Read Suspended In Dusk for Free Online

and began to walk home. A few cars drifted past—one or two drivers sounded their horns for her attention, or called from their open windows—but she ignored them. She only needed a few hundred francs more, and she could go. Fuck Radouane. Fuck this city. She didn’t know why she’d ever thought it was a good idea. There was no point in trying to hold onto the past, no point in trying to find something new. There was no secret paradise out there, no sudden key to unlock a perfect life, and she was as stupid as the rest of them for ever thinking it could happen.
    She walked on, the cigarette smoke a dirty halo around her head, and the clouds continued to streak across the starless sky.
     
    * * *
     
    Michele
     
    I met up with Antoine two days later, outside the pool hall that he liked to call his base of operations. He’d found a car: an ugly grey Citroën Visa with rust in the wheel arches and only one working headlight.
    “The fuck is this?” I asked as I surveyed the wreck. “This thing is foutue before we start!”
    Antoine just shrugged and smiled his unsmiling smile, so I got in and hoped the engine held out until Nantes, or wherever the damn place was supposed to be. We drove for almost four hours. The air in the car was stifling, hot metal and plastic stinking of rubber and staleness. Sweat ran down my back and the waistband of my jeans grew damp, my seat on the worn upholstery becoming a boggy swamp. Antoine rolled two joints and put a cassette on, blasting IAM through the open windows as we ripped along the autoroute. I enjoyed that early part of the journey—rap music and weed and one giant “fuck you” to the blue-haired little biddies and wrinkled old men we passed in the suburbs—but, as we neared the toll roads, Antoine broke out the whisky and attitude.
    He started to talk, to complain and bitch about this guy, Radouane, and what a dummy he was. Antoine knew better, Antoine was going to run rings around him… all of that shit. He sat there, sprawled in the passenger seat, one foot up on the dashboard, smoking and swigging the booze, and I started to think that maybe I wasn’t going to get a nice holiday. I started to feel afraid, and the pounding of the music against the beat of the sun and the road grit that blew in through the open windows began to give me a headache.
    I couldn’t complain, of course. You didn’t complain to Antoine, because he would only respond by laughing at you.
    When we were about half an hour from Nantes, he pulled out a gun.
    “Fuck, mec !” I was so busy gawping at Antoine and his piece, I nearly plowed into a cyclist, and I had to swerve hard. “What the fuck?”
    He just laughed at me, although for once at least it reached his eyes.
    “C’mon, Michele. Don’t pussy out, hey? I told you, we go there, I see Radouane… we get laid and, once all the business is done, we’ll go home. Back in Paris by tonight, huh? All easy. Easy like slow dance, huh?”
    Antoine held the gun up to his cheek, making kissy lips and swaying his head from side to side as the side of the flattish black muzzle pressed into his skin. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, I’d have rolled my eyes and called him an asshole.
    “You know what this is?” he asked, bringing the gun around in front of him, pointing it up at the roof. “You know what’s special about it?”
    I shook my head and kept myself focused on the road. It was coming up to lunchtime, but my whole day had already gone to shit. “No. No, I don’t know.”
    “Glock 20,” Antoine said proudly. “American. I look like Dirty Harry, eh?”
    He laughed again, the fat end of the joint drooping from the corner of his mouth. I didn’t want to say that Dirty Harry carried a Magnum, so I took the bottle of whisky he passed to me and buried my mouth in a big gulp. It burned the taste of the weed away and mixed the stale, hot air into something sour and acrid that coated my tongue. We weren’t far from Nantes. I had been there