“Don’t worry,” Scotty said, as if he’d read my mind. He pulled into the parking lot at the Town Center. “Marcus keeps things close to the vest until he’s sure he has something. The fact that he hasn’t said anything doesn’t mean he isn’t close.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. We only had a little over two weeks until Parker’s trial date, and I was starting to feel the ticking clock under both of us. If we didn’t find some kind of information to help him, he’d go to jail and I’d be back on my own.
“I’m always right. Just ask Marcus.” He winked and reached for the door. “You okay here while I go in?”
I nodded. “I’m good.”
He shut the door and hurried toward Joey’s Real New York Pizza (Selena had once told me Joey was from New Jersey). I turned around in my seat, scanning the shopping center from the safety of the tinted rear window. It was quiet for a Friday night, and I was turning back around when a black limo eased into the parking lot. I twisted farther in my seat to get a better view. Playa Hermosa was home to some of the wealthiest people in Southern California, but a limo at the Town Center was still an anomaly.
The limo came to a stop in front of Mike’s. A second later the driver hopped out and hurried to one of the rear doors. He opened it, and a gown-clad woman stepped out of the back. No, not a woman.
Rachel Mercer.
I hardly recognized her with her hair piled in curls on top of her head, her makeup dark and smoky. She was wearing a long violet gown that hugged every long, lean curve, one slender leg emerging from a slit that went halfway up her thigh. She turned, laughing at something someone said behind her, and a moment later Logan emerged from the limo.
My breath caught at the sight of him, looking even more handsome than I remembered in a simple black tux. The flower on his lapel was a deep lilac, leaving no doubt who was his date.
And then I understood: it was prom night. Olivia and Harper had tried to get me to join the committee last fall, but the Fairchild job had been nearing its close, the end of my time with Logan sitting like a lead weight on my chest. I didn’t think I’d be in Playa Hermosa all these months later for prom night.
And I wasn’t, I reminded myself. Not really. I was just a ghost.
I watched the others get out of the car—Selena wearing a dark green dress, David close at her side. Olivia in short red silk. Harper in white. And all the guys in tuxes, looking older than when I’d last seen them. I wondered what they were doing as they headed into Mike’s—stopping for cheese fries on their way to the dance? They disappeared into the burger joint and I turned back around in my seat, watching traffic pass on the main road in front of me. Seeing everyone together, having fun and laughing and heading to prom, should have made me sad. Actually, if I was a good person, it should have made me happy. They deserved this night, especially Selena and Logan.
But I didn’t feel either of those things. Instead, a surge of anger rushed my body like the water at high tide. I was unaccountably mad at them. All of them. They were doing a normal thing, having fun, while I hid in Scotty’s car, afraid even to go in to get the pizza. My mind knew it was irrational. They hadn’t done anything wrong. I was in this position because of the things I had done. But telling myself that didn’t help, and I still felt like a little kid, watching everyone else eat ice cream on the swings while I sat alone in the shadows.
I felt the tightening in my chest, the impending panic attack like an incoming missile. I forced myself to breathe slowly like Scotty had taught me, to blot out everything else as I focused only on my breath, making its way in and out of my nose. By the time Scotty came back, the vise around my chest had loosened its grip, my earlier rage dissipating in a more painful swell of melancholy.
“Apparently, sausage is a vegetable in New York,” Scotty said as he handed me the pizza across the center console. “I didn’t want to wait for them to make a new one. We can just pick it off.”
I took the pizza. “That’s fine.” I was only vaguely aware that my voice was wooden.
He got in the car and shut the door. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head, and just then, something caught Scotty’s eye in the rearview mirror. He turned around in his seat. “Oh . . . Oh, Grace. I’m so sorry.”
I chewed my lip as the limo pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not like I ever thought I’d be able to go.”
“I know,” he said, “but seeing it is still harder than imagining it.”
I nodded.
He took a deep breath. “You’ve missed out on a lot, but now you’re taking back your life, one step at a time. You can have all of that, honey: dances and boyfriends and college and . . . well, anything. But the first step is getting Cormac.”
I turned to him. “What if Fletcher finds me first?” I asked. “What if I . . . go to jail?” I had to beat back my panic at the thought.
“We won’t let that happen,” Scotty said. “We’re going to get Cormac, and we’re going to get the best deal we can for you and Parker so you can get the clean slate you deserve. But right now, you have to focus on what’s in front of you. Tune out everything else, and just focus on the next thing.”
“Trying to find Cormac.”
“Exactly,” he said.
I nodded, my anger and sadness hardening into resolve. “I can do that.”
He turned on the car. “Of course you can. But not on an empty stomach.”
Thirty-Four
Two days later I was sitting in the hammock out back with my laptop, looking at the last of the security footage from Seattle. It was a little awkward, getting settled into the swinging contraption while holding my computer, but my brain was fuzzy from all the grainy images I’d reviewed over the past week or so. I’d started to get lazy, tuning out the footage for seconds at a time while I thought about Parker, Logan, Renee. A change of scenery had made all the difference.
I pressed Pause on the video file Scotty had sent me and looked up into the trees, scanning for the parrots. A new one had shown up a couple of days ago. Unlike the regulars, this one was almost entirely blue, with just a little bit of orange under its neck and on its breast. The others didn’t know what to do with it. Scotty’s yellow-eyed enemy flew around the newcomer squawking, trying to keep it from the bird feeders, but the others seemed more curious than anything else. I couldn’t help wondering if it would stick it out and stay or get fed up and leave. There were lots of trees in Playa Hermosa. Lots of places it could go.
A couple of minutes later I saw it approaching the feeder nearest the deck. It landed on a nearby tree first, looking around like it was trying to see if the coast was clear. The other birds were nowhere in sight, and it cautiously flew to the feeder and took some seed before flying quickly to another branch. A second later, something flashed red in the trees surrounding the feeder, and I saw that the other parrots were there—well, two of them, at least. The yellow-eyed bird was missing, but the other two just watched as the newcomer ate his stolen seed. I wondered if it was a betrayal of some kind of bird code, letting the blue bird eat unaccosted from the feeders while their obvious leader was away.
Scotty stepped out onto the deck, and the parrots disappeared in a flutter of wings and displaced branches. “You ready for lunch, Grace?” he called across the lawn.
“Sure. Be right in!”
The back door closed and I hit Play on the video, using my impending lunch break as an incentive to get through five more minutes of footage. The video was from a gas station in Tacoma, a city just south of Seattle. I’d been surprised when Scotty had sent it to me, but he just said that Marcus knew what he was doing, and if he was looking in Tacoma, there was a reason.
I’d already looked at the outdoor footage. It hadn’t been much help: cars pulled up to the pump; people got out, got their gas, and left. The gas station had seen better days. Its pavement was rutted with potholes, and two of the pumps had signs on them that must have meant they we
re out of order, because no one used them. Every now and then someone paid with a credit card and then punched angrily at the keypad before stalking toward the minimart that was part of the station. I figured receipts were hit-and-miss at the pump, which meant going inside to get one.
Now I was reviewing the indoor footage, which was trained outward from the register. I’d watched as a parade of customers had paid for gas, engaged in both angry and pleasant conversation with the small man behind the counter, bought packs of gum, Slim Jims, soda, Twinkies. It was funny the things you noticed without sound as a backdrop. More than one woman started to pay for her gas and then added a pack of Skittles or a packaged muffin, her posture guilty, sheepish, even on the security footage. People agonized over which lottery tickets to buy, sometimes leaving the store only to return a few minutes later for more, and lots of customers dug for exact change, seemingly oblivious to the person behind them, impatiently rolling their eyes.
I was getting ready to hit Pause again when an older man approached the register. He was balding, his hair entirely gone on top, a small fringe surrounding it like trees around a clearing. He had glasses, but they didn’t seem to fit his face, and his nose looked a little too large for the rest of his features. He was wearing a stretched out T-shirt instead of the oversize suit, but I was sure it was the man from the used-car lot. He said something to the cashier, and the man pulled a carton of cigarettes from a rack behind him. While he pushed buttons on the register, the balding man reached up and touched the back of his head. For a split second, his scalp seemed to tilt, the hair ringing his bald spot slightly off center in the moment before he made another adjustment and set everything right.
It was a prosthetic. And maybe the nose, too.
I hit Pause and expanded the window, bringing the computer closer to my face.
But I already knew. I knew it from the determined set of the man’s jaw, the arrogant line of his spine. He was trying to look down and out, like a lot of the people who stopped at the run-down little gas station. But he couldn’t hide his sense of superiority. I felt it even through my computer, just like I’d felt it when I first saw him on the security footage from the used-car lot in Seattle. In spite of the lengths he’d gone to disguise himself, there was no doubt in my mind that my instincts had been right the first time.
It was Cormac.
Thirty-Five
I stood in the hallway later that night, listening to Scotty and Marcus talk about Seattle through their partially open bedroom door. At first they hadn’t been sure it was Cormac, especially Marcus, who thought he would recognize Cormac even with an elaborate disguise. But Scotty had imported the picture to Photoshop, refined it, made it clearer. Then he’d sent it to a friend of his who did digital profiles for the LAPD. Scotty told the computer guy to make the nose smaller, give him hair like Cormac’s, take off the glasses, dress him in a suit. When the picture came back a couple of hours later, there was no doubt in any of our minds that the guy who’d bought cigarettes at the crappy little minimart in Tacoma, Washington, was Cormac. He hadn’t smoked when I’d lived with him, but I knew from experience that being on the run was its own special kind of hell. If anything would push someone back to a bad habit, that would be it.
“I wish I could stay,” Scotty was saying, “but Wilson won’t work with you. It’s irregular even for him to work with me, but at least I was on the force here in LA. They’ll let me stand on the sidelines as a courtesy. Besides, someone needs to stay with Grace.”
“I don’t have a problem staying with the kid. But I want to be there when they get him.” Marcus sounded unusually agitated, but from the hallway I couldn’t tell if it was annoyance or excitement in his voice. “I’ve waited a long time for this, Scott.”
“I thought it wasn’t about revenge? That it was about justice?” Scotty said. “If that’s true, what does it matter if you’re there?”
I heard Marcus’s frustrated sigh. “Hell, I don’t know. It just does.”
There was a shuffling sound, a low murmur, and then Scotty’s voice again. “They won’t let you in on the bust anyway. You’d be stuck in some hotel around the corner, waiting for word from me. You’d hate it. Besides, there’s no guarantee we’ll even find him.”
“Exactly.” Marcus sounded a little desperate, even to me. “Which is why I should do the legwork while you team up with your pal Wilson.”
“What about Grace?” Scotty asked.
I pushed their door open the rest of the way and stood in the doorway. “I’m coming too.”
They turned to look at me. An open duffel bag, half filled with neatly folded clothes, sat on the bed. Scotty had a bundle of socks in one hand.
He dropped the socks in the duffel and came toward me. “I understand why you’d want to be there, Grace, but you wouldn’t be able to get close enough to see it go down anyway.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t care. I helped find him, and I want to be close by when you bring him in.”
“Look, I get it,” Marcus began, “believe me, I do. But if they don’t want an old fogey like me there, you can bet your ass they’re not signing off on a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“They can’t stop me from staying in a hotel around the corner.” I looked at Marcus, sensing an opportunity to gain an ally. “And they can’t stop you, either. Right, Scotty?”
Scotty sighed. “Not technically, no. But I think it would be better for both of you if you stayed here. I’ll call you the minute something happens.”
“But it’s already been twelve days since he was at the used-car lot, and nine since he was in the minimart.” The time-and-date stamps on the footage were burned in my memory. “We have to move fast, and you know the police aren’t going to devote a lot of people to it. I mean, we don’t know where he’s staying or if he has a car. We don’t even know which name he’s using. Marcus and I can work on that stuff. We can go to the used-car lot and see if someone remembers him, can’t we, Marcus?”
Marcus grinned a little. “You know it, kid.”
Scotty folded his arms across his chest in an exact imitation of my posture. “You’re not going to give up, are you?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I need to do everything I can to get him. For Parker.”
Scotty closed his eyes for a split second as his shoulders dropped. When he opened them again, I knew I’d won.
“You do everything I say,” Scotty said. I knew it was no accident that he was looking at Marcus when he said it. “And I do mean everything. You might be Lord of the Grift, but I’m Prince of Police, and when we’re on my turf, we play by my rules.”
Marcus nodded a little too eagerly. “You got it.”
Scotty turned his eyes on me. “And that goes double for you.”
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re the boss.”
He walked to the closet and pulled down a tiny suitcase with wheels. “Be ready to leave in an hour.”
Thirty-Six
It was dark by the time Marcus backed out of the driveway. I’d packed everything in the little suitcase Scotty had given me, including the new clothes, my books, and the pictures I’d taken with Scotty at the arcade. I didn’t want to say anything to Scotty and Marcus, but I had no idea if I’d ever be back at the house on Colina Verde. Would the police take me into custody right after they got Cormac? Would I surrender in Seattle? Or come back to LA? I didn’t know how any of it worked, and I’d closed the door on the guest room with a sharp pang of loss, wondering if I’d ever be safe inside its walls again.
The streets were dark as we headed for the freeway. We could have taken PCH to San Francisco, but that was the scenic route. We needed to get to Seattle and go to work as quickly as possible. I was already worried that Cormac might have moved on. If that was the case, we were really screwed, because I had no idea where he’d go next. I comforted myself with the knowledge that whatever happened, I was putting some distance between me and Detective Fletcher.
Scotty and Marcus argued over the radio. Scotty wanted an indie-rock station while Marcus fought for golden oldies that he pronounced “not so golden, but better than the junk that’s on the rest of the radio.” They settled on NPR, and we made our way north on the 405 to the sound of a British broadcaster interviewing a convict-turned-activist who was fighting to improve educational opportunities for inmates. I was comforted by the backseat of the Range Rover: the darkness, the buttery leather seats, the soft murmur of Scotty and Marcus talking about everything from the plantings in the front flower beds to a possible remodel on the upstairs bathroom. I looked out the window, taking in the streetlamps that threw orbs of light onto the asphalt, the homes and businesses of LA’s suburbs twinkling like a galaxy all its own. I was glad to be leaving. I hoped everyone in Playa Hermosa was happy, that graduation would be all they dreamed it would be and that at least some of them would spend their last summer before college surfing and hanging at the Cove and going to Mike’s together. But I didn’t want to be there. It was too sharp a reminder of all I’d lost.
We left the city behind and everything went dark beyond the lights on the freeway. I thought of Parker, tried to imagine what he was doing, if he was safe and comfortable, if he missed me as much as I missed him. I thought about Renee and her offer to start over. Was it that easy? Could I free Parker and simply join Renee, enroll in school, pretend that the last few months hadn’t happened? I didn’t know. I thought about Logan, too, getting ready for college and trying to take care of his mom. I didn’t really believe in God, but I sent a little prayer out into the universe that they would be okay, that Warren would be home soon and Logan would go to college and they would be able to pretend the last few months hadn’t happened too. Scotty would call it “sending light and love” to them. So I guess that’s what I did: sent them light and love. Sometimes, I guess that’s all you can do.