Miami Noir Read Online Free

Guy’s limp hand and stepped back to size him up.
    “This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit.”
    Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he’d come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.
    Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.
    Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.
    The gin and tonic was spinning inside his skull.
    “You son of a bitch.” Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”
    “Hey, professor, come on in, the water’s fine.” It was a woman’s voice he vaguely recognized.
    He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.
    She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.
    “Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”
    Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred—meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred—round magazine.
    Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.
    “A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.
    The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.
    “You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”
    “I used you , Guy? I fucking used you ?”
    Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.
    “Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”
    Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.
    Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.
    “Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”
    Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right biceps and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.
    “This is what you wanted,