Lies I Told(71)

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?”

“I don’t know, Grace. But this job is bigger than any of the others. There’s more at stake. Just take it.” She thrust it into my hands.

I was still in shock, still making note of the cold weight of it, when she headed down the stairs into the bunker. It took me a minute to move, to resign myself to the fact that I’d have to hold the gun until she came back. I held it away from my body, careful to keep my finger off the trigger, as I moved to the carriage house door.

It was dark outside, but the almost-full moon still threw a little light around, and I stood in the shadows offered by the eaves, scanning the driveway for movement. There was nothing, and I turned my attention to the house, barely visible through the trees. I thought of Logan, asleep in the media room where I’d left him. I hoped he wouldn’t be sick from the Valium. That he’d feel okay in the morning in the moments before he realized what I’d done.

I looked down at the gun in my hands, wondering when everything had gone so wrong. When we had become the kind of people who carried guns and stole from someone like Warren Fairchild. Had all our marks been as human as Warren? Had they all had fears and weaknesses hidden beneath a veneer of money and power? And what did it say about me that I was only now asking that question?

A thump from inside the carriage house pulled me away from my thoughts, and I turned around just as my dad’s head came into view at the top of the stairs.

“Give it a push, for f*ck’s sake,” he growled, tugging on the ends of what looked like one of the tarps from the bunker.

The load seemed to lighten, and a moment later he stepped onto the carriage house floor and yanked on the tarp. The rest of it spilled out with a clatter. My mom appeared a second later, breathing heavily, her hair askew.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Not all of it,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to get it all up, but this is the fastest method we could devise with what we have.”

I looked at the tarp, its contents bulging from the gathered middle tied with rope. They’d loaded gold onto the tarp and tied it off, using the ends as a handle like a Santa’s sack of toys. Clearly my dad had been the one to pull while my mom had pushed from the bottom.

“How much did you get in there?” I asked.