Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Rory, now thinking more clearly, shouted, “They’re here for Shay and the dog—get Twist,” and groped for the key latched to his belt. “Get the knives too. They got a gun.”

  One of the two men the kids had taken down managed to crawl out the door as the kids tore off, and he spoke something into his mouthpiece.

  Cruz noticed one of the two men stationed at the rear of the hotel as he unloaded art supplies from Twist’s Range Rover. Didn’t matter that it was a middle-aged white guy dressed like a banker on vacation—a lookout was a lookout, and this guy’s eyes were radar behind his shades, just as obviously as any cholo from East L.A.

  Cruz started toward the loading dock with a bolt of canvas under each arm and feigned an interest in the trumpet music coming from above. Looking up, he thought, Doesn’t feel like a cop. The undercovers he was used to seeing generally tried to dress “street.” A spy from the district attorney’s office, maybe? He’d alert Twist as soon as he got up to the studio.

  All at once, the guy was on the move, and then a second guy—same clothes, same gang—was racing across the back of the hotel from the other side, and the three of them practically smashed into each other at the base of the dock.

  “What’s up?” Cruz said, but the men pushed past him, up the stairs, and through the fire door into the kitchen. Overhead, he heard Twist shouting.

  Twist finally broke through the trumpet noise, calling down to Dee: “Guys with guns, coming through the lobby, looking for Shay and the dog. Don’t know if she’s in her room, but get down on five, and be careful! Be careful!”

  He plunged back through the studio, and Cade, who’d been working at the bank of computers, came running at him.

  “She’s in her room, Twist—”

  Twist was already in the lead, moving as fast as he could, but his bad leg was a drag. “Stay here!” he hollered at Cade’s back. “Hold up!”

  Cade snagged a pair of scissors off a table and was out the door and down the back stairwell.

  Jaxon inserted Rory’s key and yanked the drawer open and the kids piled on the desk, arming themselves with pocketknives, screwdrivers, a fish scaler, an eighteen-inch piece of rebar …

  The men led by Thorne were mounting the stairs two at a time, headed for five. No sign yet of the girl or the dog.

  The two lookouts from the rear of the hotel powered through the lobby, one of them swatting away a couple of boys that came at them with knives, while the other grabbed the man who’d been hit with the lamp and carried him out the door.

  Cruz followed the screams to the lobby, and a girl with a screwdriver went running by and said, “They’re on five!” and he said, “Who?” and she went up the staircase and called down over the banister, “The guys who want to kill Shay!”

  Shay heard what sounded like shouting from the hallway, but it was muffled, and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard shouting from the hallway. Then X got to his feet and pointed his nose toward the commotion, like a hunting dog, and bared his teeth.

  Shay thought about the muzzle but said, “Hey, pretty boy. Easy, it’s okay.”

  X growled, Wrong about that.

  Someone banged on the door, which was locked. She got off the bed, and X started with her toward the front room.

  “No. You stay,” she said, and closed him inside the bedroom. She turned back into the jumbled living area, cut around a rack of clothing, and stumbled on a skateboard. “Just a sec! I’m coming!”

  At that moment, the banging stopped and the door exploded off its frame.

  Two men were there, and she knew them instantly by type—Singulars. She tried to turn and one man caught her hair, shouting, “Got her, got her.…”

  The man yanked her close, pulling her head back, and she cried out in pain, but there was no easing up, just more shouting, “Where’s the dog, where’s the—”

  He didn’t finish, because he didn’t have to: the bedroom door swung open and the dog was right there, airborne for ten or twelve feet, bared teeth leading the way. He leapt right past Shay’s shoulder and sank his inch-long fangs in the man’s face, and the man howled in agony and went down, and the dog ripped his face and then turned in a whirling motion and went for the second man, clamping first on a metal-and-plastic leg, recognizing it for what it was, and then virtually climbing the man’s body to go for his throat. The man hit the dog in the chest and the dog came off for just a second, but then, recovering with phenomenal speed, was back at the man’s face.

  The man caught the animal by the throat and X twisted to get away, but the man had his collar.

  Shay hit him on the back of the head with the only thing she could reach, a blue-and-white china pot, which shattered like an egg, but the man went down and—just for one instant—the dog’s yellow eye caught hers, and the dog seemed to be saying, Thanks for that.

  Then there were more men coming through the door, and the first man, whose face had been ripped open, was back on his feet, thrashing through all of Emily’s junk, trying to get at Shay or the dog, and howling like a wounded animal all at the same time.

  One of the new men—Thorne—had a gun, but he pointed it at the dog and Shay threw a snow globe at his head and he ducked and came back up with the gun.

  Cade took the stairs two and three at a time, plunging down the two flights and around the landings, and burst into the hallway on five to find a dozen hotel kids, both male and female, swarming two men in golf shirts and black gloves and one of the girls was screaming, “The gloves are weighted, they got lead in their knuckles,” and one boy was crawling out of the mass of people, blood running from his nose and mouth.

  The fight had pushed the two strangers away from Shay’s room, and Cade sprinted around all the fighters, getting to the broken-down door and seeing more men inside just as Cruz arrived from the other side, and Cade saw him now and shouted, “Shay’s inside!” and Cruz thrust past him and went in first.

  And Cruz went down, tripped up by the mass of Emily’s junk, and Cade, just behind him, saw a man with one hand on Shay’s neck, and on the other side of the room, X in a swirling fight with another man, who was screaming in pain as the dog ripped at his face and arms while Thorne aimed a short rifle at the dog.

  Cade jumped over Cruz and came down two feet behind the man wrestling with Shay, and he swung the art scissors at the man’s shoulder and felt the blades penetrate and the man screamed and turned, and Thorne turned and the barrel swung toward Cade’s head and he tried to duck and the gun went off with a sharp crack and Cade saw something flash past his eye and then Cruz, coming off the floor, put one arm under the gunman’s crotch and another at the back of his neck and lifted him clear of the floor and then overhead and smashed him down into a prized Louis Vuitton trunk Emily had collected, and Cade saw another flash and then the man he’d stabbed raised his good arm and backhanded him, and Cade, feeling as though he’d been hit by a dumbbell, went down into the junk.

  One of the gloved men at the door pushed through and screamed, “Get out, abort, get out, get out,” and Thorne got up off the crushed trunk and looked around for his dropped gun, and Cruz went after him again until the gloved man thumped him once on the back of the head and Cruz went down. Thorne found his weapon and the two men pushed back through the broken door, where more kids were flooding the floor.

  All of that in twenty seconds.

  The three men from the room joined the two in the hall, all of them bloodied, one man’s face terribly ripped by the dog, another bleeding from Cade’s stab wound, his arm useless, and together they fought their way to the main stairs and then down the stairs, the kids pushing behind them. In the confined area of the stairs, the kids, who’d been winning the fight through sheer numbers, couldn’t compete with the weighted gloves and the attackers’ training, and the five men pushed around and down and around and down and into the lobby.

  And then Dee and Twist came down the back stairs, too late for the fight on five, and Dee, swinging his weighted bat at one of t
he attackers, connected with the man’s forearm but the man took it with no sign of pain and swung back at Dee’s face with the same weighted hand, and Dee went down.

  Twist came in with his cane but the men lurched away toward the door, with the kids running at them, slashing with knives and rebar and pieces of furniture, and another kid went down, and Twist, realizing that the men were trying to get out of the building and that they were empty-handed, began shouting, “Let them go, let them go, let them go.…”

  From the doorway, a huddle of kids watched as the injured men were loaded into the four SUVs, and meanwhile, from across the street, the homeless man in the cowboy boots jogged over, beeped a remote key at the white van with the empty cage, and climbed behind the wheel.

  And the motorcade, led by the van, sped away.

  The dog stood over Shay, guarding her against any more violence. Cade and Cruz were on either side of Emily’s crushed trunk, struggling to get upright.

  Cruz got to Shay first and asked, “Are you all right?”

  She was on her back, her eyes open and her lids fluttering, and the dog whimpered next to Cruz’s face and Cruz said, “She’s all right, X, she’s tough,” and Cruz cupped a bloody hand to her cheek and said it again in a voice that caught with emotion, “She’s tough.”

  Shay touched the top of her head. “I think he ripped my scalp off.”

  At the sound of her voice, the dog nosed Cruz out of the way.

  “X,” she cried, and pulled the dog into her chest. “I saw you open the door! Cruz—he opened the door with his paws to come help me, I saw him.”

  Cruz leaned back in and said, “Taught yourself a trick, huh? I knew you were smart.”

  X licked Shay’s face, and she saw that he was injured, too. The dewclaw on his right forepaw had been snapped off, leaving a bloody divot.

  Cade, his cheekbone bleeding, came around her other side and repeated the question, “Are you all right?”

  “Cade, your cheek—”

  “It’s not too bad,” he said, and to Cruz, “You okay?”

  “I hurt,” Cruz said, pressing a hand to his rib cage. “Those guys, the guy I hit, his arm felt like metal … like he was a robot.”

  Shay sat up at that, with Cade and Cruz each taking an elbow. Her mind swirled with thoughts of West and his metal legs, and of Cherry and his unusual strength.

  “Gotta stop the blood,” Cruz said as he examined X’s inside ankle where the claw had been. He looked around, picked up a sock, and pressed it to the wound. “A couple minutes of pressure, I think we’ll be okay.”

  “At least he didn’t get stuck with this,” said Cade, and held out what looked like a hypodermic needle with a yellow tail.

  “What is it?” Shay asked.

  “Tranquilizer dart. Should be at least one more around here somewhere, ’cause the guy with the gun got off two that I saw. Which means, whoever they were, they wanted X, and they weren’t expecting him to go willingly.”

  Shay said, “It was them—the guys who took Odin. The same guys, they’re these …” She got to her feet, shaking with the realization. The dog nosed at her leg and she stroked his forehead and said, “I won’t let them take you.”

  “Who?” said Cruz. “You know those guys?”

  In the hallway, people were crying and shouting for help.

  “We better get downstairs,” Cade said. “People are hurt. Some of them are hurt bad.”

  21

  Harmon usually took care to be casual with Sync; it was a way to demonstrate their equality, or at least a sign of camaraderie. Not this time. He was squatting in a hospital emergency room in the stink of disinfectant and blood, on the phone with his boss, still angry about what had happened at the hotel.

  Angry with himself, and with Thorne.

  “Our fault,” he said. He didn’t excuse mistakes made by others, or by himself. “We saw kids, we just didn’t see what kind of kids. It was a complete hornet’s nest: going in there was like going into an al-Qaeda hotel. They had knives, scissors, and clubs, and there were twenty or thirty of them, and they knew how to use that stuff. Vance was stabbed twice in the back, in the kidneys, we’ll be lucky if he’s working in a month. Dennit’s face is pudding from that damn robo-dog, they’re calling in a plastic surgeon. Kyle has a concussion and a bad stab wound in the shoulder, and Carter has a broken arm, Thorne sprained a knee. Christ, they’re all cut up, stabbed, slashed.… We’re lucky nobody was killed. We won’t be going back in there, not without armor and a lot more men.”

  Harmon had been at the hospital for two hours seeing that the entry team was properly cared for; six of them had injuries that needed urgent medical attention.

  “Forget the hotel,” Sync said. “We won’t be going back there—we’d have to hurt somebody too bad. Do you know if they’re talking to the police?”

  “Apparently not. This artist, Twist, takes kids off the street. A lot of them, probably most of them, have criminal backgrounds. They stay away from the cops.”

  “That’s one for us,” Sync said. “What about the artist? He there?”

  “Missed the main event. Thorne saw him on the staircase when they were backing out. Guy’s on a cane, a gimp—”

  “So we made a mistake,” Sync broke in. He picked up a yellow pencil and rolled it between his palms. “Maybe we’ll have another shot at the dog on the street.”

  “There’s a problem there. The professors said the dog should be dead by now, or so weak it couldn’t walk. That dog was like a hurricane, from what the entry team tells me. When Dennit did the brush-by yesterday, he said the dog looked sharp. So it’s been recharged—the girl must have figured it out. Trying to take it on the street might be like trying to capture a leopard.”

  A nurse came out from behind a curtained bed, glanced at Harmon, saw that he wasn’t one of the injured, and jogged away.

  “Dammit, the problem is spreading out on us,” Sync said. “It’s like an oil slick—if you don’t get on top of it immediately, you wind up all over TV and people are calling you criminals.”

  “What about her brother? What are we doing?”

  Sync turned in his chair and looked out toward the ocean. “We baptized him right after you left for Los Angeles,” he said. “That’ll work, I think, if we’re careful. They did him three times, and the third time, he actually sucked the water down into his lungs. Deliberately. They had to empty him out.”

  “He tried to suicide?”

  “Either that, or he was daring us to kill him,” Sync said. “McCullough was there, he knew what to do.”

  “Tough little rat,” Harmon said, letting the admiration show in his voice.

  Sync touched a few keys on his computer and a file popped up. He paged through the entries on Odin’s questioning. “Not so tough. We pulled together everything we could find on him. A lot of it from his school counselors. His IQ is off the charts, but he has quirks. He’s worse than clumsy … I don’t know the exact word. He’s not disabled, but he’s physically inept, and always has been. He’s socially backward, although he always seems to have had friends. The key thing here, though, is that he’s apparently had episodes of depression since he was in middle school, and he’s also both claustrophobic and aquaphobic. He was excused from his school’s swimming requirement on the recommendation of a school psychologist.”

  “So the baptism must’ve freaked him out.”

  “Yes.” Sync looked at his watch. “McCullough is going to talk to him again at two o’clock in the morning, when he’s at the low point of the circadian cycle. If you have questions you want answered, send them to me. I’m going up to Sacramento to sit in.”

  “He hasn’t said anything about the thumb drives?”

  “Haven’t asked the question yet. We’ve been demonstrating our control. At least, that’s what we were doing until he started breathing water. That gave some of the control back to him, but still—he can’t have liked it.”

  “All right, if I think of anything, I
’ll call you,” Harmon said. “Look: the dog is important, I know that. But even if it winds up with the wrong people, we can still say it’s a scientific experiment that’d been approved by the proper authorities. We have the paperwork. There might be questions, but there’d be defenses. If this group cracks those thumb drives, we’re in a much bigger world of hurt.”

  Sync agreed about the dog. “But I want to continue the surveillance on them, see if they let down their guard and give us a chance to grab it. The thumb drives are top priority. They could hang us all. We need to push Odin Remby. Right up to the edge, if we have to.”

  “Not over the edge.”

  “Not yet,” Sync said. He looked at his watch. “You—finish with the hospital, bag out somewhere.”

  Harmon stood up, said, “Talk to you later,” and hung up. Down the hospital’s hallway, somebody cried out in pain.

  Odin didn’t know it was two o’clock in the morning, didn’t know it was the next day, didn’t even remember it was his birthday, that he was finally eighteen. He’d pace, then he’d go back to the rug and lie down, and then he’d pace. He did it for hours, for what felt like days, though he never got especially hungry. Or thirsty. He felt like he never wanted another drink of water in his life.

  He thought he might have gotten some sleep despite the noise, or he might have simply passed out. Either way, his whole body felt wrong, as though he were dying. Although he’d managed to maneuver the hood off, his arms were still cuffed behind him.

  Then he heard a key in the door and it popped open. Two men were there in golf shirts and khaki slacks and hoods with nothing but eyeholes so he couldn’t see their faces. They picked him up, pulled the hood back over his face, walked him to another room, and sat him in a chair.

  The man who’d called him a “little shit”—Odin thought he was the same one, from his voice—said, “Okay, we’re going to ask you a question. If you answer it correctly, we won’t hurt you. If you don’t answer it correctly, we will hurt you. Do you understand?”