[The story begins here.]

"Buy me a drrink, sholder?"

"I'm not a soldier, sister. Not now. Not any more."

"Well, you don' look like a sailor."

She laughed like a wood-chipper eating a pint bottle of rotgut bourbon. She was loaded to the gills. Just another worn-out bottle blonde on the wrong side of forty in a lonely town, scraping the rent together with her shopworn carcass, the only way she knew how. That's what I thought, all right. Yeah, I'm a real judge of character. I was a fine old judge of character as I let her keep leaning against me because I didn't have the heart to push her away. I was a real smart fella. I knew it all, I did, right up until the moment I looked down and saw her shoes. Shoes two feet long. Bright red, turned up at the end. And then I felt the muzzle of a .32 against my ribcage.

[ previous | begin | next ]