Day of the Dead

by Lisa Brackman

  She checked her purse next. Opened every pocket. Dumped the contents out on the bed.

  Nothing.

  But something was different.

  Her passport was gone.

  Michelle decided to put on a little makeup. She didn’t know what she’d gotten herself into with Gary, but she did know the advantages of looking good.

  ‘Well, don’t you look nice,’ Gary said.

  He’d turned the TV off. He sat at the table by the open kitchen, a setup not unlike the one at Daniel’s place, though done on a larger, more expensive scale. It still had that same anonymous look. The art on the walls – Banderas Bay at sunset, with whales; donkeys by the cathedral, vaguely mystical; pseudo-Mayan corn maidens – she’d seen paintings like this countless times in the downtown Vallarta tourist galleries.

  On the table was a pizza in a box, a salad in a plastic take-out container, and an open bottle of wine.

  ‘Thought you might be hungry,’ Gary said. ‘I know this isn’t exactly haute cuisine, but these guys do a pretty good job on short notice.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Michelle said, sitting down at the table. Pizza wasn’t generally her thing, but she really was hungry. She helped herself to a slice and a scoop of salad. Gary poured her a glass of wine.

  The pizza was good, and so was the salad. The wine was drinkable, which was good enough under the circumstances.

  ‘You know, I can’t find my passport,’ she finally said.

  ‘Anything else missing? Oh—’ He made a show of patting his chest, as if he’d stashed something in a nonexistent pocket. ‘I have your phone and your jewelry. Almost forgot about it.’

  ‘What about my passport?’

  ‘Well, that’s a little complicated.’

  ‘Complicated how?’

  He took a slow, deliberate sip of wine. ‘They’re dropping the charges, for now. But they don’t quite trust you, Michelle. They want to keep their eye on you a little bit longer.’

  That doesn’t make sense! she wanted to scream, but she didn’t.

  ‘I guess I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Somebody planted a little bit of – what was it, coke? – in my purse. Not enough for anyone to really even care about. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten me out so easily. Right? But you’re telling me they care enough to hold on to my passport?’

  Gary smiled and served himself another slice of pizza, cutting the dangling strings of cheese with his knife. ‘I knew you were smart. It’s always a pleasure, finding someone like you. A diamond in the rough.’

  ‘Look, Gary …’ How was she going to get herself out of this when she didn’t even know what she’d gotten into? ‘I’m really grateful for the help. But right now what I need to know is, when do I get my passport back? I have a lot on my plate, and I’ve got to get home.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ He seemed to find this doubly amusing. ‘I imagine you do. I did a little checking into your situation – no place to live, a pile of debt, a lawsuit or two hanging over your head – I’m sure you can’t wait to get back to all that.’

  Michelle felt her cheeks burn red. ‘I have obligations to deal with,’ she managed.

  ‘Husband dies, leaves you holding the bag …’ Gary shook his head. ‘And all this time you spent … well, what is it you’ve been doing the last ten years, Michelle? Entertaining? You’re capable of so much more.’

  How the fuck did he know all this?

  ‘Thanks for the compliment.’

  Gary reached over to grasp the wine bottle, ready to refill her glass. Michelle put her hand on his and gave him a little squeeze. ‘What about my passport?’

  She wanted to see if the gesture would rattle him at all. It didn’t.

  ‘Like I said before, this is about us helping each other. Here’s your chance to help me back.’

  ‘What if I just went to the consulate, told them I lost my passport?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Michelle.’ His eyes widened ever so slightly, bloodshot beneath the puffy lids. ‘I really wouldn’t.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He made it sound so simple.

  ‘All you have to do is keep an eye on Danny for me a couple weeks. Let me know what he’s up to, who he sees.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Danny’s involved in some sketchy stuff,’ he said. ‘And it’d be real helpful to us to have a better idea of the specifics.’

  ‘“Us” being … ?’

  ‘Well, it’s really better if I don’t say.’

  Great, Michelle thought. ‘You can’t ask me to get involved with something when I don’t even know who you are,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, I can.’ He laughed, his cheeks rounded like a baby’s. ‘I just did.’

  She almost got up from the table. What would happen if she just walked out the door?

  ‘Now, come on, don’t be mad. I’m a consultant, just like I told you.’

  Cleansing breaths, she thought. ‘And if I don’t agree, you’ll have me arrested again?’

  ‘Now, where’d you get an idea like that?’ Gary wiped the back of his hand across his wine-reddened lips. ‘It’s the Mexican authorities who’ll have you arrested. I’m the one who’ll keep them off you. So long as you do me this little favor.’

  She watched him tuck a stray gold curl behind his ear. He was vain about his hair, she’d bet. That color? Highlights.

  ‘You want me to spy on him?’

  ‘You make it sound so formal. Just spend some time with him, that’s all.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to do that?’

  ‘We’ll set you up someplace in Old Town, get you some walking-around money – I know things are kind of tight for you right now, so don’t worry about any of that. In fact …’

  Gary studied her for a moment. He put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, reminding her of a time-share salesman about to make his pitch.

  ‘Michelle, instead of thinking of this as an inconvenience, why don’t you think of it as an opportunity?’

  ‘An opportunity?’

  ‘This is important to us. We’ll make it worth your while. Those financial problems you’re having? I’m not gonna promise I can make them all go away. But I can help.’

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. She’d very nearly asked him what kind of money he had in mind.

  Don’t get sucked into this, she told herself. There was no reason to believe a word Gary said.

  ‘Gary, look …’ She let out a sharp sigh and poured herself some more wine. This man is crazy, she thought, watching his eyes light up, his cheeks flare red, as he spun this ridiculous scheme.

  He’d better not be some sort of government agent, because she hated to think that her tax money went to guys like this.

  ‘I barely know Danny,’ she said. ‘What makes you think he’s going to want to spend time with me?’

  Gary chortled at that. ‘Come on, Michelle. You know Danny likes spending time with you.’

  ‘For one night.’ Now she laughed. ‘Look, it’s nice that you think I’m some kind of … I don’t know, femme fatale, but I have no idea if he wants to see me again. Especially after what happened.’

  ‘What, the robbery? Well, that was hardly your fault.’

  ‘Not just the robbery. When I went to his place to give him back his stuff …’

  She thought about the pig’s head. The flies.

  Gary’s idea of a joke.

  That is, if Daniel had told her the truth.

  ‘He didn’t seem that happy to see me,’ she said.

  ‘Trust me, you play it right, he’ll want to see you.’ Gary leaned back in his chair, took a big swallow of wine. ‘See, guys like Danny, they can have their little brown girls whenever they want them, but someone like you doesn’t come along every day. Classy. Polished. Someone he can take to parties. Probably have celebrity stories to tell, living the life you did in L.A. He’ll love all that shit.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, just to shut him up. ‘You want me to spend time with Dan
ny. 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 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.

  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 terracotta 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.’