Huevos Rancheros made for a fine breakfast out on the patio at the Hotel Bel-Air.
They brought Reserve, New Mexico to mind. She would get back there after a few days.
She was not prepared to feel like a fugitive. Although the clarities of good and evil had blurred, it made sense to keep moving.
Not long ago, she could use the fence posts of calculus and technology to discern between the two. Then the qualities of good and evil muddled once she realized her former employer was intent on killing her.
When they paid her off, they must have known the precariousness of buying silence.
Collateral can never be pledged with the certainty that satisfies both parties. Doors can never remain closed.
If she needed to tap into reservoirs of evil to stay alive, so be it.
She looked back on her work as a petroleum engineer and wondered why she had ignored so much. Her attorney in Houston suggested it would be difficult to present her as a whistleblower. How easy it would be for a jury to consider her complicit in the crime she had come forward to reveal.
She had taken their money. She couldn’t have it both ways. If there was a way out, her attorney hadn’t found it yet.
She watched a woman being seated at a nearby table. She had a vague Latin appearance, wore a long white dress and a floppy straw hat. A black sweater was draped over her arm and she carried a handbag with an enamel clasp suggestive of a coiled scorpion.
A pair of hummingbirds fluttered between their tables. Attracted by the fevered hum, the two women turned to watch their insistent dance.
They caught one another’s attention and exchanged the kind of soft smiles that inevitably lead to a delightful complicity.
