Wolf Point, Montana flung off tough questions.
Cecile revisited her own nagging question. Was she doomed to plod through life as a solo act?
This absence of clarity bothered her. Right now, to stay alive, she needed the safety that accompanied solitude. To take on a lover, even a companion, meant uncertainties which could easily swell into something fatal.
The die had been cast on the keyboard of her MacBook Air.
That last morning in the office on Sansome Street, when she swept more than half the cartel’s money off to the LGT Bank in Liechtenstein, she felt there would come a time she would be safe.
Hiding turned out to be more demanding than anticipated.
Not that she had underestimated the cartel’s vengeance. What crept in unexpectedly were the exasperating intensities of small and insignificant events that marred everyday life. Constant threats drove wedges of fear into her courage. Small slivers of alarm left their mark and turned into sudden pangs of trepidation increasingly difficult to dislodge.
Even as she grew more accomplished and more observant, as the second nature ways of the fugitive sank in, the demands of vigilance grew more tiring.
Once she had been an aspiring contralto, a rare voice down deep in the tessitura. Now she was offstage, forced to cower deep in the shadows, a con artist lashed to a death sentence.
A year ago, her decision to slip away from the world made perfect sense. Prizes of love could be temporarily set aside.
But her steps to ignite the cartel’s self-destruction weren’t working. The force of brother pitted against brother should have been more ferocious.
Considering all this, Cecile gave the others what she framed as a hopeful look.
What each one of them saw was an erosion of confidence.
What her fellow fugitives couldn’t see at all was Wolf Point, Montana.
Not the outskirts, not the main drag and not the motel where they wouldn’t let Sam Cooke spend the night.
