Noir

by Christopher Moore

and only then did I scream. Not the scream of a startled little girl, mind you, but a manly scream: the scream of a fellow who has caught his enormous dong in a revolving door while charging in to save a baby that was on fire or something.

She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes—a

And even though I didn’t know where she came from, where she went to, or how to find her, it felt like I was going to see her again, and when I did, something was going to happen—something big and strange and hopeful, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

The fog lay spread across the city like a drowned whore—damp, cold, smelling of salt and diesel—a sea-sodden streetwalker who’d just bonked a tugboat . . .

“That doll has more angles than she’s got curves, and you know it. If a guy is going to wreck his life on a dame, it should at least be a surprise.

Sammy’s got all the perspective of a bucketful of dark.

When she wasn’t crackin’ wise or slingin’ plates, Stilton carried a little sack of sorrow with her that could knock the sparkle out of her wide Lucille Ball eyes and the shine off her surprised hair.

She took a pull on her drink until it made a delicate slurping noise—the straw at the bottom of the glass like a tiny parched elephant. She slid the empty glass to him.

It wasn’t love yet, so he might still escape, but he didn’t remember ever liking anyone quite as much as he found himself liking this broad, and with that he smiled like a dog at a barbecue for the blind.

“Free my people!” “I will. I am the Harriet Tubman of your breasts.”