The Pretender, page 4
I realize now why I grabbed the extra diamonds from the bag.
I wanted some insurance in case I do have to run after all.
Chapter 11
Hannah’s editor calls her into her office, which is unusual. Ashley Decker is a veteran journalist who worked at several metro papers before taking the editing job at the Gazette, and she believes in coming out into the newsroom to talk to her staff, not bringing them into her office. A call to the office usually means you are in trouble, which is something that happens to the other reporters every now and then, but never to Hannah.
“Sit,” Ashley says, gesturing to an uncomfortable chair with orange foam stuffing spilling from cracks in the vinyl.
Ashley is in her mid-forties and attractive, but tired-looking. A high-pressure job and the long hours that come with it have taken their toll on her. She has crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, and filaments of silver have begun to highlight her silk-black hair.
She is someone who can command the respect of her staff and who can stand up to the publisher whenever they butt heads. She can do every job in the newsroom—reporter, photographer, copyeditor—better than the staff members paid to do them. And she can put on a dress, run a curling iron through her hair, and schmooze with Lake Tahoe’s elite at any high-society function.
Hannah has always had great admiration for her. And they’ve gotten along famously—Ashley recognizes a talented protégée when she sees one.
“So, what’s happening with the profile of Logan Bishop? You know, the hero.” Ashley adds this last part as if Hannah might have forgotten who he was.
“I don’t think I can do the story,” Hannah says. “He won’t cooperate.”
Ashley stares at her disapprovingly, a look Hannah has seen leveled at practically every other employee, but never herself.
“You can’t convince him?” Ashley says. “Come on, this is a good story.”
Hannah frowns and shakes her head. “Sorry, I think I’ve just about milked this one for all its worth.”
It’s been almost a week since she wrote the story about Logan saving the girl, and since then, Hannah has followed it up with an in-depth feature on the girl and her family; an article about the dangers of drowning; and even a day-in-the-life profile of what it’s like to drive a water taxi on the Echo Lakes, for which she interviewed the kid who’d been with them that day along with a handful of his coworkers.
The only thing missing from this collection is an article about Logan.
Ashley leafs absently through some paperwork on her desk. Every surface of the desk is covered with notes or old copies of the Gazette. She finds what she’s looking for—a copy of the front page with Logan’s photo—and considers it.
“What’s this guy afraid of?” she says.
“I think he just wants his privacy,” Hannah says.
“Well, just because he doesn’t want to talk doesn’t mean there’s no story there.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Find out what you can,” Ashley says. “Talk to his friends. Find out where he works. See where he’s from. It’s possible to write a profile on someone even if they don’t participate.”
“I don’t know,” Hannah says. “That doesn’t feel—”
“And who knows,” Ashley says, pretending she didn’t hear Hannah’s objections, “if you tell him you’re doing the story with or without his input, maybe he’ll cooperate.”
Hannah feels sick to her stomach. As a journalist, she’s never had a problem asking hard questions. She’s interviewed the family members of murder victims, people who’d lost their homes to wildfires, public figures embroiled in controversy. But she’s always respected a person’s right to say no. She’s never tried to manipulate someone into speaking to the press when he didn’t want to.
“I think we should just let the story go,” Hannah says. “He saved a girl’s life. I don’t think we should punish him by plastering his face all over the newspaper if he doesn’t want that.”
Ashley stares at her, and Hannah thinks for a moment that the two of them might have their first real conflict. Hannah has always admired Ashley’s ability to fight for what she feels strongly about, and now she psychs herself up to do the same—although it feels weird to prepare to fight with the person she’s modeling her tenacity after.
A tense few seconds pass. Then Ashley shrugs and says, “I’ll tell you what: just do some digging. See what you can find. If you still think there’s no story, we’ll bag it. I trust you.”
A compromise, Hannah thinks. I can agree to that.
“Who knows?” Ashley adds. “Maybe this guy’s hiding something. Maybe that’s why he won’t talk to you.”
“Maybe,” Hannah says, rising from her chair.
But Ashley’s suggestion is ringing inside her like a struck tuning fork. You don’t know what you’ve done, Logan had said. He’d mostly played himself off as a normal guy who simply wanted his privacy, but she suspected there was more to his secrecy than he’d let on.
“Wouldn’t that be some shit?” Ashley says, cracking a smile. “What if our hero turns out to be some criminal?”
Hannah returns to her desk, thinking about the possibility.
What does she know about him? Not much. Just that he’s independently wealthy and likes his privacy.
If he is hiding something bigger, that would actually make sense. She never quite thought the trust-fund story fit him. But does being a criminal on the run fit him either?
Hannah opens up her laptop and begins to dig.
Chapter 12
A week after my hike to Lake Aloha with Claire, she and I are in a spinning class at the gym, sweating and laughing and motivating each other. It’s the early-morning class, not the midafternoon class. This has become our routine, kicking off each day with a good workout. In the last week, we’ve spent every minute together that we can. She’s pretty much moved in with me. We both agreed it would be temporary until she finds her own place, but I think, in our hearts, we both know this is permanent. She’s made no effort to move and I certainly haven’t pressured her to. I like having her around.
She has been looking for a job, though, taking her truck each day to drive around town to fill out applications and do interviews. She’s been encouraging me to do the same, since she’s under the impression that my insurance money will run out. I’m thinking about doing it, getting a real job of some kind. I haven’t had much time alone to take a day and drive to Reno or Sacramento to try to sell some of the diamonds. And it might be nice to think of that money, my stash, as supplemental income.
When I turned my back on Marco, I wanted a normal life, didn’t I?
What’s more normal than working a regular job?
For now, though, I’m just trying to relish the moment. I’ve been alone for a long time. I want to enjoy being with someone.
These are the things I’m thinking about as we’re finishing up the class, wiping down our bikes and taking long drinks of water. When Claire and I come walking out of the gym, I see Hannah waiting in the parking lot. She’s wearing regular clothes: jeans, blouse, cardigan. She is wearing sneakers, but she clearly hasn’t been working out, which tells me she’s here for only one reason: to see me. And the fact that we’re in the morning class, not the afternoon class where I used to see her, tells me that she’s gone out of her way to find me. She’s probably afraid I wouldn’t answer her phone call.
When she sees us coming out of the building, she offers a bashful smile and lifts her arms up as if to surrender.
“Truce?” she says.
I smile and say hello. Obviously I was just being paranoid when I blew up at her about the article.
“I want to talk to you about something,” she says. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” She gestures toward the café next door to the gym. “Off the record,” she adds. “Not for publication. I just want to talk—as friends.”
Claire eyes her suspiciously. My heart swells a little—she looks cute when she’s jealous.
I tell Hannah that I’ll meet her over in the coffee shop. Then I ask Claire if she minds going back to my house and waiting for me. It’s just a short walk along the beach path. Today is a warm day—maybe the last of the season—and I don’t think she’ll mind.
“Should I be worried?” Claire says, gesturing toward the coffee shop as Hannah steps inside.
“Not at all,” I say. “Hannah and I are just friends.”
I give her a long, reassuring kiss, and then I head to the coffee shop. Hannah is waiting in line, and I join her. She buys a regular coffee and I opt for a soda instead. I’m more of a sugar junkie than a caffeine addict.
Hannah insists on paying.
In our seats, she smiles at me, and I can tell there’s something on her mind. I wonder for a moment if she’s going to declare that she has feelings for me, and I realize I’m not quite sure how I would handle that. I’m falling for Claire—hard—but sitting across from Hannah, I’m struck with how much I like her. With the sunlight through the window catching her hair and bringing out the depth in her chocolate-brown eyes, she’s every bit as pretty as Claire.
In another life, I think, maybe she and I would have been meant for each other.
“Was that your girlfriend?” Hannah asks.
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you. I guess you caught me off guard.”
I tell her that I met Claire the day after I met her. Hannah has a melancholy look on her face, like she knows she missed her chance.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she says. “I don’t want you to get mad and storm off. I just want to talk. As friends.”
Now I’m nervous.
She reaches into her purse and pulls out a piece of paper folded in half. She unfolds it and slides it across the table to me.
It’s a photocopy of a warrant for my arrest.
Chapter 13
“Shit,” I say, and I flop back in my seat. I tilt my head back and run my fingers through my sweaty hair. I think about how much trouble I’m in.
The problem isn’t the warrant. The warrant is old. It’s from an armored car job that Marco and I did a few years ago. The police brought me in after the warrant was issued, but they ended up releasing me. No charges were filed. Not enough evidence.
I’m sure Hannah knows all of this. Like I said, the problem isn’t the warrant: the problem is that if Hannah knows about the warrant, then she probably knows a lot more. If she dug deep enough to speak to someone in LA’s robbery division, which is what she would have had to do to get this outdated warrant, then she probably knows about a lot of the crimes I’m suspected of committing.
And if she writes about any of it, then Marco will find me.
Last time, I’d surprised Marco when I’d refused to show him the diamonds. Now he’s had two years to think about that scenario, to reconsider how he would handle the situation if given a second chance. The next time he sees me, I won’t be able to refuse. He’ll kill me no matter what.
I take a drink from my soda and say, “Can we walk along the beach? I don’t want to talk in here.”
She looks out the window, as if considering whether she wants to be alone with me. There are plenty of people on the sand, out en masse for one of the last decent days of the season. Forecasters are predicting the temperature will plummet in the next couple days. It might even snow.
“Okay,” she says.
We walk along the path back toward my house. There’s a slight breeze, and it chills me because I’m still in my sweat-soaked clothes. The breeze pushes Hannah’s hair back, and she walks without speaking.
“So, how much do you know?” I say.
“You’ve never been arrested,” she says. “There’s no valid warrant out for you.”
“But?”
“But you’re a suspect in a number of old robbery cases. Banks. Jewelry stores. Businesses that keep cash on hand. One detective I talked to called them ‘mid-level jobs,’ but he said your name had been kicked around in connection with the theft of some particularly valuable diamonds.”
I’m quiet.
“He thought you graduated to the big leagues,” she says. “Then you disappeared. They figured you were probably dead.”
“I would have liked it if they kept on thinking that,” I say.
We’re not far from my house now. I can see it. We’re going to be there before we know it, so I suggest to Hannah that we sit on a nearby bench.
“When you wouldn’t let me interview you,” Hannah says, “my editor asked me to find out more about you. It wasn’t too hard to find this stuff.”
“I should have used a fake name,” I say. “I thought if I didn’t have a bank account, didn’t use a credit card, paid cash for my rent, didn’t sign up for Facebook or anything stupid like that—I thought if I did all those things, I could fly under the radar.”
“The thing is,” Hannah says, “no one’s actually after you. The police found you before and couldn’t make the charges stick. You’re not actually a wanted man.”
I look into her deep brown eyes and am struck again by how pretty she is.
“It’s not the police I’m running from, Hannah.”
Her expression seems to change as she thinks about what I might be suggesting.
We’re silent for a moment. I stare out at the water. When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, my parents would bring me here each summer, and I fell in love with the brilliant blue water, the pine forests, the frosted mountain peaks. When I was pulling jobs with Marco, I thought about Lake Tahoe often, wondering if I could be a different person here. Step back in time and try to be the person I could have become, instead of the one I did.
“Last week,” I say, “I asked you if you’d ever refrain from putting something in the paper you thought was newsworthy.”
Hannah nods.
“Well,” I say, “I’m going to tell you everything. Throw myself on your sword. You have to decide what to do with it.”
She waits.
“I’m a thief, Hannah. Or I was. All those crimes I’m suspected of, I did them. My partner was a pretty bad guy named Marco. When I told him I was quitting, he tried to kill me. If he ever finds out where I am, he’ll come for me. He’ll cut my throat and pull my tongue out through the hole.”
Hannah swallows.
“I came to Lake Tahoe to start over,” I continue. “I don’t want to be the person I was. I never killed anyone, Hannah. I was never that kind of criminal. But I stole from people. I hurt people. I don’t like who I was.”
It feels good, in a way, to get this information off my chest. I’ve been pretending for so long, it’s nice to finally tell the truth to someone.
After a moment of silence, Hannah says, “So the story about the trust fund? That was all bullshit?”
I laugh. “Total bullshit.” I’m not sure how much to tell her, but I’ve already started so I decide to see it through all the way. “I’ve got a stash of ‘particularly valuable diamonds’ hidden at Lake Aloha,” I say, making quotation marks with my fingers. “I go up there a couple times a year to grab a few stones that I can sell and live off of.”
Hannah seems mortified at the thought that the day we met, the day I saved a little girl’s life, I was on a mission to retrieve stolen jewels.
She shakes her head, as if to clear her thoughts, and says, “I never thought ‘trust fund baby’ fit you.” Now it’s her turn to make air quotations. “That just didn’t seem like you.”
“What about now?” I say. “Does thief fit me any better?”
She looks at me carefully, as if really considering the question. “A little bit,” she says. “But I’d like to think ‘hero who saves little girl’ fits the best.”
“Me too,” I say softly, not sure if that’s true.
Chapter 14
“Does she know the truth?” Hannah asks. “Your girlfriend.”
“No,” I say, looking away from her and out at the wavelets lapping at the shore. “But I should tell her before it gets more serious, shouldn’t I?”
“If she’s smart,” Hannah says, “she’ll run away from you as fast as she can.”
“If I were smart,” I say, “I would have run away from Lake Tahoe the moment I saw my picture in your newspaper. We don’t always do what we’re supposed to.”
“No,” she says, “we don’t.”
I try to figure out if there’s a subtext to her words. Is she saying she won’t write about what I’m telling her? Or at least thinking about it?
“For what it’s worth,” I say, standing up and tossing my soda into a nearby garbage can, “I’m sorry about all this.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yeah,” I say. “When you met me on that boat, I’m sure you didn’t expect me to turn out to be a criminal.”
I almost add, A criminal who picked another girl over you.
I don’t need to say it. I can tell she gets the message.
“Look,” she says. “I’m glad we met on that boat. You saved a little girl’s life. Don’t forget that. I’m the one who should say she’s sorry. You didn’t ask to have your picture in the paper.”
I shrug. “You were just doing your job,” I say, echoing her words from our fight a week ago.
I ask her if she decides to publish what she knows about me, will she warn me ahead of time?
“So you can split town?” she says.
I nod.
“I’ll give you a heads up,” she says.
“Well, I guess this could be good-bye,” I say.
I open my arms, not sure if she’ll hug me, but she steps in, and we hold each other for longer than decorum would suggest is necessary. I feel her warm body pressed against mine. I inhale deeply and smell her hair.
Ah, I think, in another life…
When we break, I point and show her which house is mine. I’m not sure why. I guess I just don’t want this to be the last I ever see of her.
