Free Getaway by Lisa Brackmann

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 dodgeball 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