Promises I Made (5 page)

I walked back to the Town Center, the rain falling harder and more insistently. The sky had turned a darker shade of gray, and somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the low rumble of thunder. I felt closed in and cut off by the rain, by the hood pulled up around my face, by my isolation.

I stood back in the Plexiglas shelter while I waited for the bus. I knew I was hardly visible from the street, but I still felt exposed, and I was relieved when the bus finally pulled up in a cloud of exhaust and a screech of brakes.

I looked out the window, thinking about Selena as we wound our way down the peninsula. I should have approached her. Asking her for help was the only option I had. Waiting wasn't going to change that, and it wasn't going to make talking to her easier, either. Nothing would do that. I didn't want to talk to her, not just because it was a risk to
my freedom—and by extension Parker's—but because she didn't deserve it. Didn't deserve to be pulled back into the mess I'd made. It was just another way of victimizing her, of punishing her for caring about me.

I ran through all the other possibilities, returning to Detective Castillo. I didn't think Selena would call the cops, but I couldn't be sure. Detective Castillo could tell me if turning myself in would help Parker. If it would, I'd do it today, and I wouldn't need to approach Selena at all. If it wouldn't, I'd be back at square one. But it was worth a shot.

I rode the bus past my stop, all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway into Lomita, a mean-looking city close to the San Pedro waterfront. It was hard to believe Playa Hermosa was less than twenty minutes away; Lomita was paved and sidewalked to within an inch of its life, the lush greenery of the peninsula nothing but a memory in the shadow of countless crumbling stucco apartment buildings. I would have preferred the opposite direction and the beach, but I didn't want the sound of the water to give away my location.

I got off the bus at a fast-food stand on the corner. My stomach was scooped out with hunger, but there was no way I could think about food until I did what I had to do.

I walked around back, pulling Detective Castillo's number from my pocket. I stared down at the numbers, racking my brain for another way. There wasn't one, and I took out my cell phone and dialed before I could talk myself into postponing the inevitable.

I waited for the automated greeting, then punched in
Detective Castillo's extension. It only rang twice before I heard his voice on the other end of the phone.

“Detective Castillo.”

I didn't bother with a greeting. The clock was already ticking. “It's Grace Fontaine.”

“Grace.” He breathed my name into the phone, and I wondered if I was imagining the relief in his voice. Had he been waiting for me to call? “Are you all right?”

It took me by surprise. I couldn't remember the last time someone had asked me that question. “I'm . . . I'm fine,” I said. “I want to talk about Parker.”

“Okay,” he said.

“What happened isn't his fault. He didn't kill that guard.”

“I know that, Grace. The evidence doesn't match up. But he was part of the Fairchild theft, and I'm guessing you were too.”

I hesitated, trying to think of a way to impart as much information as possible in the short amount of time before I would have to disconnect the call. “We didn't plan any of it. We were both kids. We did what we were told by the people taking care of us.”

“I hear you, Grace, but Parker's eighteen.” I heard a note of regret in his voice. “He's considered responsible for his actions, and so are you. Unless . . .”

I seized on the word. “Unless?”

“If you could get us information about the people who were really behind it, you might be able to cut a deal with the prosecutor.”

“What kind of information?”

There was silence on the other end of the line before he finally spoke again. “That's a complicated question. Why don't we meet and talk about it? Just you and me.”

I looked at the call time on my phone. One minute thirty-one seconds.

“I . . . I don't know,” I said, running possible scenarios through my mind. Would he bring backup to a meeting with me? Was it a trick so he could throw me in jail with Parker?

“I want to help you, Grace. I do. But listen . . .” I heard the squeak of his desk chair followed by footsteps. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled, like he was trying to be quiet. “Things are happening here that will impact the case. I might not be able to help you much longer.”

“What kind of things?”

He was so quiet that I wondered if he'd heard the question. “I'll fill you in when we meet,” he finally said.

“I don't know . . .”

“Come on, Grace. You need help here. You know it, and I know it. Let me help you.”

One minute fifty seconds.

“I have to go,” I said. “I'll call you back in an hour.”

I disconnected the call and leaned against the stained exterior of the building. My chest felt tight, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. I swayed a little, my head buzzing. The last thing I needed was to pass out in public a few miles from Playa Hermosa.

I stood there for a minute, forcing myself to take slow,
deep breaths until my head cleared. When I felt almost normal, I went inside and ordered a cheeseburger and fries to go, then waited for the next bus heading back to Torrance.

I took a seat in the back and ate the burger while the city passed by on the other side of the dirty glass. I heard Detective Castillo's voice in my head:
You need help here. You know it, and I know it.

He was right. My money was dwindling fast, something that wouldn't change as long as I was on the run. I could follow through on my original plan to ask Selena for help, but all roads still led back to Detective Castillo. Regardless of where I slept, I'd need to talk to him eventually, figure out if I could trade information on Cormac and Renee for Parker's freedom. And what had he meant about things changing? Did they have a break in the case? Something they were going to announce soon?

I looked at my watch. It had been forty-two minutes since I'd hung up with Detective Castillo. I got off the bus at the corner of PCH and Hawthorne and started walking. At the one-hour mark, I called him again.

“Grace.” He picked it up even before I heard it ring. “I'm not tracing this call. You don't have to hurry off the phone every time we talk.”

“The Reel Inn at the Third Street Promenade, tomorrow at one p.m.,” I said. “And give me your cell phone number.”

I wrote the number in my notebook as he recited it over the phone. “I'll be there, Grace. And I'll come alone.”

The surfers were just climbing out of the water when I reached Santa Monica early the next morning. I got off the bus and walked toward the promenade, my footsteps heavy and sluggish. I'd slept soundly and without nightmares, but I was dragging, a deep-seated exhaustion taking root in my bones. I'd been on the move almost constantly, taking the bus from one end of town to the other, walking to Selena's house, to out-of-the-way places to call Detective Castillo. It was wearing on me, and I knew I'd need to find a way to regroup before I lost focus and started making mistakes.

I took a deep breath, sucking in the ocean air, trying to keep myself alert. The sun glinted off the Ferris wheel on the pier, and I had a sudden flash of Logan's face, inches from mine as we rose over the ocean in one of the tin buckets, his arm securely around my shoulders, the feeling that nothing
in the world could come between us as long as we kept climbing into the sky. It hurt to remember, a physical ache in my chest, like my heart had been scraped out, the wound left empty and rotting.

I continued toward the Reel Inn. Logan had taken me there for dinner the night we'd come to the promenade, and while I didn't plan to use it as a meeting spot for Detective Castillo, it was a good place to start the scavenger hunt that would lead him to me.

The restaurant stood on a corner at the end of the promenade. I walked slowly past it, not wanting to draw attention to myself, casing the surrounding businesses. There was a children's boutique on one side and a specialty paper store on the other. Across from it stood a bookstore, and next to that a café and coffee shop. I made note of it all and looked up, scanning the rooftops for places the cops might hide to watch my meeting with Detective Castillo.

Once I had a handle on the area around the Reel Inn, I continued along the promenade, looking for places to send Detective Castillo while I watched to make sure he wasn't being followed. Finally, I chose the place that would be our last stop: a P.F. Chang's that was close to a parking garage and a bunch of stores that could provide hiding spots if I needed them. I'd been to a P.F. Chang's in Seattle, and I knew the lighting was dim, the furnishings dark. It was nearly always crowded, and the kitchen would give me an alternate way out if things went bad. Small things might vary from location to location, but chain restaurants were always
designed to look and feel the same to the people who frequented them. I was willing to bet this one was almost identical to the one in Seattle. At one p.m., the place would be packed.

Recon complete, I bought a breakfast burrito and a coffee from one of the hole-in-the-wall food places close to the beach. I'd planned to avoid the water, but I felt the pull of it like the tide to the moon, and I found myself heading for the pier and taking the stairs down to the still-cool sand almost without thinking.

I sat down near the water. The beach was deserted except for a few surfers, rising and falling on the waves, and the joggers that populated every beach I'd ever been to in California. Gulls wheeled out over the sea, calling to one another as they swooped down, skimming fish and scraps of food off the surface. The water crawled toward my feet before withdrawing back into the well of the ocean. The sound of it was hypnotic, and my nerves smoothed out just a little. I closed my eyes, letting my breath match the rhythm of it, trying to commit the sound and smell to memory. Maybe I could call on it the next time I was heaving against a crumbling building, trying to catch my breath.

By the time I finished my breakfast, I felt a little better. More in control. Like I might actually be able to pull it all off. I made my way back up to the promenade and bought a bottled water at the café across the street from the Reel Inn. Then I sat down at one of the window seats and waited.

I wasn't due to meet Detective Castillo for nearly two hours, but if the police were setting up a sting, they'd have
to do it in advance. I pulled out a magazine I'd pilfered from the lobby of the hotel and scanned the surrounding buildings through the lenses of my aviators. I looked for sudden movement around the restaurant, for a group of people—mostly men—moving toward it. I looked for activity on the roof, people talking on headsets, meaningful glances that would be out of place passed between strangers. But it was quiet.

The crowd slowly increased as the lunch hour approached. People walked by with shopping bags and paper cups of coffee. There were even a few uniformed officers strolling the walkway. But no one was in a hurry. No one was being too careful, too casual.

Thirty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Detective Castillo, little had changed. Someone had opened the door to the Reel Inn, propping it open with a sandwich board, and there were a few more people, some of them in business suits, hurrying over the walkway. But that was it. No police that I could see and nothing that could be an undercover operation. If Detective Castillo's men were moving in, they were completely undetectable to my eyes.

I'd found only a couple of photos online of Raul Castillo, both of them taken during press conferences. In one shot he was standing off to the side, hands clasped behind his back, eyes aimed at someone in a suit standing in front of a microphone. In the second picture he'd been half hidden behind a detective named Fletcher, whose steely gaze was aimed directly at the camera. Neither of the angles had provided me with a full view of Detective Castillo's face. Instead I
had gotten a glimpse of powerful shoulders, a strong jaw beneath unsmiling eyes, dark hair cut close to the head. I kept the images in mind as I watched the front door of the Reel Inn, afraid to even blink in case I missed him.

Finally, just before one p.m., a solidly built man approached the restaurant. He moved so quickly and with such assurance that I almost dismissed him. I'd expected him to look around, to try to spot me before he went inside. But he moved toward the door with single-minded purpose. He was wearing a navy Windbreaker, his eyes hidden behind aviators that weren't very different from the cheap ones I'd bought at Rite Aid. I wondered if he had been in the military; he had that kind of gait, confident that nothing would deter him from his purpose, daring anything—or anyone—to try.

I took out my phone and dialed as he disappeared inside the restaurant.

“Grace?”

“Leave the restaurant and turn left. Keep walking until you get to the Gap. Go inside, all the way to the back of the store.”

“You don't have to—”

I hung up before he could finish. A few seconds later he appeared in front of the restaurant and started walking. I waited, watching for signs of anyone on the move, anyone following him. There weren't any, and I stood up and left the café.

I hung back, careful to keep the navy Windbreaker in
view as it bobbed in and out of the growing lunchtime crowd. My heart was beating a mile a minute, and a bead of sweat dripped down my back. I half expected to hear the clatter of boots behind me, the voice of someone telling me to freeze. When he ducked into the Gap, I stopped at a hat kiosk in the middle of the promenade and dialed his number while I tried on fedoras and newsboys.

He sighed in lieu of a greeting. “I came alone. Like I said I would.”

“Great. Leave the Gap and walk to the corner. Turn right and keep walking until you hit P.F. Chang's. Go inside and sit at the bar with your back to the door.” I disconnected the call and put my phone in my pocket.

He appeared a moment later. I watched him follow my instructions; then I returned the sun hat I'd been trying on and moved into the crowd.

I tailed him to P.F. Chang's, still hanging back. He worked his way around a group of people in business suits, skirts, and button-downs and disappeared inside the restaurant. I waited two minutes before I went inside.

The restaurant was as dark as I remembered, and I stood in the entryway, letting my eyes adjust to the dim lighting. I looked through the people standing around—talking about work, texting, waiting for a table—until I found the bar.

He was sitting there, his broad back to the door just liked I'd instructed.

I took one last glance around. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and I started for the bar, marking the swinging
kitchen doors in case I needed a quick escape.

Time seemed to slow down. I waited for a hand on my arm, a shout through the crowd, a group of uniformed men to appear from the kitchen or the hallway leading to the bathrooms. No way would Detective Castillo let go of an opportunity to bring me in. Not on a high-profile case attached to a name like Warren Fairchild. It would be a career maker—or a career breaker.

Detective Castillo's navy-clad back remained in front of me. Once I reached him, detaining me would be as simple as a cuff around my wrist, a tight hold on my arm. I wasn't some kind of highly trained assassin. I knew people, not martial arts. If he wanted to take me in, even by himself, there wouldn't be much I could do to stop him.

I slid carefully into the seat next to him, surprised to see that he seemed to be reading the menu.

“I made you back at the Reel Inn.” He turned to face me. “But I said I'd come alone, and I did.”