“Hide somewhere,” Parvati said. “I’ll grab the hard drive, meet up with you, and we can check out his files together. If Preston is in Vegas we can head there tomorrow after my parents go to work.”
She made it sound so easy, like there wasn’t anything to think about. Hide. Then find Preston. Get back to a normal life by the weekend. “I guess I could go camping again. Maybe a little ways up the coast, catch a few waves.” I frowned. “Darla’s going to get all freaked out, though. We were supposed to go out to dinner for my birthday.”
On cue, a bolt of lightning cut the sky outside into two pieces. The rain came down in sheets, blotting out my front yard and the houses across the street.
“Stupid weather.” Parvati swore under her breath. “You can’t camp in this. What about my dad’s cabin?”
“Isn’t it still full of his military pals?” I envisioned a few Navy SEALs launching themselves through the plate-glass front window in gas masks and full riot gear.
“I saw Dad detail-cleaning his rifles last week, so hunting must be done for this year. You should be okay.”
Being inside was definitely preferable to riding out the storm in a tent. Plus, the cabin was isolated, and McGhee and Gonzalez had no reason to know about it. They didn’t know Parvati and I were still together, so they’d have no reason to suspect she was helping me. Not yet, anyway. By the time they figured out we were still a couple and thought to question her, we’d be on the way to Vegas.
“I’ll go back to Pres’s house and talk Esmeralda into letting me in his bedroom,” she continued. “Then I’ll meet you at the cabin. We’ll look at anything I manage to find and go from there.”
“How are you going to get away with cutting class?”
She grinned. “The same way I’m getting away with it right now. ‘I’m afraid Parvati’s condition has not improved. It might be the influenza,’” she said in an exact imitation of her mother’s lilting Indian accent. “Duh. Liars, Inc. Self-alibis are free, right?”
I shook my head. “You’re a piece of work, you know it?”
“A national treasure,” she said, still speaking in her mom’s accent.
“It’s kind of hot when you talk like that.” For a second, I almost forgot I was preparing to run away to avoid being arrested for a crime against my friend.
“It’s hot no matter how I talk.” Parvati leaned in and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.
Both of us smiled, and I realized how glad I was to have her on my side, how everything seemed a little less scary with her around.
FIFTEEN
WHILE I SCRIBBLED A NOTE to Darla and Ben about how I left to go look for Preston, Parvati helped me quickly pack a bag of things I’d need for a couple days in case I went straight from the Colonel’s cabin to Vegas. Then she went to pick up Amanda while I headed toward the Angeles National Forest.
My tires quickly ate up the miles of dusty highway. I still didn’t know if running away was a smart move. Parvati thought it was, but easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one implicating herself in a possible felony. Still, thanks to her mom she knew more about this crap than I did, and what she said made sense. The FBI agents would present my lies to the judge, along with the bloody trunk and missing phone, and I’d be done for. They’d assign me another overworked public defender who would tell me to take a plea bargain, and I’d end up in jail. Not happening.
I puzzled over two main questions as I drove. The first: who would want to hurt Pres? He was our school’s most beloved athlete, but his rah-rah go-team image was mostly smoke and mirrors. He didn’t give a shit about school spirit or our classmates. He played football because he loved it, the feel of slipping between two hulk-like defenders, the thrill of beating the odds. It was the same reason he liked surfing and gambling. He liked taking risks, especially when he came out on top, which he almost always did.
In that sense, a lot of people might have wanted to hurt him. People who he had lied to or beaten. People who had gambled with him and lost. Or won. Jared Jacobsen said Preston might have moved on to bigger and better things. Was Pres betting with a professional bookie? Maybe that was why he was so secretive about his recent online activities. Maybe that was the real reason he went to Vegas. I thought about what happened in movies to gamblers who owed money. I hoped Pres wasn’t lying bloody and beaten in an alley somewhere.
The other question was harder: who would want to hurt me? I was basically invisible at school and tried my best not to piss people off at the beach. I couldn’t think of a single person who had anything against me. But someone had lied about Preston and me fighting at the top of Ravens’ Cliff, and possibly planted Pres’s bloody phone in my trunk. It had to be the Jacobsens, didn’t it? No one else was there.
No.
Wait.
There was another car.
A gray SUV.
I had nearly crashed into a gray SUV just down the street from my house when I was daydreaming about Parvati. It could have been the same one that was parked at the beach overlook on Sunday morning.
My phone buzzed. Shit. If I left it on, the feds would be able to GPS me. I glanced down at the display before switching it off. Darla. My stomach tightened. I was screwing up everything—our birthday dinner, trimming the tree. I wondered if she and Ben had ever regretted adopting me, if they were secretly glad I was eighteen now so they could be rid of me whenever they wanted.
I’d been on the road for just under an hour when the turnoff for the cabin appeared. I realized I hadn’t thought about what I should do with my car. Parking it in the Colonel’s driveway didn’t seem like a smart idea.
I turned off the winding two-lane road about a mile past the cabin when I saw a sign for a nature preserve. Gravel sprayed up on both sides of me as the car lurched and bounced down a shallow incline. I did my best to avoid the bathtub-sized potholes and low-hanging branches. At the bottom of a hill, a tiny parking area sat overgrown with weeds. I pulled the Escort as far into the high grass as I could. Anyone who came this way would find it, but it wouldn’t be visible from the top of the hill.
A wooden trailhead, with a place for backpackers to register if they were going into the backcountry, stood at the edge of the parking area. If someone found the car, maybe they’d think I hiked into the wilderness to hide.
The camping gear from Preston’s alibi was still in my trunk. If I remembered right, the cabin was pretty sparsely furnished. I’d need just about everything I had with me to survive comfortably there. I packed my sleeping bag, first aid kit, a thermos of water, and the bag of clothes and toiletries Parvati had gathered for me into my oversized frame pack.