"She was like a wildcat, officer! She bloodied my face with her heel whilst I lay prone on the surface of the ground! I've never seen such a woman!"
"I have. I have," said Lacere, replacing his hat. "And this time she won't get away from me."
The priest picked at the scab forming on the corner of his lip. The worst part was how he hurt his hand stabbing the cop, but he kept that one in his pocket. And he kept his mouth shut. God didn't care anyhow.

What they found was a basement full of blood.

Cops besieged the churchyard like potato bugs, fat and slick, making sure to shoot out the stained glass windows. Out the back door ran a pretty girl, one step closer to nothing at all.

A right hook with a prayer book sent the preacher's teeth flying, artificial as they were. And a high heel made its mark on his high arches. She grabs him by his fancy collar and says, "Some kind of preacher you are, tying up grown men with their own pants. He comes here looking for solace and you give him a broken nose."

Noir Car, Episode 14

The red-blue flash in his eye on the roof of his retina, a siren, a blue flash, a mere episode in the life of cones, rods, and pounding blood-vessels, knocked a hole straight through into his brain like "RUN!," so run he did. Glad to be out of there even with glass on his boots, rapidly shuddering onto the street in tiny gemlike crystals crunch crunch, feet first out the window. Crack open a smile, he's out of there quicker than he can before he finds out what's wrong. Licking pavement with his chin after he trips, a stray dog along for the run for a moment, a playful bark that hearkens to the pleasure of stolen freedom.

Little does he know he just missed his boat.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode written by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 13

Meanwhile, time was mean, making do by screaming lean through the hungry night in a slightly stolen and/or lightly lifted convertible with gleaming black highlights on black metal flake in a pitch black neighborhood of busted streetlamp glass music crunching under screeching wheels and black thoughts of vengeance in her brain. Black goes with everything, the ultimate accessory.

Around corners and up down-alley arrows she wound and the cracked maze of urban disuse and decay haunted the metal flake reflections but bounced off before they reached her, scared of falling in the furrow of her brow like an ice climber into a ravine. That's a furrow of thought, a furrow of anger, a deep trench of anxious fear that casts unlikely shadows on her milk-white visage. It's a night for shadows, shadows that jump up and escape laughing from their cage of daylight like flat funhouse ghosts on cheap sheet metal.

She drove faster to splatter the shadows, to shatter the fear-soaked miasma shooting from steam tunnels and into her line of sight. Clarity, clarity of purpose and resolve to do if not what's right then what's least wrong or at least most interesting was what's required for a kamikaze gambit to free a man who probably didn't even know how much trouble he was in. And that was just what she would do to him, disregarding any scars, nicks, cuts, abrasions, folds, tears, staples, or mutilations he had already gotten or would get at the hands of whatever friendly neighborhood hoods he'd gotten himself mixed in with this time.

The crumpled scrap exhibit A had sent her packing to Tulips, the very stinking arse of the city, and it was all downhill from there if her sources (lips loosed by a double scotch on the rocks and a sound pistol-whipping) were correct, and they usually were, sad to say. The screech stopped on a rusty nickel right in front of everything wrong with a city on the edge of the world. A warehouse tumbling to ruin off the jagged edge of the world that's round everywhere but here on the edge, a giant brick scab that God's aching to itch off his infected parasite planet, and such a lovely setting for a shootout. And that was hoping for the best.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode written by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 12

What broke through? What broke through? What broke through was an excellent intellect gone bad from too many stockyard beatings, bartender's your only friend, but still, he knows he didn't do this. He may have killed a man or two, but not directly, not with the icecracker tip of an ice pick poke poke. He might, once in a while, be known for fluttering around town on the back of the blackout butterfly but not this. His tormentors tortured his tired frame until he vanished vaulting over his lumpy and bruised cerebrum into the darkness of his reptile mind, incidentally the most highly cultivated part of his once-nimble brain, and then they did something bad? Or did he do it himself? The blood on his hands met the red of his bloodshot eyes and made friends, howdyado, you're guilty.

Doubt at the thought of lost hours. Killing hours? Or are they dying hours? Might as well be manacled to the floor, jack, cause you're not getting out of this one if those sirens have anything to scream about it.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode written by Matt Fontaine

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

Noir Car, Episode 10

Meanwhile, in an even more pitiful part of the metropolis, on a mattress much harder than the floor, he rests in blackness after a hard afternoon of kidney punches and boxed ears. In the soothing, somnambulant service of his dreams walked his memory, reminding him of his first her.

When he hit the jukebox, his quarter stayed stuck inside, jammed in the tunnel at the end of which lay the mechanical click that set in motion musical fulfillment. A quick feminine finger enters the frame and raps the yellow, bubbling arch of the machine just so, so the coin let go and dropped. "Petty cash," she says, "it's all petty cash. I know a good pennies from bad, I can smell the copper burning," and walked on through without him needing to see her face. Ka-chink and those soft strains, Duke's tickling black fingers on the ghostly white keys etched back in black plastic floated his favorite melody, his favorite, Satin Doll. She'd made music for him with a flick of her finger, not like a whore but like a god, in her feel for the weight of a coin, for the gravity of everyday things, for the motion that sets all other things in motion.

For him it was the con, this magic flick of the finger that set everything right like dominoes standing at attention. The con was his magic trick that made him believe in life, that made his spine tingle with impossible dreams, like we believe the magician can cut a lady in two without leaving mark. No regular man could do that, and no regular man could bring his dreams into being (albeit at the mark's expense) so quickly and so smoothly as this sidewalk find-the-peanut three-card monte hood.

There, in his memory, he stood staring at the effervescent jukebox. There, standing, in his memory, he fell in love once more without even looking at her face.

TO BE CONTINUED
this episode by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 9

She touches her tongue to her lips quickly, so as not to put forth the impression that she was that kind of girl. Her mouth is filled with the sands of what not to say, and utterly lacking the keys that will unlock the lips of these usual suspects with unusual skills. Every eye in the bar watches as she takes a shot with her left hand, and tenses to shoot with her right. The rum rolls down her throat, over her voicebox and steadies the shaking in her lungs. A skeleton key sentence clatters against her teeth as she swivels with her hips to survey the silent bar. Save said jukebox, now ringing out Nina Simone Don’t let him take me honey, don’t let him handle me, every eye in the bar calculated her hand on her hip as she stood and said, "I’m looking for a man with cement under his fingernails." Nina sings out I love you, Porgy and her mind flashes to how she got in this splinter-floor, cast iron door den of undeserved trouble.

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 9 by Sonya Walker

Noir Car, Episode 8

…sacks of oranges that’d been beat against something hard for an hour or two. She ran two fingers over the ass of her piece and pushed through the door, muttering a few words recalled from a thick book with gold leaf.

The haze of the joint, the cruel fog of blood and booze that settles on a place after years of bad tidings, reached out and tugged her inside. Shirley Valentine was trapped inside the jukebox, wailing about strangers in love. Shirley had a good voice, once, but after it was filtered through this room it sounded like a mortally wounded cat. With a headache.

A smattering of thugs swiveled their stools to memorize her hips through small eyes that took cover in their sockets like soldiers hunkered in foxholes. These men looked as if they could never have been babes in their mother’s arms. These men looked like they had just come off a greasy conveyor belt at the end of some desperate, ugly machine.

She passed them, keeping as much femininity out of her stride as possible. She tried to walk like her Father, who had worked all those docks all those years, and had only bestowed one piece of parental wisdom: Don’t wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was certain, as she pulled up to the end of the bar and motioned to the man with the apron, that given her current situation, she was not heeding her Pop’s advice.

Someone whistled, a low, drawn-out sound aimed at her derriere, emerging from the murky darkness of the card tables in back. She pulled back her coat a bit, so that the electric red of the neon beer signs reflected the steel tucked into her waist. The barkeep, who had aimed to ignore her by polishing a glass, put his towel down. The room shifted into second gear as tension arrived like a swarm of flies on a hot pile. Blurred edges became sharp, standing at attention. It was the feeling a can of napalm gets when it hears a match get struck.

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 8 by Tim Sanders

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

Noir Car, Episode 6

to release the tension, to keep from explosion, to get to where she needs to go. She knows which direction, but the destination is hazy. A page from the phonebook crumpled between her fingers. Heading over the wrong side of the tracks, where she always backtracks, tracing her steps into the night before to find the floor she left her keys on, the floor she scraped her knees on in the hazy gaze of the night before. She doesn’t need to watch the road, the car is driven by the neon glow of EATS DRINKS DANCING. 'Whatever suits your fancy can be found for a price here', they'll whisper in your ear, when the music’s taken all your sense away. She passes up the street signs for a crooked side side alley, not meant for a lady, but she's got a ladies helper in the holster on her hip. The one gift he gave her would act as a savior; he knew she had a steady hand.

Cuts the lights, cuts the motor, takes a moment to load her with lead.

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 6 by Sonya Walker

Noir Car, Episode 5

...knowing that the princess phone white like princess bones could only hold news, good or bad, which would shake her from her showered absolution. She knows the noise, the sound of the phone, the ring that tells tales, the ring that always calls forth unsavory adventures, the ring that lets the night in. Let the machine get it.

She's drying behind her pale ears, tipping her head and trying to shake the water out, when the machine clicks and picks up the phone. She halts, half-hoping to hear the a salesman's computer coldly cut off her machine's advances, but she hears something instead of the nothing she'd hoped for. The speaker speaks, a whispery mumble rising to one nearly clear word then a clash and clatter, a big bad sound that shakes her teeth.

It's his voice, of course. The one she'd just washed off in the scalding shower like sulfur from rotting roses. It's his goddamned voice. Of course, she can't resisit. What's that word?, she thinks, against her will. What's that word and where is he calling from and why am I even wondering when I wish he was dead?

Against her will to stay alone, she steps, one, two, three, quick to the irresistible machine and rewinds and listens, rewinds and listens, rewinds and listens, until the word gets more or less clear and she can't stand to hear the crashing that cuts it off. It's his voice, it's his, the only one he has and the only one she hears, the one when he's in trouble, because he's always in trouble, at least when he bothers to call at all.

The word is clear, she thinks she hears the word. Looking the smoking gun of a word up in the phone book, it tells her all she needs to know: that the night has just begun and she's along for a ride to the hot dog stand from Hell. She puts on clothes and slams on her makeup, steps inevitably down the stairs, chasing the sound of the door she slammed behind her. Piling her sleepy self into her sand-colored Studebaker, pushing the clutch and revving the engine,

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 5 by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 4

when she's suprised to be alone.

She's sober now, and sauntering into the shower in the silence of the hour and the nights too hot to sleep. She swears he's somewhere she doesnt want him to be. Hanging on the shoulder of the road, handling the shoulders of a rouge-cheeked good for nothing girl who doesn't know where he's been. Betting against his better judgement, laying in a liars lounge chair...he could be anywhere, but she only knows where he's not.

She's towelling off and the telephone is sounding its teltale two AM tone. She reaches, and retreats...

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 4 by Sonya Walker

Noir Car, Episode 3

The patter of his own noseblood falling to the ground roped his mind into a memory, years ago, the sound of wet brown rocks blindly dripping and dreaming like his busted nose, dementia of love he, he, didn't, not quite, didn't know, her, face, it was, well, he couldn't...he couldn't say it, couldn't say it too...her face...her eyes were, like the brown rocks, dripping cold...cold ocean water, and the memory was punctuated with sharp toothed pain, a loose mouthed mastery of nerve endings shouting now and then but the ocean and the dripping brown rocks called him back to stepping out of the car onto the soft sand, taking her soft hand and walking from the edge of the road that always only ended up leading to the nowhere of now, but then, then, she sang him a soft song in the ear of his history, that landed like blood drops drip drip drip from the heart, far away from the moment he met a man he never met at all, who took him hand in hand in fist in face from the soft singing sands where he and his love once walked on blood drips drip drip drop. As he's alone he falls asleep until It's dark outside and after being back in the bar she's back in the street walking home to her home where he's not awake or asleep but just not, he's somewhere else as she opens the door and she knows it so she's surprised when

TO BE CONTINUED
episode 3 by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 2

“Looks like I’m overdressed,” replied the captor to the groaning ache of opening eyes, dried from the vision of too much night, too few punctuation marks except the occasional misplaced, comma and rolled over to see the ceiling of possibility, the limit of his own laugh, the busted bloody tooth now no doubt deserved in his drunkenness. The last thing he remembered was her spilt Scarlett splashing into the street and trails of glittering glass hucked at the last taxi cab, followed by famous words, “you lousy bastard!” fading into the air behind. He wished he’d not thought of staying, had not asked her to rescue him, because besides a better mousetrap the human mind can cobble cathedrals of shame out of the fading mirror of amnesia as it shatters with each second, each breath. When would he be big enough to see the whole thing? Only after another forgotten bloody tooth? Only after she asked him to buy her one more drink? Only after she quit chasing him, spilling her drink again and again, deciding finally, forever, to stay sitting, facing him with her back, her eyes occupied with the dewy drama of television and the eternal happy hour? When would he quit being worth the kindness of the fists of strangers? When would what he knows quit making him forgetful? His captor rubbed bandaged fists and took a drag from a cigarette, feeding the cancer in his heart, waiting for the truth to emerge. The bloody nose recalled the spilt Scarlett, running after him in rivulets, his roped wrists the compulsion to flee, the bondage of broken promises.

TO BE CONTINUED
espisode 2 by Matt Fontaine

Noir Car, Episode 1

"Give her the slip" he called out, from his gangster car standpoint at the corner bar, at the corner of the bar she sits sulking and sipping her Scarlett O’Hara (Southern Comfort and some sort of sweetener), he saunters up and smiles that smile she’s seen somwhere else.
"Honey, he wants me to hike out of here" he hisses through his half hearted smile. Her slip is showing, He hails a hansom cab and hears her scream at him in the silent corner bar. He gave her that slip and he gave her the slip and she screams in stereo in that hansom cab. "Isn’t she just that way," he says, "Isn’t it just that way..."

TO BE CONTINUED...
episode 1 by Sonya Walker