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

seventeen, plaited hair and middy blouse, slipping off a bus at Sixth and Los Angeles Street a dozen years ago.
    The whole ride down, nearly two days, this girl could think of nothing but what she had done with the man in the cave. But that it was okay because the man smelled of Pinaud’s Lilac and was a talent agent and had an office on Hollywood Boulevard, or so his creasy card said. The girl was sure there would be many more cards.
    The girl—all those years still ahead of her, her teeth turning soft and the rest of her hard—who believed in everything with a pure, pure heart.
    The girl who just knew that the world would give her things because life had been hard already and she was very pretty and was made to be a star.
    The girl who had written, in grease pencil, on the inside of her cardboard suitcase, “Daddy loves you and your big gold dream.”
    The girl who held her hands out, wrists up, for every man with a casting sheet and a promise.
    June slipped the pearl-gray pelts around the young girl’s shoulders.
    “I didn’t think you’d really let me,” the girl said.
    “I wasn’t sure,” June said.
    “Are you taking me to the pink room?” the girl asked as they rose.
    “Yes,” June said. “That’s where I’m taking you.”
    The walls were cold and even wetter and June held the girl’s hand behind her the whole way up.
    The girl tried to stop under the heavy hanging red bell tree. The coat tangling beneath her, she tried to fix her shoe.
    “You can’t stop here,” June said. “You can’t stop.” And she grabbed the girl’s hand tighter, which was cold as silver.
    “Don’t stop,” June said. “And never let go of my hand.”
    In the courtyard, with all the stone faces turning, all the ivory heads lifted, tusks raised, June pulled the mink over the girl’s head.
    No longer lost, June guided the girl through the flaming center of the house, which she knew better than her own. Better than anyone.
    She didn’t let anyone see the girl.



See the Woman

Lawrence Block

    Red light’s on, so I guess that thing’s recording. This whole project you’ve got, this oral history, I’ll confess I didn’t see the point of it. You running a tape recorder while an old man runs his mouth.
    But it stirs things up, doesn’t it? The other day—Wednesday, it must have been—all I did was talk for an hour or two, and then I went home and lay down for a nap and slept for fifteen hours. I’m an old man, I got up every three hours to pee, but then I went back to bed and fell right back asleep again. And dreams! Can’t recall the last time I dreamed so much.
    And then I got up, and my memory was coming up with stuff I never thought of in years. Years! All the way back to when I was a boy growing up in Oklahoma. You know, before the dust, before my old man lost the farm and brought us here. Memories of nothing much. Walking down a farm road watching a garter snake wriggling along in a tractor rut. And me, kicking a tin can while I’m walking, just watching the snake, just kicking the can. Del Monte peaches, that’s what the can was. Why’d anybody remember that?
    Mostly, though, what I kept going over in my mind was something that happened in my first year on the force. If it’s all the same to you, that’s what I’ll talk about today.
    Now, you know I wasn’t but sixteen when the Japs bombed Pearl, and like just about everybody else I was down there the next morning looking to get into it.
    They sent me home when I told them my age, so I waited two days and went back, and wouldn’t you know the same sergeant was behind the desk. This time I told him I was eighteen, and either he didn’t remember me from before or he didn’t give a damn, and they took me.
    I went through basic and shipped out to England, and from there to North Africa, and what happened was they cut me out of the infantry and made an MP out of me. But I don’t want to get sidetracked here and tell war stories. I came through it