Day of the Dead (6 page)

‘I'm sorry you're having a tough time,' she said, and she was. Maybe she wasn't a Mexican waiter hustling for tips on the beach, but the idea that she might not have enough, might not be able to make enough to support herself, seemed all too relatable.

She'd gotten an e-mail from her lawyer saying that things weren't looking good, that Tom had been behind in the life insurance payments and he hadn't been able to get it reinstated. She'd been counting on the life insurance. The house was gone, foreclosed, and she'd had no clue until Tom wasn't around anymore to intercept the communications. His kids laid claim to everything else that was left. Whatever that might be.

She had nothing.

I have to accept it, she told herself.

‘Something to drink?' the waiter asked. ‘Something special? Since this is your last day here.'

She'd had far too much to drink on this trip already. But it was her last day. Quite possibly the last time she'd ever be here, on this beach.

‘Just a margarita, I think.'

He brought her a double, and later he came by and topped it off.

I'll have to get a job, Michelle thought. But it had been years since she'd worked. She'd stopped shortly after marrying Tom, not that the photo gallery had paid much in any case. ‘Look, I'm making plenty for both of us,' he'd said. ‘Why don't you spend your time doing things you enjoy?'

Funny, that.

He'd meant it kindly, for the most part. But not working meant she ran the house. Chose the furniture, the appliances. Hung the right paintings on the walls. Made sure the gifts Tom sent were personalized and appropriate. Picked their charities and arranged for their attendance at the banquets.

And she'd kept herself in shape for all that. Yoga, Pilates, spin classes. She looked good, and not like one of those Brentwood plastic-surgery victims either.

‘Michelle, you're so creative! Love the way you dress! Love your house!'

That was what everyone said about her.

How much had she actually enjoyed it?

She'd almost reached the end of the book about the woman who found redemption through baked goods. She thumbed through to the last pages. Sure enough, the heroine ended up with the cultured, overeducated woodworker. Why did people even read things like this, she wondered, where you know how it will end almost as soon as it starts?

Maybe they liked the certainty. The reassurance that things worked out all right in the end.

At three-fifteen she went upstairs, showered, changed, and finished her packing. At four she retrieved her valuables from the hotel safe and said good-bye to the woman behind the front counter.

‘Alejandra,' the woman said, extending a slender hand. ‘I hope you come back to see us again. It isn't right, what happened to you and your friend. We hope we can make it up to you.'

The cab arrived a few minutes later; the driver took her wheeled bag and put it in the trunk. Michelle climbed into the back, and as the cab pulled away, Alejandra and one of the hotel workers waved good-bye. Michelle returned the wave. She supposed it was simply good business, that after the attack the hotel workers wanted to do whatever they could to mitigate the bad publicity by being extra attentive.

Still, they were nice people.

The taxi chugged up the hill, heading in the opposite direction of the airport at first, then around a tight curve that straightened into a road heading north, condos at the crest of the hill, morphing into
colonias
as they descended. The road widened, dirt shoulders on either side, concrete shoring up the hillsides, covered with graffiti and political posters, mostly for PRI and PAN. Michelle couldn't remember what the parties stood for here, though she thought that
pan
might be Spanish for ‘bread.'

She leaned against the backseat, eyes half closed. She had the beginnings of a headache. I shouldn't have had those drinks, she thought. Soon as I get home, it's back to the regimen: the workout routine, the yoga, the raw food and greens. Definitely no margaritas. The calories in one were staggering.

The taxi driver muttered something under his breath that sounded like a curse, put his foot on the brake, and pulled over onto the dirt shoulder.

‘What's wrong?'

The driver jerked his thumb behind them.
‘Policía.'

She turned and looked out the rear window. A squad car, black and white, compact, a little battered, light bar flashing blue and red.

Great, Michelle thought. Had the driver been speeding? Was a taillight out? She'd tried to leave plenty of time to get to the airport, but she'd heard that things with the police could turn complicated here.

Well, there was no point in panicking.

The policeman approached the driver's-side door. Best not to get involved, Michelle decided. She stared out the passenger window.

They'd parked at the edge of a lot that looked like an ad hoc body shop, with cars in various states of assembly, stacked sidepanels, bumpers, and doors. A tin roof propped up on poles was the only indication of any permanency. Odd, she thought. What would stop someone from coming in at night and stealing parts? Maybe the workers slept here. Maybe the whole operation was somehow magically packed up at dusk and reassembled the next day.

She could hear the policeman and the driver exchange a few low words.
‘Aeropuerto'
was one she caught.

The policeman rapped his knuckles on the backseat window.
‘Señora.'

‘What? Excuse me?'

The policeman gestured for her to open the door. She did.

‘Su bolsa.'

‘My … ?'

‘Purse.'

She could feel her heart pound in her throat. Was this some kind of shakedown? A robbery in the guise of a traffic stop? What was she supposed to do?

She handed him her purse.

The policeman opened it, rifling through the main compartment, opening the interior zip, then moving to the exterior pockets. It was a Marc Jacobs hobo, and there were a lot of them.

The policeman extracted a brown paper packet. Folded. A square the size of a lopped-off business card. He opened it.

‘Come out of the car.'

‘What?'

‘Out of the car.'

‘What
is
that?' Michelle asked. ‘I don't know what that is.'

‘Now.'

‘That's not mine!'

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him.

Lawyer. How did you say ‘lawyer'? The only word Michelle could come up with was
albóndigas,
and that, she was fairly sure, meant ‘meatballs.'

Sitting in the back of the squad car seemed so unreal that she couldn't process it. The seat smelled like beer-scented puke. The policeman had
cuffed
her, hands behind her back and tight enough to hurt. Taken her luggage out of the taxi and thrown it next to her. Was he even a real policeman? He looked like one, she thought – a big man with a big belly and a mustache and aviator sunglasses. His uniform looked real. The squad car looked credible too. Now and again the radio squawked and broadcast chatter.

‘¿Dónde vamos?'
she managed.

‘A la cárcel.'

‘What?'

‘Jail.' The policeman barked out a laugh. ‘
Tienes drogas,
go to jail.'

‘Drugs? I don't have any drugs.'

He shrugged fractionally, shoulders tense, hands gripping the wheel.

A setup, she thought, it was some kind of setup. A con, a way to extort money. ‘Look,' she said. ‘This is a misunderstanding. Can't we work this out?'

As soon as she said it, she knew she'd made a mistake.

‘What do you think, lady? You want to give me something?'

‘No, I, just …'

‘Money, maybe? Something else?' He laughed again, all the while staring straight ahead.

‘It's a misunderstanding,' she repeated. ‘I'm not trying to insult you.'

‘You want to give me something, you want to stop right here?'

The squad car slowed.

On one side of the road, there were cinder-block buildings: apartments mostly, a few downtrodden businesses, peeling hand-painted signs, rusting cars, broken-down fences. On the other a steep hill, dirt roads, shacks interspersed among browning vines and palms.

‘No,' she said. ‘No.'

The car sped up again.

The jail was in a neighborhood like the ones she'd seen from the road, cement-slab and cinder-block apartments, unpaved streets in places, hardly distinguishable from the surrounding buildings except for its iron bars and guards with machine guns.

There was paperwork to fill out. They searched her and had her take off her jewelry and empty her pockets – the pants she wore, thin linen, had only a rear patch pocket anyway.

‘I want to make a phone call,' she said, but no one listened.

Then a guard took her back to a cell. Cement floors, a cement bench, and a toilet that looked as if it hadn't been flushed in a week. There was a woman passed out on the bench, one stilettoed foot dangling off the edge at a wobbling right angle.

‘When can I make a phone call?' Michelle asked the guard again.
‘¿Cuándo … teléfono?'

The guard raised a finger.
‘Espérate,'
he said.

Maybe that meant he'd come back.

She couldn't sit on the bench because of the passed-out woman (a hooker? Michelle thought she looked like one anyway), so she leaned against the wall opposite the barred front of the cell.

From here she could see into the cell across the way. It was filled with men, five or six of them, who milled around and muttered things she couldn't understand. One of them, a young guy, came over to the bars of his cell and pressed his face against them. ‘Hello!' he said. ‘Hello!'

Michelle ignored him. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her head on them. It was stifling hot in the cell. No breeze came in from the small barred window above her.

This couldn't go on, could it? She couldn't stay here.

But she'd never make her flight, even if they let her out right now. And they weren't going to do that. Weren't going to suddenly decide it was all a mistake, that she was free to go.

They'd taken her watch along with her necklace and bracelets, so she had no way of marking the time beyond the square of darkening sky visible through the window. After it grew black, there was no way to tell at all.

Her head pounded; her body ached from sitting on concrete. I shouldn't have had those drinks, she thought. There was a barrel of water, a sort of Sparkletts bottle in a wrought-iron stand that tipped to fill a solitary plastic cup, in one corner of the cell.

One cup? Michelle thought. One cup for everyone who's come in and out of here? And how clean was the water?

The woman on the bench stirred, moaned, and turned onto her side. She gagged a few times and threw up on the floor.

I should get up, Michelle thought, I should do something. Call for a guard. Make sure she doesn't choke.

She stayed where she was. The woman rolled onto her back, one arm flung over her eyes, and was mumbling to herself. Obviously she could breathe.

Not my problem, Michelle thought, and her own problems at the moment were nearly too long to list.

How had the drugs gotten in her purse? The policeman, most probably, but why? He hadn't seemed interested in a bribe.

Of course she hadn't checked in all of those pockets when she'd packed. There were several she rarely opened. It could have happened before that.

What were the penalties for drug possession in Mexico? Weren't they more serious than in the United States? And without a good lawyer … How would she find a lawyer? How would she pay for one?

Tears welled up without her even realizing. This was too much, too much to take in, too much to handle.

A fight broke out in one of the other cells. That was what it sounded like anyway: sudden shouts, grunts, thuds.

Michelle stopped crying and wiped her nose on her gauzy sleeve. I have to keep it together, she told herself. There's no one to look out for me but me. Not anymore.

She'd get to make a phone call eventually, wouldn't she? The American consulate, that was who you called in situations like this. I'll call the consulate, she thought. They'll help me. This will all work out somehow.

Guards came to break up the fight, barking commands, slapping truncheons against the iron bars. The woman on the bench stirred again, spoke a few words seemingly in her sleep, and turned over to face the wall.

I have to drink something, Michelle thought. Her mouth felt as if the surfaces had been coated with glue. She stood up, tried to stretch out the cramps in her legs and back, and approached the water bottle.

Don't think about it, she told herself as she tilted the bottle and filled the communal cup. I'll just have to get a gamma globulin shot after I get out of here. Better that than passing out from dehydration.

After that she thought she might as well pee. Don't even look, she thought. Just go and get it over with. She squatted over the toilet, the backs of her thighs skimming the seat, willing her bladder to let go while she held the pose.

In the cell across the way, the young man had come back to press his face against the bars, watching her.

‘Fuck off!' she spit, surprising herself.

The young man laughed and kept watching.

Whatever, she thought. What difference did it make at this point?

When she finished, she went back to her place against the wall, as far from the toilet as possible. She lay on the concrete floor on her side, head resting on her arm, and closed her eyes.

She didn't sleep – that was impossible. But she dozed, on and off. The murmurs of the woman on the bench, the laughs and cursing of the men in the cell across the way, all combined into a dream-narrative soundtrack that could not be precisely translated to waking life.