Noir Car, Episode 11

Sometimes love hurts a man more than loneliness ever could.

His eyes stung with tears. A man's tears, the kind that have to cause pain, that have to burn like acid to make their way through the layers of rage that keeps them in check. He looks down at the knuckles on his right hand, trying to make out his wounds through the darkness. Cracked and bleeding, their prints should match some snitch's jaw, not the dents in the sheetrock of this lousy room. He knew that when the morning sun seeped through his yellow window, he would be caught in the stare of two cracked plaster eyes, a child born of his own hate.

He found his mind drifting back to the Chicago stockyards, where his father made his living. He had watched his father, shirtless, dragging cattle that could no longer stand around by a chain on their way to slaughter. He realized this was not just an idle memory, and shuddered as he sensed the familiar smell of the old man in the room.

He staggered in an obscene obstacle course, dull sensations of broken lamps and overturned bookcases registering as he arrived at the bathroom door. The body in the bathtub was expected, realized, before it came into sensory focus.

The fat cop lay naked with his mouth open, his mustache and girth combining with his stab wound to conjure the image of a harpooned walrus.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode by Paul Gude