USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series by Johnny Temple

Author:Johnny Temple [Temple, Johnny]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Detective, Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Literary, Collections & Anthologies, Thriller
ISBN: 9781617751899
Google: lWkymgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1617751847
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2013-11-04T11:00:00+00:00

* * *

Charlie comes into the kitchen in his skivvies and a T-shirt and sits down at the table.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?” she asks.

“The other girls are all at work, aren’t they?” he asks.

She pours him a cup of coffee and sets it down in front of him. Then she puts a little margarine in a pan, waits for it to bubble, and throws in two slices of bread and fries them.

He can feel her impatience and aggravation. He hasn’t done a damn thing but hang around for a month, and even though she says it’s all right with her, he knows it isn’t. Women can’t stand a man not working. Just a fact of life—it was that way with his mother and his old man and it’s the same way with Millie and him now. She knows he can’t get a job, knows he can’t ever get a job with a DD on his record, so she’s wondering how long he plans on living off her and he knows that’s what’s on her mind.

Has been for the past couple of weeks, if you want to know the truth. Since that night he woke up with Millie shaking his shoulder, telling him he was having a bad dream.

“It’s okay, baby,” she was saying. “It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.”

He didn’t want to tell her it wasn’t a nightmare but real life, and she asked him, “Where were you?”

“None of your damn business,” was all he said, and he felt that his cheeks were wet with tears and then he remembered that he’d been crying and moaning, over and over again, “I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back…”

She asked him, “Where? Where don’t you want to go back to, Charlie?”

“I told you it was none of your damn business,” he said, and slapped her across her pretty little Betty Boop mouth. When she came back in from the kitchen she had ice in a towel pressed against her lower lip and there was a little streak of blood on her chin and she said, “You ever hit me again, I’ll call the SPs and turn you in.”

But she didn’t throw him out.

She knew he had no place to go, no money, and would probably get picked up by Shore Patrol. So she pressed the ice to her lips and let him stay, but nothing was ever as good between them after that and he knows that he broke something between them that he can’t fix.

Now she sets the plate down just a little hard.

“What?” he asks, even though he knows.

“What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Eat my breakfast,” he answers.

“And then what?”

He almost says, Slap that look off your puss if it’s still there. Instead he shoves a piece of fried bread into his mouth and chews it deliberately. A woman should let a man have his coffee and breakfast before she starts in on him. The day is going to

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