Cruz nuzzled Shay’s neck in the stairwell outside the studio and suggested they take the next couple of hours to go to his room and break some rules. X was behind them, sniffing at a nasty stain on the concrete.
“Here’s what I’m thinking we’ll do,” Cruz said, and whispered into her ear in Spanish. Shay rolled her eyes but grinned and said, “Oh, señor, I don’t think so.” They kissed again, and she tapped the heavy plastic bandage on his left arm, where he’d been badly bitten by one of Senator Dash’s guard dogs as they’d fled the house. She said, “Maybe we should wait until you have total and complete use of all your limbs.”
Cruz started trying to rip off the bandage right there.
“Hey, hey, stop that,” Shay said. “I could cut it off with my knife, if I had it….You take X. I’ll find something to cut it with in the studio. Meet you in your room in five minutes.”
—
Cruz moved furiously. First to the bathroom, then to his room to chew a stick of gum and make the twin-sized bed with the sheets he’d last washed…three weeks ago? He scratched X on the spot between his ears he liked, then told the dog that he was going to need to “chill” for a while and directed him to the corner farthest from the bed.
“Stay over there, and there’s a burger for you later.”
Shay came through the door with a smile and an X-Acto knife. She sat Cruz down on the bed and carefully cut the bandage off. X sauntered over and watched.
The bite had gone deep, and there would be scars, but the skin was scabbed over and healing. Cruz rubbed his arm and turned his wrist over for the first time since he’d been attacked by Dash’s dogs.
“You wanna keep?” Shay asked, and held up the two chunks of bandage. “A little memento of our time together breaking and entering?”
Cruz said he wasn’t sentimental that way, then put his free arm around her waist and pulled her down onto the bed. A couple minutes later, shirts were off and she was kissing the tattoos on his chest: the RIP in memory of the brother who’d been shot in a gang war, and the words of revenge he’d had inked in Spanish but never followed through on because he’d found Twist, and the hotel, and another way of going….
Cruz’s phone buzzed in his jeans pocket. It was Odin, asking if he’d seen Shay. Cruz lied: “No…what’s up?”
“See if you can find her,” Odin said. “We’ve got something you guys ought to look at.”
“I’ll check around,” Cruz said. He hung up and said, “Well…what do you want to do?”
Shay: “Oh, man…we should go.”
“Don’t want to.”
“Neither do I. But it sounds important.”
Cruz flopped back and groaned, “Go ahead and shoot me.”
“Didn’t bring my gun,” Shay said. “I could stab you….”
The X-Acto was on the floor at the end of the bed.
Cruz sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. “All right. Let’s go see what’s so important.”
They got buttoned up and zipped up and put their shoes on, and Shay hurried down to the ladies’ room to throw some water on her face, then ran back up the hallway, where Cruz “found” her.
—
They were headed for the front stairs and down to Cade’s room, where they ran into Harmon coming up from the basement. He was with Dum and Dee, the nearly seven-foot-tall twins who handled hotel security for Twist when they weren’t playing their horns in bands around town. All three men were carrying dust-covered bicycles.
“What’re you doing?” Shay asked.
“Working out some defensive positions, in case we get hit,” Harmon said. “There are a dozen old bikes down in the basement. We put them in the hallway, loosely tied together with a chain. If we get hit, we freeze the elevator and throw the bikes onto the stairs, front and back, in a big pile. You ever try to climb over a pile of bikes? It’s almost impossible….”
Shay shook her head. “Whatever you say…”
“I say,” Harmon said. “Where’re you guys going?”
“Odin and Cade found something. You oughta come along.”
Harmon handed Dee his bike.
—
There were five computers in Cade’s room, and Odin and Cade were using all of them.
“What’s up?” Shay asked.
“Okay,” Cade said. “We got the news reports on the airplane crash, which said the plane was flying out of Flagstaff, Arizona. Odin cracked the FAA site…”
Odin said, “Yes, I did.”
“…and we found the flight plan, and we also found the flight plan that took them into Flagstaff the same day. If you believe those flight plans, they were on the ground for ten hours or so. We couldn’t find any people checking into a motel with their names, or with Singular credit cards, so then Odin comes up with the bright idea of checking the fixed-base operator—that’s who takes care of private planes. Took us a while to get to the FBO’s computer, but we found that the plane refueled twice—once right after arrival and once right before departure.”
“Which means the plane went somewhere in between, without a flight plan,” Harmon said.
Harmon thought for a moment, looked back and forth between Odin and Cade, then asked: “Can you get into IRS files?”
“Yeah, but it’s tricky,” Cade said. “Why?”
“Or maybe the New Mexico tax records. If you own a piece of property that you have to pay tax on, you can deduct that from your income tax. So if they’re going to a private place in New Mexico, somebody’s got to own it.”
“Dash,” Shay said.
Harmon said, “That’s what I’m thinking. New Mexico is a very good place if you want major privacy. There are ranches out there that cover hundreds of thousands of acres, with almost nobody on them. Nobody snooping. Some of them have landing strips. Dash certainly could afford a place like that….”
Cade said to Odin: “Ten dollars says I crack New Mexico’s tax department before you do.”
“You got it,” Odin said.
—
While the rest of them sat around and chatted, Odin and Cade pounded on two computers each, and twelve minutes later, Cade said, “Got it. I’m in.”
“Damn it.” Odin handed him two limp fives that had been sitting on the bed next to his leg. Surprised that Cade had gotten in first, Shay raised an eyebrow at her brother. “He’s actually better than he looks,” Odin said.
“And I look pretty friggin’ good, if I do say so myself,” Cade said. He moved the laptop so Odin could see it and, as he typed, said, “Dash, Dash, Dash, where are you, Senator Dash? Ah—there you are.”
They all gathered to look over Cade’s shoulder as he scrolled through a massive income tax return to find the page for property tax deductions. Dash owned more than two dozen properties scattered around Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, but Harmon touched a line that listed a deduction for $210,000 for a property in far southwest New Mexico. “I recognize the name of the county,” he said. “I’ve been there researching Indian sites. I can tell you, $210,000 in taxes means it’s a big chunk of dirt down there. Really big.”
The tax return listed a post office box as an address, which didn’t help, but they went to the county appraiser’s office online help page, and, after some more thrashing around, got a legal description of the property.
“Yeah, it’s big,” Harmon said. “A hundred and sixty thousand acres—that’s two hundred fifty square miles.”
“If it was a square…,” Odin began. He looked at the ceiling, his eyes defocused for a second, then continued, “It’d be fifteen point eight miles on a side. You could hide a jet landing strip on that.”
“I can do square roots in my head, too,” Cade said.
“Yeah, but yours are estimates,” Odin said.
—
In another ten minutes, they had a precise location that they could transfer to the satellite views on Google Earth, and thirty seconds after that, they were looking down at a ranch that included a lake, a long blacktop
landing strip, and seven buildings.
Harmon whistled and said, “I bet that strip’s longer than most of the municipal landing strips in New Mexico. I’m not saying you could put a jumbo jet down, but you could put any business jet in there.”
Cade took a virtual tape measure out of the Google toolbox and stretched it down the landing strip. “I don’t know how accurate this measure is, but it says it’s seven thousand feet long.”
Harmon said, “You could land an Air Force C-130 on that.”
“Which means a plane big enough to move a lot of prisoners,” Shay said.
Cruz put a hand on Shay’s back and said, “You are so smart.”
“Yeah,” Shay said. “We gotta think about getting out there. See what we can find.”
—
Lou stuck her head in and said, “There you are. Shay, Dylan Brown from KABC is calling here, trying to get in touch with Twist and ‘that red-haired girl.’ He wants you on his show tonight to talk about Singular. I got a number for him.”
“That’s good,” Cade said. “We’ll put the show up on Mindkill afterward.”
“Better call Twist,” Shay said to Lou. “He knows about this stuff.”
“I hesitate to do that,” Lou said. “He’s on a date.”
“Jeez, Lou, it’s important,” Shay said.
“So you call him,” Lou said.
Shay called, got switched to voice mail. Hung up, called again. Hung up, called a third time. Twist picked up and shouted, “WHAT?”
“Dylan Brown from KABC is trying to get in touch with you. He wants you and maybe me to be on his show tonight. We’ve got a number for him.”
Silence. Then: “Give me the number.”
Shay gave him the number and Twist hung up. Four minutes later, he called back. He wants us on his show at six-thirty. He wants your hair red. Go get some red hair.”
“Twist—”
“I’m turning off the phone now.” Click.
Shay looked around. “Where do I get red hair?”
Cade spread his hands. “Emily.”
“Of course,” Shay said.
Emily called in a favor with a hairdresser at a place everyone called Bon Bon, which was a shortened form of the real name, Bonjour Bonheur, French for Hello Happiness.
The hairdresser, Agrippine, was a severe dark-haired woman with a beauty mark on her upper lip. She looked at Shay and asked, “Why would you want to change?”
“It’s a movie thing,” Emily said. “They want her to be a redhead—and that’s her natural color.”
“Ah. Oui. I see.” The woman was digging around in Shay’s hair, where her natural red color was showing at the roots. “You want a match?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps, I think…with a small green accent?”
“No. Just a match,” Shay said.
“I think a green accent would be terrific,” Emily said.
“Striking,” Agrippine said.
“Distinctive,” said Emily.
“You’re not helping here,” Shay said. “I just want a simple match…nothing else.”
—
The first step, Shay found, was to scrub in some stinky stuff that, after it had worked its magic, turned her hair translucent orange. “What! What!”
“Relax,” Emily said, pushing her back down in the chair. “It’s the necessary first step. Agrippine knows what she’s doing.” She popped her gum to punctuate the statement.
“She’d better,” Shay said. “Or you best know how to sleep with your eyes open.”
“I spit on your threats,” Emily said.
—
Two hours later, they were back on the street. Shay could hardly believe it, but Agrippine had precisely matched her original hair color.
“You know the most amazing stuff.”
“It’s a gift,” Emily allowed.
Twist was back at the hotel. He glanced at her and then smiled. “You’re you again.”
“More or less.”
“We’ve got an hour before we have to leave. Let’s get the group together and figure out what Dylan might ask and how we’re going to answer.”
—
Harmon drove them to Glendale in Twist’s Range Rover, with Twist giving Shay performance tips all the way across town:
“Don’t look at the cameras. Ignore them and talk to Dylan. The cameras are set up so they can shoot you straight in the face, and shoot Dylan separately, and both of you together, and so on. Smile when you’re being polite to him, but go serious when you’re filling him in on Singular. Don’t cut him off when he’s talking—it’ll not only piss him off, you’ll both be talking and nobody’ll know what either one of you is saying….”
And so on.
KABC was a beige building with what looked like a flying saucer parked on its roof.
Harmon, who’d stuffed his gun under the seat, said, “I’ll be close. If you call, I’ll be out front in less than ten seconds.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Twist said.
X would stay with Harmon, though the dog didn’t like it. When Shay shut the door, X whimpered at her, wagging his tail in forlorn hope.
“Be right back,” Shay promised.
—
An intern named Carly took them to a studio with a high ceiling and lighting equipment and cameras everywhere. There were several sets, including the weather girl’s station, which was nothing more than a box and a green screen. A sound tech rigged them with wireless microphones.
They waited through a forecast from the weather girl, who had the aging-cheerleader look of an NFL sideline commentator, saying it would be hot and sunny with no rain even slightly possible. The usual news in L.A. Then a commercial came up, and while that was running, the intern herded them across the studio floor to a simple set with chairs in front of a green screen. Dylan Brown hustled through a side door and nodded at Twist and shook Shay’s hand. He was a short man with spiky hair and an expensive suit worn without a necktie; he might have been any age between thirty and forty. He said to Twist, “I’m going to ask some hard questions. No offense.”
“We’ll answer anything that doesn’t put us in jail,” Twist said.
Brown nodded without smiling and asked Shay, “What happened to the long hair?”
“It was too warm down here, so I cut it,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment, and then a woman standing behind a camera with a clipboard in her hand said, “Thirty seconds.”
Brown said to Shay, “Twist is an old pro at this. You’re not. Look at me and answer the questions. That’s all you have to remember. If you can’t answer or don’t know the answer, say so.”
The woman started counting, “Five, four, three…”
—
At “zero,” Brown peered at a camera and said, “We’re back, with the L.A. artist known as Twist and with Shay Remby, the redheaded girl you may have seen swinging down a building or climbing the Hollywood sign. The two have been on a campaign against the research company called Singular, which they claim is pursuing a scientific form of immortality and doing illegal experiments on human subjects. The night before last, one of those alleged subjects, a young Chinese woman, was shot to death shortly before a ship apparently holding at least a dozen illegal aliens, Korean and Chinese, crashed into the Antioch Bridge, near San Francisco. Authorities have been tight-lipped on the status of those illegals, but word has leaked that they were apparently the subjects of grotesque experimentation. Then, last night, a private plane carrying Singular’s president and legal counsel crashed in the mountains. They were both killed, along with the pilot and copilot.”
Brown turned to Shay and asked, “Were you there when the Chinese girl was shot? Were you on the ship?”
Twist jumped in: “Dylan, we had some ground rules….”
Shay held up a hand to him, turned to Brown, and said, “Yes. I was there. I won’t tell you who else was there, though. The people you called illegal aliens are not. They wer
e kidnapped and brought here against their will from North Korea, where Singular used them as human lab rats. Now they are more like zombies. Zombies! That’s what’s left of them after Singular did their experiments. We don’t know why the authorities are hiding this information from the public.”
Beside her, Twist was rubbing his face with both hands.
“And the girl who was shot?” Brown asked.
“Her name was Fenfang. She was a wonderful person, a university student back in China until Singular kidnapped both her and her cousin and experimented on them. They tried to implant another woman’s memories into Fenfang’s brain. So when she escaped, Singular was afraid of all she knew, and wanted her dead. They shot her in cold blood.”
Brown said, “Twist seems very reluctant to talk about this. Why are you talking?”
“Two reasons. Mostly because what Singular is doing is…evil. I don’t know what else to call it. And they have to be stopped. My brother was kidnapped by Singular. He had some flash drives that had information about the experiments that Singular was doing on humans. They waterboarded him in a prison they were running in Sacramento, trying to make him tell them where the flash drives were hidden. That’s the same place they murdered one of their own men, Marcus West. He wasn’t killed like they said: he’d been wounded, and he was waiting for an ambulance when they executed him because he was trying to help my brother escape.”
“Murder and waterboarding. Extremely serious charges,” Brown said. “What’s the other reason you’re talking?”
“I’m sixteen,” she said. “I don’t think anybody will come after me, or any of the rest of us, once the truth comes out, but if they do…I’m a juvenile. Twist isn’t.”
“So you’re saying you’ve broken some laws….”
Shay said, “I never wanted to break any laws—I wanted to expose a bunch of killers. Now I’m waiting for the real law enforcement people to get involved.”
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