, on the same side that HARC was on. He walked a bit, then paused and took out his phone. There was something about him—his athletic body, his well-cut suit, his short, military-style hair—that reminded her of Cherry and West.

She watched as he held the phone to his ear for a minute or two, all the while watching the HARC entrance and not once speaking into the mouthpiece. He was faking the call, she decided, doing surveillance on the animal rights group, same as herself.

Then a young bearded man walked out of the HARC office, a courier bag over his shoulder. The man on the telephone followed, and Shay picked up an odd rolling motion in the way he moved. That was it, she thought. His legs.

He had the same prostheses as West. Good, but not perfect. The Singular people were watching HARC. In fact, the way the man walked out on the street, it was as if he had known the bearded man was coming out. Were the HARC offices bugged?

Her fingers flew to the laptop, out to Facebook, and she left another message for Odin:

Singular is watching the office of Hollywood Animal Rights Conference. Office may be bugged. Don’t go there
.

She closed down the page and headed back to the Twist Hotel, more worried than ever about Odin. She thought about the Singular watcher back at the HARC offices. How many were there? Were they everywhere?

She never saw the man who followed a block behind her in khaki slacks, a wrinkled blue guayabera shirt, and window-glass spectacles. He didn’t need real glasses, because he was almost physically perfect, except for the bionic arm.

She got back to the hotel at dinnertime, and the kid in the miner’s helmet said, “Hey! Twist has been looking for you. He wants you to go up.”

Twist was in his studio with five other people, four men and a woman, all adults, plus Cade. When Shay walked in, Twist said, “Ah, here she is. Finally. Where’ve you been?”

“Laundromat. What’s up?”

“We got a hell of a kick out of this morning’s action,” Twist said. He was wearing a cheery red blazer, the usual brown bowler hat, and a satisfied grin. “These are friends of mine,” he added. “David, he’s my dealer, and Joey, he does PR for David. Hernando is a photographer, Logan does makeup and hair and clothes, and Adelmo does political strategy.”

“We need a poster of you in your mask, on a rope, making a fist,” Adelmo said, making a clenched fist to demonstrate. “We need to have it on the street tomorrow. Stark, clean colors. At the bottom:
SOLIDARITY!
Half the posters in English, half in Spanish:
SOLIDARIDAD!
”

Shay frowned. “I’m going back to that building?”

“No, no,” the photographer said. He pointed at the wall behind her, where a long roll of seamless paper had been hung. “We’ll shoot you here, against the seamless. Put a fan on you to blow your hair out, like you’re swinging. Once we get the shot, we’ll Photoshop you over a photo of Twist’s banner. We’ll make a bunch of photo repros for the street, and Twist will produce an exclusive silk screen based on the photo to sell to rich people.”

Adelmo said to the others, “You know what I’m thinking? T-shirts. We’ve got to copyright the image …”

“I don’t know,” Shay said. “I’m not really that political.”

“Don’t be a child,” Twist said. “This might all seem very L.A. to you—”

“Yeah, it does seem that way,” she snapped.

He rode over her. “But it’s serious business. We made a dent in the illegal immigrant debate this morning. We need to keep the momentum going.”

“You do, more than me. I’m not here for this—and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure a bunch of posters is going to make much difference in a fight that’s been going on for years.”

Joey had moved in close and Shay felt his eyes on her like a magnifying glass on a bug. “Make you into a movie star,” he muttered.

“I don’t want to be a movie star,” Shay said.

“We need to talk,” Twist said. To the others: “Give us two minutes.”

He led her over to the far corner of the studio.

“You don’t have to be a movie star,” Twist said. “But this, you’ve got to do. You’re not playing in a sandbox anymore.”

“I don’t want to be a jerk—you’ve given me a lot of help, Twist. But the attention—that’s
not
helping me. I’ve already given away more than I wanted.”

Twist looked at her for a long moment, then asked, “Is that why you’ve gone back to the lumberjack look?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“So you’re not so much a runaway as running.”

It was like he’d seen right through her, and it put her off-balance. She didn’t want him to probe any further—if he learned she was chasing a group of radical activists, and that the police were chasing them too, well, he might just kick her out of his hotel.

“What if I don’t show your face?” Twist said.

Shay thought it over for a moment. “I can live with that.”

“Good, done.” And, with a half-inch grin, “I’m gonna have to make inquiries.”

“Don’t,” she said.

Then she did it, removing the flannel shirt, changing into her climbing gear and cowboy mask, swinging on her rope across the seamless paper, her hair blowing in the fake breeze from the fan, back and forth, fifty times. Logan worked on her hair with a tease comb and gel, and Hernando operated a Nikon digital camera and a bank of strobes behind silky white light boxes until they got a shot that Joey and Twist agreed was almost perfect.

“We’ll never get better than almost,” Twist said, looking up at the monitor where the shot was displayed. Then, to Cade, “Cut it out, let’s see it on the banner.”

Cade went to work on the computer, with Joey looking over his shoulder, while David and Twist helped Shay get off the wall and retrieve her rope and gear.

Adelmo said, “We’ll need five thousand handbills. We can get them out tomorrow if I can move the image to the printer before six.”

“I can do that,” Cade said from the computer. “If the master can get me the final version.”

David said to Twist, “We’ll want another thousand on good heavy paper, photo repros, we can wholesale them to L.A. Bookster for thirty-five bucks each, and they’ll get fifty from the college kids. Then we need ten oversized silk screens. A little obvious touchup on each one of them, with a brush, to give them individuality. Signed on the screen
and
with the brush.”

“I thought this was supposed to be all anonymous,” Shay said.

“Screw anonymous,” David said. “Everybody knows—and signed, we’ll get twenty-five grand each over the next couple of weeks. I can peddle them all over the Hollywood Hills and Malibu. If we could have them in two days, that’d be good.”

Shay ran the numbers in her head:
More than a quarter-million dollars? For this?

Out loud, she asked, “What’s my cut?”

Twist, startled, looked at her, then grinned. “Artists’ models usually get a flat fee. Thirty dollars an hour. In this case, though—”

Logan said from behind them, “She’s not an artist’s model. She’s talent. Talent gets way more.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said David, shifting into dealer mode. “Let’s not go that way.”

Twist said, “I’ll give you ten percent of what I get. You’ll get it under the table, in cash, tax-free. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a bit less than two hundred thousand, after David takes out his piece, and the expenses—the paper and paint and paying these guys, and paying street kids to put up the leaflets. The feds and state will get nearly half of that. I’ll clear maybe a hundred, and you’ll get ten. If we’re lucky.”

“No luck in it,” David said. “You get me the screens, I’ll get you the cash.”

Ten thousand dollars was outlandish, Shay thought. For an hour’s work? She could live on that for a year. “Deal,” she said.

“What do I get?” Cade asked.

“Shut up,” said Twist.

Cade said, “Look.”

A photo popped up on a monitor: Shay swinging across the face of the banner, one fist held up in a “power” pose.

They all looked for a minute, and Twist said, “Still needs a lot of work.” Then: “Listen up: We’re not gonna sit on our asses feeling all smug about all this. We gotta get moving on our next action. It’s gonna be big.”