Uncaged

by John Sandford

  That would happen soon; it always did.

  The star’s bodyguard fell in behind the lanky girl and the two creeps she’d been trying to lose for six or seven blocks. The creeps had slowed their black Tahoe as she’d been walking along Hollywood Boulevard and called out to her from the SUV’s open windows. “Hey, we need to talk. Hey, baby, we need …”

  When she’d ducked into a parking structure and up a flight of stairs in an effort to ditch them, they’d pulled into a no-parking zone, jumped out of the car: the chase was on.

  Darting out a rear exit of the parking structure, she’d cut back to the neon boulevard. She glanced behind her and saw they were still coming.

  Pimps, she guessed, though she didn’t know exactly why they were after her: there were prettier girls all over the street. She twirled her waist-long hair into a knot, pulled on her hoodie, and quickened her pace. She’d come too far to risk a call for help, to risk bringing in the police.

  Maybe they guessed that; maybe they’d picked out something about the way she moved, the differences between her and the others in the crowd.…

  The girl veered north on Vine, into darker territory, and broke into a run. Within a block, the star’s bodyguard—she’d figured him for another pimp—had dropped out, and she felt safer, felt like she’d opened up some distance. Then her left boot slipped on Marlon Brando’s star, imbedded there in the sidewalk.

  She went headlong into the pavement, scraping skin from the heels of her hands and her knees. There was no time to check the damage, she was up and back in motion and lurched into the shadows separating a costume shop from a boarded-up video store.

  Her tumble had caught the eyes of the Tahoe guys, and now they skidded into the shadows behind her, with ugly grins at the sight of the six-foot-high Dumpster blocking the back of the alley—and their cornered prey.

  The girl pulled a knife with a taped wooden handle from her waistband and raised it shoulder-high, seven inches of steel with a well-honed edge that flashed when it caught the light.

  “C’mon, baby girl, we ain’t gonna hurt you,” said the big fat liar in the blue tracksuit. He had a nasty rash of pink acne across his forehead, and his eyes were deep set, with black circles beneath them. A meth freak, or something like it. “Tell her, man, we’re here to help.”

  The second big fat liar, in doubled-up gold chains, stepped forward. “Fine thing like you, we offer career opportunities—”

  “I know I can’t take both of you, but one of you is gonna get it in the gut,” the girl said. She had the knife out in front of her, and the point of it tracked back and forth between the two men. “Get away from me and stay away.”

  The two liars moved in a coordinated dance, watching the knife. They’d seen females with knives before. Usually, they were no big problem, but this one seemed like she might know what she was doing.

  She moved slowly backward, but also slipped sideways, first one way, and then the other, so she was always one-on-one, rather than between the two of them.

  Knife looked nasty. Still, they had the reach on her …

  She was moving in a crouch, and she feinted toward the one on the left, and he felt the point of the knife flick past his eyes and then come in low, toward his gut, and he managed, just barely, to jump back; he grunted, “Jesus …”

  But the other reached out, a punch, and almost tagged her on the forehead. Not much room left. With the knife in her right hand, her left hand reached back, feeling for the wall of the Dumpster. She needed to know exactly where she was.…

  Then a third man walked into her field of view, behind her attackers, ambling in from the mouth of the alley. He said, “What the hell? Rollo? Dick? That can’t be you.”

  The two thugs swiveled their heads toward the voice.

  In the dim light from an overhead billboard, the newcomer looked, Shay Remby thought, a little like the Cat in the Hat, one of her favorite childhood characters. Not an especially friendly cat, not this one.

  He wore a shabby round-topped bowler hat, a rumpled linen jacket over a black T-shirt, and black jeans, with polished motorcycle boots. He was on the short side, even with the bowler hat and boots, and he was slender, with a three-day beard. He was leaning on a gold-headed walking stick.

  His face was crossed by a scar, which started somewhere below the rim of the hat, cut over his left eyebrow and cheek, and disappeared below his jaw, as though he’d been hit with a machete. His narrow shoulders heaved with a sigh.

  He said, “You can’t have forgotten. I mean, how could you forget? You’re banned from Hollywood. This …” He looked around him, as though perplexed. “This is certainly Hollywood. Isn’t it?”

  Rollo and Dick—Shay had their names now—stepped away from her, and Rollo said, “Watch her, watch her …”

  Dick glanced at her and said, “Stay put or I cut your face off,” and a knife flicked open in his hand. The blade was six inches long, with a serrated edge.

  The four of them were now spread out in a rough diamond shape, with Rollo and Dick in the middle, their heads swiveling back and forth between Shay and the Cat in the Hat. Rollo snarled at the man: “You forget your goons? Flying solo, like Superman?”

  “This saddens me,” the Cat in the Hat said. He didn’t seem at all afraid of the switchblade.

  Shay glanced back at the Dumpster, assessing the possibility of escape with a quick jump and a pull-up. Just then, two very tall but very thin men stepped silently to the edge of it, their toes gripping the metal rim in soft Indian-style moccasins.

  They perched there, over her head, like enormous owls on a low branch. One of them smiled down at her.

  As the thugs had moved away from Shay, they’d focused on the Cat in the Hat and hadn’t seen the newcomers.

  “You gonna be a lot sadder when we cut you,” Rollo said, moving off to his right, showing a razor. “Ain’t gonna be enough left to feed my dogs.”

  Dick circled to his left, the switchblade slashing air.

  “An assault on me is an insult to Dum and Dee,” the Cat in the Hat said, not moving to defend himself.

  “Dum and Dee?” Shay blurted. She didn’t know what was going on. Hollywood had always seemed confusing, but this was ridiculous.

  “Two butt-ugly goons who do his dirty work,” Dick said, as if talking to himself. He never took his eyes off the Cat in the Hat. He behaved as though the small man was dangerous, though he didn’t look it. “Two crazy orange-headed mothers.”

  Shay cocked her head. “You mean like … these guys?”

  Dick and Rollo jerked around as the two hawk-nosed giants dropped into the alley. They were, Shay thought, at least six eight, and twins, with pockmarked complexions and, indeed, orange hair, and wearing matching outfits that might have been designed for combat in the Hollywood zone: cargo pants and black shirts, and fringed buckskin moccasins.

  They each carried a club that looked like a thin, half-length baseball bat. Shay would later find out that they were Bam Bam fish bats, lead-weighted clubs normally used for killing big game fish.

  Dick opened his mouth and said, “Ahhhh.”

  Rollo tried to run for it, but the two giants were on top of them with the bats faster than light, clubbing them down to the bricks of the alley, beating them. Bones were broken, blood spattered on the blacktop, the men screamed and rolled and crawled and tried to get up, tried to protect themselves, until Shay screamed, “Stop! You’re killing them! You’re killing them!”

  The Cat in the Hat waved at the twins and said, “Okay.… Did you break Dick’s leg there? I don’t think you did.”

  One of the men—she didn’t know Dum from Dee, and wondered that anyone could—stepped up with a bat and swung it like an ax down on Dick’s shin and the leg broke with a crack that preceded Dick’s scream by a thin nanosecond and sent an electric shiver through Shay.

  She’d seen fights before, men beating on each other with their fists. She’d seen a man get cut bad in a fight outside a payday-loan stor
e, but nothing like this. This wasn’t even a fight: it was cold, calculated, almost scientific punishment, but still vicious. Dick and Rollo, large as they were and armed with blades, had no chance, and they curled up like snails and bled on the pavement.

  As the beating ceased, the Cat in the Hat squatted between the two men and said, “Now: you tell Randy that if he sends you two back here, I will send Dum and Dee down to see him. They will break as many bones in his body as they can find. They might miss a few, but it won’t be many.”

  Rollo said through bloody teeth, “When we get you—”

  The Cat in the Hat didn’t let him finish. His blackthorn walking stick snapped up nine or ten inches, then thumped down across the bridge of Rollo’s nose, smashing it flat. Rollo screamed in renewed agony, and a gush of blood spurted from his nose and through his fingers when he tried to cover it.

  Shay realized that the walking stick, with its heavy gold head, was effectively a hammer with a long handle—as nasty a weapon as Dum and Dee’s clubs. She thought, Maybe I need one of those.

  “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.

  5

  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.”