Noir

by Christopher Moore

everyone looks up like rats caught in a spotlight eating the brains of a friend dead in a trap.

checking my back bar and my kegs before I started my shift. As usual, Sal had restocked nothing at all.

That mug couldn’t catch a cough in a tire fire.

Really, really liked her. 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.

“She changed your oil and put the chill on you all in one night?”

Gene Krupa in my chest.

Who

“Yeah, if you see him, tell him I said to piss up a rope.”

“Right, so I tells these xylophone cocksuckers that I ain’t never heard of you, and if they don’t scram I’m gonna go get my uncle Bert from upstairs and he’ll blast them with his forty-five, ’cause he doesn’t go for strangers asking me stuff, ’cause he’s a cop.”

I had never been inside a whorehouse before. I was not apprised of the etiquette, and I was not in the market to purchase some tail, yet I sensed it would not be kosher to stroll in and announce that I was just browsing,

My entrance drew an eye from here and there, but only a substantial dame in a green-sequined evening dress and enough face paint to refinish a carload of clowns approached:

“What do you mean, nothing? It looks like if we didn’t open the door you’d be giving Jeff here the razzmatazz.”

“I told my uncle Howie about you guys last time you was here and he said you guys were probably morons from Salt Lake City. Stupid black suits. Morons, that’s what you are.”

“Is he asking to motorboat your boobs good-bye?”

“Perky Noir,”