*******
Summer
june
A man in Mexico City looks like him. The illusion isn't good, but it isn't bad, either, and in the flashing white-blue lights of the club his silhouette is enough to choke her breath and stop her heart, and that silhouette is almost deadly. She lingers a moment longer than she knows she should, perched on a barstool, one hand tracing the rim of her glass in the spot where she licked off the salt. The hand slips, one finger dipping into her drink. She will not do this. She must not do this. But she sits, frozen, eyes locked on the silhouette in the far corner, waiting for the right combination of lights and smoke and shadow, waiting for another glimpse and the surprise that chokes her breath. The sight is absorbing, so much so that she does not hear the thudding of boots on the concrete floor until they are too close, until a hand, heavy and hairy and greasy, rests on her arm.
"Hola, Bonita." The voice is simultaneously whispery and gruff; the grimy fingers curl around the exposed strap of her bra. She puts on her best seductive smile, turning toward him, the motion sliding her short skirt further up her thigh. His eyes flick down to look at it, and the flick is just enough. She grabs the grimy wrist, twisting it back at the same time she jerks her knee up. A choked moan tells her she hit her target. He staggers a step back, off-balance, hands instinctively cupping against the pain. She could raise a heel, use a jab, finish it off, but she doesn't need a scene. She calls him a bastard and huffs in annoyance and walks quickly away, tossing her hair (long and blonde this time) as she tugs her skirt back down.
Eyes follow her, more than usual, and she covers the anger and exasperation on her face. Once out the doors, she rounds the corner into the nearest alley and breaks into a run. Her contact will not meet her tonight; she must find the warehouse on her own.
She cannot be slow. She cannot be stupid. She cannot be seen.
********
july
Irina
She would make a good Lady MacBeth.
She knows this -- she has always known it. A little red in her hair, an absent look in her eyes, she could walk around the tiny room rubbing the grainy, mud-colored lye soap over her hands until they were red and raw and felt, somehow, clean.
The role suits her. Betrayal is something she's become accustomed to; she wonders now if she would even remember how to build a relationship without one careful eye on the weak spots, the pressure points.
She, too, sits on the too-thin comforter of a cheap motel. She keeps a small gun beside her (always in arm's reach) and a larger one in the boxy silver camera-case sitting in the tiny alcove that serves as a closet. Above it (on hangers bolted to the rod) are three suits: navy, black, tan, and a dress of shimmery red silk with a slim cut and a halter-neck, designed to help her stand out rather than blend in; to get what she wants rather than the half-truths everyone seems bent on telling her.
She wanders over to the lone window, clear gel hand sanitizer still clutched in her fist, and presses one eye to the hideous geometric-print curtains. The tiny slit is just enough for her to observe the dusty parking lot and the ramshackle All-Dollar next door. She watches for several minutes, but the faded pickups and aging imports seem to all be in place, here and there a tired guest dragging bags out of their trunk, t-shirts sticking to their bodies in the heat.
She likes these places best, somehow. Something about the anonymous simplicity of being surrounded by people with grating, boring lives. She does not fit in here, but she did, once, in a dusty Russian town where nobody did ever did anything and no one expected much. She doesn't fit in here anymore, but she fakes it well.
She pulls herself away from the window and crosses to the narrow dresser, top still sticky with someone else's spilled drink, remembering to set the sanitizer down, its alcohol in it still cool and damp on her palms.
The narrow slit of sunlight slowly crosses the room, running up the wall and partway onto the ceiling before it finally disappears, the tiny room growing dark. She sits on the floor, meditating, but the room distracts her. She thinks she can see it, the erratic flash of ghostly green neon, the tiny, aging import that smelled of corn syrup and nicotine and blood. She remembers the cold air that rushed through her when she closed the door, how pale and how tiny her daughter looked, curled into the fetal position in the back floorboard. She's tucked a thin stack of twenties in the backseat (the best a mother could do) and a bottle of aspirin in the glove box. She'd wanted to leave prescription painkillers, but Sydney would have been too skeptical to take them, however bad the pain might be. She'd wanted to get a room across the street, to hide, to watch, but she knew better than to stay in that area for a moment longer. Her best chance -- her daughter's best chance -- was to hide, to run, to put as much distance between them as possible and hope that the majority of Sloane's vengeance, and thereby his search, would focus on her. He was livid, of course. But she's long past fearing a man like him. Planning for, running from, certainly. Fearing, no. In some way her worst fears have already come true -- when she sleeps at night she dreams of thick blood-drops denting the white sand, of a girl, her girl, staggering cut and hunched-over into the orange-tiled lobby, grasping an old key in trembling hands, and finally collapsing onto a flimsy mattress, all alone.
The last feeling, at least, is one she's familiar with.
*******
august
She taps the cardboard ticket against her hand, and her heel against the tile. Black suit, black heels, white shirt and a strand of (fake) pearls. Hair, dark now, in a neat twist at the base of her neck. She rests one hand on the black roll-a-long and taps it with her (fake, and French manicured) nails. Electronic check-in would be so much simpler, but she's never been able to stomach it, with all the screens and the tapping that must leave fingerprints. An irrational fear, she knows, but a fear all the same. This has been her third trip to Mexico City in as many months, her third attempt to find contacts who will not know her by sight or reputation, her third fruitless search for a fabled warehouse.