Getaway (8 page)

“Okay,” she said, just to shut him up. “You want me to spend time with Danny. Say I do that. I’ll tell you what we do and who we see. What if all we do is go to the beach and El Tiburón? Is that enough for you?”

“Just make a good-faith effort. That’s all I’m asking.” He reached across the table and patted her hand. “And trust me. I’ll know if you don’t.”

She wasn’t sure what to say after that.

“You should tell me what he’s involved with,” she finally said. “That night in the hotel … Those men who came in—they had guns. You can’t expect me to … to …”

Gary smiled at her. “I wouldn’t worry about anything like that happening again.”

She shivered a little in the overly chilled air.

He might not have had anything to do with the attack. Maybe he was just using it. Using her fear.

Don’t let him see it, she told herself.

He stretched in his chair, wincing as he did. “I can open another bottle of wine if you’d like, but I bet you’re pretty tired. You should probably get some sleep. Start tomorrow fresh.”

Michelle nodded. “I am kind of tired.”

“All right, then. See you in the morning.” He rose slowly, with a little groan, hand on his back. “I’m gonna have to schedule a massage. You want a massage, Michelle? I know a great gal.”

Oh, I bet you do, she thought.

Gary started toward his bedroom. Then stopped. “You take good photos,” he said suddenly. “That a particular hobby of yours?”

Michelle didn’t bother to ask him how he knew that. He’d had her stuff; he could easily have looked at the images on her cameras.

“I enjoy taking pictures,” she said.

“Like those ones of the pig’s head. Sounds sort of funny to say, but those were artistic almost. Like I could hang ’em up on my wall.” He gestured toward the kitchen. “What do you think? Maybe do a … what do you call it? A trio? A triptych? Print up a few of those and hang them in the kitchen. I think that would look pretty cool.”

“If you’d like,” Michelle said. What else
could
she say?

Sipping the remains of her wine, she watched him go into the master bedroom and close the door. Finally, when there were no more sounds from Gary’s bedroom, she stood and walked as silently as she could to the front door of the condominium. Jiggled the doorknob.

Locked. A double-keyed deadbolt, and no key in sight.

No phone. No neighbors. No way out.

She’d gone
beyond exhaustion. Lying in bed, she felt wrung out, nerves exposed, like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper.

Who was Gary, and what did he want?

He wanted her to think he had government connections, that he was some sort of spook—that seemed pretty obvious, with
all his remarks about “helping” the consulate, his insinuations about her situation in Los Angeles, his claims that he would know whether she did what he wanted.

But she couldn’t be certain—Gary didn’t want her to be, for one thing. For another, it was easy to get information about people nowadays, wasn’t it? There were plenty of public records, plenty of ways to get at things that were supposed to be private as well.

She hadn’t called the consulate herself. She had only Gary’s word that the consulate had called him. He could have set the whole thing up, with the policeman, with the coke, somehow manipulated the situation to get her out of jail, all so she would agree to “keep an eye” on Daniel.

How did she even know if the charges had actually been dropped?

The only thing she knew was that Gary had some pull. Some power. And right now he had power over her.

Thinking of this, thinking of him sleeping in the room next door—he
was
sleeping, she thought; she could hear his gentle snoring through the wall—she got up, grabbed the little chair by the writing desk, and propped it under the doorknob, like she’d seen in the movies.

She still couldn’t sleep.

What was the smart thing to do in this situation?

Maybe the whole business with the consulate was a bluff, and she should just go to them. Tell them her passport had been stolen, tell them she’d been kidnapped, tell them … well, maybe just that her passport had been stolen.

But what if Gary really
was
some kind of government agent? In the CIA or some other alphabet-soup agency? If he could set her up as easily as he had—as someone had—if the consulate was in on it …

This is crazy, she thought.

She tried a few cleansing breaths, but they didn’t seem to help much.

Maybe an Ambien.

• • •

A driver
would take her to her new hotel, “a cute little place off Olas Altas,” Gary informed her the next morning as they sat at the table in his breakfast nook, drinking coffee. “Not that Danny’s likely to spot me if I took you, but PV’s a small town. No point in taking chances.”

She’d harbored a vague hope that when she woke up this morning, things would have somehow gone back to normal. Gary would give her the passport, say it was all a mistake, and she’d head to the airport and home to Los Angeles.

And while she was fantasizing, she’d have a house again, preferably on the Westside. A condominium would do.

He gave her back her jewelry and her iPhone, everything but her passport. “Oh, don’t want to forget this.” He went into his bedroom and returned carrying an envelope.

Michelle took the envelope. It felt thick. “Split it up,” Gary said with an offhand wave. “Put some in your wallet and stash the rest.”

She opened it. There had to be at least five thousand dollars. Well, four thousand dollars and fifteen thousand pesos. Mouth dry, she counted out three thousand pesos and tucked the envelope into her sundries bag.

“Buy yourself an outfit or something,” Gary said. “And if you run out, just give me a call. I programmed a contact number into your phone. Speed-dial number eighty-six. Like
Get Smart
, right?” He snickered. Obviously he cracked himself up. “The name that comes up for that is Ted Banks. It’s an L.A. number. You can say it’s your attorney or your cousin or your trainer—whatever you like. Just make it something you can sell. You know, in general, a good principle with this stuff? It’s easier to keep track of the truth than a lie. So if you’re gonna lie, keep it simple.”

“All right,” Michelle said, nodding like this was all completely normal and sane.

“I put Danny’s number in there, too. You can tell him I gave it to you when I gave you his address, if he asks.”

Gary’s phone rang. The ringtone was “Ring of Fire.”

“Driver’s here,” he said. “Let me give you a hand with your bags.”

Outside the condo a white minivan idled by the driveway. Gary rattled off a few sentences in rapid Spanish to the driver, handed over some money.

“Okay, Michelle, looks like we’re good to go.” He pointed to the driver. “Gustavo here’s a friend of mine. Make sure you get his card so you’ll have someone reliable to drive you around town.” He opened the back door for her. “Now, anything comes up, you don’t hesitate to call me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

Gary held the door, waited for her to climb into the backseat and buckle her seatbelt. “Oh,” he said, like it was an afterthought. “What was that about last night, putting a chair in front of the door?” He wagged a finger at her. “What kinda guy do you think I am?”

For a moment she felt like she was a kid playing dodgeball back in elementary school—the ball catching her just under the ribs, knocking the wind out of her. How could he have known about that?

“I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, Gary,” she said.

He smiled. “No. I suppose you don’t.”

[CHAPTER NINE]

Five thousand dollars
. Gary threw around five grand like it was nothing.

Granted, there was a time when Michelle hadn’t thought of five thousand dollars as a particularly large sum, from shortly after her marriage to Tom (she’d needed a while to get used to the idea) until shortly before his death (when some intuition had warned her that the way they’d been living was, on some level, not precisely real). But even then, five thousand dollars in cash stuffed casually into an envelope was not the way she was used to seeing money. Money was a concept, something represented by plastic, encoded in electronic transactions—abstract numbers to be moved from one account to another.

Five thousand dollars in cash, and more if I want it, she thought.

This just could not be good.

She briefly thought about asking Gustavo to take her someplace other than the hotel, maybe not to the airport but to the bus station, maybe. But though he seemed friendly enough—asking her where she was from, if this was her first time in Vallarta—he was Gary’s friend.

Gustavo dropped her off at a small hotel tucked in a steep, cobbled street off Los Muertos Beach, not too far from the hotel where she’d stayed before. The entrance was easy to miss: a wrought-iron gate between two whitewashed walls, a narrow drive that dipped sharply and then rose up to meet a pink-tiled courtyard with a fountain in the middle. The rooms were grouped around it in two-story wings. A few mangy-looking dogs lay by the fountain, and a calico cat stretched out on a second-floor balcony, twined between two terra-cotta planters. About a half dozen guests—she assumed they were tourists, mostly older women and several older men—reclined in lounge chairs around the fountain, chatting with one another, reading books, sipping iced drinks.

The office was in a lower unit immediately to the right of the entrance. The side that faced the courtyard was almost entirely open to the air, with a low wall about waist high where abandoned drinks and ashtrays sat, waiting to be cleared. Inside was a counter, a round table with a grimy computer and several shelves of books, most of which were English-language paperbacks.

It shouldn’t look so normal, she thought. It didn’t feel real; it was like she’d arrived here in a state of jet lag.

“You’re in Number Thirty-two,” the woman behind the counter said in lightly accented English. “Do you need help to your room?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“We serve continental breakfast in the courtyard from seven to ten
A.M.,”
the woman explained. She was in her thirties, solidly built, with tanned olive skin, streaked hair, and above her breast a rose tattoo that peeked out from her embroidered tank top. “And we have happy hour every night, from five until seven.”

“Great,” Michelle said. “You know, I can’t exactly remember. What’s the last date of my reservation?”

The woman consulted her computer. “You’re paid through the fifteenth,” she said. “But if you want to extend, just let me know. It’s not so busy this time of year.”

Nearly two weeks. Was that how long she was expected to play this game?

At least the room was cute, almost a suite, with a mini-fridge, a microwave, a wardrobe that had a luggage stand and a small safe inside. Painted tiles formed borders along the walls; there were a few framed
molas
hung up as well, and the bed featured an elaborately carved headboard.

She put her suitcase down on top of the open cabinet by the wardrobe and stood there for a moment. The room was hot. It would take a while before the air conditioner cooled it down.

I have to get out of here, she thought.

She grabbed her purse and her good camera and bolted out the door.

In the courtyard the guests still sat, drinking, chatting, reading books. A dog trotted slowly past the fountain. It was as hot as her room and utterly still.

She slowed her steps so it wouldn’t look like she was running, managed a smile and a half wave at the woman behind the counter, and pulled open the wrought-iron gate.

Free.

Up the hill, she thought. She was pretty sure that if she walked up the hill, she’d come to a broad avenue running north and south, where there were buses that went downtown, maybe even to the airport. What was stopping her from just getting on one? She had five thousand dollars in her purse. She could go pretty far with that, all the way to the border, certainly. Just walk across and tell the customs people she’d lost her passport. They wouldn’t throw her in jail for that.

Behind her a car started with a misfire that sounded like a hammer on a tin can. She could smell the unburned gas. They probably didn’t have strict emissions standards here, she thought, not like California. She kept walking, past a gay bar, a
lavandería
, which she knew meant “laundry.” If I stay here, I’ll need to wash my clothes, she thought; most of them were filthy. But it was crazy to think about staying here, wasn’t it? This whole thing with Gary, whatever the money was, it couldn’t be worth the risk.

It took a moment before she realized that the car she’d heard
start matched her progress up the hill. It floated next to her, idling roughly, a presence she felt before she really took it in.

A police car. Not the Vallarta police, who drove white pickups with cheerful green geckos painted on them. A black-and-white sedan, with a shield on the door.

In the car just one officer: a big man with a mustache and aviator sunglasses. The man who’d arrested her.

When he saw that she’d noticed him, he leaned his head toward the window. Stared at her, eyes obscured behind the sunglasses.

Her heart hammered. She almost bolted and ran, but she stopped herself. Instead she turned away and continued to walk up the hill. Act like there’s nothing wrong, she told herself. Don’t try to run. Don’t give him an excuse.

The police car followed, cruising slowly up the hill, keeping even with her progress, past the Oxxo mart, past the yoga/Pilates studio.

The street dead-ended into a road that hugged the hill, curving out of sight a short distance ahead. At the junction were a sex shop and a tiny newsstand/Internet café.

She was aware of the police car turning left, toward downtown, though she wouldn’t look directly. She kept walking another half a block, toward the junction, and then she stopped and turned around. The police car was gone.

The adrenaline drained out of her, leaving her trembling after it had gone, and she stumbled a little on the uneven pavement.