Day of the Dead

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 dodge-ball 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.