The stranger Lido was laid out nearly flat, his head pressed at a hard angle against the dent it had made in the rotting wood of the deserted bank's back wall. He stared crazily ahead, his normally narrow squint eyes huge and white with unaccustomed shock. His slack mouth puckered, and half-spat a wash of blood onto the front of his own clean, white shirt.
Focus returned to his eyes. "I don't want to have to kill you, Rose Althea."
Rose Althea held one of the stranger's own six-guns out dead level at arm's length. The dull gray barrel's pitiless pitch-black eye was locked in a staring contest with the stranger's watery left eye.
Rose Althea's legs were trembling in a wide stance. Her wet torso shook with ragged, gasping sobs. Her lovely head swayed, eyes fixed forward, one black lock of long hair matted to a sweat- and tear-streaked cheek; her long, pale neck a tower listing on its unsteady foundation of bare shoulders. Somehow, her long right arm held out shock straight: as white, smooth and immobile as the stony, accusing finger of a carved giant's marble hand.
"You're not going to have to," Rose Althea began. "Because..." her voice caught. The stranger's eyes had strayed upwards by millimiters to find Rose Althea's gaze. All the shock had gone out of them. All the accustomed hard, mean squint had gone as well. Rose Althea felt she was looking at a man she'd never known before. A man she wished she could have had a chance to meet.
The trigger pulled all the way back, dragging her finger with it.
1 comment:
That's like..........a cliffhanger!
Also, Rose and Lido are totally the new Kurt and Courtney only less junkie-like and mad. And making slightly more sense.
Post a Comment