Uncaged (26 page)

The chair was tipped back again and the towel pulled tight and the water came again and he choked and struggled and tried to scream, felt the rope cutting into his chest and arms, and as he was about to pass out or die, suddenly … he was back upright again, vomiting water down his chest.

He screamed, “Don’t don’t don’t don’t …!”

The man said, “You can take it two times. You might be able to take it five. Can you take it six? I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?”

They tipped him back a third time. But this time, a little, rational corner of his mind said,
They don’t want to kill you. They won’t let you drown
.

The combination of his claustrophobia and fear of water pushed his back against the wall.
Okay
, he thought,
do it
.

He inhaled. In case he was wrong, he said good-bye to Shay in his thoughts, and he then sucked the water straight down into his lungs.

Everything went dim after a few seconds, but he felt his body being moved, and moved violently, but it all seemed at a great distance. He heard two men and then maybe three shouting, but he couldn’t make sense of the words.… He felt his legs being lifted in the air, his head dangling, and wondered if they were hanging him by his feet.

Then it all came rushing back, and he was vomiting and spewing water, and great heavy hands were beating him on the back, and somebody was shouting, “You little shit, you little shit …”

After a while, when he was breathing again, the hood went back over his face and they half walked, half carried him to the room where he was now confined.

The man who’d almost drowned him had said only one more thing: “We’ll be back.”

Odin thought,
I’ll do it again
. It was a tiny spark, but it was there. He could fight them.

They’d left him on the cold floor, the hood loose around his face. He’d managed to get it off by dragging his forehead across the rug, and found himself in the concrete room. A mirrored window, a steel door, a few vents.

And from the walls, the screaming stereophonic noise began again.

Shay and Twist couldn’t stay away from the videos. Couldn’t stop talking about them. Eventually, Shay went back to the room and managed to sleep. When she got up, late in the afternoon still tired, she found herself at loose ends. There was nobody that she really wanted to talk to with the videos running through her mind.

And Odin. The memories of him as a child. A kid so obsessed with animals that he’d crashed his computer’s hard drive downloading thousands of articles and photos from
National Geographic
’s website …

She went back to the studio, did a little unpaid cleaning up, and worked for a bit on the large canvases. Finally Twist, who’d spoken hardly a word to her, said, “Get out of here. Go see a movie. Go do something else.”

“What am I gonna do?” Shay asked.

“It’s not just you anymore,” Twist said. “It’s
we
. What are
we
going to do? And I don’t know. But for right now, get out of here.”

She left the studio with X and headed back to the room. She’d get cleaned up, she thought, and go out to a coffee shop and get a little private online time. And X could use the walk.

As she did that, two boys and a girl were sitting on the hotel’s front steps smoking, talking music, cars, and celebrities, and about a girl they all knew who the week before had gotten on an elevator at the Getty Museum and Brad Pitt had been inside, and he’d said hello to her and seemed pretty cool. They stopped talking when five vehicles—four SUVs and a white delivery van—swung to the curb. There was a military precision to it, like the president was dropping by.

Then the men got out, and it was exactly like the Secret Service had arrived. They weren’t all big, but they were neatly dressed and in good shape, like soldiers disguised as golf pros, all in wraparound shades, pressed khakis, polo shirts.

And black gloves.

One of the boys later told Twist that when the doors rolled back on the van, he saw what looked like a cage inside, a big one with steel bars, like you might use for a gorilla.

“Or a person,” the kid said. “If you’re running a torture chamber.”

Two of the men broke off and went around the building, out of sight, two more stood on the sidewalk in front, watching the street, and the other five went straight up the steps, never taking a glance at the smokers.

A tenth man the smokers never noticed pretended to doze at a
bus stop across the street. He was dressed in shabby street clothes and had a proprietary hand on a grocery cart filled with blankets, aluminum cans—and a hidden high-res camera. He’d been making movies of everyone who lived at the hotel, and had confirmed that the targets were both in the building.

The man stirred and readjusted a woolly green blanket across his lap—and as he did, the toes of his boots poked out from beneath the blanket.

Shiny lizard-skin boots, the kind real cowboys wore.

When the five men hit the lobby, the room was filled with kids. They were waiting for dinner and everyone was around, poking at computers or plugged into headphones, or just talking. The five intruders spread out quickly, peering into faces, speaking only to each other through discreet mouth- and earpieces.

A man in a peach-colored shirt approached Trina, a long-haired girl in low-slung yoga pants who was propped against a bookcase, madly texting. She flicked him a look, used to blowing off leering, age-inappropriate men, and said, “What?”

The man studied her face with no subtlety whatsoever, and the silence and dark glasses struck her as rude.

“Seriously,” she said, still texting. “Stop it.”

He nodded and walked away.

Rory Ames was on duty at the front desk and talking to another kid when he noticed the stranger in Trina’s airspace and the other strangers sifting through the room like vultures. He switched on his headlamp, because he sensed something bad was about to happen,
and he thought he should do something, even if it was stupid. He grabbed the house cell phone and pressed Twist’s number on the speed dial.

A man with cropped blond hair and a lavender shirt—Thorne—locked in on Rory and snapped, “Hang up.”

Rory held the ringing phone away from his multipierced ear. “And you are?”

The man shook his head to that. “Where’s the dog?”

Rory mulled over the question for a moment, but came up baffled. “The dog? You guys lost a dog?”

“The dog and the girl,” the man pinged back. “We know they’re here. Which room?”

The dog and the girl
 … Shay and the big gray mutt? Rory had only seen the animal in passing once or twice, but had heard how Shay had rescued it from somewhere, and that it was now living in Shay and Emily’s room.

“No dogs allowed here,” he said. He started to back away from the desk and heard Twist’s voice through the receiver, annoyed enough for both he and the man to hear. “Yeah. What is it? Hello?”

“I’m gonna have to ask the boss,” Rory said to the lavender shirt, and then to Twist: “Yeah, Twist, man, there’s some guys here, they’re—”

Thorne, fast as light, ripped the phone from Rory’s grip as the kid screamed, “We’re being hit, we’re being hit,” a line he got from an old movie.

Twist had his face in a mist of sawdust. He’d painted a four-by-eight street scene on a sheet of plywood to be hung outside a school, but the painting wasn’t working, and a painting that didn’t work never
left the studio in one piece. He was using a table saw to cut it to scrap.

He was thinking about nothing at all, except keeping his fingers out of the spinning blade, when Rory called. The phone was on the table’s edge, beside his hat. He couldn’t hear the ringer over the whir, but the white rectangle lit up and
LOBBY
flashed on the screen.

The list of people who had Twist’s number wasn’t long, and the number of calls he actually answered was next to none, but one interruption he never ignored was a call from the kids who worked the front desk. He warned all new desk hires to measure their need to bug him against this simple equation: if the building’s on fire and the fire department can’t be reached, and you can’t put out the fire yourself because the fire extinguisher malfunctions and you’re too stupid to find another solution—call. In other words, it’d better be an emergency bordering on cataclysm.

He switched off the saw and picked up the phone: “Yeah. What is it? Hello?”

Thorne stepped between four boys who’d been killing each other on an Xbox but had stood up because of Rory’s sudden screeched warning. He turned his face to his mouthpiece, which was attached to his shirt collar: “Let’s go up.”

At once, the five men cut through the lobby like sharks and assembled at the central staircase to the rooms. The kids in the lobby—most of them—were on their feet now, uncertain, watching. Thorne waved the others up the staircase and had started after them when Rory caught up.

“Stop!” he blurted from two stairs behind, and in reaching for the man’s arm, he hooked a slim case dangling off Thorne’s right
shoulder. Rory felt a barrel through the nylon: rifle? Dangerous waters: he tried to backpedal down the stairs, but the man spun with fury and seized him by the collar. “You little asshole,” he said, their faces an inch apart, “I oughta shoot you along with the damn dog.”

“Gun!” Rory screamed.

Thorne cuffed him across the face and knocked Rory back down the stairs into the lobby, a gusher of blood spurting from his nose, and threw the phone after him. Rory landed like a rag, limp, as though he were dead. Two of the kids in the lobby started screaming, and the man disappeared up the stairs.

Briana Murphy and Cherise Porter shut the door on their second-floor room and were talking about Cherise’s possibly cheating boyfriend as they turned down the burgundy-carpeted stairs and ran into the phalanx of men coming up.

“Shay Remby’s room?” asked a man in a yellow golf shirt. The girls traded looks, confused about what they were dealing with, but experienced at stonewalling. They shook their heads.

“The girl with the dog,” said the one in the peach shirt, while two other men in pastel colors stepped above and behind them, boxing them in.

They were girls who had grown up on gang blocks and didn’t scare easily, who knew their way around a juvenile courthouse and, as the saying went, knew their rights.

“You LAPD?” Cherise asked.

“I don’t talk unless I’m Miranda’ed,” said Briana.

The man in yellow produced a thin, mean smile, grabbed Cherise by the throat, and lifted her onto her tiptoes one-handed. “Give me the room or I squeeze.”

Cherise made a strangling sound as Briana tried to kick him in the leg, but the man easily dodged that, and another man grabbed the second girl by her hair and lifted, then grabbed her upper arm and twisted, and the two girls knew then that these weren’t cops. These were something far worse, more like the gangs, but in better shirts.

“Gimme the number or I’ll pull your arms out of their sockets,” the peach shirt said, his face two inches from Briana’s. She squealed with pain, and the man wrenched her arm higher and twisted until she said, “Fifth floor, fifth floor! I don’t know the number.”

The men let go instantly, the girls no longer relevant to anything, and stormed the stairs.

Rory Ames was a twitchy kid who’d arrived at the hotel seven months earlier with a split lip that had taken stitches to close and a tendency not to look anyone in the eye. He’d gone to work in the kitchen and done well there, always on time, always ready to do the worst stuff. Twist had decided to put him on desk duty, and the routine social contact seemed to raise his confidence.

Now:
We’re being hit
?

Trumpet music floated in through the open window: one of the twins was practicing on the fire escape outside their room, a floor below. Sometimes Twist inched out onto his own landing to listen, hating the height but loving the music. When the twins were out there together, really jamming, the steel grille beneath him pulsed with the sound.

Nothing but garbled noise on the phone. Twist said, “Rory? What did you—” and heard an angry male voice shout something about “the damn dog,” and then Rory screamed, “Gun!”

Twist dropped the phone and ran to the window and shouted, “Dum! Dee!”

Shay had gotten her laptop but then had dropped onto her bed, thinking about what she’d seen on Odin’s thumb drive. One possibility: contact West through the Facebook account he’d given her, BlackWallpaper. Would it be possible to negotiate?

Another question: what was her responsibility to the victims of Singular—people she didn’t even know?

On paper, Shay didn’t know West from a stranger on the street, and yet, in their first brief, strained encounter in Eugene and in their second harrowing, surreal encounter on the beach, she’d felt, literally felt in her stomach, a vibration between them. Something that didn’t feel dangerous, though by Odin’s account, West was the enemy. He was Singular.

She thought about the fact that some people—Twist was one—could manipulate you simply because they knew more about how to do that than you knew about how to resist. She didn’t think she was so easily manipulated, but then, she’d been pulled into Twist’s action over the 110 when she hadn’t known him for more than a few minutes.

X was lying on the floor, and she leaned off the bed and ruffled the fur along his spine. He turned his head and his yellow eye fixed on her while the blue one stared off in the opposite direction.