“Are you sure?” His eyes burned into mine.
It would make saying good-bye harder. It would mean leaving a bigger part of myself in Playa Hermosa. But on the eve of my betrayal, I wanted to give him something that was real. Something that might make him doubt all the things he would hear about me in the weeks ahead. Something that might make him believe in me despite what I would do.
I didn’t answer. Instead I took the blanket from the couch and laid it on the floor with some of the throw pillows. Then I took his hands and pulled him down next to me.
He held my face in his hands as his mouth found mine. And then his hands were in my hair, lifting my T-shirt over my head, burning into my skin like a brand. There was nothing but him: his lips on mine, his hands exploring my body in the flickering firelight. I was lost, and I shut out everything, made him the center of my universe, if only for a couple of hours.
Afterward, I lay in the crook of his arm, the lights from the Christmas tree playing across his face.
He kissed the top of my head. “I love you, Grace. I think I’ve loved you since you first looked into my eyes in the hallway, the day you dropped your schedule. Remember?”
I nodded. “I love you, too.”
It was true. And it was all I had to give.
Fifty-Three
It was after eleven when I got up for water. I’d been careful not to drink too much of the wine, but I was feeling drowsy and a little sluggish, too comfortable in Logan’s arms by the fireplace. I couldn’t put off the job forever. I needed to get on with it.
I padded to the kitchen on bare feet and poured two glasses of water. Then I pulled the vial from the pocket of my jeans. I uncapped it, holding it over one of the glasses. This was it. Once I drugged Logan, there would be no going back.
But there was already no going back. Parker was at Allied, baiting the guard. My mom and dad were parked somewhere nearby, waiting for the signal that Logan was out. I couldn’t leave them hanging. And even if there had been time to rehash everything, to tell them I’d changed my mind, then what?
One way or another, we were on a collision course with the Fairchild job. It was too late for me to develop a conscience. Or too late for me to do anything about it, anyway.
I tipped the vial into one of the glasses and pulled a spoon from one of the drawers, stirring until the powder dissolved. Then I picked up the glasses, careful to keep Logan’s in my right hand.
I climbed the stairs with my heart in my throat.
Compartmentalize, I ordered myself. Stop thinking about Logan and what this will do to him. To his family. Think about this moment. About the job.
It was a tactic Cormac had taught Parker and me when we’d first started grifting. He told us it went all the way back to Buddhist teachings. They called it mindfulness, but it was the same thing: Focus only on what’s in front of you. Block out everything else.
I entered the media room and handed Logan the water, taking a drink from my own glass as I sat down next to him on the floor. I had a fleeting hope that he wouldn’t drink it, or at least not enough of it to put him out. I shouldn’t have worried. He downed the whole thing in one long swallow and then set down the glass.
He reached out, pulling me back onto the floor with him. I lay against his chest, listening to the soft drumming of his heart, trying to memorize the rhythm of it, the feel of his bare skin under my cheek. I stayed there too long after his breathing had settled into the regular cadence of sleep, not wanting to set into motion the string of events that would solidify my betrayal.
Finally, I eased out of his arms and sat up. I leaned down and kissed his cheek, trying to imprint his sleeping face on my mind. Then I got up, grabbed my bag, and hurried downstairs.
When I got to the foyer I texted my dad. All clear.
His reply came a few seconds later. Stand by.
I sat on the bench near the Fairchilds’ front door, pushing away the thought of Logan, upstairs in a drug-induced sleep. I wanted to go to him, pull the blankets over us both, and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. Pretend I didn’t exist.
The house was dark and eerily quiet. The soft ticking of an old-fashioned clock sounded from somewhere down the hall, the occasional gust of wind ringing the chimes Leslie had scattered throughout the property.
I checked my phone. It had been ten minutes since my dad’s last message. I texted him again. Everything okay?
My phone lit up a second later. No word. Stand by.
I tapped my toes against the tile floor, trying not to read too much into the delay. I don’t know if it was instinct or paranoia, but I was suddenly sure something was wrong, and a burst of energy forced me to my feet as adrenaline flooded my body. I paced the floor, forcing myself to take steady, even breaths.
I was getting ready to text my dad again when a muted buzzing sounded from my hand. I looked down, surprised to see that Parker was calling.
“What’s going on?” I asked as soon as I picked up.
“Listen carefully, Grace.” Everything seemed to slow down when I heard Parker’s labored breathing, the sound of distant sirens in the background. “The guard didn’t come out like he was supposed to. Someone called the cops instead, and they’re on my tail. I’m—”
“Where are you?” I demanded. “I’ll send Mom and Dad to pick you up.”
“You have to listen!” he shouted, panting. I could picture him running, trying to put some distance between him and the police. “I’m going to ditch this phone in the water and hope for the best. I’ll be back in touch with you later if I can.”
“Parker . . .” I paced the floor, barely able to breathe. “We’ll come get you. We’ll come right now!”
“No, you won’t.” His voice was strangely calm, like he had known this would happen all along. I could hear the roar of the ocean on the other end of the phone. He was trying to lose the police at the cliffs. It was what I would have done. “Everything is in place. You have to move. Make sure Cormac and Renee save my share. And Grace?”
“Yeah?” I could barely get the word out.
“It’s you and me. No matter what.”
The call dropped, and I looked down at the screen, not wanting to believe it. I fought the urge to throw my phone, to scream, to run. Then I called Cormac.
“We’re still waiting, Grace.”
“Parker’s on the run,” I said. “The police came instead of the guard. He’s going to ditch the phone and try to lose them.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. “I’ll call you back in one minute.”
I dropped onto the bench in the Fairchilds’ foyer. “Let him be okay,” I whispered to the silent house. “Please let him be okay.”
The phone buzzed in my hand. “We’re heading to Allied,” my dad said, his voice even. “We’ll be back in half an hour. Sit tight.”
“But I—” I didn’t have time to finish. The phone was dead.
Fifty-Four
I spent the next hour and a half pacing the house, listening carefully for any sound, worried that Logan would wake up earlier than planned, that whatever had happened at Allied had alerted the guards to a potential problem at the Fairchild house.
By the time my phone buzzed, I was a nervous wreck. The text was from my dad.
Open gates. Proceed as planned.
I wanted to ask him about Parker, about what had happened at Allied. But this wasn’t the time. They were outside, exposed as they waited for me to open the gate.
I went to the keypad and pressed the Gate Entry button. Then I walked to the big window in the living room, watching for the truck. A few seconds later, headlights bounced through the trees along the driveway. I hit the button to close the gate and disarmed the alarm before picking up my bag.
I headed into the kitchen, stopping at the terrace doors. The lawn was dark and quiet, no sign of the drama playing out elsewhere on the peninsula. Was it still okay to cross the lawn in full view of the cameras? Had my dad put
them on a loop in Parker’s absence? There was no way to know for sure, but he had said to proceed as planned. I reached into my bag and pulled out the mask he’d given me that morning.
Opening the terrace door, I stepped out into the cold night and hurried across the lawn. I couldn’t see the carriage house, but a visual of the property was imprinted on my mind, and I made my way down the footpath and over to the driveway.
The truck was just a shadow in the darkness, the headlights off. The doors opened as I moved toward it. My dad emerged first, duffel bag in hand, and my mom stepped down from the passenger side a moment later. They wore masks identical to mine, and I felt a thrill of fear, like we were all unwitting participants in some kind of horror movie.
We didn’t speak. Voices carried in unpredictable ways outside, bouncing off buildings, drifting on breezes. I was dying to know what had happened at Allied, if they’d heard anything about Parker, but I followed them silently to the carriage house and helped them ease open the doors as quietly as possible.
Cormac waited until we were inside to take off his mask and turn on one of the flashlights. Working with anything brighter would be too dangerous. Light, like sound, had a way of bouncing where you didn’t want it to.
He dropped the duffel bag on the floor and unzipped it, rifling through its contents.
I shook my head. “What are we doing?” My voice rose in panic. “We have to find Parker!”
My mom grabbed ahold of my arm, her grip a little too tight. Her eyes were bright, her blond hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. “Parker knows what he’s doing. He’s probably holed up in some cave at the cliffs, waiting for it all to blow over. We continue as planned and get Parker later. It’s how he would want it.”
I heard Parker’s voice on the phone: Everything is in place. You have to move. Make sure Cormac and Renee save my share.
My mom was right. We had to finish the job.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Pull back the mat,” my dad said, standing with the bolt cutters in one hand.
My mom held the flashlight as I slid the gray mat off the bunker door. The light bounced around the room as she bent to help, and I caught sight of something on my dad’s shirt. I squinted through the darkness, a large wine-colored stain coming into focus on his chest.
“What is . . .” I swallowed hard, my gaze riveted to his shirt. “Is that blood?”
His gaze turned cold. “Don’t worry about it, Gracie. Just keep moving.”
I took an involuntary step backward. “What did you do?”
“We did what had to be done,” my mom said softly. “Your safety depends on it. Parker’s safety depends on it. We were in too deep to call it off. You’d already given Logan the Valium. The buyers are waiting. We won’t have another chance, and without the gold, we can’t make a run for it. We’d be stuck here, sitting ducks while the police put together everything that was in process. And that’s doubly true if they pick up Parker. At least this way, we’ll have the resources to help him.”
I was flailing around in my mind, on overload as I weighed the merit of her argument. Something bad had happened at Allied, but my brain was shutting down, focusing on the fact that my dad had the bolt cutters out, wondering how long it would take us to load the gold so we could find Parker.
“We took care of the monitors at Allied,” Cormac said, grunting a little as he snapped the first lock with the bolt cutter. “The cameras are looped. Parker knows how to handle himself. Everything’s fine.”
Everything wasn’t fine. Even I knew that, despite the layer of cotton in my head, the void that was opening up between my panic and the reality of the situation. I was on autopilot by the time my dad snipped the last lock, and I bent down, heaving open one of the double doors with my mom’s help while my dad grabbed the other one.
The doors weren’t even open all the way when a wave of cold, damp air hit my face. It smelled like concrete and metal and, somewhere underneath it all, wet earth.
We folded the doors back against the carriage house floor. My mom shone the flashlight into the hole in the ground, illuminating a staircase and rows of metal shelving far below us.
“Moment of truth.” Cormac pulled a headlamp out of the bag and turned on the light. Then he looked at my mom and me. “You coming?”
I looked around. “Someone needs to cover.”
“Come take a look first,” he said. “You were a big part of this. You deserve to be there when we find the gold.”
I hesitated.
“Go ahead, Grace,” my mom said. “I’ll keep watch. Your dad’s right; this one’s yours.”
I started down the stairs, her words ringing in my ears.
This one’s yours.
I didn’t want it. Didn’t want to acknowledge how big a part I’d played in this moment. But they were right. It wouldn’t have been possible without all the snooping I’d done at Logan’s, without my access to the Fairchild estate.
It was my fault. All of it.
The stairs were metal. They rang under our footsteps as we descended into the darkness below, Cormac’s headlamp the only source of light. It was a lot farther down than I’d expected. I wondered how long it had taken Warren to complete the bunker. Had he hired someone to build it? Or was doing it himself part of his obsession? His paranoia?
Finally, my dad stepped onto the concrete floor. I looked up, trying to gauge how far down we were by the distant shine of my mom’s flashlight at the bunker’s entrance above us.
My dad whistled softly. “Jesus . . .”
I turned around. “What is it?”
“This is crazy.” I walked over to where he stood. He lifted a thick length of metal tubing hanging from one of the cement walls. “Looks like Warren’s planning some kind of ventilation system.”
I looked around, shocked by the size of the place. It was huge. At least one hundred feet by one hundred feet. Way bigger than I’d imagined. My gaze came to rest on the rows of metal shelving. One entire wall was stacked with five-gallon bottles of water. Another was lined with packaged food, canned vegetables and beans, cases of energy bars, dried fruit, rice, cornmeal, flour, sugar, powdered milk. I could make out partitions at the far end of the room and, beyond them, a set of bunk beds.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. I had a sudden flash of Warren Fairchild, manning the grill with his Kiss the Cook apron, smiling and greeting his guests. And all the while, he was scared enough of some unknown future to have a massive bunker under his property.
Cormac was moving around on one side of the room. “Help me look, Grace.”
I took the other wall, shifting and lifting, looking under the tarps that covered medicine and first-aid supplies, a shortwave radio, a rack of fishing poles. I was beginning to give up, beginning to think we were wrong, when I came to a large metal cabinet. A heavy padlock identical to the ones on the bunker doors was threaded through its two handles.
“There’s something here,” I called out. “I think it might be a gun cabinet.”
Cormac appeared over my shoulder. “Let me see.”
I stepped aside, and he studied it for a few seconds. “Go get the bolt cutters.”
I took the stairs two at a time. My mom was still there, eyes on the carriage house doors. “Anything?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said, grabbing the bolt cutters off the duffel bag. “But we found a locked cabinet. Be right back.”
I hurried down the stairs and handed my dad the bolt cutters. After positioning them just right, he snipped through the padlock in one try. It fell to the floor with a noisy clunk.
He tipped his head at the cabinet. “Go ahead, Grace.”
It was suddenly hard to swallow. I’d told myself I didn’t want the gold to be there. That not finding it was the only way to get out of Playa Hermosa without hurting Logan and his family. But now, with Parker on the run, maybe already in custody, I knew it was a lie. I needed the gold to be there. Otherwise it would all have been
for nothing, and we’d have no way to help Parker. To make our escape.
I pulled on the handles. The doors swung open.
And there it was.
Fifty-Five
It didn’t take up nearly as much room as I’d expected. In fact, it fit neatly inside the metal cabinet, the racks that had been meant for guns removed to make room for the bars of gold stacked in its interior.
I don’t know why I thought it would be shiny. It wasn’t. They were just dull, golden bars, stacked like bricks.
“Bingo,” my dad said. “Well done, Grace.”
“What now?” It was all I could manage with the emotions warring inside my heart and head.
“Go upstairs and relieve your mother. Send her down to help load.”
I walked back to the staircase and made my way back into the carriage house.
“Well?” my mom said, peering over the ledge as I came closer to the top.
“Found it.”
She exhaled her relief. “Thank God. Is it all there?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “There’s a cabinet full of it. I’m supposed to relieve you and send you down to load.”
She nodded, reaching behind her. A second later she withdrew something from the waistband of her jeans. It took me a second to register that it was a small black pistol.
I looked at it in disbelief. “What are you doing with a gun?”
“It’s a last resort,” she said, holding it out toward me. “In case of an emergency.”
I recoiled. No one ever got hurt in our cons. Most of the time we stole jewelry and semivaluable artwork from houses when our marks were out of town. Once, we’d gotten the pass codes to an investment account and transferred money offshore, moving it twice more before Cormac took a trip to withdraw the cash. After that it was deposited into our personal, untraceable offshore accounts. And that was that.
We didn’t use guns. Then again, we’d never stood guard over twenty million dollars’ worth of gold. But still.
“In case of an emergency? What kind of emergency would make us use a gun?”
Lies I Told Page 21
