Julia had to get out of jail.

She had to get out of this cell, and then she had to pee.

Okay. Not necessarily in that order.

The need had been growing steadily worse for the past two hours, but neither of the hijab-clad women spoke English, Spanish or French, and her sign-language repertoire didn’t extend to urination.

There was a drain in the middle of the sloping stone floor. Crude. But it was looking better and better all the time.

She could be discreet.

She was alone in the cell. And it wasn’t as if she still had her underwear. And the voluminous gray dress they’d forced on her was essentially a tent with sleeves. It was drab and scratchy, with a musky smell that made her gag. But it would certainly hide her activities.

Of course, the drain might not be the toilet. In which case, she might be committing some horrible faux pas. She might even be breaking another law. They’d already added immodest dress to her charges of break-in and attempted theft.

And they hadn’t let her make a phone call. In fact, they’d confiscated her cell phone along with every other one of her possessions. She’d repeated the words American and embassy until she was nearly hoarse. She could only hope someone had called them.

If not…

She glanced around at the stained cement walls and the iron-barred door, shivering despite the close air. Voices shouted down the narrow hallway, and metal clanked in the distance. A centipede wriggled out from under the bare mattress laid across the floor.

Julia shuddered, swallowing a shriek.

Why had she thought she could be a real reporter? Why had she ever left Seattle? She should have taken that promotion to night-shift supervisor at Econo Foods instead of the scholarship to Cal State and the road that brought her to this.