The Flight Attendant

by Chris Bohjalian

Then, because much of the night before was a blur with yawning black holes in between, she ran the washcloth over everything she was even likely to have touched. The hotel room’s doorknobs and closet handles, its hangers, the footboard to the bed. That beautiful headboard, too.

In doing this she removes the other prints too

She left the “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling by its elegant gold braid around the hotel room doorknob to keep Alex’s body undiscovered for as long as possible, and stood for a moment trying to remember where the hell the elevator was.

Cameras will place her

She’d met Megan’s husband a couple of times. He seemed nice enough. She remembered mostly the jokes he had made about being a consultant: You really only need to get two things to be a consultant: Fired. And business cards. You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. But since the family had moved to Virginia he had worked a lot for defense department contractors, so Cassie presumed he was far more competent than his self-deprecation suggested.

These days, no one felt entitled to anything in economy, and so the passengers—especially on an overnight flight to Europe—were rather docile: the airlines had beaten out of them the idea that they had virtually any rights at all.

She couldn’t recall the last time she’d had sex sober, and wondered a little now at the synaptic connection between her body—body image, really—and booze. Between intimacy and intoxicants.

Killing Bowden wouldn’t be like killing Sokolov, an opportunistic fuck who’d agreed to mule American data because he knew he was in deep shit for skimming and had now served his purpose.

a smart girl is nobody’s pushover and nobody’s foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile.

She realized that she was most afraid of the pain, the sharp, brief, razor-like sting of the blade slicing into her skin, and maybe that explained why she drank. Pain came in all colors and sizes, much of it far worse than the pricks and aches and fever dreams that affected the body. This was the pain that gouged out great holes in the soul, hollowing out self-esteem and cratering a person’s self-respect. This was the pain that caused you to gaze at yourself in the mirror and wonder why in the name of God you were here.