Lies I Told (16 page)

I was still light on my feet when we headed back to the car hand in hand. High above it all, Logan and I had been in a world all our own. I still felt a little untouchable. Like nothing in the world could hurt us.

We were almost to the car when Logan slowed his pace. “What the . . . ?”

“What's wrong?” I looked around, following his gaze.

He was looking at the BMW, parked about fifty feet ahead. At first I didn't know what he was seeing, but a second later my eyes adjusted to the dark and I caught sight of the hooded figure, bent down near the driver's side window.

“Hey!” Logan shouted, hurrying toward the car. “What are you doing?”

The figure straightened, turning toward us. I couldn't make out the person's face in the split second before he took
off sprinting in the opposite direction.

I followed Logan, stopping a few feet away when I caught sight of the damage. Someone had keyed the driver's side, and a deep gash ran all the way from the rear tire well to the front bumper.

“Oh, my God . . . ,” I said.

“Stay here, Grace.” Logan took off after the man.

“Logan!” I looked around, not sure what to do. “Be careful!”

A gust of wind blew in off the ocean, and I wrapped my arms around my upper body, scanning the parking lot, suddenly aware of how alone I was. I don't know how long I stood there before I heard footsteps pounding the pavement in the distance. I peered into the darkness. A rush of adrenaline hit my system as a figure came into view beyond the streetlight casting a weak yellow glow across the pavement. Could it be the vandal coming back to do more damage?

I braced myself to run. The promenade wasn't that far away, and we'd passed plenty of people walking to and from it on our way to the parking lot.

But a second later the figure emerged under the streetlight. It was Logan.

I hurried toward him. “Are you okay? What happened?”

He bent over, panting, trying to catch his breath. “I found a cop. They're going after the guy. Told me to wait here.”

I nodded, looking back at the car. “Who would do something like that?”

“I don't know. Let's just hope they catch him.”

We walked back toward the car. We'd been waiting about ten minutes when the blue and red lights from a police cruiser passed over the parking lot. It pulled behind the BMW, and a uniformed officer emerged from the driver's side. She was small, her dark hair pulled back into a short ponytail.

“You the owner of the car that was vandalized?” she asked us.

Logan nodded.

The woman turned toward the squad car, and a tall man got out of the passenger side. He opened the back door.

“Let's go,” he ordered.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to get a better look at the person in the back of the cruiser. He stepped out, head bowed, posture defiant.

The male officer tugged off the hood that concealed the suspect's face in shadow.

“Parker?” I said it almost without thinking.

“You know this guy?” the woman asked me.

I nodded, glancing quickly at Logan before turning back to her. “He's my brother.”

She grabbed hold of Parker's arms, cuffed behind his back, and tugged him toward me. “What are you doing messing with your sister?” She shone a penlight in his eyes. “You drunk? High?”

“Should we test him?” her partner asked.

She shook her head. “Nah, he's clean.” She looked at me, tipping her head at the BMW. “This your car?”

“It's mine,” Logan said softly.

I searched his face, fear welling inside me. Not because I was worried about the con, worried that Parker had blown all my work with the mark. Not for any of the reasons that should have had me afraid.

I was scared because I didn't want Logan to think less of me. Didn't want my association with Parker to change the way Logan saw me.

The woman held out her hand. “License, insurance, and registration.”

Logan went around to the passenger side and opened the door. He dug around in the glove compartment before returning with some slips of paper. He handed them over to the woman.

“Run them,” she said, handing them to her partner. He went back to the squad car. “You guys have some kind of beef?” she asked, looking from Logan to Parker.

“Not that I was aware of,” Logan said.

Parker had yet to say anything.

We stood in awkward silence until the male officer returned with Logan's documents. “He's clean,” he said, handing them back to Logan.

The woman sighed. “You want to press charges?”

Logan didn't even hesitate. “No. It's fine.”

She glanced back at the car before turning to Logan. Her expression as she shook her head said it all:
Any seventeen-year-old with a BMW can afford a new paint job.

She looked at Parker. “You got a free pass this time. Looks
like you should be nicer to your sister's boyfriend.”

She returned to the police cruiser with her partner, and they got in the car and pulled slowly out of the lot.

“Parker . . . ,” I started.

He turned around and started to walk away.

“That's it?” I shouted at his back. “No apology? No explanation?”

But he just kept walking. I watched him go, waiting until he'd disappeared into the shadows to turn to Logan.

“Logan . . . I'm so sorry. I don't know what's gotten into him.”

He shook his head and took a step toward me, pulling me into his arms. “It's okay. It's not your fault. You're not responsible for Parker.”

I laid my head against his chest, his words echoing through my mind. It wasn't true. Our parents had taught us well. Taught us that the only way to make it unscathed out of a long con was to stick together no matter what. We were responsible for each other.

All of us.

I left the house early Sunday morning before anyone else was awake. I'd spent the night in a kind of half sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness, floating in that space between dreams and the endless loop of my thoughts. It was six thirty when I finally gave up, and I threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt before letting myself quietly out of the house.

I didn't have a destination in mind. I just needed to move. I headed down Camino Jardin, turned onto another residential side street, and kept on going. The morning was damp, a light mist falling from an overcast sky. The smell of the sea was heavy in the air, the ebb and flow of the tide audible in the distance. Every now and then a flash of color caught my eyes from the trees. I thought about the parrots, making themselves a home in the only one they
had. I wondered if they were happy here.

Parker hadn't been home when Logan had dropped me off, although the door to his bedroom was closed when I left this morning. I knew I should tell our parents about his behavior. It was erratic, a danger to us all. But I wasn't sure I could do it. Wasn't sure I could put the job—or even my own security—before Parker.

And that's what I'd be doing, because if my dad believed that Parker was jeopardizing the job, he would find a way to eliminate Parker from the equation, pay him to leave or hold something over his head to get him to step back.

And then what? After the Fairchild con, we'd move on. There would be no Logan. No Selena to cushion the blow of my loneliness. We needed each other, Parker and I. My isolation had never been more palpable. Normally, I would talk to Parker about my problems. Now he was the problem, and I had nowhere to turn.

I was turning the corner, ascending one of the peninsula's steep hills, when I saw the figure coming toward me. Shrouded by the mist, almost blending into the early morning twilight, there was something familiar about the gait, the slight stoop to the shoulders. He was only a few feet away when I realized it was Parker, wearing the same hoodie he'd been wearing the night before when he'd vandalized Logan's car.

He slowed down as I approached. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Mind if I join you?”

I shrugged, and he fell into step beside me. For a few minutes we walked in silence, our companionship like an old friend in spite of everything that had happened.

“I'm sorry,” he finally said.

I glanced over at him. Even in profile, I could see the dark circles under his eyes, his sallow complexion. “For what you did to Logan's car or for jeopardizing the job?”

We were outside the War Room, out in the open where anyone could hear. But somehow I couldn't find the energy to care.

He looked at me. “For putting you in that position.”

“I'm not the only one exposed here,” I said.

His eyes were unwavering. “You're the only one I care about.”

I shook my head. “And what do you think would happen to me if the job went bad? If something happened to you or Mom and Dad?”

His laugh was bitter. “Trust me, you'd be fine without ‘Mom and Dad.'”

We came to a dead end, the sidewalk stopping at a chain-link fence. A field of brush lay past it, and beyond that the ocean. Parker bent down, lifting up a piece of the fence that had been cut. I ducked under it and waited for him to follow, the unspoken language of longtime allies flowing between us. Following a path through the overgrowth, we stopped at the edge of the cliff, the water frothy and violent below us.

I dropped onto the ground and looked out over the sea.
“We're all in this together. If one of us goes down, we all go down.” I paused, trying to figure out where things had gone so wrong. “I guess I just don't get it.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“What's changed? Why now?”

His gaze tracked the seagulls gliding in circles over the water. “I see how you look at him,” he said softly. “At Logan.”

The flush of humiliation warmed my face, as if he had unearthed my deepest secret, laid it bare for us to inspect and analyze.

I didn't look at him. “Haven't you ever liked someone? Gotten attached?”

He was silent so long I wondered if he'd heard me. “There was someone once.”

I looked at him, surprised by his honesty. “Who?” I thought back, trying to guess. “That girl in Seattle? Maya Richardson?”

Maya had been Parker's mark. I'd spent a lot of rainy afternoons with her younger sister, Lacey, watching movies in the family room with a fire blazing in the giant fireplace. They had been nicer than a lot of our marks.

He shook his head. “Her little brother, Ben.”

“Ben?” I only vaguely remembered him, a small, quiet boy with dark, glossy hair and eyes that had seemed too big for his delicate face.

Parker nodded. “I played basketball with him when it wasn't raining, built LEGOs in his room when it was.
He . . . well, I think he looked up to me.”

“You told Mom and Dad that Maya and Ben were close,” I said, remembering. “That you could get on her good side by spending time with her little brother.”

“It wasn't a lie,” he said.

“But that's not all there was to it.”

“No.” He hesitated. “He was so innocent. It was like . . .” He shook his head. “I don't know. Like seeing myself. The kid I could have been if I'd had parents with boring jobs and a house in the suburbs, the kind who put out presents from Santa at Christmas and pretend to eat the cookies left by their kids.”

“Was it hard?” I lowered my voice. “Stealing from them?”

The job had been simple: steal the savings bonds purported to be somewhere in the house. After two months of snooping, Parker had found them in a couple of shoe boxes at the top of the parents' closet.

He picked up a rock and tossed it angrily over the cliff. “Turns out the bonds were for Maya and Lacey and Ben. For college. Their parents had been buying them since the kids were born. They weren't even rich.”

Dread swept over me. It was the dread of sudden realization, like I'd been swimming in the shallow end only to extend my legs and find that the bottom was nowhere to be found.

“But you took them anyway.” We'd stuck around Seattle for two more months, but no one had ever said a word.
I wonder how long it took the Richardsons to realize the bonds were gone.

He looked at me. “I lost something on that job, Grace. Some . . . I don't know, some part of me that still believed I was redeemable. That believed I could be someone else someday. And it was because I stole from Ben. Because I cared about him and I stole from his family anyway.”

I didn't know what to say. It had never occurred to me that Parker had a conscience about what we did. His loyalty to our parents had been less than enthusiastic, but he had never openly questioned their motives until we came to Playa Hermosa. Until it had been to protect me.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't know about Ben, about the Richardsons. But this is the deal. It always has been. You've never minded before.”

“That's not true.” His voice was dangerously low, an undercurrent of anger running through it. “I've never liked the way they use you. The way they use us.”

“They're not using me,” I said. “I've profited from our jobs. So have you.”

He continued looking out over the water. “Yeah, well, we've lost, too.”

“Maybe. But that's life. And this is who we are.”

His eyes bore into mine. “What if it isn't?”

The words struck a chord, some long-buried part of myself snapping to attention.

Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .

But no. I couldn't afford to think that way. Not now.
We were in too deep.

I shook my head. “You can't just change the rules in the middle of the game.”

“I don't want to change them,” he said. “I want to stop playing.”

“Parker . . .”

“Come with me, Grace. That's all I'm asking. You don't even have to stay with me if you don't want. I just want you to . . . to have a chance.”

“A chance at what?”

“Another life. A better life.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Don't you want that, too?”

He looked away. “I think it might be too late for me.”

My heart seemed to skip a beat. “Don't say that. You're only a year older than me. If I have a chance, you do, too.”

“I'm not like you, Grace. I don't have an endless supply of hope, of optimism.”

“You think I don't lose hope? I don't feel despair?”

He turned toward me. “Then come with me. Before it's too late.”

I thought about it, tried to imagine it. Parker and me somewhere else. On our own. No more lying. No more running.

“I'm not saying no,” I said. “I just . . . I can't think about it right now. Let's finish this job. Then we can figure out what's next. Can we do that?”

“You'll think about getting out?”

I nodded. “But Parker . . . you have to stop what you're doing. You're shining a light on the whole family. And
neither of us will get out if we're exposed now.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I've been at loose ends. But I can hold it together until the end of this job. I
will
hold it together.”

“Promise?”

He put his arm around me and pulled me close in a brotherly embrace. “I promise.”