The pretender, p.7
The Pretender,
p.7
She lets out a scream and then claps her hand over her mouth.
The man is clearly dead. His vacant eyes catch the moonlight, and the blood on his face looks black.
Hannah looks around wildly. There’s another body in the shallow water. The person’s face is submerged. She thinks for a moment that it might be Logan, but the clothes are all wrong.
Then she spots a pair of hiking shoes that look like Logan’s. And his daypack.
Tears spring to her eyes. Her airway constricts. She doesn’t know what to do.
Then, barely audible over her own breathing, she hears a voice.
“Hannah,” Logan moans from somewhere in the distance. “Hannah.”
She sees him out on the lake, barely visible in the gloom, sitting on an island, leaning against a dried-up old tree.
“Are you hurt?” she shouts.
“Yes,” he says, his voice choked with sandpaper hoarseness. “I’ve been shot.”
“Oh, shit,” Hannah whispers.
She’s unsure what to do. The feeling of helplessness she had when Logan was saving the girl begins to wrap itself around her in a paralyzing squeeze.
No, she thinks. I have to do something.
She thinks of Logan’s quick, unhesitating action when the girl was drowning, and this breaks her paralysis.
She kicks off her shoes and strips off her clothes. She stands in her bra and underwear on the cold rock and steels herself for the swim.
“I’m coming,” she shouts to Logan, and then she runs into the lake.
The water burns like liquid fire.
She gasps, unable to catch her breath. It feels as if her lungs are being compressed by the cold. She flaps her arms and kicks her legs, and still she feels like she’s getting nowhere. In the moonlight, the water looks black, like she’s swimming through oil. She has the urge to turn around, swim back to shore, and climb up on the rock out of the water’s icy grip. She wills herself to fight forward.
I’m not going to die here, she thinks. And neither is Logan.
She pulls herself onto the shore of the island and crawls to Logan. His skin is ghost white.
“Hey,” he says to her, his voice a whisper.
“Hey,” she says, not knowing what else to say.
His eyes drop for a moment to her body. “This is a good look for you,” he says, and his mouth curves just slightly into the hint of a smile.
“What happened?” Hannah says.
“Claire and I broke up,” he says. Then he points to a hole in his stomach trickling blood and says, “This was her good-bye present.”
“What about those two?” Hannah says, pointing toward the bank where the two dead bodies lay.
“My old partner,” Logan says. “She played them just like she played me.”
“Come on,” Hannah says. “We need to get you to shore.”
“There’s no point,” Logan says.
“Don’t give me that shit,” Hannah says. “I need you to hang on. I need you to fight.”
Logan shakes his head. “Even if you get me to shore, and we somehow make it down to the telephone, we can’t call an ambulance.”
Hannah stares at him in disbelief. In the moonlight, his face looks like a skull.
“The hospital will have to report a bullet wound,” Logan says. “They’ll connect me to Marco’s and Jasper’s deaths. And maybe you too. How are you going to keep your job at the newspaper when you’re being investigated?”
Hannah feels that sense of panic again. Then the solution presents itself.
“I have an idea,” she says. She grabs him by the face and looks hard into his eyes. “I need you to come with me, Logan. I need you to swim across this lake and hike down the mountain with me.”
“What’s your idea?”
“Just trust me,” she says. “You trusted me with your story earlier today. I need you to trust me again. Get down the mountain with me, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
She helps him to the bank, and they slip together into the black burning water.
Chapter 23
I’m floating in darkness so pure it feels like death.
Then I wake with a start, my heart thumping like a kick drum, my skin clammy and hot.
I’m lying in a strange room. The walls are wood-paneled, decorated with wildlife paintings. A soft light comes in through the window, telling me it’s evening.
How long have I been asleep?
I try to sit up and feel a throbbing pain in my stomach. I look and see white bandages stretched across my abdomen. I notice for the first time that there’s an IV hooked to the bed frame with a wire hanger. It’s feeding fluid into my arm.
I swing my feet off the bed and onto the floor. I’m wearing boxer shorts but nothing else.
My mouth is dry, and I snatch a plastic water cup from the nightstand and drink it down. I yank the IV needle out of my arm. I grab the blanket from the bed and wrap it around my shoulders, stepping out of the room.
My legs are weak.
I round the corner of the hallway and step into a kitchen, and then I recognize where I am. I’m in the cabin of the girl who was drowning. There is the phone by the refrigerator that I used to dial 911.
I walk into a spacious living room with a floor-to-ceiling picture window looking out over the lake. There is a fire crackling in the fireplace. Sitting in a plush leather chair, Hannah is looking out the window, watching snow falling down in fat flakes.
She sees me and gives me a smile so beautiful and so genuine that I can’t believe I ever fell for Claire.
“So this was your idea?” I say, looking around the house.
“I told you to trust me.”
“How long have I been out?”
“Almost twenty-four hours,” she says. “Do you remember anything?”
I take a chair next to her and pull the blanket around me. Out the window, the sun is setting. There is already a layer of snow on the lawn and deck, and it doesn’t look like the storm will let up anytime soon.
“The last thing I remember,” I say, “was going into the water and knowing I was going to die. I remember thinking, I hope Hannah doesn’t blame herself that she wasn’t able to save me.”
Hannah fills me in on the rest. We made it to the shore and then stumbled down the mountain, with her supporting most of my weight and me practically unconscious on my feet. She knocked on the door of the house and asked the father of the girl I’d saved for help. I’d forgotten she’d told me he was a doctor.
He was nervous, afraid he was getting involved in something illegal, but he figured he owed me, she explained. He shot me full of sedative, pulled the bullet out, and sewed me back up. Then he gave Hannah a big bottle of antibiotics and another of painkillers, and he packed up his girls and took off.
“They drove back to the Bay Area this morning,” she says. “The house is paid up for four more days. I can watch over you until you’re ready to go back to your house and take care of yourself. I’m sure the storm will let up by then.”
“You saved my life,” I say.
She shrugs. “I learned from the best.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I say. “To repay you?”
She looks at me sincerely. The firelight twinkles in her brown eyes.
“You can be the person I know you are,” she says.
We’re quiet for a few minutes, enjoying the serenity, then she asks what I’m going to do about Claire.
“Let her go,” I say. “She can have the diamonds. I want out of that life. For good.”
“She shot you,” Hannah says. “She shouldn’t get away with that.”
“A wise man once told me there’s no honor among thieves,” I say. “Everyone who lives that life ends up dead sooner or later.”
“I’m not sure that’s good enough for me,” Hannah says. “She shouldn’t get away scot-free.”
“Have they found the bodies yet?” I ask.
She shakes her head no. “I called my editor and told her I was sick and wasn’t coming in this week. She would have mentioned a double homicide if anyone knew about it. I doubt anyone’s gone hiking up there because of the snow.”
Outside, the snow is really coming down. This early in the season, it will probably melt off within a few days.
I picture spending those days curled up in front of the fire with Hannah, talking, getting to know her.
“So, what are you going to do now?” Hannah says. “Your trust fund is gone.”
“I guess I’ll get a job,” I say.
“This might help tide you over,” she says, reaching into her pocket.
She pulls out a diamond the size of a small marble and holds it between her thumb and forefinger, its surface sparkling in the firelight.
“Where did you get that?”
She explains that when we got to shore, she was trying to put my hiking shoes onto my feet when something glinting in the moonlight caught her eye. The diamond was wedged into a crack in the rocks.
“I bet there are more up there,” she says.
I shrug. “I already got what I wanted,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“To be here with you.”
She tries to hide her smile, and I can’t tell if it’s the glow of the firelight or her skin, but it looks like she’s blushing.
Epilogue
The woman Logan knew as Claire and Marco knew as Jill—and whom other people have known by other names—walks through Union Station in Los Angeles. Orange light from the setting sun pours in through the big windows. She walks in tight jeans and tall heels, with a black leather jacket cinched around her body and a Louis Vuitton handbag slung over her shoulder. Her luxuriant golden hair bounces around her shoulders as she struts over the marble floors.
A group of college-aged boys turn their heads and watch her. A tired-looking woman with two kids in a double-stroller eyes her. A middle-aged man in a Lakers sweatshirt does a double-take as she walks by.
The woman settles into a seat to wait for her train. She can feel the eyes on her—jealous eyes, lustful eyes—and she loves the feeling. She is on top of the world. She’s rich. She’s confident. And, after a week, she’s still feeling quite elated about how things went down at Lake Aloha. It couldn’t have worked out better.
She’d fooled Logan from the start. He’d never suspected a thing until she’d put a bullet into him. And Marco, the thug who’d brought her in? She didn’t even have to double-cross him. Logan took him out for her.
The only inconvenience was that she had to pick the diamonds up off the ground. She’s certain she left some behind, but it couldn’t be helped. She didn’t have a lot of time. She needed to get back to Logan’s house and wipe down anything that might have her fingerprints or DNA on it.
She knows she did a half-assed job, but that bitch from the newspaper showing up had made her antsy to get out of town.
It didn’t matter. The police would search Logan’s house once they found his body on that island, but they wouldn’t look too hard. The evidence at Lake Aloha would tell a pretty clear story: three crooks had a dispute and killed each other.
Yes, the whole thing couldn’t have worked out much better.
There’s a television mounted on a nearby wall that she’s been ignoring. It’s tuned to one of those all-day news channels, and when she hears the words “Lake Tahoe,” the broadcast suddenly catches her attention.
The anchor is explaining how cross-country skiers found two dead bodies in a hiking area near Lake Tahoe. The words “double homicide” are stamped along the bottom, as the screen shows footage of police cars at the snow-filled parking lot by Echo Lake.
They must not have found Logan’s body yet, she thinks. She’d been checking the Lake Tahoe Gazette website for the past few days and had seen that it had begun snowing the day after everything went down.
If they don’t find Logan’s body until spring, or even next summer, then that’s even better for her.
She is starting to smile, but then her face freezes as the broadcast continues.
There is a police sketch placed prominently on the screen—an excellent rendering of her own face. The artist couldn’t have done a better job if she’d been posing in person.
“Police are looking for this woman for questioning,” the reporter states. “A witness saw her leaving the hiking area the day of the homicide.”
The reporter continues, “The Lake Tahoe Gazette is reporting that the woman has used the aliases Claire and Jill, and she was last seen driving a Toyota Tacoma pickup. Authorities believe she has ties to the Los Angeles area.”
She grits her teeth, thinking of that bitch from the newspaper. But how would she know about the name Jill? And how did the reporter know what she drove?
The TV anchor moves on to other news, a warehouse fire in New York, but the woman stares at the TV in a daze, trying to make sense of what she just saw.
There’s only one explanation: Logan is still alive.
That bitch from the paper went to Lake Aloha and saved him. Then, when the bodies were discovered, she told police she’d been hiking there and saw a woman come out alone.
She can’t quite figure out all the details. It is hard to believe Logan could make it back down the hill, but even if he had, he’d need medical attention. And a hospital would certainly report a gunshot wound to the police. Maybe the police know more than the TV is reporting.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Logan could go ahead and enjoy his retirement in Lake Tahoe without his diamonds. She’d gotten away with it.
But as she glances around the terminal, she feels again like all eyes are on her. Not jealous eyes this time. Not lustful eyes.
Suspicious eyes.
She reaches into her handbag, her fingers brushing against the bag of diamonds, and pulls out her sunglasses. She puts them on and looks around, trying to act casual. There are people everywhere stealing glances her way. A man who’d been watching the news is gawking openly at her. Two security guards standing by the bathroom keep glancing at her as they talk.
She stands up and starts walking toward the exit, trying to exude the confidence she’d had just five minutes earlier, pretending the stares don’t bother her, pretending everything is all right. She is good at pretending, after all. She fooled Marco. She fooled Logan. She can fool anyone she wants.
But, she realizes, it’s harder to pretend when the person you’re trying to fool is yourself.
About the Authors
James Patterson has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He lives in Florida with his family.
Max DiLallo is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He lives in Los Angeles.
Andrew Bourelle has published numerous short stories in literary magazines and fiction anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories. He teaches writing at the University of New Mexico.
Table of Contents
The Pretender
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
About the Authors
James Patterson, The Pretender
