Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Dum and Dee had scouted Mount Lee and picked out a site where they could stash the equipment. They put “Hollywood sign” in Google Maps and zoomed in on the mountain. The satellite view showed the dirt trails leading up the hill like a spider’s web, and individual clumps of brush.

  “Not many people walk directly up the face of Mount Lee, though there’s actually a couple of old trails,” Twist said, tapping the map on his computer screen. “Most hikers come up the back road to the TV tower. That’s how Dum and Dee will get in, except they’ll be driving. They’ll wrap all the gear in a couple of tarps and leave it in the bush here. Off to the left of the letter H”—he tapped the screen again—“which is inside the fence. The fence is only along the road, above the sign. You’ll walk up from the bottom, where there is no fence.”

  “How steep is that? Going up?” Shay asked.

  “It’s steep, but it’s not climbing like you know it. You can walk up. But it’ll be dark. You’ll need your headlamps. Keep them on the red light, it’ll be enough to see.”

  After Dum and Dee left, they were all restless, feeling cooped up, on edge about what they were going to do that night. Cade and Cruz decided to check out a commotion on the beach involving a couple of big video cameras, a wedge of paparazzi, and three young women in bikinis romping along the water’s edge. Shay and Twist got Diet Cokes and climbed up to the rooftop deck.

  They talked about West, about the depth of his obligation to Singular for his legs. She told Twist about the college professor who had tried to extort sex from West’s sister, and West’s reaction—running the professor out of the country.

  That made Twist smile, and he said, “I’d probably like the guy … but I still can’t trust him.”

  Shay said, “Okay,” and the conversation drifted for a while, and they talked about Eugene, where Twist had never been, and the street culture there, and the kids at the hotel.

  Finally Shay said, “You know, you have all these worries and questions about West. I’ve sort of wondered about you. Some of the same questions. Actually, even more questions. I know why West was working for this company, why there’s loyalty there, but I don’t understand what you’re doing at all.”

  “You’re saying you don’t trust me?”

  Shay said, “That’s not it. I just have questions.”

  Twist said, “I answer only a limited number of questions. I’m pretty private.”

  “Except, of course, you’ve got about seventy runaways who you’re involved with, which is pretty unprivate,” Shay said.

  “I rent them space,” he said. “Like I told you on the first day, sooner or later, you have to pay.”

  “That’s not true,” Shay said. “I haven’t been there long, and I’ve already met at least ten kids who’ve never been able to pay anything, and never will be able to.”

  “Give me their names, I’ll kick them out.”

  “You know their names, and you won’t kick them out,” Shay said. “I understand, just from the rumors about you, that you spent some time on the street yourself, and now you’re rich, so you decide, Okay, I’ll help out. A lot of rich people do something like that. Maybe not so hands-on.… But why have you gotten involved with me, and my problems? You’re not required to save me—but here you are.”

  “What’s this thing you’ve got about sharing stories?”

  “I don’t want to know that your mom didn’t nurse you long enough; I just want to know why you’re doing this.”

  After a long time, Twist said, “Because a lot of what’s happened is my fault. I needed to use you, for my immigration action, and I did. You made that about a hundred times better than it would have been. Then you were famous, and Singular was able to track you. Because they could track you, they found your brother and they took him. My fault.”

  “Not entirely your fault,” Shay said. “I could have said no.”

  “Really? You’re on the street and you’re desperately looking for your brother, and a guy offers you a safe place to stay and some money for one easy job? I don’t think you could’ve said no. Now it’s come to this.”

  “Okay, it’s all your fault,” Shay said with a forgiving grin.

  “Aside from that, I hate what these guys are doing,” Twist said. “Experimenting on people? Discarding them.… And what are dogooders for if they don’t take on assholes like Singular? As far as your brother goes, I think they ought to give him a friggin’ medal.”

  Shay nodded and said, “Thank you. I’d like to know how you got this way, but if it’s private.…”

  “You know what I always say.”

  “I do,” Shay said, and together they intoned, “Let’s not overshare.”

  Cade and Cruz came back, amused by the sighting of a movie star who’d been arrested for impaired driving the week before—impaired meaning by both alcohol and a variety of illegal drugs—and was apparently trying to reinflate her healthy All-American Girl image by splashing around in the surf with two carefully chosen girlfriends, carefully chosen to be slightly less attractive.

  The rest of the afternoon and early evening featured a series of what-ifs: What if they were seen going up the hill? What if somebody else was at the sign? What if something happened and Twist couldn’t pick them up after they fled the sign site? What if a police helicopter came before they could light the letters?

  Nobody said it, but everybody thought it: what if the action was futile because Odin was already dead?

  Late in the afternoon, Dum called and said that the equipment had been delivered and was waiting in the designated bush.

  “He said all that?” Shay asked.

  Twist said, “Actually, what he said was ‘Done.’ ”

  “Remember the sequence, everything is packed in sequence,” Twist said about six times. “As soon as you get there, get to the equipment bundles.”

  He ran through the rest of the action until Shay waved him off. “We got it, Twist. We got it.”

  “What if there’s a cop with a dog?” Cade asked.

  “Not a problem, depending on how fast or slow you are,” Shay said.

  Cade looked perplexed. “What?”

  “If there’s a dog, all I have to do is outrun you,” Shay said. “If I can do that, not a problem.”

  Cade said, “Hey!”

  Cruz laughed and said to Cade, “I can outrun you too, hombre.”

  At eight o’clock, Twist asked, “What do you think? Are we gonna do it?”

  “I think so,” Cade said, and Cruz nodded.

  “Yes. We’re gonna do it,” Shay said, looking around at the other three, catching their eyes one at a time. “Let’s load up.”

  29

  They were quiet as they drove across town, fiddling with equipment. They each had a hunter’s headlamp, bought at a gun store, that offered a choice of red or white LED lights. The red lights would allow them to see, but would be less visible than white lights to anyone else on the mountain.

  They were all dressed in indigo jeans and dark shirts and had daypacks between their legs. Shay’s and Cruz’s had their climbing gear, leather gloves, and one-liter water bottles, and Cade’s had water, gloves, electrical tape, and a couple of pairs of pliers in case an emergency fix-it with the wiring was needed.

  They’d talked about whether they should take X, and X had sensed it and stuck close to Shay’s leg all evening, and they finally voted that X would go: he’d be no more visible than the average coyote, and there were lots of those around.

  And who knew—he might provide a warning of a possible encounter with others on the hill.

  Shortly after nine o’clock, they climbed a narrow road to a hairpin curve and a steep patch of dirt feeding into the trail that led up the mountain to the sign. They were in a residential neighborhood, and might be seen—a chance they had to take.

  They drove past the trailhead once, looking it over. Everything seemed clear.

  “Bug spray, packs, headlamps,” Twist said. “I’ll find a place to t
urn around.”

  When they came back, he paused at the trailhead and they piled out. They didn’t slam the doors, but barely and silently latched them. The SUV’s door alarms would buzz at Twist for a while, but he’d wait until he was away from the mountain before he stopped to close the doors tightly.

  As the Range Rover rolled on, the three of them looked up the hill. They knew they were at the right place, but could see nothing of the unlit sign.

  “Red lamps,” Shay whispered, and they started up the hillside, pulling on their gloves, packs on their backs, with Shay and X in the lead.

  There was a house down and to their left with lights in the windows, but they saw no movement, heard no voices, and in a few seconds, the dirt path had narrowed to little more than a game trail through the brush, the tan earth barely visible in the red light from the headlamps.

  The preparations had been intricate, although simple enough in outline. They had glued long ropes of powerful LED Christmas lights between clear sheets of plastic like painters used to cover furniture, but thicker. The electrical connections for the lights were all located at the bottom of the sheets. At the top of each sheet, a wooden pole was glued into a sleeve, with hooks at both ends.

  Shay and Cruz would climb the backs of the letters, which were flat sheets of white-painted metal supported by scaffolding, with maintenance ladders going to the top. At the top, they’d stretch a cable across each letter and clip the two ends of the cable onto the brace bars at the sides of each letter. To do that, they’d have to toe-walk on the scaffold bars, which were only inches wide, and forty feet above the ground.

  The cables, which they had precut, had carabiners wired to their centers. When each cable was in place, Cruz and Shay would drop lift lines to the ground through the carabiners, which would act as pulleys.

  Once all the lift lines were ready, Shay, Cruz, and Cade would begin to lift the new letters into place.

  While Shay and Cruz were attaching the cables and pulleys to the top of the sign, Cade would be moving the plastic lighting bundles into place under the sign and stringing the electric wires needed to connect the overlaid letters to a compact Honda generator.

  They’d had two more complicated problems to work through.

  The first was that if the police arrived shortly after the sign was turned on, the cops could quickly kill it by pulling the connection to the generator. The goal was to keep the sign lighted for news cameras as long as possible. Twist’s solution was inspired by art.

  “Back when electronic art was big, a guy here in Los Angeles came up with a sculpture that involved bent glass rods coming out of a light box. When you turned it on, it looked like lightning strikes,” Twist said. “We’ll put those under the sign, and when you get close, it’ll look like high-voltage lightning is shooting through the brush under the sign. The cops won’t mess with it until they can get a specialist electrician up to look at it … or until the gas runs out on the generator.”

  The second problem was how to keep the police away from the sign long enough for Shay, Cade, and Cruz to get the letters up and working. Twist had an answer for that too. The road to the top was blocked with a locked steel gate at night. Twist would drive to the gate and simply add his own lock—a heavy chain with a massive padlock designed to defeat bolt cutters.

  “Simple, but effective,” Cade said.

  “Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this action for years,” Twist said. “I just hadn’t thought of anything I really, really needed to say.”

  As Shay, Cruz, and Cade climbed the hill, Twist found a place to park in an affluent neighborhood where the Range Rover would feel at home. Shay would call when they were ready to start lifting the letters, and then he’d go up the hill with his gate chain.

  Everything was on the clock. They had a maximum of forty-five minutes to climb up to the sign, thirty-five to forty minutes to scale the nine letters, secure the plastic sheeting, set up the lightning boxes, and, with fifteen minutes left before L.A.’s eleven o’clock news, flip the switch on the generator—

  And run.

  The climb was a tough one: Mount Lee was a mountain, but a mountain of rough dirt with embedded rock fragments. They could walk, mostly, but at a few washouts, they had to go to all fours.

  X turned out to be a gift: he was visible in the red light and moved slowly ahead on his leash, picking out a route. He seemed to sense where they wanted to go, and he sniffed at the air and turned and watched and led the way up.

  The night was warm, and they were all sweating in their long sleeves and long pants. They stopped twice to drink from their water bottles, looking down at Hollywood below them, the lights stretching away across the Los Angeles Basin, with an inky spot below and to the west: the Hollywood Reservoir. Lavender, sage, and eucalyptus scented the air. There was little traffic noise; they could hear a couple of horses whinnying back and forth at a stable half a mile away.

  They had one encounter on the way up: the ghostly flash of a coyote pack cutting across their path. X had had their scent almost from the beginning of the climb, and when they were within ten yards, he growled a warning, pointing with his nose, throwing a glance back at Shay, then looking forward again.

  Shay risked a quick flash with the white LEDs and caught the yellow eyes of the coyotes, like road-sign warning reflectors. They pulled back and paused, three thin, flea-bitten things that looked more curious than menacing. Young coyotes, maybe siblings, with patchy, gray-brown fur and large, cartoonish ears.

  X lurched toward them, restrained by his leash, the low rumble in his throat not a fight call, but a warning. The coyotes looked him over for a second, then moved away in the dark. Shay went back to the red light.

  “Well done,” Shay whispered to X, and ruffled his neck.

  “Thirty-four minutes,” Cade whispered from behind.

  They picked up the pace.

  They weren’t talking much by the time they got to the sign. The trip up the hill had been tough, and if not for the gloves and long-sleeve shirts and jeans, the brush would have torn them up. Twice they’d hit pitches so steep that all of them slid back down the trail, grabbing bushes and protruding rocks just to stay upright.

  They finally saw the pale, white-painted D looming overhead, and Shay whispered, “Before we get too close, let’s take a minute to get our heads together.”

  They found a shelf in the dirt, six feet long and a couple of feet wide, sat down, and looked out over the city. “Pretty,” Cade said. “Be cool to come up here with a camera.”

  A moment later, Cruz said, “It’s so quiet.”

  “And that’s good,” Shay said. “Listen …”

  They listened, and Cruz said, “I don’t hear anything.”

  “So it’s time to go,” said Shay. “Not a word now. Turn the headlamps off.”

  For a sign as huge as it was, HOLLYWOOD looked almost fragile in the night. They crossed behind the D, then walked across the hillside to the bush where the equipment packs were hidden. There were lights at the top of the hill, at the TV or radio tower or whatever it was, but they saw nobody. Moving slowly in their dark clothes, they were all but invisible.

  They’d talked all afternoon about possible problems with finding the equipment, but they’d looked at the Google Earth photos for so long and talked so much about angles off the H that they went directly to it. The bundles of gear were well to the side, where they wouldn’t be found by casual intruders. Cruz and Cade pulled them out as carefully as they could, while Shay looked up in the dark for the security cameras that were mounted at the tops of the letters. She whispered, “I don’t think anyone knows we’re here yet.”

  “The longer, the better,” Cruz whispered.

  “Okay. Keep moving slowly, and stay in the shadows and behind the brush as much as we can,” Shay said. “We need to change the plan: Cruz and I will help take the letter bundles and the equipment out to the sign to get the heavy work done. I don’t think they’ll see us until we start clim
bing.”

  The whole setup went so well that Shay could hardly believe it. They pulled the packs apart and made sure that each of their LED-lighted letters was placed beneath the correct HOLLYWOOD letter. With all the gear in position, Shay took out one of the clean phones and texted Twist: “Ready to climb. See any problems?”

  A moment later, an answer flashed on her screen: “Nothing. Will lock gate. Close to schedule. Go.”

  Shay took a deep breath and said to Cruz, “Think about your feet. Use your hands to balance. Be sure you’re tied in, don’t be afraid to fall, but stay up any way you can.”

  “I will.”

  She turned to Cade and said, “Since we’ve got the letters in place, you’ve got more time. Don’t hurry with the lightning boxes and all those glass rods. Be cool. Take your time. Get it right.”

  He nodded.

  “And remember,” she said to both of them, “the worst thing that could happen is if one of us gets hurt. We’d have to give ourselves up. I don’t know what would happen then.”

  “You guys be careful,” Cade whispered. “And, Shay—take this.”

  He reached around Cruz and palmed her the Hopi stone. Shay nodded back at him, and pushed it down her front pocket.

  They moved sideways back to the sign. Shay tied X’s leash to a support at the bottom of the sign, and he whined once at her, a mild protest.

  “Only for thirty-nine minutes,” she said.

  Shay waited next to the dog, stroking his head, as Cruz worked his way across the hillside to the letter D. When he was ready, he gave her a flash with his headlamp, and they both turned on their red lights and began climbing the ladders behind the letters, carrying the support cables and lift lines with them.

  When Shay got to the top of the H, she tied in. She could no longer see Cruz, and concentrated on clipping one end of the support cable to the right end of the H. That done, she walked across the back of the letter on the narrow scaffolding bar, pulling the support cable behind her; the sign felt surprisingly rough under her gloves. She got to the other side of the H and clipped the support cable to the bar on the other end. Moving back to the middle of the H, she reached over the top of the letter, threaded the lift line through the carabiner at the middle of the support cable, and dropped the lift line, which Cade would clip to the lighted-letter sheet.