Uncaged

by John Sandford

  A half hour later, she spotted the motel she wanted, a place where they wouldn’t call the cops about anything unless they found a body under a bed. The motel was much crummier than the mom-and-pop of the night before, this one with a rawboned desk clerk who suggested that she might qualify for a free room.

  When she walked out of the motel two hours later, taking a stained towel and a long rope of red hair with her, she was a different person, not anything like the red-haired, camera-friendly Shay Remby who’d wall-crawled the building on the 110 or lit a new sign over Hollywood.

  She looked like a punk, pale skin and chopped black hair, like somebody who should have a Tiny Terror guitar amp stowed behind the rough-looking black-and-gray wolf that sat beside her.

  She got back in the Jeep and found a Starbucks. She didn’t go in; she could get the Wi-Fi from the parking lot.

  This time, she scored.

  On the GandyDancer site, an obscure statement:

  The number on the curb plus 109.

  Obscure to everyone but Shay and Odin. When they were young teenagers, they’d temporarily lived in a house with a 666 address, the number of the beast. Odin had been amused; Shay had been vaguely frightened by it. Now she added 666 and 109 in her head and came up with 775. She Googled it and, along with a variety of other things, learned that it was the area code for Reno.

  The fear that had clutched her heart released just a bit. But where was the rest of the phone number?

  She went to her Facebook link with Odin and found another Odin-only line.

  Add El Primo Primo to the following number …

  There followed a seven-digit number. And El Primo Primo was 3,631, a number that had frightened Odin, as 666 had frightened Shay. Thinking about prime numbers was one of Odin’s pastimes, and 3,631 was a prime. It was also the ages of their mother and father when they’d died.

  She added them, and now had a new seven-digit number to add to the area code she already had.

  But no phone. The iPad had Internet access, but no voice capability.

  Not a problem anymore, not in America, not if you have money in your pocket, and she had West’s wallet.

  If she could just get them all back together, they could work this out: Odin, Twist, West, Cade, and Cruz. If they could just get back to the Twist Hotel.…

  She drove north until she spotted a Best Buy. With a new phone in her hand, she punched in the number. It rang once, and then somebody picked up. Said nothing.

  After a few seconds, Shay said, “Hello?”

  “You coming, or are you gonna stand out there like a lamppost?”

  The fear let her go, and she sagged into the phone.

  Twist.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  Lights. Everywhere.

  She couldn’t believe it: they were staying at a shabby casino motel, under a two-story-tall pair of blinking red dice. GPS and a three-hour drive had gotten her to Reno, and now Twist, on the phone, guided her in. “We told them we had a handicapped woman and we needed to be on the first floor, somewhere quiet. We’re on the back of the motel, room seventy—look for the truck.”

  The truck and Camry were parked side by side, and Shay fit into a slot next to them. She grabbed West’s briefcase from behind her seat, then leaned over and smooched X on the nose. “We’re back with the pack.”

  Twist was waiting at the door; he took her in, said, “Good God, you’re so different. It’s like seeing the night after knowing the day.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a hard squeeze, and she touched the faces of both Cruz and Cade as she went by, into the room, and knelt by the first of two twin beds, where Odin was sprawled on his back, his head up on two pillows. X came up and licked his hand. She asked, “How are you?”

  “Better. Lots better,” Odin said. His voice was stronger. “They were trying to wear me out. They just about had me. Sleep is bringing me back.”

  There was a high-pitched gasp, and Shay looked over at the other bed: the Asian girl was curled on her side, eyes closed, shaking uncontrollably.

  To Odin: “What’s happening? Do you know?”

  “I don’t know why, but I know it happens every few hours, then it just stops,” he said. “She says it feels like bugs are crawling through her body.”

  “Bastards,” Shay said.

  “She’s had it a lot worse than I have,” Odin said. “We’ve been talking about what to do.”

  Shay stroked Odin’s arm and continued staring at the girl, thin as a stick figure in the gray hospital smock, chains around her waist, wrists, and ankles, beads of sweat dripping from her forehead to her quivering lips. And her head … all the wires. They had to get her out of there—but rescuing her wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

  Twist was standing beside her now and Shay looked up at him and asked, “West—do we know how he’s doing? I saw a report that said two men were taken to a hospital—”

  Twist shook his head.

  “We have to find out,” she said. “He can testify against them, but—”

  Twist placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “He’s gone, Shay.”

  For a moment, she didn’t understand. Couldn’t possibly fathom—he’d saved her brother’s life. He’d saved her own.

  Shay stood up and Twist said, “His father’s done some interviews with reporters. Singular has put out a press release saying that they think he led some animal rights radicals in an attack on the lab. They said he may have helped organize the attack on the lab in Eugene too, that he may have been involved with them for a long time. They’re saying that the Remby activists might have been involved in the raid, but they’re not sure of that.…”

  Shay’s face was like a stone. “He’s dead. We know that for sure?”

  “His father identified him. Said he didn’t know how West could have gotten tied up with radicals. Said he was a hero in Afghanistan …”

  “He was shot in the legs, which wouldn’t kill him, and in the side—he believed he’d be okay if he got to the hospital,” Shay said.

  “That’s not how it worked out,” Cruz said quietly.

  Shay took a step back from the three men and said, “No. He’d been wounded before. He knew what he was talking about. They murdered him.”

  “We can’t know that—” Twist said.

  “Believe me. They killed him,” she said. “I owe them one dead man.” She looked at her brother and the shaking, mutilated girl. “More than that. They’ve got more than that coming.”

  Twist: “Shay—”

  She drew X to her side and said, “C’mon, boy, we’re gonna take a walk.”

  As she stepped toward the door, Cade asked, “Where’re you going?”

  “Ten minutes to walk my dog, okay?” she snapped, without making eye contact.

  She grabbed a key to the room and the door slammed behind her. The men just looked at each other.

  “I should follow her,” said Cade.

  Odin pushed himself up and spoke: “No. My sister won’t ever let anybody see her cry.”

  Sitting with X in West’s Jeep, her face lit by the glow from West’s iPad, Shay went out to GandyDancer and dropped a final message.

  West, you were right: I am an exceptionally good liar. I made you think I didn’t trust you. But I did, right from the start.

  You are a war hero.

  Shay

  Then she cried.

  Twist took a hundredth turn around the motel room, then snapped at Odin, “We’ve got to get the chains off this girl. I can’t even stand looking at her anymore. Where in the hell is your sister?”

  “She’ll be back.…”

  “She’s been gone almost an hour. If she needed to cry, that’s fine—but we’ve got things to do, and crying’s a luxury right now,” Twist said. “We don’t know what Singular’s doing, we don’t have any communications, we—”

  A key rattled in the lock and they all turned toward the door as Shay stepped
inside. Her face was pink, but her eyes were dry.

  She had a Home Depot bag and shook out a pair of bolt cutters.

  “Let’s cut her loose,” she said, and unconsciously repeated what Twist had said: “We’ve got things to do.”

  “Like what?” Cade asked.

  Shay snapped open the bolt cutters, like the jaws of a crocodile, and stepped toward the girl on the bed.

  “Like revenge,” she said.

  The leader stepped closer. “We need to know three things now. How high in the government does all this go? CIA, military, politicians—where does it go? Who’s paying Singular? We need the names, now. We need to know how many people are like our friend. How many human copies have you made?”

  The woman in bed said, “I won’t tell you a thing.” She shouted, “Otto! Karl! Herkommen!”

  The boy slammed the bedroom door, locking the dogs out.

  The leader said, “We need—”

  “Not a thing!” the woman shrieked. “Nothing! Never!”

  The leader turned to the boy and said, “Give me the gun.”

  He slipped it out of his waistband and handed it to her. “What are you going to do?”

  The sixteen-year-old girl thumbed the safety off with an audible metallic click.

  “I’m gonna kill the bitch,” she said. She raised the gun. “Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”

  * * *

  Excerpt from Outrage copyright © 2014 by John Sandford and Michele Cook. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.