Getaway by Lisa Brackmann Page B

like she’d swallowed an ice cube.
    That night at the hotel, maybe. Or when she’d gone to return his clothes. Or he could have hired someone else to do it. Maybe even the policeman.
    But why?
    She wasn’t going to ask Gary. Not yet. She didn’t trust Gary at all. But there was something else she could ask him.
    “Why are you helping me?”
    “You’re a suspicious person, aren’t you?” His grin broadened. “Well, the way I see it, we’re helping each other.”
    Michelle took a long, hot shower. She was truly filthy, for one, and sore. Being in the shower also gave her time away from Gary. Time to think.
    He’d taken her to a condo in a gated complex on the bay, a series of ten-story towers flanked by a golf course. On one side of the complex, the towers were only half built, still bare concrete and rebar, and even the completed towers had an unfinished lookto them, uncluttered by any signs of occupancy. “Yep, these just came on the market,” Gary had said. “I practically have the whole floor to myself.” His unit, on the seventh floor, overlooked the golf course. “It’s a great course. You like to golf, Michelle? Maybe you and I could play a few rounds sometime.”
    I should have just asked him to take me to the airport, she thought. I could have cleaned up in the restroom or something, gotten on a plane to somewhere, anywhere in the United States. But she’d been so tired, so out of her own element, that she hadn’t thought of that soon enough. She’d just sat in Gary’s expensive car, on Gary’s expensive leather seats, and let him take her here.
    There was something very wrong with this situation.
    The attack in the hotel room. The pig’s head. Two acts aimed against Daniel. And her. But it couldn’t really be about her, could it? She was just a tourist who’d hooked up with a good-looking man she’d known nothing about.
    So it had to be about Daniel. Until the drugs planted in her purse.
    Maybe Daniel blamed her for what had happened to him, for the break-in and his injury. Maybe he thought that she’d set him up somehow, and this was some sick form of revenge.
    The way Gary had shown up at the jail, playing her rescuer, everything suddenly fixed—she didn’t believe that performance at all.
    She felt dizzy and sick, like she was going to throw up. Which could have been from the jailhouse burrito and not just her nerves. Keep it together, she told herself. Get dressed and figure out some way to get out of here. Just get to the airport.
    Figuring out what she’d landed in wasn’t nearly as important as getting out of it.
    She toweled off quickly, put on a clean blouse and knee-length shorts—because a dress felt too vulnerable—unlocked the bathroom door, and stepped out into the hall.
    She could hear the TV blaring from the living room—a comedy, she thought, because suddenly Gary laughed out loud.
    Heart thumping, she stepped into the bedroom where her things were.
    First things first. Make sure there were no more surprises in her luggage.
    She searched her suitcase as quickly and thoroughly as she could. Nothing there, at least that she could find. She could tell that the suitcase had been unloaded and hastily repacked, but there was nothing unfamiliar here.
    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