Free Uncaged by John Sandford, Michele Cook Page A

rat the size of a chicken was sniffing at her backpack, looking for her saltines. Odin liked rats. She didn’t. She could handle a nice, clean caged rat, maybe with a little chill running down her spine, but a garbage-eating feral rat was something else.
    “Scram!” she screamed. She thumped her constrained legs against the dirt like a grounded mermaid. The rat seemed to be thinking it over. “Seriously! Beat it!”
    The rat ambled away.
    Not what Odin would have done. There’d been a rat phase after the gecko phase, until the rats started multiplying like rats and the clueless foster mother that year—Mrs. Thurman?—finally caught on. She’d called the caseworker at midnight and demanded that the creepy kid, his sister, and the rats be out of there by morning.
    Shay checked her watch: six o’clock. She’d been asleep for less than five hours.
    She rolled over with a groan. She didn’t want to get up, but a bunch of crows were squawking about food. Overhead, the drone of the morning traffic was picking up and a semitrailer driver leaned on his air horn.
    She wriggled out of the bivy, giving up. The Hollywood Starbucks on Gower opened at six. If she hustled over there, she thought, she could get some decent private time in the bathroom to clean up. It was her third day in L.A. and her fourth without a shower.
    She smelled bad. She smelled homeless.
    A quarter-mile hike from her shrub below the freeway and Shay was back in the land of make-believe. The Starbucks she’d been using was directly across the street from Paramount Studios. Billboards loomed overhead, advertising summer blockbusters she couldn’t afford to go to. In a couple of hours, movie executives in black BMWs, black Mercedeses, and black Range Rovers would be pulling into the studio ramp, and their browbeaten assistants would be racing into the coffee shop, cutting in line for their bosses’ half-caf, no-foam, two-Splenda soy lattes.
    The Starbucks day crew was led by the same guy as yesterday, an over caffeinated middle-aged man with full-sleeve tattoos wearing a green apron. Same dumb grin as he checked her out all over again. Shay twiddled her fingers and smiled. Maybe he’d make her another mocha frap “on the house.” She was hungry and had noted, the daybefore, that the scones were almost five hundred calories—a third of her daily food requirement, if worst came to worst.
    “Hi, Tobias,” she said, reading his name tag. “Can I have the restroom key?”
    Locked inside the women’s room, Shay pulled off the bedroll and backpack and rummaged for her toothbrush. Living, and typically vying for just one bathroom, with dozens of different girls in foster care had made her extremely efficient at pulling herself together—and also a bit resentful of all the attention paid to primping. Most days, she was just glad if there was still hot water left for a shower.
    If there was a time suck in her routine, it was her hair—and that was nonnegotiable. She’d worn it to her waist since she was a little girl: straight, thick rust-red hair, identical to her mother’s. It wasn’t easy to get a brush through, and it was sort of a pain to wash, but when she looked in the mirror, there was always the private reminder that she’d once been someone’s daughter.
    There wasn’t enough headroom under the Starbucks faucet to shampoo, so, same as the day before, she unsnarled her hair and smoothed it back into a scruffy ponytail. Double-checking that the door was locked, she pulled off her clothes, pumped the soap dispenser a dozen times to get a decent amount in the palm of her hand, and sudsed up. She rinsed and dried with paper towels. After pulling on underpants and a T-shirt that she’d dried out on a branch, she gave the overnight T-shirt and underpants a quick wash in the sink and stuffed them into a plastic bag to be dried later.
    At least they were clean, and so was she—more or less. She’d have to do something soon about her jeans, and the