Getaway

by Lisa Brackmann

  The inside of the store smelled like mildew and heated sunscreen: coconut mixed with chemicals. She perused the rack. Mexican tabloids and papers dominated, but here were the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

  The Mexican papers printed some really gruesome images, she thought. This one, on the front page, a body scorched and melted by flame in the middle of a burned-out room.

  MATARON A NORTEAMERICANO, she read.

  Mataron. Did that mean “killed”?

  Her heart started pounding before she could even think why.

  There was a hand-lettered sign taped to the rack that said NO READING! in English. She picked up the paper anyway and looked below the fold. “Incendio,” she saw. “Restaurante.”

  And a name. Ned Gardner.

  She bought the paper, shoved it in her tote bag, and went outside, blinking in the glaring light.

  Don’t think about it. Not yet. Find someplace to sit down.

  She walked blindly down Olas Altas, sweat dripping into her eyes.

  Here were some restaurants. Where to sit? Inside, where no one could see her? She thought of fire.

  By the window, closer to the exit. Where she could get away.

  “Coffee, por favor,” she said automatically when the waiter came by. She sat and stared out the window. The newspaper in her bag felt poisonous, something she feared to touch.

  Not yet. She’d wait for her coffee.

  “¿Y para comer? For breakfast?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  She sipped the bitter coffee and finally pulled out the paper.

  Not that she could understand much of what it said, just a few words here and there. But the photo she understood: That charred and melted thing, that was Ned. A man she’d met. She’d talked to him. He’d had to talk to Daniel. And she’d told Gary about it.

  She found a twenty-peso note, threw it on the table, and pushed back the chair, acid burning her throat, stumbling a little as she stood.

  • • •

  At the Internet café, she searched for the article and found it easily enough, then ran it through Babelfish to see if she could figure out what had happened.

  “The official of Firemen information emphasized: in the 2:45 hours, it reported that Ned Gardner, who was a person of North American, apparently dead by the flame erupted it in a restaurant denominated the Lonely Bull, in the flank of the street Insurgentes in the Emiliano colony Zapata, already by the firemen extinguished.…”

  Okay, Michelle thought. Firemen reported that they’d found him dead at 2:45 A.M.—this morning—in the restaurant. There’d been a fire.

  “The agents of the municipal police they went to the place, later the judicial and personal authority arrived from the Instituto Jalisciense de Ciencias Forenses. It extended that there were no violence tracks and the body did not present/display blows or wounds, but that had a splice of cord or rope in the wrist, reason why thinks that he can be assassinated.”

  Cord or rope in the wrist. Tied.

  “The authorities expect to the use an accelerator, as liquid lighter or gasoline.”

  The online version had additional photos, and they were clearer than the one in the newspaper.

  You could still see his sneaker in one shot, a Nike. It hadn’t burned all the way. Why was that? she wondered. And bits of fabric from his pants. Were they Dockers?

  A giggle rose in her throat. She swallowed it.

  You can’t lose it now, she told herself. Get a grip.

  She forced herself to look at the photo again. The head and torso had burned more than the lower legs.

  Now, if this were one of those stupid CSI programs, they’d do some fancy graphics with slow motion and reconstruct the murder, with a few shots of the screaming victim thrown in for shock value, she supposed. She’d always hated those shows.

  But she could guess what had happened, from what she could read and what she could see. Tied. An accelerant. Burning from the top down. She could picture it. Bound in a chair maybe. Gas or fluid poured on his head. The match or lighter lit.

  She shuddered and closed the browser.

  [CHAPTER SEVENTEEN]

  Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe Ned’s death had nothing to do with either Gary or Daniel. What was it that Charlie had said?

  He’s perpetually in over his head.

  She stood outside the Internet café and thought about what she should do.

  Maybe nothing. Leave it alone and just try to get through the next few days, until she saw Daniel again.

  If she saw Daniel again. They hadn’t exactly made plans.

  What was she supposed to do? Yoga? Go to the beach? Ignore it all and hope that nothing bad would happen?

  I can’t keep just letting things happen to me, she thought, I can’t. I have to do something.

  Do what?

  Charlie had been friendly. He seemed to know a lot of people here. He knew something about Ned, and about Daniel. Maybe she could talk to him, see what he’d tell her.

  Most of the time you run into trouble here, you have to go looking for it.

  He’s not dangerous, she told herself. He’s just a harmless old guy you met at a bar.

  An aging drunk with a tactless streak.

  The only local person whose phone number she had apart from Daniel and Gary was Vicky.

  It was nearly 11:00 A.M. on a Sunday, not too early to call, late enough, she hoped, that whatever church service Vicky attended would be over.

  Three rings and Vicky picked up.

  “Vicky? Hi, it’s Michelle. Michelle from Los Angeles. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine, just fine.” In fact, Vicky sounded distracted. “How about yourself?”

  “Great, thanks. Listen, I was wondering if you had Charlie’s number. Charlie from the board meeting.”

  “Well, I think so. Hang on, I’ll check.”

  Vicky had both Charlie’s cell phone and his e-mail address. Michelle jotted them down in the margins of the newspaper she’d bought that morning.

  “Did you hear?” Vicky suddenly blurted. “About Ned? Oh, maybe you didn’t know him.”

  Of course, this was a small town. No surprise that Vicky had heard.

  “The guy that owned the Lonely Bull? I did hear. There was some kind of fire?”

  “Oh, Michelle, it’s just horrible. They say somebody killed him.”

  “It’s awful,” Michelle said. “I mean, I only barely knew him, but what a terrible thing to happen.”

  “I don’t know what to think.” She could hear Vicky’s sigh through the phone. “I know it sounds crazy for me to be saying this, but that kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.”

  Michelle called Charlie around noon. Right about when she figured her call would go to voicemail, he answered the phone.

  “It’s Michelle. We met at El Tiburón. Danny’s friend,” she added.

  “Of course, I remember. What can I do for you?”

  “Well … I’m thinking about moving here, and I have a few questions. I was just wondering … if I could talk to you about it.”

  Charlie coughed a few times in her ear.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m not busy. Come on over for the sunset if you’d like. I have a good view.”

  She hesitated. He didn’t seem dangerous, but how could she be sure? “I don’t want to impose. We could meet someplace for drinks if you’d like. On me.”

  “You wouldn’t be imposing. I like having people over.”

  Charlie lived north and east of La Zona Romántica and Los Muertos Beach. A Mexican neighborhood, it looked like, without a lot of gringos, the buildings blocks of irregular whitewashed rectangles with tile and tin roofs, trimmed with wrought iron and hand-painted signs. Leafy plants in red ceramic pots dotted the balconies; palm trees and a few ginkgoes and parotas thrust up from planters on the sidewalk: places where the earth broke through the thin crust of cement trying to hold it in bondage. The curbs cracked and staggered, wires crisscrossing the
street and catching on the window bars, among the bougainvillea.

  She’d stopped and bought a fancy bottle of tequila, feeling like she needed to bring something, and anyway, she liked spending Gary’s money.

  She passed a taco stand that overlapped sidewalk and street, a Formica box with a tin roof ringed by barstools, half occupied. She almost sat down herself, the sizzle of meat fat and onions and chilies reminding her that she’d hardly eaten today.

  Maybe I should have brought tacos instead of tequila, she thought.

  Here was Charlie’s building: a typical concrete block trimmed with rusting iron, perhaps three stories high.

  She started climbing up the stairs that ran along the outside. Charlie’s apartment was on the top floor. The building looked like a dive—the steep, uneven steps; the smears of green-black mold and trickles of rust; the dismantled gym equipment with dried, cracked vinyl; the abandoned kid’s bike, its once-gaudy pinks and purples faded by sun and damp. In the rooms she passed, she could hear televisions, kids playing, someone practicing, of all things, a tuba.

  She reached the top of the stairs on the third floor and paused for a moment in front of the metal security screen.

  Was this really a good idea?

  You’re here, she told herself. Suck it up.

  She knocked on the door.

  “Well, we will have to open this.” Charlie cradled in both hands the bottle of tequila that Michelle had brought.

  “Oh, is it good? I wasn’t sure.”

  “It is excellent, my dear. Thank you.”

  Charlie’s place wasn’t what she’d expected. The apartment was a series of rooms—two bedrooms, big kitchen, a living room that bordered on a terrace. The walls were carefully painted, washes of color alternating with white—apricot in one bedroom, a red wall in the other—with framed prints hung here and there. The furniture—Michelle supposed you could call it rustic, or “Mexican country”—was simple, but it worked. There were a couple of bookcases. An old-fashioned stereo with turntable.

  “This is lovely,” she said.

  “I like to think the best part is outside.” He gestured toward the terrace.

  Outside, on the roof of the apartment below, he’d set up a table and chairs, shaded by market umbrellas, a broad bench, almost a daybed, surrounded on three sides by gauze curtains. Plants in tubs lined the perimeter. The view was mostly rooftops, but beyond them was the ocean and, if you turned your head, the mountains.

  “I live out here a lot of the time.”

  On the table were a platter of quesadillas, a bowl of guacamole, and small dishes of salsa and spicy peanuts.

  They sat down, and he poured out two tequilas into blue-rimmed shot glasses.

  “Cheers!”

  They both sipped.

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “My dear, anyone who brings tequila of this quality is more than welcome in my house.”

  The sun had begun its descent into the bay, staining the surrounding clouds a pale pink that deepened to violet.

  Charlie sighed in seeming contentment and stretched his legs out into the spare chair. “I never get tired of this.”

  “Is that what everyone does here? Watch the sunsets?”

  “If they have any sense.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Party too much, usually. Sleep with people they’d be better off avoiding. Get involved in a whole excess of drama.”

  A flush rose on her cheeks. Hadn’t she done exactly all that?

  Maybe he hadn’t been referring to her specifically. It hadn’t sounded like a dig or a reprimand. The only thing Charlie knew about her for sure was that she’d been with Daniel.

  And he didn’t know a fraction of the drama.

  At least she didn’t think he did.

  “What about Ned?”

  Charlie sat very still. “You heard what happened.”

  “I did.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Michelle took a sip of her tequila and thought about what she should say. “Everybody tells me how safe it is here. But I’ve had some strange things happen to me. And I don’t know …”

  Who to trust, she almost said, but she stopped herself.

  “You told me Ned was always in over his head,” she said. “And that you had to go looking for trouble here. I just want to know, if I decide to stay … what kind of trouble are you talking about?”

  “Ah.” He poured himself more tequila. “Look, you’re safer here, probably, than you’d be in Los Angeles. I mean, you’ve got your theft and your robbery, but most of it’s like I said. It’s getting involved with the wrong kind of people.”

  “Like Danny?”

  There. She’d said it.

  Charlie drew in another lungful of smoke as the last crescent slice of sun dipped into the bay.

  “I hope I didn’t give you the wrong impression of him,” he said. “I don’t really know him that well, but he seems like a decent guy.”

  Did he mean it? She couldn’t tell. He sounded reluctant, as if he were afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  Like he didn’t want to go looking for trouble.

  “I don’t know Danny that well either,” she said. “I like him, and we’ve been seeing each other, and I’d like to see him more. But … what you said … I just got the impression … It worried me a little.”

  Charlie let out a long, smoke-filled sigh. Sipped his tequila. “I don’t really know his business. He doesn’t discuss it much. But the people who hire private jets around here … well, not all of them are going to have the most savory connections.”

  “You mean they’re involved with drugs?”

  “Do you have reason to think that?”

  “I … just …” She wasn’t going to tell him about the coke. “I don’t know. I just know it’s a real problem here. I mean, isn’t it?”

  A silence. “Look, the people Danny works for, I don’t really know any of them personally,” he finally said. “But drug money in this country … it’s everywhere, and if you have any kind of large business, it’s tough to avoid. So maybe they aren’t involved directly. But they’ll do business with people who are.”

  She’d hoped for something else. A defense of Daniel, testimony that he was a good guy, so that she could have some measure of trust in her own perceptions.

  Failing that, definitive proof that what Gary said was true.

  That was the worst part of this situation in a way, that she didn’t think she could accurately read anyone or anything around her.

  She used to think she was good at that.

  “So what about Ned?” she asked.

  “It might have been a robbery.”

  “Do you really think it was? That robbers would go to all the trouble to do … that?”

  “Probably not.” Charlie sighed. “That restaurant of his never did great business, but somehow he kept it going. A lot of people guessed he was selling drugs on the side. You know, to the gringos who didn’t want to deal with the locals. There’s all kinds of ways that can go bad.” He paused to refill her tequila. “But that’s just a rumor.”

  [CHAPTER EIGHTEEN]

  The last year with Tom, she’d promised herself that she was going to make some changes. It wasn’t enough, the way she’d been living; she wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t truly engaged in anything. She’d go back to school, maybe. Get more serious about the photography again. Or go in a completely different direction. Adopt a kid—someone who needed her, whom she could care for. Volunteer to do something, something hard and meaningful. Dig wells in Africa. Build orphanages in Peru. She’d drag Tom into counseling, and if he wouldn’t go or it didn’t help, maybe she’d leave him. What was even keeping them together anymore?

  She was going to make some changes, she really was. As soon as things calmed down a little. When Tom’s business had improved.

  When she figured out what it was she really wanted to be when she grew up.

  Then Tom had died,
and the changes weren’t choices anymore.

  “Hey there, Michelle.”

  “Hi, Ted.”

  “Just wanted to touch base,” he said. “It’s been a couple days since we’ve talked.”

  As usual, he’d called her early in the morning, six-thirty Vallarta time. He probably did it to keep her off balance, get to her before she’d had a chance to talk to anyone else, when she was still unused to speaking.

  “I haven’t seen Danny, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “Well, aren’t we cranky this morning?”

  “You better fucking believe I’m cranky,” she spit out before she could stop herself. “Did you hear about Ned? Somebody lit him on fire. Like … like a fucking birthday candle.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it. Listen, we don’t know who did it. It might not have anything to do with—”

  “Oh, come on, Gary. He talks to Danny. I tell you. And the next day he’s dead.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, then a raspy breath. “See, this is why we do the things we do, Michelle. I know you’ve felt … well, pretty put out by all this. But this is what’s at stake. The people we’re up against, this is what they do. You need to understand that.”

  Michelle lay on her bed, holding her iPhone at arm’s length. “I do understand,” she finally said. “But you can’t expect me to go up against people who do this kind of thing. I’m not a cop or a spy. I’m just …”

  A housewife, she almost said. That wasn’t really who she was, was it?

  “Sure, Michelle. I hear what you’re saying. But you’re not going to be in any danger as long as you keep doing exactly what I tell you to do. Just give me another week, okay? Can you do that? I promise you, that’ll be the end of it. And you’ll be compensated for it. Trust me on that.” A snorted laugh. “Check your accounts in a couple of hours.”

  After Tom died, she’d figured it out. How he’d used a credit card to put money into the household account. How he’d used another card to pay the first one off. Frantically moved money from one account to the other. Kept up appearances, while the mortgage went into default.

  It was, on a much larger scale, what he’d done with his business.