Uncaged (6 page)

“You are not listening,” the Cat in the Hat said to the two men in a quiet voice. “You’re just not listening. Dee, break his wrist.”

Rollo groaned, “No!” but one of the big men pinned Rollo’s forearm to the ground with a giant moccasin and smashed the end of his bat into Rollo’s wrist. It crunched like a walnut in a nutcracker.

“This is what happens when people like you come sniffing round my Hollywood,” the Cat in the Hat said. “Now, will you give my message to Randy?”

Dick moaned something that might have been a yes.

“Good.” The Cat in the Hat patted Dick on the hip. “We’ll call 911 and ask them to get an ambulance down here. You fell off the roof. Hollywood roofs—they’re so dangerous if you’re dumb enough to climb on them.”

They left the men lying there on the bloody bricks, the Cat in the Hat and Dum and Dee walking down toward the mouth of the alley, Shay trailing a safe distance behind. The man said casually, turning, “Good knife.”

She said, tracking them, “Works for me.” And, “Thanks for the help.”

“No problem, though it wasn’t entirely about you,” said the Cat in the Hat. “It was more about those two. They’ve done some very bad things to young runaways. Very bad. We’ve chased them off before, but they didn’t learn. They came back. As you could see.”

“Pimps,” she said.

“Worse than that,” the Cat said. “They’re more like slavers. They took a twelve-year-old girl out of here two weeks ago … well, never mind.”

“You can’t be social workers,” Shay said as Dick groaned behind her.

The Cat in the Hat laughed at the thought, and Dum and Dee almost laughed, but no sound came from their oversized mouths. Shay thought that the Cat in the Hat looked like one of the happiest men she’d ever seen.

“No. We’re not social workers,” he said. “Where’d you learn to use the knife?”

“Around,” she said.

He took in the way she was dressed and said, “Not around here.”

She shrugged. “The street is the street.”

“You ever stick anybody?”

“Trying to figure out how crazy I am?” Shay asked, instead of answering the question. They were getting close to the mouth of the alley, where she could break free. Behind her, she could hear one of the injured men, who’d begun to cry. He sounded like a badly injured animal—a pig, maybe.

The Cat in the Hat smiled and said, “Maybe. I basically think all women should be heavily armed.” He was charming, despite the scarred face, and somewhere in his early thirties, she thought.

“Okay,” she said. And, “Are you the Cat in the Hat?”

The man laughed again, and Dum and Dee did their silent laughing-like thing. The man reached into his pocket, took out a silver cigarette case, opened it, and produced a business card.

He didn’t try to step closer to her, but held the card out at arm’s length, where she could take it without risk of being grabbed.

The card was black, with silver script, and said:

TWIST
.

Underneath that was a phone number. He said, “If you stay on the street, and stay alive, you’ll hear about me. Call me when you’re ready.”

A tip of his hat and he was gone, the two big men behind him. Rollo groaned back in the alley and cried, “Help me.”

With one backward glance, sixteen-year-old Shay Remby slipped the knife back into its sheath and was out of the alley, into the crowd.

Rollo would have to help himself.

Out of the alley, Shay was moving fast again, jacked up by the encounter with the pimps, or slavers, or whatever they were. She’d been on the street before, but the predators in L.A. were a whole nother thing compared to those in Eugene, who were, by comparison, gentlemen creeps.

Shay had spent her second full day in Hollywood combing storefronts and clubs looking for a face, with no luck. She needed a place to stay, she needed money, and she needed time to think about everything. One harsh thing about the street: you never had time to
think
, only to react.

Money was critical: it could buy you time, safety, even information. She had fifty-eight dollars in her pocket, and no immediate way to get more.

Shay had stashed her camping gear in an overgrown juniper behind the Del Taco on Ivar Avenue. She plucked the scuffed-up backpack
from the scratchy bush and pulled it on, tightened the waist belt, and headed north on Ivar. Ahead, she could hear heavy traffic on the freeway. The famed Hollywood sign was on the mountainside beyond, but she couldn’t see it. On her first night in Hollywood she’d found, to her surprise, that it wasn’t lighted.

But she had a spot up ahead, safe, she thought, in some brush beneath the Hollywood Freeway overpass.

As she walked toward it, she thought about the fight.
What did the man with one name—Twist?—what did he mean
, she wondered,
when he’d said “when you’re ready”?

Ready for what?

Shay had spent her first night in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, one eye open against a parade of men who had nothing better to do than wash their shorts at 3:00 a.m. Tonight would be better—she might actually get some sleep.

Before the sun had gone down, she’d scoped out a possible camp. She’d run away before, and had an idea of what would make her safe. She didn’t go for the obvious roof-over-my-head spots—the doorways, the drainage tunnels—that would attract street people. Instead, she went for a place that looked like nothing.

Because the thing that made a female safe on the street, she’d learned, was invisibility.

After checking her backtrail and the shadows around her, she cut through a church parking lot and walked across the last street before the freeway overpass. With another quick look around, she hopped a wire-mesh fence and pushed into the brush beyond it. The stuff was tough, springy, but free of thorns.

In the center of the clump was a space long and wide enough to unroll the olive-drab bivy sack she’d taken from her foster parents’ collection of camping gear. The sack was small, lightweight, and waterproof. She unrolled her summer-weight sleeping bag inside of it, climbed in, zipped up the bag, settled down, took a drink from her water bottle. She listened for a few minutes, checking for human movement. The heavy, crunchy brush was effectively a burglar alarm. Satisfied that she was alone, she pulled out a pack of saltine crackers and a jar of peanut butter.

She slipped out the knife again. Twist asked if she’d ever stuck anyone with it: she hadn’t. But it worked really well for spreading peanut butter. She was neat about it, building a stack of crackers, then carefully licking off and drying the knife before eating the crackers one by one.

Twist. What was that all about? When she was ready?

Over the past two years, Shay had spent nearly a hundred nights in a tent in the mountains of Oregon and Idaho, and now was nearly as comfortable in a sleeping bag as in a regular bed. She knew the particular noises of the outdoors, and tried to settle herself by focusing on the chirping crickets, the light rustling breeze, a few nocturnal notes from a Northern mockingbird. After a while, the fight scene stopped replaying in her head and the tension leaked out of her body, but then her real worries came flooding back in …

Four days earlier, she’d been in Eugene, with no idea of going to Los Angeles. Three weeks before that, her brother Odin had fled their hometown and headed south, down the coast.

She’d come to find him.

Like too many nightmares, this one began with a phone call.

Shay had been in bed, asleep, at her foster parents’ place when her cell phone began vibrating. It stopped before she was fully awake, then started again. She picked it off her nightstand, and the foster kid who shared the room mumbled, “Turn that thing off. Turn it off.”

She looked at the screen, saw the unfamiliar number—no name—and because of that, and because of the time, knew exactly who it must be. She rolled out of bed, stepped into the hallway, closed the door behind her. “Odin …,” she whispered.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

“They might catch me,” she said. Post-midnight calls were a violation.

“I’ve got to go away,” Odin said. “I’m running. I don’t know where, but Oates will ask about me. Tell her you didn’t know I was going, or why I was going, and you don’t know where I went.”

Shay wasn’t sure he was serious. “That’s a terrible idea. What about graduation? You’ll miss the ceremony—”

“Look,” he broke in, “you can read about it tomorrow, but there was an accident. It was at the lab. I was there, and I did some computer stuff to get us in, and the police might find out. And the ceremony … I graduated, I don’t need the ceremony.”

“What kind of accident? This involves Rachel, doesn’t it? She made you do something stupid.”

“She didn’t make me do anything, Shay. I’m here on my own.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Shay said. “But you can’t just go. You can’t leave me here.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re a lot tougher than I am. One more year and you’ll be free. Maybe there’ll be some of Mom’s money left. You can go to college.”

“Fat chance,” Shay whispered, one eye on her foster parents’ bedroom door. “They’re draining it like vampires.…”

“There’s still some left. More than enough, if I’m not taking any,” Odin said. “I’ll be eighteen in forty-three days and done with them. They won’t catch me before then.”

“Odin, please …”

There was a strange whine and Odin said, “It’s okay, I’m not going to leave you.…”

“Is that Rachel? Let me talk to her. Odin!”

“That’s not Rachel,” he said. Then: “The van’s here. I gotta go. Watch the news tomorrow, you’ll see why I’m going. Rachel says it was worth it. I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe her anymore.”

Shay made another protest, but Odin said, “Listen: I’ll pop you a Facebook message when I can. Hey: I’m glad you’re my sister.”

He was gone.

Shay flew to her laptop to see if any of the local stations were posting on their websites about a lab accident. She checked twice more overnight, but there was nothing until the shocking morning newscasts: TV reporters said “radical greens” had attacked a medical laboratory in Eugene, and as they were freeing monkeys and rodents, a security guard had shot one of the raiders, who remained in serious condition.

The shooter, described by a spokeswoman for the lab’s parent company, Singular Corporation, as a “highly-trained weapons handler and grandfather of four,” might be charged with something, but probably not. He himself had been shot with a Taser. The wounded girl was the same age as Shay, but had attended a private high school. A yearbook photo flashed on the screen, and Shay thought Aubrey
Calder looked like the kind of person who’d be nice to her brother, and that made her a little sad.

Then the reporter added, “Police say the shooting, which occurred in the course of a crime being committed by the raiders, could mean the raiders themselves are guilty of aggravated assault.”

Odin, guilty of assault?

He’d always been the sensitive one, the naive one, the one who didn’t fight back when he was bullied at school; Odin, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’d been the one to take care of business, who carried a secret knife, who went head to head with social workers and lousy foster parents. A year younger, she’d filled in for their missing parents, taking care of her sweet, mildly autistic brother.

Over the next week, Shay had gotten three messages from him, saying simply that he was okay and with friends. The messages were on fake Facebook accounts they’d set up after the county had separated them. For extra security, they’d even gone to a Starbucks, used the store’s wireless to set up Gmail accounts under fake names—so not even Gmail would have an incriminating URL in their records. They’d then used the Gmail accounts to set up the Facebook pages.

When Shay wanted to leave a message, she’d turn on private browsing and leave the message on Odin’s Facebook page. He’d leave his messages and replies on another page.

His three messages had been short and cheerful. He was getting closer to freedom—the magic age of eighteen—and he was traveling with people in Colorado and northern New Mexico. There were no more specifics about whom he was with, though she assumed Rachel was among them, or what they were doing.

Then the mysterious investigators had come to see her.