Uncaged (22 page)

Then her brother appeared. He was shown walking down the bluff, his image surrounded by a green circle. Another caption came up:
ODIN REMBY
. Then a pale red circle around another woman:
RACHEL WHARTON
.

“There’s that damn dog,” Sync said, showing a bit of excitement.

The screen split into two images, one following Odin Remby, the big gray dog, and Rachel Wharton, the other following Shay Remby.
The two digital clockfaces under the videos showed the same time. They saw, but couldn’t hear, Odin Remby shouting something and, on the other half of the split screen, Shay Remby turning and then the brother and sister running toward each other.

Thirty seconds later, Odin and Shay collided, the muzzled dog lunging between them, and a third screen split came up and they watched as West dashed after them.

“Man, you were moving fast,” Thorne said to West. “You gotta watch it, you were giving it away—”

“Okay under the circumstances,” Sync said.

They watched as West approached, and then as Rachel Wharton gunned him down.

“Tasered you,” Sync said to West. “Nice shot.”

“That’s the first thing I thought,” West said. “After I stopped screaming.”

They saw Shay Remby pass the dog’s leash to an unidentified man, who left with the dog. Another split screen followed the dog in a long shot, while the first one remained with Shay Remby and West. West said, “She killed the power for me. I’ve explained the exotic world of fuse technology to the wizards downstairs so I won’t have to go through that again.”

“Watch the dog, watch the dog,” Sync said.

The man with the dog was hurrying down the beach, and the dog stumbled a couple of times. Simultaneously, they saw Cherry pick up West and carry him out of the picture, which stayed with Remby, who climbed the bluff and stood looking for a moment, then hurried off in the same direction the man and dog had.

They lost the man with the dog until another newsclip caught
him in the background loading the dog into the back of an old convertible truck.

“That’s a Scout II,” Harmon said. “I’d give my eyeteeth for a really good Scout.”

“Can we see the plates?” Sync asked.

“Not with the quality of this video,” Harmon said.

They watched as Shay Remby joined three other people at the Scout. All four got in the truck, which rolled away and out of the range of the media’s cameras.

Harmon said, “After Cherry got West out of there, we didn’t have anybody to track Shay Remby—but I suspect that they’re all kids from the hotel. They look like it. They’re all young and scruffy. We can probably pick up the dog right there.”

Sync turned to West. “You don’t have a thing for the girl, do you?”

West said, “Well, I like her. I don’t think she’s involved in any of this. Looking at the body language between Odin Remby and Wharton, I’d say they’re sleeping together. That means he’s traveling with the leadership—Wharton and probably Ethan Enquist. That’s where the drives will be.”

Harmon said, “Then we find Wharton, and cover her.”

“And we need to get that dog,” Sync said to Thorne.

Thorne nodded and said, “We can do that.”

West said, “I’ve been looking into Odin Remby’s history, and I think I figured out how they got into the lab, how they got through the gate.”

Sync leaned forward. “That’s interesting. How’d they do it?”

“The Remby kids’ mother used to work at the lab,” West said. “She would have had a key card for that gate—years ago, the parking
lot was out back. Anyway, they changed the code on the lock every month, and people just threw away the old cards. If the kid had access to the cards, and if he could work out the coding, he might have been able to crack the way the new codes were imprinted. It’d take a smart kid, a really smart kid, but Odin Remby is supposedly really smart.”

“Where’s the mother now?” Sync asked. “I thought these kids were orphans.”

“Mother’s dead,” said West. “She drowned in Australia, supposedly when she was scuba diving on the reef out there. I guess she—”

Sync interrupted. “Wait, wait, wait … These are Kathleen Carter’s kids?”

“You knew her?” West asked.

“Knew her? Jesus, she was there at the beginning. The kids are named Remby. What’s that about?”

West rolled forward a couple feet in his wheelchair and then backward, almost as if he were pacing. “Carter used her maiden name. Kids got the father’s name.”

“Where’s he?” Harmon asked.

“Also dead,” West said. “Hit by a car.”

“I remember that, kind of vaguely—that Carter’s husband was hit by a car while he was out jogging,” said Sync.

“That’s right,” West said. “But this dog—what’s so special about this dog, anyway?”

Sync arched a brow at West, then shook his head. “Not your pay grade,” he said with a softening smile.

“Right. So I’ll let the big paychecks figure it out, if there’s nothing else,” West said, and spun his wheelchair toward the door.

“Thank you,” said Sync. “You’ve done a hell of a job. You’ve got a future here.”

West rolled out of the room, and the door closed behind him.

Harmon asked, “So—I thought the dog was another lab animal. Is there more?”

Sync: “I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that even a test monkey needs a test monkey. Janes had just wired a new round of neurons into the dog when the crazies broke in. Idiot that he was—and is—about security, he’d had a real breakthrough on the neural integration front. We need to watch that process, that’s why we need the dog. And we don’t need anybody else getting curious about it.”

“So what are we doing?” Thorne asked.

“Well, we need the dog, and we need to find the leadership group. Odin Remby should be able to help us with that,” Sync said, “one way or another.”

On the video screen, the picture had frozen on an image of Shay Remby.

“Silly girl,” Sync said.

“Not really, and we need to keep that in mind,” Harmon said. “Could we rerun the last minute or so of the dog pictures?”

Sync said, “Sure,” and reran the video. They watched the young man and the dog moving down the beach and saw the dog stumble once, and then again, and Harmon said, “That’s what I thought—Lassie seems to be dragging.”

Sync said, “No,” but watched the segment again, and suddenly buzzed his secretary. “Get Dr. Janes on the phone, now,” he said.

“This is more trouble?” Harmon asked.

Sync took a swig of his green drink as if to steady himself. “Let’s just say the dog, as high-tech as he now is, has basic maintenance needs, or we lose him.”

“Shit.”

“Janes said we had at least another week—”

The artery in Sync’s cheek fluttered, and in the next second, he was hurling the only thing he could find on his uncluttered desk: the Rubik’s Cube bounced off the window.

“Harmon. Thorne. Find Wharton and get the goddamn dog.”

Twist pushed open the door with his cane and went inside, trailed by Shay. The dog lay in the space between the beds, too weak to lift his head or shift his eye toward the cane’s clacking approach. Emily and Cruz backed away.

If Twist was angry about the rule breaking, there was no reading it in his face. Shay hung back in the doorway as he bent to the muzzled animal and pressed two fingers to the femoral artery on his inner thigh. He counted the dog’s pulse against his steel Rolex, then made all three teens jump with a two-fingered whistle.

The dog didn’t blink.

Twist yanked a patchwork quilt off Emily’s bed and tossed it to Shay. “He’s in shock, keep him warm. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Twist drove south on Alvarado Street in a hurry, dodging cars and trucks and jumping lights, past MacArthur Park, an urban mishmash of noisy geese, mothers pushing strollers, homeless campers,
food carts, counterfeit ID vendors, uniformed schoolchildren, and drug-dealing gangbangers.

The dog was sprawled in the back of Twist’s Range Rover, the canvases and climbing gear removed in case X had another seizure. Where exactly they were going, Twist hadn’t explained. After stepping outside the room to make a private call, he’d said, “Shay, I’ll get one of the twins to carry the dog to my truck. You’re coming with me. Emily, Cruz, we’ll talk when I get back.”

Twist shifted lanes, blowing past a Volkswagen, and veered off Alvarado to park on a side street. Shay opened the passenger door and considered the possibilities: On one corner, a twenty-four-hour bail-bond business, neon sign flashing in the window. And across from it, a small storefront with its security gate pulled shut. Beyond the grimy bars, Shay could make out a plaster cast of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary surrounded by half a dozen sun-melted candles and the word
BOTANICA
painted on the window glass.

“The one on the left,” Twist said, and opened the rear hatch.

Dum carried the limp dog like a sheep, one arm around its chest, the other around its hind legs, no struggle from the animal, no sign he was even aware of being carried. Twist stuck his cane through the storefront bars and pressed a doorbell.

“What is this place?” Shay asked.

“Your basic everyday drugstore except for the religion, mysticism, voodoo, and wishful thinking thrown in with it,” Twist said.

A small, wrinkled woman in a traditional huipil top and black polyester pants unlocked a deadbolt on the interior door, then rolled back the gate just enough to allow them inside. A gray braid hung down her back.

“Hola, señora,”
Twist said with a respectful tip of his bowler.

Shay’s nose twitched at the stew of odors: patchouli incense, seared meat, dirty diapers, cleaning fluids heavy on the bleach.

The old woman took a peek at the dog in Dum’s arms, then turned on her yellow flip-flops, crooked a finger at them to follow. A parrot in a cage hanging from a rafter started to squawk. Twist motioned for Shay to go ahead of him, the room too crammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves for anything but single file.

Snaking through the narrow aisles, Shay marveled at the variety of things a person could buy here: pharmaceuticals with Spanish labels; bundles of dried herbs poking out of Coca-Cola bottles; religious statues; Dodgers baseball caps and gardening gloves; pastel skulls made out of sugar; incense sticks and aromatic oils that promised to cure various habits and addictions; candles that promised to attract love and money; brand-name toothpastes and shampoos; a bin of wire-sprung mousetraps, three for a dollar.

Arriving at what seemed to be the back of the store, the old woman knocked twice on a blue-painted door. An inset panel the size of a hand swung open, and someone in silver aviators peered out.

“Amigo,”
came the low voice.

“Dr. Girard,” said Twist.

It was a whole different world behind the blue door. Bright fluorescent lights, white-tiled walls, a jar of disposable thermometers and a box of plastic gloves sitting on a stainless-steel sink like a trough. The slender, middle-aged Girard wore a serious expression, belted jeans, a tan pullover, and a stethoscope around his neck.

“Please,” he said, and motioned for Dum to place the dog on
a large metal exam table draped in sanitary paper. Then,
“Gracias, Rosita.”

The old woman’s cue to leave the room. Twist gestured at Dum to clear out too, and he went, closing the blue door behind them.

Shay peeled back the quilt and realized, at the same moment as the doctor, that the dog wasn’t breathing. Twist hooked her by the arm to move her out of the way, and the doctor, unable to find a heartbeat through his stethoscope, started cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

For the next minute, he pumped his laced hands into the dog’s chest no differently from the way Shay had learned on a mannequin in health class. But the animal wasn’t reviving and the doctor said he needed to add oxygen. He puzzled over the mechanics of mouth-to-mouth, then glanced up at Shay.

“Can the muzzle come off? Is he dangerous?”

“I don’t know,” she sputtered, “he’s not mine.”

The doctor looked at the dog for a moment, then went to a drawer where he found a plastic mask, attached it to the coupling on a hand-sized oxygen tank, wrapped the mask around the muzzle as well as he could, and turned on the oxygen.

Nothing happened; they could all feel it, death roiling around them like smoke.

The doctor watched for a minute, then went to another drawer, brought out a syringe with a five-inch needle, took a bottle out of another drawer, and sucked a clear fluid into the syringe. Bending over the dog, he used one front leg as a lever and half rolled it, then felt through the dog’s fur for the breastbone and, in one sharp movement, punched the needle into the heart.

Twist flinched and said, “Ouch.”

“Adrenaline,” the doctor said. “Sometimes it restarts things.”

The doctor began pumping the dog’s chest again—Shay’s own heart thumping wildly—and somewhere between the forty-fourth and forty-seventh count, the dog’s eye popped open.

“Look! He’s alive,” she said.

“Like Frankenstein said about his monster,” Twist said.

The dog shifted his head toward Shay’s voice, and she broke away from Twist to stroke his head. The doctor straightened, then said, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”