DePresti overtook her, and started turning in towards a surprisingly empty beach for one o’clock on a Saturday. She estimated that they were half a mile from the pier, near the Manhattan/Hermosa dividing line. It must be safe.
The authorities must have cleared the beaches after they became aware of the massacre happening just up the road. The only people Parkowski saw on the beach were the lifeguards, and instead of looking out towards the ocean for a swimmer in distress or the occasional shark, they were looking at the far-off Manhattan Beach pier.
DePresti swam easily through the waves and surf towards the beach with Parkowski closely following him. She knew he had grown up going to the beach, his parents had a beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey and he was an excellent scuba diver. But she hadn’t realized just how powerful of a swimmer he was.
Unfortunately, Parkowski wasn’t quite as strong as her boyfriend. She got caught in a rip current that took her back out to sea. She may not have been as powerful as DePresti, but she was just as intelligent. Parkowski let the current take her in the wrong direction while swimming south, perpendicular to the beach. DePresti had made it ashore and was watching her. Finally, she got free, and with a few overhand strokes made it to shore.
“What happened?” her boyfriend asked. He was soaked, his shorts dripping onto the sand and his wet t-shirt clinging to his thin frame. “I thought you were right behind me.”
“Rip current,” Parkowski replied. “You either swam through it or just missed it.”
“Must have been the adrenaline,” he responded. “Grace, what happened back there…”
“I almost don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Dr. Pham… he was my boss, but he also was my friend.”
DePresti was about to say something but she interrupted him loudly. “And then they tried to kill us!”
He put his finger to his lips. “Shh!” he said in a loud whisper. “Yes, they did, and we need to get off the beach and somewhere safe.”
“But where is safe?” Parkowski demanded. “They almost just murdered us in broad daylight.”
DePresti didn’t answer, he didn’t have a good answer. Instead, he turned and started walking nonchalantly up the beach towards the houses of Hermosa Beach.
Parkowski followed him closely. She couldn’t be completely calm — she had just been shot at — but she tried to give off an air of coolness as she walked in her soaked gym shorts and t-shirt away from the Pacific.
The beach was eerily quiet.
They watched as an ambulance, speeding with its lights and siren on, drove parallel to the road north to Manhattan Beach.
“That was bad,” Parkowski said.
“Yeah, really bad, and I don’t even know how we got out of that one alive,” her boyfriend responded. “Those people were professionals, Grace, professional killers. They just gunned people down without thinking about it, men, women, children, it didn’t matter. Dr. Pham was the target, and everyone else was just collateral damage.”
“You think so?” she asked.
He nodded. “That’s why they killed everyone else. To hide who the real targets were.”
“You read too many books,” Parkowski said as they walked off of the beach onto the sidewalk. This was like something out of an action novel. But, deep down, she knew her boyfriend was right. Someone wanted them dead — but why?
Parkowski knew it had to be related to Bronze Knot. Pham was going to tell her something, something important, but it was so important that he was killed for his secret before he was able to reveal it.
However, even if he hadn’t agreed to meet them, she had a suspicion that she and DePresti would have been targeted for elimination regardless. Whoever had killed Dr. Pham would have killed them too, eventually. The secret was too great to let anyone in on.
But what was that secret? Parkowski had no idea.
Pham said something about a “cover story.” What was that? Something to worry about later.
Neither of them were wearing shoes, their flip-flops lost in the vast ocean to the west. The pavement was warm but not hot under her toes as they crossed The Strand and started the half-mile walk back to their car.
As they strode along the sidewalk, Parkowski checked her pockets. Her phone was there, likely dead from extended water exposure, as was the document she had created for Dr. Pham and her wallet.
DePresti didn’t speak. He was a man on a mission, trying to get them back to his car. She watched as he pulled out his car keys and wallet — but surprisingly no phone — out from his shorts’ pockets and checked them before putting them back in.
“You didn’t bring your phone?” she asked.
“Nope,” DePresti replied. “Old habit from work. I can’t bring my phone into the office with me, so I leave it in my car.”
It was half a mile back to his Subaru, and her feet hurt like hell by the end of it. Parkowski breathed a sigh of relief as DePresti unlocked the car and got in. He took his phone, an older Samsung model, and opened up the back to get to the battery.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Taking the battery out so we can’t be tracked,” he responded. “Grace, I hate to break it to you, but we’re now on the run.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Parkowski twiddled her thumbs while DePresti fumbled to get the battery out of his phone. Finally, he gave up. DePresti chucked the cell phone out of the car’s window into a bush outside the house they were parked in front of.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“Whoever attacked us on the pier, they can track us through our phones,” he explained. “I’ve seen it in movies.”
“In movies,” she repeated, incredulous at the suggestion.
“And I know that anything transmitting via an antenna can be triangulated,” DePresti said. “So I want to be better safe than sorry.” He looked at her. “Grace, this is serious business now.”
“No shit,” she responded. “We almost just died.”
He didn’t have a response.
“And Dr. Pham…”
His silence continued.
“What now?” Parkowski asked.
“We need to get out of here,” her boyfriend answered. “And we can’t go back to my house or your apartment. We don’t know if we were the intended targets or not.”
“Ok, so we go to the police?”
“We can’t go to the police,” DePresti argued. “We have no idea who those four people were on the pier. They could be from our government, a foreign government, an NGO, or a corporation coming from God-knows-where. For all we know, they could be in cahoots with the local cops.”
They sat in the car quietly.
“Can we go to one of our friends’ houses?” Parkowski asked.
DePresti considered it. “That’s not the worst idea. Reggie lives at the far side of Manhattan Beach up by El Segundo off of Rosecrans. He’s working from home today. Let’s pay him a visit.”
He started to back out of the parking spot and froze. “Cop car,” DePresti said quietly.
Parkowski saw it in her side’s rear-view mirror. The black-and-white SUV was coming towards the Subaru slowly, its lights on, but no siren blaring.
She sat as still as she could manage with her heart beating a thousand times per minute. Had they been caught? Why else would a police car be here, blocks away from a recent massacre? They had to be coming for them.
There was nothing they could do. Parkowski and DePresti sat motionless as the police SUV approached.
But it didn’t stop. Instead, the car with the flashing lights slowly passed their parked Subaru and continued down the residential street.
DePresti let out a short laugh.