Noir

The tires burned a dark smear into the pavement.  The suicidal maniac I had been following for months was getting away, again.  My partner Ellis commandeered a 97 Toyota Corolla off of the street, and we jumped it.
It took about 12 seconds to get it to sixty, and after awhile we were on our way.  We had to catch him, now, before he got on the freeway.  We had no backup anymore, we were off the grid, no help.  Ellis fired a few shots from the passenger side, but no luck.  We swerved off into some country road. God help us where we would end up.  We drove for a few miles into some deserted hell, farmhouses galore.  It was some hour into the night, and the old fellows were probably sound asleep.  Good, i thought, they would be driving into hostile gunfire at about 3 miles an hour.
He led us on, probably into a trap, but we followed.  The road had turned into some dust layer in between mounds of grass.  Finally he led us to some hellish shack in the middle of-the middle of nowhere.
I pulled out my .38 and crawled behind the car.  He hadn't slipped out any lead aspirin yet, but after all we had been through this was not the place to be merciful.  This guy had to go down, now or never.
We crouched and started to make our way into the shack.  The outisde was covered with antique Coca Cola signs, NEHI beverage signs, wonderbread signs.  Anything from the early 50's would be found here.  In my youth my father and I would have admired these, but now....


I slipped my revolver out and pushed the door open.  The house stunk like a thousand garbage compactors had let milk sit in them since the dawn of time.  Tears flowed down my cheeks.  The gas was so unbearable, so inhumane, Ellis had to push me on.  Most of the rooms were abandoned, and within them lay an assortment of miscellaneous items: lamps, dingy furniture, old blankets, sleeping bags, something a homeless man would envy.  The smell was lessened near the end of the house, but it got darker as we moved on.
The man had obviously hidden somewhere, but we couldn't find anything.  We reached the end of the house and found a dismal bedroom, full of guns and the like.  A lifetime of jail awaited this bastard, aside from all the other sick things he had done.  We doubletraced our steps, walked back and over again through this nightmare of a once lovely honeymoon house.
Finally Ellis let out a yell, and with my safety off I slammed the door to the kitchen open with my .38 aimed.
The creep had him in a hold, and I had only a fraction of a second to pull the trigger.  It bounced off some dirty pan and the shadow ran into the refrigerator, leaving Ellis in a coughing fit.
As soon as he gained his breath, we crawled into the dank fridge and made our way down a claustrophobes dream staircase.  I only had a few matches, thanks to my habit with Camel, and we made our way down further.  Step after step, like a boat letting loose its sails in the ocean and giving up, endlessly going down and down stairs.
We somehow reached a climax at the end, and a dimly lit room awaited us.  We unholstered and buckled up for the ride.
WHAP! I was hit in the back of the head...going into a spiral.....