“Cowgirl,” Shay said. “You wanna try?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized their stupidity: Fenfang, the girl without a mind of her own, could certainly not be entrusted with a loaded weapon. Dash might ambush them.
“Ah, I…,” Shay stammered.
Fenfang put up a hand to stop her. “I understand,” she said.
Shay was relieved to hear that, but it wasn’t only out on a shooting range that she and Cruz might need to be on the lookout for Dash; it could be at Dash’s house itself. Shay thought about that for a few moments and said, “Maybe what we need is a code word, something you could say, or some answer you could give, when we really need to be sure you’re…you. Would that be okay with you?”
“I think that would make us all feel better. We make a code in my language because this lady does not know Chinese…only maybe some Spanish.”
“That sounds smart,” said Shay, and they quickly settled on a simple exchange they would rely on anytime Shay or the others felt a need to check Fenfang’s ID:
“Are you okay?”
“Háixíng.”
I am okay.
—
When they were down to the last seven cartridges from the first box, Cruz had Shay fire three shots quickly, trying to repoint after each shot. With the next three, he had her pull the trigger as quickly as she could: the shots were all over the place. “If you take just one extra tenth of a second to steady yourself, you’ll shoot a lot better than when you’re just pulling the trigger as fast as you can,” he said. “If you ever have to pull the trigger, remember that. You probably won’t, but try.”
“I’ll do that,” Shay said.
From behind them, Fenfang said, “You should practice once with your words, too, Shay. When you make the lady think you will shoot her—so she will do what we want.”
“Good idea,” Shay said. Back at the hotel, she and Twist had written scripts for the two groups to follow when they confronted Dash and Janes. Clicking on the safety, she handed the gun back to Cruz, who put it in his waistband, and they started from the top.
“Give me the gun,” Shay said in a stone-cold voice.
Cruz pulled the gun out and handed it to her. Shay thumbed off the safety with a dramatic flourish, held the pistol upright in front of her face, and took aim.
“What are you doing?” Cruz asked in mock alarm.
Shay shook her head and lowered the gun. “The line is, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”
“Sorry….What are you going to do?”
Shay widened her stance and again took aim. “I’m gonna kill the bitch. Say good-bye to Senator Dash.”
BANG!
The can flew through the air like a hockey puck.
—
Feeling slightly more prepared, they continued south to Kingman, Arizona, stopped to use the bathrooms and buy water and some snacks, and then headed east on I-40, rolling along at an efficient eighty miles an hour. The Jeep wasn’t the most comfortable vehicle in the world, but out in the desert, it felt seriously competent.
They passed the time explaining the word snack to Fenfang, in both verb and noun forms.
“So I snack on a snack?” she asked.
“Yes,” Shay said. “My brother once said he felt a little snacky—meaning he wanted to snack on a snack.”
Cruz said, “You can get snack cakes…so that’s like an adjective. If you’re feeling a little snacky, you could snack on snack-cake snacks.”
“Could you snack on a dinner?”
“No, because a dinner is a meal…so you eat a dinner. Of course, you can also eat a snack….”
Cruz and Shay traded off driving every couple hours. Whoever wasn’t driving sat in the backseat with Fenfang to help her if she had a seizure and monitor her for signs of Dash. They were nearly nine hours out of Vegas without a seizure, and all of them were starting to privately brace for trouble.
As they approached the lights of a huge casino at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, X, sitting up front with Cruz, suddenly stood, leaned over the seat, and pointed his nose at Fenfang. She was in the midst of telling Shay and Cruz about Internet blackouts by the government in China, and how she and her university friends got around them, but the dog’s nose, two inches from her own, made her stop.
“Don’t be rude, X,” Shay said, and pushed him back over the seat. Fenfang resumed speaking, but the dog came back at her with his nose, sniffing at her. Suddenly Fenfang stiffened, and then her eyes rolled up and she started to thrash.
“She’s seizing!” Shay said, and threw herself across Fenfang, trying to hold her away from the hard surfaces in the car, things that could hurt her. Fenfang’s back arched, and she began to rhythmically shake as Cruz pulled to the side of the road.
When the Jeep was stopped, Cruz knelt on the front seat and asked, “What can I do?”
“Nothing, unless…she gets out of control, but I think I have her….”
Ninety seconds after the seizure started, Fenfang began to relax and her eyes opened, and she said something in Chinese and looked at Shay as though she didn’t recognize her. She turned her head away and said something else in Chinese, then turned back to Shay and said, “Shay?”
“Are you okay?”
“I think I am okay.”
“What’s the word?”
“Háixíng.”
“Okay. You’re back.”
“I have…” Fenfang touched her head. “Pain inside. How do you call it?”
“I don’t know, maybe we need to find a hotel….”
“No, no…this is, mmm, normal pain. Is that correct? Like when you study too hard? I need, mmm, aspirin.”
“That, we’ve got,” Cruz said. “Check in my backpack.”
During the seizure, X had been intently focused on Fenfang, almost like a hunting dog focused on its prey; now he relaxed and settled back in his seat.
Fenfang said, “X knew I was going to have a seizure before I did. His nose…that was what he was telling me.”
Shay looked at X and said, “I think you’re right.” She reached out and gave him a scratch between the ears. “Now we’ll have to pay even more attention to you.” The dog panted and hung his tongue out.
—
Twist, Odin, and Cade stopped in a state forest in Northern California, in the dark, Twist hobbling off to stretch his legs. Cade aimed Odin the opposite way and told him why Twist needed a cane.
“What happened was, he nearly got beaten to death when he was twenty by some drunk assholes,” Cade said. “Twist was living in a warehouse, illegally, getting started as an artist, and he was walking back there when he ran into these three rednecks who thought he looked homeless and jumped him for fun. They beat him up and kicked him senseless. Broke both his legs and cracked his pelvis and left him for dead. Never were caught. When he got out of the hospital, he bought a pistol, legally, and carried it with him, waiting for them to come back. Lucky for Twist, they never did, because he was going to kill them.”
“Lucky for them, too,” Odin said.
“I guess, but that’s not the way I think about it,” Cade said. “ ’Cause I didn’t care what happened to them after I read the police file. Dead was okay with me. But it would have been a tragedy if Twist had been sent off to prison and there never was a Twist Hotel. Dude’s helped a lot of kids.”
“Like you?”
“Yes.”
“And Shay.”
“Yes. But hey, don’t ask him a lot of personal stuff. Man gets edgy.”
“All I was asking was why he limps, and he can’t be maniacally private if he let you read that police file….”
“He didn’t let me read any files, Odin,” Cade said. “He’s totally stonewalled me on every personal thing I’ve ever asked him. So I went looking for myself.”
“Police files are so easy,” Odin said.
Cade smiled at that and gave him a fist bump.
They traded hacking stories until Twist came a
mbling back to the car, carrying his cane. Back on the freeway, Cade and Twist talked for a while about the hotel, and every few minutes, one of them would throw out an improbable theory about the warning they’d gotten from the mystery man in Vegas.
Odin, who was driving, had the only one they couldn’t refute: “When Storm did the raid on the laboratory that started all of this, we had an insider. I don’t know who it was—but it’s possible that he’s still in place, and that he might have heard something.”
“He happened to know where we were, and also know someone in Vegas who could warn us?” Twist asked. He didn’t even bother to sound skeptical.
“Better idea than any you have,” Odin said.
“That’s true. Mine are all about a one on a one-to-ten scale. Yours is a two.”
—
Eight hours after the gun lesson, past the Meteor Crater, past the Painted Desert, past the Petrified Forest, Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X pulled into the Bandolero Motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“This has got the look,” Shay said. The look of a place that would take cash and not ask questions. “I’ll get the rooms.”
“Better that I do it,” Cruz said.
“Why?”
“Because bandolero is Spanish, and there are five beat-up trucks with Spanish bumper stickers in the parking lot. This is a Mexican motel. And as you might have noticed…” Cruz patted his chest.
“You look Mexican. Go ahead.”
He got out and walked into the motel’s office, and Fenfang asked, “He is Mexican?”
“No, he’s an American, but his parents were Mexican. Though it’s not incorrect to say he’s Mexican American….It’s kind of complicated to explain.”
“No, I understand this. It is not at all complicated like snacky snacks.”
Cruz paid in advance for two rooms for two days. They were all asleep before two o’clock and didn’t get going until ten the next morning. Cruz woke first, knocked on the girls’ door, and found that Shay had wired it shut to contain Fenfang if Dash emerged. Shay undid the clothes hanger she’d bent around the chain lock and slipped outside.
“She had a seizure around four this morning,” Shay said. “Two, actually, they were back to back, about a minute in between.”
“You should have gotten me up to help you.”
“You needed to sleep,” Shay said. “You’ve been doing most of the driving, you never nap, you get up before everyone else….Wait, you’re not a vampire, are you?”
He tapped his teeth together noisily, then bent to her throat and gave her a little nip. Shay responded with an “Ooo, ow!” that sounded awfully real; Cruz was mortified. “Jeez, I’m sorry—did I hurt you?”
“Not my neck—my feet,” she said. “The sun’s already so hot, the pavement’s like a skillet.”
He looked down at her prancing feet, understanding the problem now, and scooped her up in his arms. “I rescue girls with hot feet,” he said. That made her laugh.
Cruz said, “It’s nice when you smile.” Her arms were around his neck, and they looked at each other for a moment before Cruz opened the door and set her down on the grungy green carpet.
“See you in twenty minutes,” he said. “The vampire needs an Egg McMuffin.”
Shay shut the door with a grin still on her face, and they all got cleaned up and went to find a drive-thru.
At noon, they rolled into Santa Fe, an hour north of the motel. The city was the oddest Shay had ever seen, mud-colored adobe houses everywhere, many surrounded by high walls. There was a feeling of being paused in some earlier time, with dozens of Indians selling jewelry on blankets in the plaza downtown, and gravel roads all over the place, even a couple of blocks from the state capitol.
And it was dry: hard, high desert. The sign coming into town said the city was 7,199 feet above sea level, which was a couple thousand feet higher than Denver, and in places, it almost seemed like you could reach up and touch the cottony clouds.
Senator Charlotte Dash lived on the edge of the city, up a low, scrub-covered mountain, inside a walled compound—one they knew from satellite and aerial photographs downloaded in Vegas. Those photos had also shown Sun Mountain, a huge rounded hill that hung over the east side of the city. In the photos, they could see the thin thread of a hiking trail up the mountain.
They got binoculars at an REI store and sandwiches and water at a deli, and by two o’clock, they were settled on a dusty cutout in the mountain trail and looking down at Dash’s mansion, a half mile away and three hundred feet below.
Cruz said, “Look at all that green grass. More green grass than anybody.”
“Is that bad?” Shay asked.
“If you live in L.A. or any other desert, water hogs are not appreciated,” Cruz said. He handed her the binoculars.
Shay brought them to her eyes, looked at Dash’s house and her lush gardens, and after a minute, said, “She’s also got the highest walls.”
“She has much to hide,” Fenfang said. “It is the same in China. Houses with walls to hide things.”
“We can take that small street up the hill and park in that grassy place until we get the gate open. Nobody will see,” Cruz said, pointing. “We go over the wall right next to the car, you see the greenhouse….”
They worked out a variety of possible approaches, taking turns looking at the house. Ten minutes later, Cruz said, “When the sun hits that side wall, it sparkles along the top. Here, take a look.”
Shay looked and said, “I see it. You’re right. What is it?”
Cruz: “If it’s like it is in Mexico, could be broken glass. You know, to discourage thieves.”
“Or angry teenagers,” said Shay.
—
Twist, Odin, and Cade had taken turns sleeping in the truck, best as they could, but were tired when they checked into the Triple-A Motel on the edge of Eugene. Twist got two rooms—he still didn’t share—and paid for two days. They probably wouldn’t stay that long, but he wanted a bolt-hole in case of trouble.
The Triple-A, which apparently hoped to be confused with motels approved by the American Automobile Association, was a Twist special: a place with a roof that probably didn’t leak too much, toilets that mostly flushed, and beds that smelled funny, but not too funny. The guy in the office who took the cash was a guy who wouldn’t ask questions, or even think of any.
At seven o’clock in the morning, they were all asleep. At two o’clock in the afternoon, they were up again, eating pancakes, quietly reviewing what they needed most from Janes and how they intended to get it.
—
When Shay, Cruz, Fenfang, and X began their watch, there were two cars and a truck parked behind a steel gate in Dash’s front wall. The truck, which belonged to a gardener, left at three o’clock. One of the cars left an hour later. “Maid,” Cruz grunted, watching through the binoculars.
The other car left a few minutes after—a well-dressed woman in heels, not Dash. They hadn’t seen Dash at all.
At five o’clock, a garage door rolled up, and a huge white Suburban backed carefully out. When it turned, they could see the driver. Shay, who had the binoculars, said, “There she is. That’s Dash.”
As the SUV rolled slowly up to the gate, a back window dropped and a German shepherd stuck its head out in the open air and sniffed.
“That ain’t no poodle,” said Cruz, who’d taken the binoculars.
He passed them to Fenfang, who said, “It is good I know the control words.”
“Let’s hope we don’t forget them in the heat of the moment,” said Shay. “Else we’re gonna be somebody’s lunch.”
“Midnight snack, I think,” Cruz said.
“Enough of these snacks,” Fenfang said, peering through the binoculars.
“Nein packen,” said Cruz.
Fenfang went over the German commands for the dogs again, and that night they practiced them as they headed back up the mountain. Shay was wearing the black shirt, with the Sony camera tucked into her armpit
. As Cruz drove, she shot a few seconds of video to make sure the camera’s lens wasn’t blocked by a fold in the sleeve.
The video was fine; she just had to remember to keep aiming at Dash once the action got rolling.
Five minutes out, Cruz called Cade: “We’re going.”
Cade said, “Yes. We are, too. Good luck.”
“You too,” Cruz said, and jammed the phone in his pocket.
9
They parked out of sight, off the road, twenty feet from Dash’s perimeter wall. They left X locked in the Jeep and slipped past the desert brush. Shay unhooked a thick blue yoga mat from her backpack, shook it out. Cruz crouched next to the adobe wall, and Shay settled on his shoulders, her legs dangling down his chest. “Lift.”
Cruz caught her by the feet and stood up. Shay couldn’t quite reach the top: Cruz did a forearm curl, lifting until she could step on his shoulders, her gloved hands against the rough plaster. When she was upright, she tested her balance, then felt along the top of the wall, where she found the embedded glass shards they’d seen from the hillside.
They were sharp, but manageable, meant to defeat bare-handed intruders. She threw the yoga mat over the wall, then carefully shifted her weight onto it until she was sure that none of the glass would penetrate.
Fenfang stood ten feet away, at the edge of the passing road, watching for cars. There was no moon, but about a million stars, and a gritty wind rustled her long hair and made her blink. She half turned to the other two and whispered, “I see nobody.”
Shay hoisted herself onto the mat and then waited atop the wall for a minute, listening, watching the darkened house. She heard a faint toll of church bells from the old cathedral downtown—midnight—and dug inside her pants pocket for the small banded stone Cade had given her for luck the night she’d rappelled off an office building in downtown L.A. She rubbed the stone between her fingers, said a silent wish that no harm would come to any of them in the next hour, and dropped to the other side.
She was behind a four-foot-tall clump of scrubby plantings called chamisa. Again, she listened. After a few seconds, she took a coiled rope from her pack, held on to one end, and threw the rope back across the wall. On the other side, Cruz tied it to a homemade rope ladder. He called quietly, “Okay.”
Outrage Page 9
