"You said you knew the plan," Sasha said. "You know exactly what I mean."
"They said if I sat here in this dress by the window," Grace said, in a voice so soft he could hardly hear her, "then I wouldn't face charges."
"Charges," he repeated helplessly. He was so close now but he still couldn't see it, he didn't quite grasp how her presence here fit into any sort of a larger scheme, the story just beyond his reach. "Who said that, Grace?"
"The detective," Grace said. "The detective and Anna."
"Grace," Sasha said, "would you listen to your music for a minute?"
Grace had a tiny plastic purse, suitable for a girl much younger. She zipped it open with difficulty— it was cheap, and the zipper stuck— and pulled out a scratched-up iPod, inserted the earbuds and looked away from them. He could hear the music very faintly but couldn't make out what it was.
"Sasha," Gavin whispered, "I don't know this part of the plan. Could you tell me what's going on here?"
"What do you mean, you don't know this part of the plan? This is the plan."
"She's not— you're not giving her to anyone, are you?"
"Of course not," Sasha whispered. "You know that. She's a decoy."
"So nothing will happen to her?"
"She'll sit here as planned, and at a certain point I'll walk her toward
the back door in full view of someone who will be waiting outside in the parking lot. That's all."
"Why her?"
"She's a runaway," Sasha said softly. "She's facing drug charges. She's at hand."
"So if she sits here as a decoy, the drug charges go away?"
"All she has to do is remain in full view through the windows while a payment gets handed off in the parking lot. It's not such a bad deal. How do you not know all of this? You said you knew the—"
"What happens to her afterward?"
"Afterward? I'll drive her home."
"The home she ran away from."
"It's an imperfect world. Would you rather have Chloe sitting here?"
Gavin was silent.
"Me neither," she said, " Grace made a deal. She knows what she's doing. Nothing will happen to her."
"Then why not have Chloe here?"
"There's always a risk."
"And you think this girl's disposable." Something was welling up inside him. He reached across the table and pulled the earbuds gently from Grace's head. He heard thin tinny voices. She was listening to rap.
"Grace," he said, "do your parents know you're here?"
Grace reached for the earbuds and turned her face to the window. Sasha was glaring at him.
"Gavin, what the hell was that?"
"She's so goddamn young," he said.
"We all were, at one point or another." Sasha sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim. It struck him, watching her, that he'd never realized how hard she was. "And we all survived our youths, didn't we? She fell into our laps. She's a little old for our purposes, but she looks young for thirteen and Chloe's almost eleven. It's plausible." Sasha glanced at her watch. "Are you really supposed to be here for this?"
"No," Gavin said, "I don't think I am." His arm was throbbing, a dull sick pain. The floor lurched alarmingly when he stood, the diner lights too bright. "Will you. could you possibly tell me where to find Anna?"
"I don't know where she is," Sasha said. "She just said she was going to another motel."
"If she— if you speak with her," he said, "will you tell her I'd like to talk?"
"I will," Sasha said.
" Thank you." He crossed the room and opened the door with his good hand, walked out of the air conditioning into the heat and the darkness of the parking lot. Long after dark but he still felt heat radiating from the pavement.
A taxi was pulling into the parking lot. Gavin stepped between two cars and watched Liam Deval get out. Deval paid the driver, but he didn't enter the diner. He was walking toward the back of the building, where shadows hung black and the parking lot faded into bushes and weeds, and Gavin didn't want to see any more. When he looked up Grace was still listening to music in the window, her hair falling over her face. Sasha was staring into her coffee cup.
The diner wasn't far from his apartment, two miles, maybe three. Gavin slipped between the parked cars and walked quickly away from there, turned away from Route 77 onto a side street. The beauty of the suburbs at night, streetlight shining through palm trees, the flicker of sprinklers on lawns, strange shadows. The pleasure of being alone outside after all these days of interiors. He was wandering through a new housing development when he realized he was lost. He didn't recognize the name of the street he was on. Half of the new houses seemed vacant. At the far end of the development they weren't even finished yet, skeletal beams against the sky. Raw dirt driveways with tall weeds, an abandoned bulldozer silhouetted black. Does a house still count as a ruin if it's abandoned before it's done? Asphalt soft beneath his shoes. He was aware of his footsteps on the silent street.
He crossed an expanse of weeds to the next cul-de-sac, an older neighborhood where the houses had people in them, out onto a wider commercial strip. A 7-Eleven was shining like a beacon ahead. He went in and bought a map. His thoughts were scattered. He didn't think he'd wandered that far from Route 77, but it took Gavin and the 7-Eleven counter guy a solid five minutes to find themselves on the map. All the streets looped and circled back on themselves and crashed up against grids, the grids broke into a spaghetti chaos of freeways and came back together on the other side and then disintegrated into loops again, and also the 7-Eleven guy was stoned.
Gavin found the intersection closest to his apartment after a while, but the loops and circles of the outer suburbs made for a confounding route and the 7-Eleven guy was distracted by the way all the streets converged, man. Gavin thanked him and set off in what he thought was the correct direction, but it wasn't easy to tell and all his thoughts were of Anna, Chloe, the girl in the diner. He kept realizing that he'd been walking without thinking, taking random turns. He wandered in and out of three cul-de-sacs. All the houses looked the same to him. Dogs barked occasionally. A shadow in the middle of the street turned into the silhouette of an animal he couldn't identify, then ran off into the bushes. An iguana, he decided a few blocks later, and he wished the street had been bright enough to see its skin.
Gavin lost track of where he was on the map, so he resolved to set his course by the stars. It was a clear night and in theory he was trying to get home again, but it seemed to him later that he'd really just wanted to keep walking and stay alone with his thoughts, away from the diner where at this moment a glassy-eyed runaway in a frilly dress was playing the part of his daughter and a plan that had a gun in it was moving into action. He was trying to understand and something was pulling at him, a memory of a story covered years ago by the New York Star, something about a lost child. Gavin found the North Star and kept it over his left shoulder, or tried to, but the streets wouldn't cooperate.