Getaway by Lisa Brackmann

Maybe to Maggie’s office. Just in case …
    She couldn’t finish that thought. She stood there, hot and sweaty and unable to think at all.
    Internet.
    There were things she should look up. Things she should know. How the legal system worked here. What kind of trouble she might be in.
    The chairs in the café were plastic and uncomfortable, the computers old and set to Spanish-language keyboards, but it still felt like a refuge, a place where she could sit and think and try to understand what had happened to her.
    From what she could find out online in an hour, Gary had told her the truth. At least about how the legal system worked. And the prisons—not that the prisons in the United States were much better, but someone in her position could probably avoid prison there. Here not so likely. Not while the case dragged on and on, waiting for trial.
    The Mexican president had proposed decriminalizing small amounts of street drugs, but she didn’t even know how much she was accused of possessing.
    Before, she’d heard of a crackdown on drug smugglers by the Mexican federal government; she’d read stories about border massacres, headless bodies, corruption at every level of society, stories that had formed part of the fuzzy background to what little she’d known about Mexico. But she’d never associated any of that with resorts like Puerto Vallarta. Things like that didn’t happen here, or so she’d thought.
    Not often anyway.
    Sinaloa cowboys. Narcos . Assassinations. Street battles with grenade launchers.
    The cartels had infiltrated everything here. Police forces, judicial offices, even American embassies. There were former presidents whose relatives were awash in drug money from one cartel. A current president whose top officials were in the service of the another. The cartels slaughtered cops, politicians, journalists, and mostly, each other.
    Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. She didn’t know that the conflict between Gary and Daniel was about drugs.
    But the money. The coke in her purse. And Daniel. He’d said he was a private pilot. Flying Gulfstreams. Wasn’t that how you smuggled large amounts of drugs? In planes?
    The air-conditioning chilled the sweat on her skin.
    When she went outside, the police car was still nowhere in sight.
    She started walking back to the hotel. The streets were quiet. A few tourists wandered in and out of the storefronts. An older gay couple stood on the corner, accompanied by a little dog straining at its leash. She passed a tiny stall, tucked between a money-changing window and a condominium building, that sold fresh juices, a youngish woman in a tight T-shirt grinding oranges, a small boy bouncing a soccer ball on his knee by the scoured wooden table where she worked. Then a boutique, with cocktail dresses and hand-tooled and beaded bags displayed in the window.
    Michelle thought about the five thousand dollars Gary had given her. Maybe I should buy an outfit, she thought. Something nice, in case Daniel wants to go out with me again.
    Crazy. She was getting as crazy as fucking Gary.
    “Michelle?”
    She flinched, and Vicky quickly said, “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you!”
    Vicky, the American woman she’d met in El Tiburón. Gary’s friend.
    “Sorry,” Michelle said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone here to know me.”
    Vicky wore another Hawaiian shirt, blue hibiscuses this time, a pair of khaki shorts that came just above her dimpled knees, and the Teva-style sandals that every American expat here who didn’t wear Crocs seemed to favor.
    “Well, it’s a small town,” Vicky said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
    For a moment Michelle had some strange thoughts—fragments of them, more accurately—like Vicky was actually an international drug smuggler, or a hit woman, or who knows what, a procurer of children for sex tourists. And then she took another look at Vicky, this stout, middle-aged American woman with dyed-blond hair and a Hawaiian shirt and told