Outrage

by John Sandford

  “Nope, and here’s proof.” She scanned around to the front of the building, where a huge sign said UNCLAIMED FREIGHT AUCTION. She tapped a long string of graffiti below the tattered sign. “The writers feel safe enough to do this on the front of the building. That tells me no one’s paying much attention to the property. Or even much cares.”

  Odin and Fenfang drifted over. “What have you got?” Odin asked.

  Shay explained, and Odin nodded. “That’s something I can get behind. Look, there’s this subdivision.” He touched the screen. “If you had to run, it’s a few hundred yards. The houses look like they’re about ten feet apart, and everyone’s idea of landscaping is jungle-style. Once you got in there, nobody could find you. If you had to run the other way, there’s this bunch of houses to the south….”

  The rest of the group had come over to look.

  “Lots of cars parked on the street—which means we could have a backup car thirty seconds away, if we needed it,” Shay said. “We could reach it with the walkie-talkies.”

  “We don’t know how old the Google pictures are,” Cade said. “We’ll have to see it for real to decide.”

  Odin said, “We should go tomorrow morning.”

  “Not you,” Shay said. “They know your face too well. And not Fenfang—we need her safe. She’s our final proof, if we really need it.” She shook her head at Twist. “I don’t think you, either. You’re pretty recognizable, and you have trouble running.”

  “I’m going, but I don’t have to climb,” Twist said. “I’d be the emergency backup. And I’ll monitor the satphone—in case the guy calls back.”

  “Cade, Cruz, me, and you,” Shay said. “I’ve got to go so I can check out the climb.”

  “Probably don’t really need to climb,” Danny said. “I’ve got an aluminum folding ladder, weighs twenty pounds, unfolds to eight feet. You could run over behind that little building, throw the ladder up, pull it up after you, climb to the top roof. You wouldn’t have to go up there alone—you could have somebody with you.”

  “That’ll be me,” Cruz said.

  “Get the ladder,” Twist said. “We’ll do some practice here on the front deck.”

  “I’ll still take rope,” Shay said. “We could tie it around a vent on the opposite side of the building, so if somebody did see us, we could run across the roof and slide down the rope and take off.”

  Twist nodded. “So—we go tomorrow morning. Check it out, and when it gets dark, if everything looks right, we’ll put two people on the roof.”

  —

  They spent the afternoon shopping for supplies and the evening talking about all the possibilities, until Odin said, “You know what? We’re talking in circles. I’m gonna go work on the Mindkill cache.”

  “Where you at with that?” Twist asked.

  “We’re working out all the formatting, and all the pieces we have so far. We want to be able to bring it up in an instant,” Odin replied.

  Cade said, “We’re also prepping a message to all the sites that took us seriously the first time, asking them to mirror us. With any luck, Mindkill will show up on a couple of hundred sites all over the country. Singular would have a helluva time bringing it all down….There’s a lot of busywork.”

  “Alternatively, we could just mellow out, since it’s closing in on midnight,” Danny said.

  “I ain’t smokin’ nothin’,” said Twist.

  “Then I’ll get you a root beer,” Danny said. “But really, I was thinking about some old Seattle sounds….”

  He brought up an eighties album from Pearl Jam, and Twist said, “Excellent.”

  Things didn’t mellow out right away: they still couldn’t tear themselves away from the talk-and-more-talk. Danny shook his head and said, “I’m gonna have to drop the bomb.” A Willie Nelson album came up, and the computer speakers began kicking out really old songs, slow ones, beginning with “Stardust.”

  Danny came up behind Shay and put his arm around her waist and said, “Dance.”

  Shay pulled back. “What?”

  “We’re gonna dance. We need to dance.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Shay said.

  “I’m not,” Danny said. He pulled her into the middle of the living room floor, swung her around, and Shay muttered, “This is weird.”

  And they slow-danced. Shay probably wouldn’t have admitted it, but it felt good the way her planning brain faded into some other place as she swayed to the music.

  Odin said to Fenfang, “C’mon.”

  Fenfang blushed and said, “I am a nerd. I do not know how.”

  Cade smiled and stepped toward her. “One thing you learn in private school is how to dance to old-fart music. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  “Show us both,” Odin said, cutting in front of him. He looked into Fenfang’s eyes and said: “You haven’t had any seizures since the medicine kicked in. Janes said we might be able to bury Dash’s personality if we teach you new things. He even mentioned dancing. So…let’s both learn how to dance.”

  Cade got them positioned, and Odin put one arm around her waist and raised one of her hands in his. Then Cade explained the box step.

  “This makes perfect sense,” Fenfang said, and they both stared down at their feet. Cade started them off, and they made their first small square together.

  …And they danced.

  Cade cut in on Danny for “Georgia on My Mind,” and then Cruz cut in on Cade and took Shay for “Blue Skies.”

  Twist didn’t dance, and didn’t explain, just sat backward on a dining room chair, grinning at the makeshift ballroom. “I gotta say, I can’t believe…Cade? Cruz? Odin? Danny? You can all dance….I mean, Cruz, look at you.”

  Cruz said, “It’s my culture.” He had a tight grip on Shay, his good arm around her waist, his plastic-cast arm resting on her shoulder, as though he weren’t inclined to let go again.

  Cade danced with Fenfang, but then Odin cut in again, and then Danny danced with Fenfang, and Odin cut in again, and then everybody got the hint, and Odin and Fenfang edged off by themselves.

  Shay muttered to Danny, “I can’t believe my brother. My brother can’t dance.”

  “I get the impression that you think your brother can’t do a lot of things.”

  “What? No, I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “When I was teaching him to run right, you were worried that he was going to hurt himself, for God’s sake.”

  “I—”

  Danny put a finger to his lips to shush her and said, “Let’s find something that rocks a little….”

  So they danced faster, and mellowed out more. A party, almost. A tension break, definitely. Once, when Shay stopped dancing for a while and was wiping her face off with a towel, she noticed that Odin and Fenfang had gone out on the front deck.

  Twist followed her gaze and said, “You may want to avert your eyes.”

  Shay watched as her big brother silenced the laughing girl in his arms with a kiss.

  17

  The next day, Twist rode with Shay and X down to Stockton, with Cruz and Cade following in the truck. “Six hours of hell,” Twist said to Shay as they drove away from Danny’s. “For you, anyway, because I plan to talk. You know, about your life, the way you dress, why most current art has no objective correlative, and so on.”

  Shay rolled her eyes, and he said, “Okay, I’ll keep it short: butt out of your brother’s love life.”

  “Twist: she’s probably going to die. Soon. He’s been through enough pain.”

  Shay was driving, and Twist was watching the speedometer rise with her emotion.

  “Slow down. I agree there’s probably pain ahead, but Odin knows that. That’s his problem. You rescued him from Singular—and that was necessary. Saving him from Fenfang isn’t.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to be a hard-ass,” Shay said.

  “You are a hard-ass. Too hard for your age. I can’t complain about that, because I was the same way. All I’
m saying is, it’s not your job to protect him from everything. He won’t thank you for that.”

  X was sitting on the backseat, his head going back and forth as they talked, like a ball-obsessed dog watching a tennis match. Now he looked at Shay and made a sound that might have been a whimper had it gone on for more than a half second. As it was, it sounded like a “Yes.”

  Twist said, “Even X agrees with me.”

  —

  Six hours on the road, with a stop for water and Cokes and gas and, for Twist, a chance to stretch his legs. Then they were driving through Stockton on I-5. From the beginning of the built-up area, to the airport was twelve or thirteen miles. Cade and Cruz had arrived ahead of them and had spotted both the Singular building and the building that Shay hoped to use as a lookout.

  Using cold cell phones, and no names, Cade said, “Might be a problem—might be two problems. First, there’s hardly any traffic on the frontage road that goes by the building we’re interested in, so if we drive up that road, they could get a good look at us through the cameras. Could catch license plate numbers, too.”

  “They have cameras?” Twist said.

  “Several. We didn’t want to get too close, so we didn’t drive around the building. We stayed on the main drag, lots of traffic there.”

  “Any good news?”

  “Yes. That climb…we think it could work. You’ll see.”

  Twist was driving, and Shay began picking up the distance markers they’d pinpointed on Google Maps. Then: “Here we go. Off to the left. Don’t slow down.”

  The Singular building, if it was a Singular building, was completely unmarked.

  A nearly blank-faced rectangle, the building had only three obvious entries on its front, and all of them were glass: anyone approaching from the front could be seen coming.

  Shay and Twist went on by, Shay turning to look at the side of the building: nothing much had changed from the view on Google Maps.

  Twist said, “There’s our watchtower.”

  The Unclaimed Freight building looked abandoned, with not a single car in the front parking lot. The banner with the name drooped dispiritedly over the entrance, and more graffiti had been added since the Google shots.

  “We need to cruise it again,” Shay said.

  Twist took the first exit, and they curled back around. From the left side of the Unclaimed Freight building, and the back, they couldn’t see the Singular building at all. As they came out from behind the back, Shay said, “Look at the trees. I didn’t even see the trees on Google.”

  Twist stopped at a stop sign. They could see the small cube-shaped building that would give them a boost to the roof. Shay nodded and scoped out the nearby buildings.

  Cruz and Cade were waiting at a McDonald’s back on I-5. The day was too hot to leave X in the Jeep, so they gathered at an outdoor table.

  “What do you think?” Cade asked when they’d settled in with food.

  “I don’t see any reason not to,” Shay said. “We can do it tonight. We’ll just look.”

  Twist kept his eyes on his burger as Cade and Cruz looked over at him, waiting to hear his take. Eventually, he dabbed his mouth with a napkin and said, “We won’t get anything done without taking some risks.”

  “Then tonight it is,” said Cruz. “We need to find a place where we can wait it out.”

  “I’ve got just the motel,” said Shay as she fed half her hamburger to X. “It’s where I cut my hair off. The guy who runs it is probably the president of the National Dirtball Association.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Twist said.

  Shay squinted at him, something in the tone of his voice. “There’s something else going through your head. What is it?”

  “Nope, not going to tell you,” Twist said. “Not until we know if the building is Singular or not.”

  “You ought to tell us now,” Cade said, and Cruz nodded.

  Twist shook his head. “No, it’s only half an idea, and it’s just completely ridiculous.”

  Twist wouldn’t budge, and when they finished the food, they all headed across town to the motel. Twist rented the rooms, then came out with three keys and said to Shay, “You have identified the single sleaziest guy in Stockton, running the single scummiest motel. I have no more to teach you.”

  Shay’s room was not the same room she’d rented before, but it was just as disgusting. The cleanest thing on the bed was the bottom sheet, so she pulled all the rest off and threw it on the floor so she could stretch out and close her eyes. X settled on the pile of bedding and closed his eyes.

  Shay knew she should nap if she was going to be up most of the night, but her brain was churning, and sleep didn’t come easily. What she’d do that night was, technically, a crime. Just as it was when she’d hung Twist’s immigrant rights banner off a twelve-story office building, and again when she’d scaled the Hollywood sign and lit it up with MINDKILL.NET.

  Both those actions thrilled her in some way, despite the legal consequences, despite the physical danger. Tonight’s warehouse climb, looking for Singular, felt different. The actual climb was nothing, really, but the stakes were so much higher. X made a snorting sound, a snore. It made Shay smile, and after a bit more churning, she followed him down.

  —

  They moved on the Unclaimed Freight building at ten o’clock. Cruz and Cade, in the pickup, made the first pass. Cruz called on the walkie-talkie: “Looks clear.”

  The space around the building was darker than Shay had expected, and the flickering of car and truck lights from Route 99, through a fence along the highway, would make it even more difficult to see dark-clothed intruders hurrying across the parking lot. Shay was wearing jeans and a reversible jacket—black side out, the red lining invisible—given to her by Danny.

  “Dope dealer trick,” he said. “You run with the black side out—but if you think they’re going to catch you, if you can’t get away, you come strolling down the street with the red side out, like you don’t know nothin’. I mean, what sneaky criminal would wear a bright red jacket?”

  Shay and Twist approached the back of the building, Shay with her pack, which contained a climbing rope, a flashlight, binoculars, some sandwiches, two bottles of water, and—unknown to Twist—the gun Danny had given her. Twist would drop Shay and keep moving so nobody would see a car loitering behind the building.

  She had the walkie-talkie and would warn the others if she ran into anyone. Cruz and Cade would be just behind, so if she did run into interference, she could turn around and pile into the back of the pickup.

  There were no other vehicles in sight. Twist said, “Shay.”

  “I know. Be careful,” she said.

  Without any more talk, he slowed, and then Shay was out the door, walkie-talkie clutched in her right hand, running through the dark. X watched her go, whining a little when the Jeep’s door closed in his face. Twist said, “Say a doggy prayer,” and pulled away.

  The run to the back of the small building took fifteen seconds, and Shay neither saw nor heard anyone else, though she almost went down when she tripped on a curb at the edge of the parking lot. Recovering, she stumbled up behind the building, put the walkie-talkie to her face, and said, “I’m here.”

  Less than a minute later, Cruz scrambled into the darkness next to her. “Listen,” Shay whispered. They both watched and listened, and heard nothing but traffic. Fianlly she said, “We go up.”

  They fumbled for a minute with the locking bolts on the ladder, then it was up, and Shay led the way to the first roof. Cruz pulled the ladder up behind them, and propped it against the wall of the main building, and Shay climbed to the top step, and then over onto the roof, which had a foot-high parapet. Cruz was right behind her, and pulled the ladder up, and they sat another minute, listening.

  Again, they heard nothing but traffic.

  Crouching, they walked to the back of the building, where, in the dim light, they fastened their escape rope to a vent housing and coiled it next to the edge
of the roof. If they had to run, they could be down in seconds.

  When Shay was sure the rope was secure, she whispered, “Let’s go look.”

  They went halfway back across the roof, then crawled to the edge facing the target building and peeked over the low parapet. The other building showed only the faintest light from the main windows. There were three cars in the parking lot—somebody was inside. The parking lot itself was brightly lit. They were looking at the building from an angle, so they could see all of the front, all of one side, nothing of the other side, and part of the back parking lot, including the gate for truckers.

  “Wish we could have scouted the back,” Cruz whispered.

  “If we don’t see anything tonight, maybe we take a shot at it tomorrow,” Shay said. “No reason to think they have the plates on your truck.”

  “We could buy some rakes and shit and throw them in the back of the truck. I could drive it through there and nobody would see anything but another Chicano gardener.”

  “Yeah, and then we’d have the rakes and shit. Maybe you could get a few yards when this is over.”

  Cruz laughed, too loud, then clapped a hand on his mouth and said, “Sorry.”

  Then nothing happened for a long time. Surveillance, Shay found, was tougher than it looked—just sitting up was tough, if you had no back support. They spent some time looking at the stars, which were hazy. Shay knew the names of a few constellations, and Cruz knew a few, too, and told her the names in Spanish.

  Cruz, who had his own pack, pulled out a bedspread from the motel, and they took turns lying on it, while the other one watched, fifteen minutes at a time. Every half hour or so, Cade and Twist would check in on the walkie-talkie, quick clicks and then: “Good?”

  “Good.”

  They ate the sandwiches at one o’clock, and by two o’clock, it had gotten quite cool. Shay wrapped the blanket around herself.

  At three o’clock she sat up and said, “Wish I’d brought some earphones and music to distract me. How did it get so cold? I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  Cruz said, “C’mon over here.”

  She settled in beside him, and Cruz pulled the bedspread across their shoulders, and they huddled together, and she eventually warmed up. At three-thirty, Shay was dozing against Cruz’s shoulder when he stiffened and muttered, “Hijueputa,” and Shay’s eyes popped open.