Andromeda Smiled

by C.W. Blackwell

About the Author: C.W. Blackwell was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California where he still lives today with his wife and two children. His passion is to blend poetic narratives with pulp dialogue to create strange and rhythmic genre fiction. He writes mostly crime fiction, dark fiction and weird westerns.

Excerpt

Charlie Kane had knocked back three fingers of bourbon and was down to nothing but ice when the girl came through the door. The bartender was counting the till and he paused mid-count with a handful of cash, watching her.

The girl was no regular.

She hovered in the doorway as if she had stumbled into a crime scene, as if she had used all her nerve just getting the door open and now there was no nerve left to go the rest of the way. Charlie watched her in the bar mirror. Petite, mousey. Red hair heavy with rainwater. Her blue eyes darted over the room until they finally settled in one direction.

“She’s lookin at me, ain’t she, Jimmy?” said Charlie. He said it with his head down, looking into his empty glass.

“Uh-huh,” said the bartender.

“Seen her before?”

“Nope.”

Charlie rattled the ice in the glass. “Better hit me again, Jimmy. The drunker I am, the meaner I get and the sooner she’ll leave me alone.”

The girl leaned her umbrella against the wall and went slowly to the bar. She was spinning her phone in her hands.

“You’re Kane, aren’t you? Charlie Kane?” Her voice was quiet, but urgent.

“I ain’t nobody you want to meet, lady.”

“But you were a cop, right? A detective?”

“I used to be a lot of things. Say, you even old enough to be in here?”

“I’ll be thirty next month.”

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