Noir Car, Episode 7

A moment that passes without blinking. She knows the seduction, the slick weight of bullets that click with a flick to fill the empty clip. Every time she can feel the line she doesn’t want to cross, the one that whispers. The one he crossed, the one that keeps his kissing lips locked up in fistfights. The one that promises power, that promises high prices for violence. The one she’s always pulling him back across to the light, from the fight, from the feral night. She elects not to enjoy it but she needs a gun.

She knew her way around enough to stay out of this neighborhood most of the time. In the lifeless wet light of the alleyway she examines the crumpled page. “Tulips”, he’d said, whispered, rather, through two swollen lips before a crash cut the line, and it could only mean one thing. The Tulips Lounge, a place at the end of the line where bad things began. She held her own in tough spots but those were tougher than a drink could make you strong, hence the handgun. A length of time had been reeled out like a rope and at the bottom of the rope in the dark was a slimy bucket called the Tulips Lounge, a place where information’s expensive and lives are lost over a nickel’s worth of short change. She knew she wouldn’t find him there but she’d know where to find out where to find him. The scum would rise and float and belch out possible futures, all of them stinking like rotted teeth. He’d been in scrapes before, but to send her packing to the Tulips Lounge meant more trouble than she deserved for a man who didn’t earn it.

She was almost there and then she was there. The window was wet with wasted breath but she could see in, through the reflections red and rippling that read "egnuol spilut", lighting the faces inside that looked like

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 7 by Matt Fontaine