Locked inside the women’s room, Shay pulled off the bedroll and backpack and rummaged for her toothbrush. Living, and typically vying for just one bathroom, with dozens of different girls in foster care had made her extremely efficient at pulling herself together—and also a bit resentful of all the attention paid to primping. Most days, she was just glad if there was still hot water left for a shower.
If there was a time suck in her routine, it was her hair—and that was nonnegotiable. She’d worn it to her waist since she was a little girl: straight, thick rust-red hair, identical to her mother’s. It wasn’t easy to get a brush through, and it was sort of a pain to wash, but when she looked in the mirror, there was always the private reminder that she’d once been someone’s daughter.
There wasn’t enough headroom under the Starbucks faucet to shampoo, so, same as the day before, she unsnarled her hair and smoothed it back into a scruffy ponytail. Double-checking that the door was locked, she pulled off her clothes, pumped the soap dispenser a dozen times to get a decent amount in the palm of her hand, and sudsed up. She rinsed and dried with paper towels. After pulling on underpants and a T-shirt that she’d dried out on a branch, she gave the overnight T-shirt and underpants a quick wash in the sink and stuffed them into a plastic bag to be dried later.
At least they were clean, and so was she—more or less. She’d have to do something soon about her jeans, and the grungy hoodie that still smelled of the Greyhound bus she’d taken down from Eugene.
And her hair …
Tobias was waiting for her with the frap. She thanked him as she unwrapped a straw, told him she had a boyfriend when he asked, and took a seat in the far corner to sip her breakfast and go online.
She dropped another Facebook message to Odin, telling him that she was in Los Angeles. Then she began looking for places where he might actually be. There were more animal rights groups in Hollywood than Shay could believe—everything from pit bull rescue specialists to seal enthusiasts. Somewhere in that matrix, she thought, the Storm people were probably talking to allies.
She began saving names and addresses to a separate file, but she was suddenly so sleepy again.… She closed the laptop and then, just for a moment, her eyes.
An hour later, a toddler in a stroller screamed for more juice, and Shay jerked awake and looked around, a little dazed. She’d slumped straight over onto the table like an actual homeless person. When she sat up, a woman with cornrows was giving her a hard stare from the next table.
“What?” Shay asked. She was feeling cranky, and the sleep taste in her mouth didn’t help. “I fell asleep.”
“Yeah, I saw,” the woman said in a Mississippi Delta accent. She had a pile of papers on the table in front of her, and a red pen. “Late night?”
“A little,” Shay said. She tightened the compression straps on her backpack and pulled it on.
The woman said, “Hang on a minute. I’m not the police.”
“Wouldn’t matter if you were. I’m not doing anything illegal,” Shay said.
The woman pushed back in her chair. “You need a place to stay? Look, I’m Rashika Jones, I’m a youth psychologist for the county.”
“Uh-huh,” Shay said. She stepped toward the door. She knew the lingo: Jones decided which abused and neglected kids were a little messed up, and which ones were really messed up.
“Let me give you a list of shelters,” Jones said. “There’s a halfway decent one just a few blocks from here.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Shay said.
Shay walked away but Jones followed along, leaving her papers on the table. “You’re too good-looking to last on the streets. A pimp will come along, act like your best friend. He’ll hook you up to something, and that’ll be the end of you. There are two hundred and fifty gangs in this city. More than two hundred murders last year—”
Shay stopped and looked her in the eye. “I appreciate your concern. But I’m fine.”
Jones said, “You’re tough and I appreciate that, but this ain’t Kansas. One of my clients, a girl about your age, tougher than you, was stabbed last year. On the run for nine days, dead on the tenth.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Shay said, and pulled at the door handle.
“Don’t live here without an address,” Jones persisted. “Nothing good can come of it.”
Shay hesitated, then dug in the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out the black business card from the Cat in the Hat. “You ever heard of this guy?”
Jones took the card in her red-lacquered fingernails. “Twist. Okay. He’s different, but if that’s your preference, you’d be safe there. You wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of me.”
“What does that mean?” Shay asked. “There?”
“He runs a hotel. Or a flophouse. Or a crash pad,” Jones said. “Kids only. Rumor is, he was one of you, until he grew up and got rich. Where’d you get his card?”
Shay hesitated again. “He gave it to me,” she said, and took back the card. “Anyway, I gotta run.” She readjusted her backpack and went out the door.
“Go see Twist,” Jones called to her back.
Shay twiddled her fingers over her shoulder.
Good-bye.
Hollywood, the place, was a letdown, especially during the day. Shay rarely went to the movies because she didn’t have the money, but she hadn’t grown up under a rock. Where were the celebrities, the red carpets, the paparazzi and limos? Okay, she’d seen a bunch of limos, and a strange piggy-looking car that she suspected was a Rolls-Royce.
By midmorning, she was elbow to elbow with hundreds of tourists on the hunt for famous faces. The Hollywood they were looking for didn’t really exist for outsiders.
The stars worked on closed sets and lived behind gates in Beverly Hills or up one of the canyons. This Hollywood was mostly cheesy souvenir shops and fast-food restaurants. Eventually, the tourists would have to settle for a five-dollar Polaroid with one of the hustlers who dressed up as Spider-Man or Shrek.
Shay looked at the map she’d bought from a grumpy Snow White outside the TCL Chinese Theatre and learned that L.A.’s Hollywood neighborhood covers about eight square miles. The seal enthusiasts’ storefront was two miles from the Starbucks where she’d had breakfast. She’d walked over and found the place, and a sign in the front window that said CLOSED. It looked like it had been closed since the millennium, with a layer of dust inside the window.
Finding Odin might take a while. And she’d been thinking about her camp beneath the freeway. Jones, the Child Protection lady, was right. Outdoors, on your own, was too dangerous; there were too many dodgy people around, and sooner or later, one of them would stumble over her.
She couldn’t help Odin if she were dead.
Shay was worried that her cell phone could be tracked. She’d meant to get rid of it, but hadn’t. Now, because she’d run from her foster parents’ home, she was afraid to use it. She’d asked a couple girls on the street and been directed to one of the rare remaining pay phones in Hollywood, one that the locals casually referred to as the “drug phone.”
She needed a hassle-free place to stay …
She called Twist on the drug phone. A boy answered.
“Yeah? Whatta ya want?”
Definitely a boy’s high-pitched voice, not a man’s, and someone who sounded like he didn’t care one way or another what she wanted.
“Is, uh, Mr. Twist there?”
“He’s around somewhere, but Twist don’t talk on the telephone,” the kid said. “So whatta ya want?”
“He gave me a card last night …”
“You’re gonna have to come over,” the boy said. “Where’re you at?”
Shay looked at the street sign and told him.
“That’s a couple miles,” he said. “Walk over to Sunset. You know where Sunset is?”
“Yes …”
“Walk over to Sunset, take a left down to Wilcox, then when you get to Wilcox, take a right and walk down to Fountain. Take a
left down Fountain about ten blocks, past the Tea Leaf. We’re on the same side of the street, right at the corner. It’s the pink building. There’ll be some time-wasting slackers sitting on the porch, and maybe a couple of righteous skaters.”
He gave her an address.
“Have you got a place I can stay?” Shay asked.
“Twist’s card will get you in the door,” the boy said. “If he’s not too busy to talk to you, he might give you a room and tell you what the rules are. But it depends.”
“On what?”
“On what he’s doing. You can at least sit in the lobby.”
She walked, looking at faces as she went. No Odin.
The walk wasn’t bad, took her twenty-five minutes. She passed the Tea Leaf and saw an old pink stucco building.
The entrance to the hotel was up wide, cracked-concrete steps and through double glass doors smoky with dirt. A hole in the center of the glass in the left door looked like something made by a small-caliber bullet. A Band-Aid had been stuck on the inside of the glass to cover the hole.
Four boys were sitting on the steps, smoking. The day had gotten warmer and they were all in T-shirts, two in jeans, two in long, baggy cargo shorts. One had a well-used skateboard. They were thin and had the dry, overtanned faces of street kids.
Shay thought of the street woman she’d seen the day before, flailing her arms and shouting at imaginary enemies. The woman had looked old, although other cues, like a healthy mop of hair, hinted that she probably wasn’t even forty. Years of outside living had wrinkled her face until it resembled a prune. These kids were young, but already had a bit of that look.
She was about to start across the street when she saw the cop car rolling down Fountain toward the hotel. She instinctively stepped back and turned, shoulders hunched, to slink away.
Walk, not run. She was in a bad spot: there was really no place to run to …
Then the patrol car stopped in front of the hotel steps and two cops got out, looking annoyed. The cop on the driver’s side opened the back door and pulled a kid out onto the sidewalk—not about her at all. The kid was cuffed and the cop was rough, banging him against the car.
The kid said, “Ooo, hit me again, Officer Friendly; it’ll make you feel like a man.”
One of the kids on the steps said, “Yeah, hit him again. He’s a master criminal.”
Shay winced: she’d always gone for a strategic meekness.
Now here was this kid, apparently enjoying himself. He was tall, long-haired, and maybe consciously cool in jeans and a pumpkinorange shirt that said DON’T WORRY, BE HOPI.
The cop was pulling him around toward the building, but the kid caught Shay in the corner of his eye and did a double take, and with the double take, he gave her a whistle she’d normally ignore. But the audacity of this boy, coming on to her while in handcuffs, made her smile back at him.
“Cade!” someone shouted. “Shut up!”
Twist was there, on the top step outside the pink building, and came down to the street to meet the cops. Cade shut up.
Twist was wearing the same bowler hat and carrying the same cane he had the night before, but now Shay noticed a limp that she hadn’t seen in the dark. She sidled toward them, hoping to catch Twist’s eye, but Twist was focused on the boy.
“What’d he do?” he asked the cops.
“Apple store at the Glendale Galleria,” said the cop who’d hauled the kid out of the car. He used a key to pop the handcuffs as he spoke. “Shut down their demos, then switched them to a porn flick that’s probably still playing, ’cause the Geniuses can’t figure out how he hacked in.”
Twist nodded. “Thanks for bringing him over. I owe you.”
The cop said, “Next time, we’ll book his butt into the Twin Towers. No more favors for this one.”
“Well, thanks again,” Twist said. “I’m serious, I owe you.”
The kid said to the cop, “Yeah, thanks for the ride, dude. Saved me the cab fare.”
Twist sank a hand into the boy’s arm and said, “Shut up.”
The cop said to Cade, “Listen to Twist, smart-ass. And if I wasn’t the dude, you’d be in jail.” He nodded at Twist, and the two cops got back in the car.
Twist, Shay could see, was furious.
Cade Holt was sixteen, better than six feet tall, and loomed over Twist. He wore his lank brown hair long enough to tuck behind his ears.
Despite his size, what had seemed like a permanent insouciant grin flicked away when Twist leaned into him and said, “You jeopardize my work again, you’re out. I’m trying to hijack a whole freakin’ skyscraper and you bring in the cops? I don’t need cops. If the sign doesn’t go tonight, it doesn’t go. You’ve got one hour.”
“Jeez, dude, I’m good for it,” Cade said, but Shay could see he was worried. “I was only having fun with the Mac fanboys.”
Twist tapped him on the chest with the tip of the cane. “You brought the cops here. You know the rules.”
Shay edged closer. Twist had yet to look at her. He climbed the steps to the glass doors, a deflated Cade trailing behind. At the top, Twist hesitated, turned to Shay with a frown, and asked, “Are you coming? Or are you gonna stand there like a lamppost?”
“I’m coming,” she said.
8
The lobby of the Twist Hotel looked like a set from an old movie—wide, with creaky wooden floors, faded red plaster walls, big windows that looked out at nothing, with canvas drapes pulled back over bronze hooks. A massive wrought iron chandelier hung from the ceiling, but the light sockets were empty. The check-in desk had pigeonhole mailboxes behind it. Worn, mismatched furniture, couches and chairs and a few tables, were scattered across ragged Persian carpets. The place smelled of French fries and Big Macs, Cheetos, popcorn, and pizza, with an undertone of ancient cigar smoke, floor wax, and flaking plaster.
A dozen kids were lounging around, plugged into headphones, reading books, typing on laptops, or texting on cell phones. When Twist walked in, a couple of kids called, “Hey, Twist,” and a young woman with white-bleached hair said, “Cassie walked last night.”
Twist stopped. “She okay?”
“I don’t know. Her old boyfriend found her. She was crying and everything, but she said she wanted to go with him.”
“Got her number?”
“Yeah …”
“Give her a day or two, call her. If she’s not okay, we’ll go get her,” Twist said.
“Thanks, Twist.”
A pimply kid, his black hair sticking like straw from beneath a miner’s hat with a headlamp, was sitting behind the check-in desk. As they walked up, he put down a skater magazine and asked, in the high-pitched voice that Shay recognized from the drug phone, “New tenant? Gonna check her in?”
“If she wants to,” Twist said.
“Gonna check her out first,” Cade said.
Twist said to Cade, “Shut up.”
Cade turned to Shay—he’d recovered his insouciance—and said, “You don’t get any sympathy around here. You work your fingers to the bone, and what do you get?”
“Bony fingers,” Shay said. She looked at Twist. “What’s the deal here?”
Twist leaned against the desk, stretched his gimpy leg out into the air, and asked, “Still got that knife?”
Shay cocked her head, but didn’t answer.
“All right, stupid question,” Twist said. He got back on both feet and reached over the desk. “It goes here.”
He pulled open a drawer on the end of the check-in desk. Inside were a half-dozen pocketknives, three butcher knives, a martial arts baton, and two canisters of pepper spray.
Shay said, “Jeez. Nice place.”
Twist shrugged. “The kids who show up here are survivors. Survivors carry protection. The deal is, while you’re in my hotel—my house—you follow the rules.”
“Which are?”
“They’re pretty simple; you’ll get a list. One is, no weapons beyond the lobby, and no guns at all. Anothe
r one is, nothing that brings the cops. No drugs, no alcohol. And you’re required to pay. Sooner or later, you have to pay. Most people here have jobs. Do you have any skills?”
Of course she did, Shay thought. She could do all kinds of things. She just couldn’t think of any that might apply to the hotel. “I guess,” she said, uncertain. “I worked at a yogurt stand for a while.”
“You ever do any burglary?” Cade asked.
“That’s kinda personal,” Shay said, putting a little snot in her tone.
Cade turned to Twist. “She’s useless. I’ll give her some training in my spare time.”
Shay ignored that and asked Twist, “You’re not some guy who exploits orphans, are you?”
“Cade has an endless line of bullshit,” Twist said. He was drifting away from the check-in desk, leaving her there, but she tagged along.
He said, “We have a group meal here in the morning and in the evening. Food’s okay, not great. I know because I eat it. In the middle, you eat what you got. You get a room with a roommate. Bathrooms are all down the hall. I don’t know if there’s a job in the kitchen, but if there is, you can work there until you find something better. That’s about four hours a day—I pay California minimum wage.”
Shay said, “Outside, you mentioned something about hijacking a skyscraper. Are you a writer?”
Twist stopped, interested. “You know about writers? Where’d you pick up the slang?”
“I knew a bunch of them around Eugene, a couple others from Portland,” she said. Writers: graffiti artists.
“Yeah? You know Gary Keats?” Twist asked.
“I know him, but I never worked with him,” Shay said. “He did street stencils for a tree-sitting action I did with my brother.”
“That’s what we need,” Cade said, “a tree sitter.”
Twist ignored him and said, “You climb?”
“Yes. That’s how I got to know the Eugene writers. I’d help them get up to billboards, off the streets. Did a couple water towers. A lot of them, you know, the ladder doesn’t start for twenty feet up. I’d get them up there.”
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