L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories Read Free Page A

own mouth seeming to go wider, spreading across her face.
    She felt the girl’s hands on her, and they were walking on the faintest of feet, their tiny shoes tapping on the courtyard.
    They stood under an arching tree hung thickly with long soft blooms like red bells. The bells tickled June’s hair and made her skin rise up.
    “I’ve been here before,” the girl said, eyes saucering. “Have you?”
    “No,” June said, brushing the blooms from her face, the musked scent from her nose. “I don’t think so. Do you know the owner?”
    “I’ve been here before,” the girl whispered. “I know where that hallway goes. I was brought here. I had something done to me here.”
    June didn’t say anything, but the way the girl was tingling her arms around her bare shoulders made her skin quill.
    It was later, maybe much later, and June was shaking off the drink, which had fallen on her like silk, flooding her mouth and covering her eyes.
    Things were starting to turn, and there seemed no life to anything suddenly, not even the bodies pressed close. The girls had hooded eyes, stone faces, lacquered bodies, hard and merciless. The men didn’t seem to have faces at all, only smears of antic pleasure, over as quickly as it began.
    Maybe there was more, June thought.
    But she and the girl were sunk deep into a low velvet couch and it was very hard for her to get up. Finally, she did, and the girl followed.
    It had been years since she’d fallen for slugged booze. When a different man came, this time with a gold-flecked decanter, June refused and the girl did, too, her eyes already like X s.
    “In three weeks, it’ll be 1947,” the girl whispered, then turned and seemed to look at her, blankly. “Did you ever think you’d be so old?”
    June, her head a greening fuzz, felt certain the girl meant you, you, you.
    She felt something rancid rise up in her and that she might say something very cruel, but then she started to wonder if the girl had meant it that way, or had said anything at all. Had she?
    There was music coming from the far end of the courtyard and it drew them, beguiled them.
    Trawling, hypnotized, across the courtyard, through the low thicket of agaves, their crimson-tipped leaves a woman’s nails, razored to crimson points, they couldn’t stop.
    There was a narrow hall that emptied down into some stone-stepped subterranean keep. From within, they heard laughter, keening.
    “I wonder what’s down there?” June asked, the girl’s fingers prickling on her.
    “Is that you, Junie?” a voice shouted from below, the talent agent. “Guess who’s down here.”
    “Huston?” June whispered into to the black, the drink still telling on her, her fingers seeming to slide down the stone wall, which felt wet and private.
    “Come down,” he said, his voice manic and unwholesome.
    Before she could do anything, the girl grabbed onto June so fast and hard June felt herself nearly fall.
    “I don’t think I can go down there,” the girl said. “I think I’ve been down there before.”
    June looked at this frailing girl, a girl like so many she had known. A girl to whom things just happened. June was not that girl and hadn’t been for some time. It had cost her.
    “Suit yourself,” June said, louder than she meant, trying to talk herself into something. “I need a job.”
    She said it hard, but it was an act. The look on the girl, her mouth open and pink, scared her. It reminded her of girls she knew back in Missouri, that family down the street. The Huffs. The girls were never allowed outside. The father hung a razor strop in their bedroom window so boys would stay away. One day, Sally Huff came to school with a red line down her face. In calisthenics, June saw it, the way the red line went all the way down to the top of Sally’s bloomers, and below. At the time, June wondered if any man would ever care about her so much.
    Leaving the girl, who kept calling after her (I don’t think you know, if only I could