So Megan liked the Dorothy Hughes thang, meaning it will be published in whatever book it’s going to be published in, extending my immortality by another 400 words.

Here’s some Hughes passages I scribbled down as I was researching it:

Her eyes were slanted, her lashes curved long and golden dark. She had red-gold hair, flaming hair, flung back from her amber face, falling to her shoulders. Her mouth was too heavy with lipstick, a copper-red mouth, a sultry mouth painted to call attention to its promise. She was dressed severely, a rigid tailored suit, but it accentuated the lift of her breasts, the curve of her hips. She wasn’t beautiful, her face was too narrow for beauty, but she was dynamite.

Belligerence wasn’t like her, she was slow and sultry and she didn’t give a damn for him or anyone.

"I don’t know what I thought," she said. "How does anyone ever know what they really think?"

Laurel couldn’t disappoint him. He’d known what she was the first time he’d looked at her. Known he couldn’t trust her, known she was a bitchy dame, cruel as her eyes and her taloned nails.

– from In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

He was frightened of her, the same fright he had felt earlier when twilight was deepening over the little plaza and the absence of life under the lights and banners a thing unreal. She was unreal, alien; yet she belonged and he was the alien. She, not the kid, was Fiesta; something deep and strong and old under the tawdry trapping, under the gimcracks. Something he didn’t understand because he was a stranger.

He didn’t recognize the man with the full greasy mouth, the red rimmed eyes, the dirty collar line at first. Not until the mouth opened to push in a hunk of bread and meat. He was looking in a mirror.

He took a big, happy breath. "They are funny people, the Gringos, no? Maybe once they were proud peoples but I do not think so. Proud peoples do not root like pigs for fifty cents, two bits, a dollar, do they? Proud people are too proud."

And without warning his eyes came against the eyes of Pila. He had the same shock he’d had last night when he first looked upon her. The same remembrance of terrors, of a head of stone which reduced him to non-existence. His first quick reaction was to turn away, not to recognize her. But he could not. She was there. She existed. He was the one without existence, the dream figure wandering in this dreadful nightmare.

"The world doesn’t care much what happens to us. Least that’s the way I’ve always figured. Like this table." He flattened his hand on the painted metal. "It doesn’t care if you bump your shin on it. It doesn’t even know you’re around. That’s the world."

Blindly, he stumbled on.

Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy Hughes