Just a Kill in the Dark...

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If she hadn’t gotten that edge in her voice and hadn’t started to think she had certain rights around the establishment; if she had just kept on as she started — placid, dumb, sultry and willing — she wouldn’t have ended up beside me in the front seat of the Cad, out cold, her head bobbing against the inside door handle, her long pretty legs outstretched like the legs of a rag doll. When the street lights shone in through the window on her side, I noticed that her wool skirt had a long rip in the hem. Mike had probably caught it on something when he had carried her down into the drive and heaved her into the seat. I remembered how he had stepped back, grinning and dusting his palms together before he waved me off.

I knew the place for it. A patch of woodland beyond Concord. She moaned and shifted and from then on every exhalation made a bubbling sound in the corner of her mouth.

She didn’t come out of it until I turned off the two-lane concrete onto the rutted dirt road, the headlights turning the scrub brush silver in front of the car. Suddenly she sat up, moaned again and felt tenderly of the lump over her ear. A little blood clotted the pale blonde hair.

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