Hotel Bel-Air guests like her were as commonplace as its hydrangeas and gardenias.
Statuesque, reserved and apparently preoccupied with matters more worthy than those of anyone else.
She had been in her suite for a week. She gauged the extent of her boredom as ghastly as the prices on the room service menu.
Not that it mattered. What she had lifted from the cartel and channeled into six different accounts at LGT, the largest bank in Liechtenstein, could buy the Hotel Bel-Air.
Early in the morning she would walk up Stone Canyon Road, passing inviting cul-de-sacs and thinking about all the places she might next disappear.
She was open to more possibilities now. She had actually enjoyed being a waitress, which surprised her. The work at the café in Laguna hadn’t been mindless. She had enjoyed figuring it all out.
What she had not enjoyed was the disguise. Bottling everything up proved draining, more than anticipated.
That man who ordered enchiladas in green sauce every night. It had been tough to constantly avoid his attempts at conversation.
Nothing good would have come of it. He probably would have asked questions. Not that she blamed him. People without curiosity didn’t interest her much.
Now and then when she thought of him she wondered if he would have preferred that she too ask no questions.
Perhaps they would have struck an unspoken pact. Perhaps the two of them were bound to a similar set of circumstances, although she could not imagine how his could possibly be in a league with hers.
She would never know. She would never see him again. And the problem was the same as always.
They could track her down at will. It would just take them some time. Existence was fragile, but certainly possible.
She was not resigned to a premature death. Nothing struck her as entirely safe and yet nothing was inevitable.
And nothing could make her believe that at that very moment one of the gardeners wasn’t passing along word of her stay at the Bel-Air Hotel to someone who would relay the message down to Sinaloa.
The Bolivian passport was in the safe. Outside her open window a hummingbird fluttered.
