“No, I came down slow, because I didn’t want to scare you,” Shay said. “I can come down fast if you want me to.”
Twist nodded at her confidence. “Good. The building tonight is nearly twice as high. Does that make a difference?”
“It’ll take longer to get down, but that’s it. A rope’s a rope. After you get thirty feet off the ground, height doesn’t matter anymore. You fall, you die.”
“That doesn’t worry you?”
“No, because I know what I’m doing.” Shay was pulling down the rope, and when the far end of it slipped free of the nylon loop on the roof, she said, “Watch it!”
The rope fell at their feet and she began gathering it in, looping it around her arm. When it was neatly tied, she asked, “We good?”
Twist laughed and then nodded. “We’re good. By the way, meet Cruz—I’ll let him apologize for plucking you out of the air like a beach ball. He’s going with us tonight.”
Cruz nodded at her, maybe annoyed at her reaction to his help. He had a thick wedge of glossy black hair and dark, unreadable eyes. He was standing next to Cade, shorter than Cade by a couple inches, but more muscular, with wide shoulders and square hips. He was dressed in a Dodgers shirt and neatly pressed jeans.
“I apologize for listening to Twist. That won’t happen again,” he said. A little smile now, and Twist didn’t tell him to shut up.
Cade leaned toward Cruz, looking at Shay as she turned away from them, and muttered, “Esta bien pechocha.”
Cruz said, “Olé.”
Shay caught it, turned back, looked from one to the other, and said, “What did you say?”
Cade shrugged with mock innocence and translated: “ ‘The barn is painted red’?”
Shay said, “Careful,” and walked away.
The demonstration done, the group trailed back into the building. In the lobby, the kid behind the desk said, “Hey—you in?”
“I’m rooming with Emily,” Shay said.
“Don’t sniff too hard, you’ll get an antique up your nose,” the kid said. He held up an index finger, meaning Wait one, dug in his desk, and came up with a sheet of paper. “The rules.”
“The rules.” She glanced at it, found a short list, like the Ten Commandments.
“Yeah. Violate the rules, and there is one penalty,” the kid said. “You’re out on your ass.”
“Okay …”
“He’s not kidding,” Emily said.
Emily led the way to the interior stairs, and as they climbed them, she explained that at one time, the Twist Hotel Rules hung in the lobby, but the adults who wandered in—cops, social workers, city inspectors, insurance agents—couldn’t handle the implications. Now newcomers got a flyer when they checked in.
Shay ran through the rules:
1. No Guns (check knives at front desk)
2. No Sex
3. No Alcohol or Drugs (weed counts)
4. No Ringtones (vibrate or die)
5. No Smoking (except me, and I quit)
6. No Pets
7. No Outsiders
8. No Trespassing in My Studio
9. Nothing That Attracts the Cops
10. No Excuses
As a foster kid, Shay understood them instantly: they were pure crowd control.
“We’re lucky we can have the Internet,” Emily said as they paused on a burgundy-carpeted landing. “Twist’s afraid that it’s turning us all into zombies and porn perverts and celebrity worshipers. In his dreams, we’d all be reading art history or knitting bottle warmers for Third World babies.”
She had been living at the hotel for almost two years, Emily said as they headed up the stairs again.
“Can’t even have a boyfriend, huh?” Shay said. She’d never had time for a serious boyfriend. There had been two possible candidates in Eugene. So much for that.…
“Depends on how you define boyfriend,” Emily said. “I asked about the no-sex thing, and Twist said he didn’t have anything against sex, but when you start allowing sex on the premises, the boys start fighting, the girls start feuding, and the whole place gets crazy. And if somebody is underage, it could bring in the cops. The same thing with drugs. It’s crazy enough without that stuff. He says the one big basic rule is, nothing that makes the place crazier. If you do stuff that attracts the cops, like Cade did today, it makes the place crazier.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Shay said. “Actually, it makes sense.”
“Well … until you fall in love. Real love,” Emily said. “Then you might want to get together with somebody. If that happens … Twist will kick you out. He can be a mean little bastard. He just won’t take the hassle.”
“Why does he do it at all?” Shay asked.
Emily shrugged. “Supposedly, he was a street kid himself. That’s pretty much the sum total of what anyone knows. Oh, and that he sells those paintings up in his studio for about a million dollars.”
“A million dollars?”
“Okay. Not a million, but a lot,” Emily said. “When he got rich, the story is, this place was a flophouse, and he bought it with the idea that he was going to build free studios for street artists. Instead, it got taken over by kids.”
“Except that he still makes the rules,” Shay said.
“Yup, and keeps the twins around to enforce ’em, if they need to.”
The twins …
Shay had seen what they were capable of in a dark alley against a couple of knife-wielding thugs. She wasn’t sure how she felt about running into them in a hallway on her way to brush her teeth. “So … are people around here afraid of them?”
“No, they’re not bad guys, as far as I can tell,” said Emily as they walked out on the fifth floor. “A little strange, but that’s no big thing around here. I’ve never heard either of them talk. They’re musicians. Trumpets, the Tweedle Brass. They’re the house brass at the Bridge, this hot studio over in Glendale.”
Shay shook her head. “Stranger and stranger,” she said.
Emily stood up, stretched, and said, “Listen, I’ve got to work. I found three little paintings today, on copper, a Western artist. I paid eight dollars each. I’ve seen the painter’s name before. I need to look him up.”
When Emily had gone, Shay got her laptop and walked out to the Tea Leaf. She’d decided against using the hotel’s Wi-Fi, because the address might be tracked.
She got an iced tea, took it to a table, went online, checked Odin’s Facebook account, and found it empty. Went to her SEND page and dropped yet another note, telling Odin where she was. Why didn’t he call her? Was Rachel isolating him?
What if he’d been hurt?
She turned away from that thought and spent some time considering Twist and his hotel. She Googled him and found six thousand entries under “Twist, artist,” mostly copies and recopies of gallery schedules and show announcements. There were a few stories from newspapers and magazines about his social activism and his social style of painting. She found no indication of a first name—or, for that matter, a real last name.
Twist was apparently it.
Odd. Judging from the kids she’d seen around, and their independent attitudes, she thought Twist was probably all right. But definitely odd. When she’d exhausted the online Twist research, she packed up her laptop and headed back to the hotel. As she was crossing the lobby, having nodded to the desk kid, she spotted Catherine, the woman who ran the kitchen. “Twist said you might have a job for me?”
“There’s already a waiting list,” Catherine said. “But it’s Twist’s call. I’ll ask him. Give me a couple minutes.”
Shay dropped into one of the beat-up overstuffed lobby chairs to wait. Cruz came through the door carrying a bundle of six long boxes bound together with tape. He looked around, took off his sunglasses, walked over, put the bundle down. The bundle hit with a thunk—it was heavy. “You ready for the big show?”
“I will be,” she said. “I’m waiting to see if I’ve got a kitchen job.”
He grimaced and dropped into the next chair. “If you gotta do it, you gotta do it. I did. It’s bad. You always smell like a stewed tomato. Even when they’re not stewing tomatoes.”
“What do you do now?” Shay asked.
“Twist found me a job on a golf course. Five in the morning until eight,” Cruz said. “I cut the greens, mow the fairways. Then I go to school. One more year.”
“I don’t know about golf,” Shay said.
Cruz said, “Neither do I—I know about cutting greens and mowing fairways. Seems weird, chasing a little white ball around, but a lot of rich people do it. Movie stars and stuff, and they take it seriously.”
She waited for Cruz to ask where she was from, but he never asked, nor did he ask why she was on the street. Hotel etiquette? She wasn’t sure. He did say that he’d seen a sign for part-time help wanted in a car wash, but she shook her head and said, “I’d rather do the kitchen.”
“Gonna smell like a tomato,” he said.
“Better than smelling like a radiator,” she said.
Catherine came back, nodded to Cruz, and said to Shay, “I talked to Twist. He said you’ll be working up in the belfry, so you don’t need the kitchen.”
“The belfry?”
“His studio,” she said.
“Am I supposed to go up?”
Catherine shrugged. “He didn’t say. Anyway, you’re not in the kitchen.”
She left and Cruz said, “Come on, I’ll take you up. I do his heavy lifting.” He patted the bundles of boxes. “Fifty pounds of canvas rolls from Artist & Craftsman.”
Twist’s studio was buzzing. Cade and a serious-looking woman whom Shay hadn’t met were on their hands and knees, painting the huge canvas with house-painting brushes. They were both wearing paper coveralls. Twist worked at a side table, mixing paint in plastic buckets.
Another woman, older, gray-haired, used a five-inch needle to sew a sleeve in the top edge of the canvas. The sleeve would take two wooden rods that would support the canvas off the side of a building, like a flag hung vertically.
Four big fans stood around the edges of the canvas, blowing air across it.
As Shay and Cruz came in, Twist looked up from the paint table and said, “Ah. Cruz and Shay. Good. We can use more painters. There are coveralls in that box.”
The cartoon looked like a panel from an early comic book, in harsh, bright colors—yellow, blue, red, black, and white. The outlines that they’d drawn that morning were all labeled with the color they would be. Cade and the woman working with him had finished about a quarter of the visible canvas.
Cruz and Shay found paper painter’s coveralls that were more or less the right size—the choices were medium and extra-large—got brushes from Twist, and went to work.
The woman introduced herself as Lou and said, “I’m Twist’s executive officer.” She had a soft accent that Shay later found out was Ethiopian.
Twist said, “Lou runs the place. I tell her what I need done, and she figures out how to do it without pissing off any more people than necessary.”
“Which ain’t easy,” Cade chipped in.
The paint, Twist said as they worked, was cheap, but still cost more than a thousand dollars. “We want the coat of paint to be thin, but we want complete coverage. Don’t slop it on. Thin coats. Thin.”
And he was fussy about the technique: “I have a reputation to uphold.” To Cade: “Slow down, slow down. Make smooth strokes. Smooth … Look at Lou.”
Lou said, “How can it affect your reputation? This is anonymous.”
“Anonymous, but everyone will know,” Cruz said.
They were a well-coordinated crew, familiar and friendly with each other, Shay realized.
Shay was working with a pail of yellow paint, blocking the outline of the cartoon woman’s body. After a while, Cruz said to Shay, “You’re pretty good at this.”
Cade: “You are pretty good.”
Twist: “Cruz, Cade. Just paint. Okay?”
“Just trying to be friendly,” Cade said.
“I know what you’re trying to be,” Twist said. “Do it on your own time.”
Shay smiled to herself and kept painting.
It was almost midnight when they finished. Twist said, “Not as bad as it could have been.”
“There’s a spot,” Shay said. She pointed to one of the center panels.
“Damn it,” Twist said. “Cade, can you reach in there?”
Cade stretched across one wet panel to reach into the center, with Cruz holding his belt in the back. Cade managed to dab at a white spot showing through a blue layer.
“Got it,” Cade said. He exhaled, as though done with heavy labor, and said to Twist, “Pay up.”
Twist said, “Yeah, yeah.”
He walked around the painting. The paint they’d used was thinned acrylic. With the fans playing across it, the paint had dried within minutes of being applied. Because the painting was so large, they’d had to roll one edge as soon as it was dry. They’d never seen the entire painted panel, all at once.
Twist said, “Is the Nazi armband big enough? We want that to really jump off the canvas.”
“With bosoms like that, you think anybody is going to look at the armband?” Lou asked.
Shay had noticed that Twist had changed the colors on the armband, which was now black with a red swastika, as she’d suggested.
Twist shook his head. “Without seeing the whole thing, it’s hard to judge the impact.”
Cade: “Look at this.” He went to the computer and punched a bunch of keys. Twist’s cartoon, Photoshopped over an image of the target building, popped up on the screen.
Lou whistled. “If it looks like that in real life, she’s really gonna be annoyed. I better check the hotel permits, in case she sics the health department on us.”
Shay: “Who is she again?”
“Ann Banks—the district attorney,” Twist said with a grin. “Man, this is good work, if I do say so myself.”
Cade said, “So pay up. C’mon. I want to spend the money before the cops come.”
Twist went off to the back room and Cruz asked Shay, “What are you doing next?”
Cade, before Shay could answer: “Probably sleeping, since we move out at three o’clock.”
Lou: “Not a bad idea if you’re planning to jump off a building on the end of a rope.”
Twist came back with an envelope full of cash and began passing it out. To Shay, he said, “Two hours doing the outlines, three hours getting the climbing gear, an hour, more or less, going up and down the building, four hours here, ten hours total, at eight dollars an hour. That’s a total of eighty.” He counted out eight ten-dollar bills and handed them to her.
“Thank you,” she said. Then, “Oh!” She dug into her hip pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “We got some deals. Here’s your change—two hundred dollars.”
Twist’s eyebrows went up. “Change? That’s a whole new concept.”
He paid off Cade and Cruz, told Shay that Lou was on a regular salary, and put the rest of the money in his pocket. He said, “We move at three a.m. Do not be late. Now everybody go away. I’ve got to think.”
Emily was in bed dozing, a three-year-old copy of Cosmopolitan folded over her chest, when Shay returned. Shay said, “I’m going to have to pay you for the clothes a little at a time.” She handed the girl fifty dollars: “Okay?”
“You have enough to live on?”
“For a few days,” Shay said. “I think I have a job with Twist, but I’m not sure. Nobody tells you anything.”
Emily said she got up at first light. “I go to flea markets all over the L.A. Basin. If you want the good stuff, you’ve got to move early.”
They turned the lights off and talked for a while. Emily was upfront about her life: her father, she said, abandoned her mother when Emily was less than a year old. She’d never known him, and had no inclination to find him.
Her mother had had drug and boyfriend problems, and
still did. “She’s only thirty-four—she feels more like a sister than a mother, especially since she wouldn’t know good advice if it bit her on the leg. Her idea of good advice is to stay away from wine in cans.”
That made Shay smile, but she felt a touch of sadness at the same time. She didn’t talk about herself, not to Emily or anybody. All she said was that her parents had been killed in accidents, and that she and a brother had lived with their grandmother until she died.
“We wound up with Child Protection—that’s when I was nine and my brother was ten.”
“Brutal,” Emily said.
“Yeah. I try not to think about the past too much,” Shay said. “We’ve been in Social Services for so long it almost feels normal.”
Emily was quiet for a moment. Then, “At least your foster parents taught you a skill. How many people can climb up and down buildings?”
“That’s right,” said Shay. “Less than a week in L.A., and I’ve already got a gig.”
Eventually, they drifted off to sleep, and an odd peace seeped into Shay’s subconscious: she was safe, among friends. She could sleep without worrying about it.…
So she was startled when, two hours in, the phone alarm vibrated against her chest. She was wearing a man’s shirt, a loan from Emily, with the phone in a breast pocket. She killed the vibration, swiveled her feet to the floor, and dressed in the dark. She found her comb and toothbrush, and made a five-minute bathroom run. Back in the room, moving as quietly as she could, she picked up her pack with the climbing gear.
Emily said in the dark, “Be careful, Shay. Do good.”
11
The group was meeting in the lobby, where a half-dozen sleep-deprived kids were still working the Net with their laptops. Like an addiction, Shay thought. Everyone arrived within a minute or so, and Twist, the last one down, said, “I had to go back up for the key. Let’s get the stuff off the dock.”
Twist drove a three-year-old black Range Rover that had never been washed by anything but rain. The large roll of painted canvas went in the back, along with two heavy bags of chains. The wooden support rods were tied to the roof.
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