B-Ville, Ch 3
In which our hero, having hardly set out, nevertheless takes a brief pause for a belated lunch.
Welcome to B-Ville, a dyke noir novel in progress set in a slightly dystopian, post-plague France where a serial killer forces the flatfoot, Dik, to navigate between the power-sharing neo-Katar functionaries and far left Green Bloc.
B-Ville, Chapter 3
There was a mirror by the elevator door. I scowled at myself, thought I looked pretty tough for middle-aged, thimble-sized dyke, garden variety gweene, complete with a shaved head, coffee-stained trousers, and a tat crawling up a brown, insufficient neck.
I scowled, then pasted on an ugly grin. Marthe was right. It was a dirty business. I didn’t like it all that much. Not on days like today when a boyfriend gets mad and pulls out a gun, and hits the lady walking by on the way to her shitty cashier job. And there was no time to mourn my own loss. No, I didn’t like it much at all.
The elevator groaned as it descended towards the street.
Cops asking about the park and a couple of dates. That wasn’t a lot to go on. She couldn’t even remember which dates. Just that there’d been three or four of them spread over a couple of months. At least it had quit raining. Standing on the curb next to my bike, my stomach growled so loudly it startled even the drug dealers, so I decided to duck into a grey little restaurant with grey linoleum, grey chairs, a couple of gray faces at gray tables eating piles of grey food. The only bright thing was the TV on the far wall which flickered and screamed.
I stood at the counter as far from it as possible. The bartender was rubbing a blue and grey striped cloth over a battered espresso machine. Her blonde hair shot out in wiry ringlets from her head. She had blue eyes, with dark smears under them, nails bitten to the quick on bony hands. Half her left ear was fake. They hadn’t bothered to match the skin tones, just stuck it on there. She didn’t speak, just came over and stood in front of me, now energetically rubbing a glass with her dirty towel.
I glanced up at the board with sandwiches. “Give me a half of beer and… a sandwich with cantal.”
She shook her head, “All out.”
“Ham?”
She shook it again.
“Omelette?”
“Nope.” She sounded almost smug.
“Bring me whatever you have.”
“Good choice,” she said, writing something on a slip of paper, before she went away again to slip it through a window, her face even longer and grayer than before.
I got out my tablet and called up the file I’d opened after Chris had died. There was the 495.N/C they’d sent me. Most of it redacted except for that word, morte. Dead. Then there was the 497.B/X when her own killer bit the dust. His name… it wasn’t on the form anymore. It had been, I could have sworn. But… Forms got changed online, had little bugs attached that updated their children whenever you went online. I shoved my screen back in my pack, and closed my eyes, breathed in and held it. Slowly exhaled. Paused. Breathed in again. Paused. Didn’t scream.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kelly At Large to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.