Getaway

[CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE]

She didn’t sleep. Daniel did, his breaths slow and even, with an occasional quiet snore.

Things fluttered and scrapped in the palm fronds above her head, small bits of leaf and fiber falling on the gauzy web of mosquito net that surrounded them.

How much more fucked up could this get? Then she told herself not to ask. It could always get worse.

There’d been some room for doubt about Daniel before. There was none now. Everything was out in the open.

Except that it wasn’t.

Cowboys. Spook stuff. Black ops.

Back in the world of Gary. The world Gary claimed to be in anyway.

But if that were true, if Daniel worked for some kind of government agency, why would Gary want her to spy on him?

Maybe Daniel had done something he wasn’t supposed to do.

Or Gary wasn’t working for the government at all.

He could be a rival drug runner, for all she knew.

Fucking Gary, she thought. She’d told him she was going to meet Daniel, and then she’d dropped off his radar. If he’d tried to call her, what would he be thinking? That she’d screwed him over? That she was dead?

Or maybe he knew exactly where she was.

Maybe he was the one who’d had her followed here. Hadn’t he been keeping track of her movements all along?

Her gut hollowed out, like something pulled it from beneath.

Maybe he and Oscar were working together.

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispered.

If there were taxis, if there were a boat, she’d leave right now. But there weren’t. There were no good ways out of here until the morning.

Maybe in the morning, she thought. Maybe in the morning I’ll leave.

And then what?

Just after dawn an alarm beeped softly-Daniel’s watch, maybe. He rose, went into the bathroom. She pretended to sleep.

He came out wearing swimtrunks and a batik shirt, found his sunglasses on the dresser, put a tube of sunscreen into a worn canvas bag.

“You awake?” he asked. He knew that she was.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be back in time for lunch.” He grinned. “Maybe with some fresh ceviche.”

“Okay.”

He hesitated by the side of the bed, the smile no longer in place. “Look, just hang tight. Can you do that? There’s nothing to worry about, and you’re not going to have any problems. Just stay here and try to relax.”

She almost laughed. “Right.”

“Go to the beach. Read a book. Have a margarita.” He smiled again. “It’s going to be fine.”

• • •

She lay there a while after he left, but of course she wasn’t going to sleep, not here, with no air-conditioning, not after last night. She got up, put on shorts and a gauze top, went out to the little coffee stand by the bar, and ordered a double cappuccino. Stood there in the coarse sand, drank it, and ordered another. The sun had just begun to rise above the eastern mountains, bringing with it bird sounds and fresh heat.

She wasn’t going to get on the water taxi back to Vallarta. She knew that already. All that would do was piss off Daniel and Gary. Gary wanted her here, “keeping an eye” on Daniel.

But she had to get in touch with Gary somehow. Just to cover her ass, whether he knew where she was or not.

E-mail, she thought.

“Sorry,” the woman at the reception counter said. “We don’t have it.”

Michelle stood there in disbelief. “No e-mail. Really?” She could see the graying computer sitting on the counter there; they had to have e-mail.

“We can in an emergency,” the woman told her. “But no, no Internet for guests.” She smiled. “Our guests mostly like that. Being out of touch.”

Was this an emergency?

“There’s an Internet bar in the pueblo. It’s still open in the summer, I think.”

“Okay,” Michelle said. “I’ll try that.”

She walked across the packed wet sand, along the beach toward the river. The bars were empty at this time of day, not surprisingly. One couple dozed in loungers. A few workers piled empty blue tanks of some sort onto the beach, waiting, Michelle supposed, for a boat to haul them back to Vallarta.

It was so quiet here after Vallarta, where the bars and hotels played music directed at the beach, where there was the constant noise of cars and horns. No music playing here, no cars. Just the birds and the waves. Riders on horses splashed across the shallows of the river. Farther upstream, women beat clothing on rocks and a group of schoolkids in blue-and-white uniforms headed east, up the river and into the hills. There must be a school up there, Michelle thought. She wondered how far they had to go.

By the time she reached the pueblo, sweat had soaked her blouse, her hair, the brim of her raffia hat. She found iced tea and a muffin at a tiny café that claimed to be an Internet bar-three aged computers on dial-up, two of which worked. The café was a U-shaped cinder-block building with a tin roof, and even with the front open to the air it was stifling hot inside.

She logged on to her e-mail account. Several from Maggie, asking how she was, when she was coming home, if she needed a ride from the airport. “I’m fine,” she replied. “I’ll be home soon.”

She hesitated, wondering if she should say anything else.

No. It might not be safe.

She got out her phone and looked up the contact information for “Ted Banks.”

“Hi, Ted,” she typed. “Sorry to be out of touch. Am with a friend, a last-minute getaway. No cell reception. Will contact you as soon as I’m back in PV in a day or two. Lots to discuss.”

Reading it over, she felt a sudden fresh wave of heat and sweat. She’d told him something without telling him everything. Splitting the difference, as usual.

She hoped it would be enough.

She hit SEND, then cleared her browsing history and closed the browser.

After that she didn’t know what to do.

Go to the beach. Read a book. Have a margarita.

Might as well.

She went back to the hotel, changed into her bathing suit, put a few things in her tote bag. She didn’t need her wallet-she could charge anything she wanted to the room-but was it safe to leave it behind? The cabanas didn’t seem very secure.

She carried her purse to the reception desk. “Do you have someplace I can check this?”

“Sure, I can take it for you,” the woman at the reception counter said.

“Thanks.”

Michelle grabbed a blue beach towel and chose a chair under a palapa at the crest of the rise of sand, so she could look down at the bay.

“Pie? Pie?”

A stout, middle-aged woman wearing a white peasant dress and a straw hat approached her. On her head she balanced a covered platter, big enough to shade her from the sun. “Pie, miss?” she asked. “Best in town.”

“Maybe later, thank you.”

Pie. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.

She tried to read her British mystery. Her eyes were sore, like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper.

She closed them. Just for a minute.

It was so quiet here. She listened to the waves.

I’m tired, she thought.

“Hey.”

Michelle opened her eyes. Daniel stood there, a shadow backlit by the sun. “Hi,” she said slowly.

What time was it?

“How was the fishing?” she asked.

“Kind of sucked. Nothing out there, and then Rick wasn’t doing too good, so we figured we might as well call it.”

“Sorry.”

He shrugged. “It was okay. But no ceviche for lunch, I guess.”

“Well, there’s plenty of ceviche around,” she said. “They’ve got a great one here, everybody says.”

“There’s a place up the river I thought we could try. I’ve heard good things about it.”

She thought, First he goes fishing, now he wants to try restaurants? “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Like I told you. There’s nothing to worry about. And it’s not far.”

She hesitated. What were the odds that he’d answer her if she asked?

Not good.

“So Rick couldn’t… He didn’t have any advice for you?” she asked anyway.

He seemed to tense, like the outline of a shadow sharpening. Then relaxed. “Actually, he had a couple good things to say. I’ll tell you about it over lunch.”

She took a few minutes to change. Put on shorts and a T-shirt and her Mephisto sandals.

“You have any aloe?” he asked. “I got a little burned out there.”

“Sure,” she said, handing him the tube from her toiletry kit. “Look, why don’t we just have lunch here?”

She didn’t like the idea of going up the river someplace, no matter how safe he claimed it was. She still didn’t know how safe she was with him.

He screwed the top on the aloe and handed the tube back to her. He wasn’t smiling. In a way that comforted her. She’d learned not to trust the smile.

“It’s a better place for us to talk. That’s what you’ve been wanting, right? And I figure I owe you.”

“I should get my purse,” she said as they passed the office.

“Seems like a pain to carry. Anything you need in it?”

“Well, my wallet.”

“Come on, you don’t need that,” he said, rubbing her shoulder. “You can treat me next time.”

• • •

They walked up the trail on the north side of the river, winding past shacks and makeshift corrals where horses grazed and stamped at flies. Cicadas rasped, so loudly that they took on the quality of machinery. The heat in the late afternoon was as oppressive as ever, and with the dirt from the trail powdering her feet and calves she longed for an ocean wave to wash her clean.

“How long do you want to stay here?” she asked.

“Maybe another day.”

“Do you think… Is it safe back in Vallarta?”

“Yeah. I mean, look… Whatever’s going on up there, with… with the guys competing, it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

That stopped her in her tracks.

“How can you say that? After last night-”

“He wanted to get my attention,” he said quietly. “Well, he’s got it. But it’s their fight. Let them have it.”

“And you don’t care who wins?”

“Can’t afford to.”

Chaos will only benefit the most wicked.

Up ahead was a skinny trail that curled into a thicket of banana trees and out of sight. A hand-painted sign for “Casita Alma” hung crookedly on a fence pole, strung up with wire.

“Here,” he said.

The path led to a clearing by the river: a cracked cement patio and two tiny buildings made of wood and tin. No one was there. Padlocked wooden shutters covered the windows. Daniel stood behind her, at the entrance to the path.

“Looks closed,” she said, turning to him.

Daniel nodded.

He’d known that all along, she realized.

He reached into his pocket. “What are you doing with this?”

She saw what he held in his hand.

Gary’s watch.