Luke Pines waits in the chill November night next to some dumpsters in the alley behind Noir for his customer to emerge from the back of the restaurant. He knows the place well despite never setting foot inside.
Noir is one of those obnoxiously trendy joints with dim lighting, dark polished surfaces, drifting jazz, and servers that aren’t permitted to write down orders but must memorize them instead. A place where the wealthy and powerful conduct dinner meetings, and the light of day never penetrates.
His younger sister used to work here and confided in him about the arrogant clientele she had dealt with nightly while toiling to pay her way through community college.
“I’ll fuck one of ‘em up, sis. Just say the word,” he once offered. “Seriously.”
They were sitting on a park bench. He had finished a delivery earlier. She was people-watching and scribbling into a notebook what she called “vignettes” or something. She did this whenever she had time, which wasn’t often. Luke never understood why she let him tag along and distract her.
She laughed and launched a playful jab at his chest. But there was sadness in her eyes after she looked up from her writing.
“Big, when are you going to leave this lifestyle behind? You’re better than this.”
Luke shrugged. He actually didn’t have an answer. A cold wind blew dark clouds across the sky. The winter sunlight suddenly snuffed out.
“Thanks for looking out for me, though,” she added, patting his leg and returning to the notebook.
This was all before her pregnancy and the deadbeat boyfriend. And later, her death, which smothered what little sunlight remained in Luke.
The squat busboy—whose name is Sean, Luke was told by his boss—emerges from the bright clamor of the restaurant kitchen, a giant trash bag in one hand. A gasp of light slices the darkness of the alley before the door to the kitchen slams closed. Sean grunts as he lifts the dumpster lid and hefts the bag over the edge. He scans the alley, littered with broken beer bottles and other refuse. The stench of rotten garbage and old booze clings to the air. He glances over his shoulder at the restaurant and walks to Luke.
“Let’s make this quick, man. Some bigwig politician’s coming in soon, so I gotta be back before my bitch boss tears my head off,” the busboy says.
Luke produces the .22 caliber pistol, wrapped in a white cloth (no fingerprints), and lets the kid inspect it for a moment.
“Good to go?” asks Luke.
“Bet, bet,” Sean replies and slips two crisp $100 bills into Luke’s outstretched hand, slips the gun into a pocket, and goes back inside.
“Stay outta trouble, kid.”
Luke never asks questions about why a client needs a gun, even of twenty-something busboys like this little shit. This is how America works, flush with guns and hungry for violence. Luke is happy to play the game and confident he won’t be a runner for much longer, having worked in the trafficking organization for years. He’s been paying his dues and suspects that his boss thinks he is ready for a leadership role.
He knocks down the prices of pieces for women when he can clearly see the need for the transaction. He takes some pride in this, actually. On account of the lumps and bruises his mother had taken from his asshole father when Luke was growing up.
He heads up the alley and toward the front of Noir. That’s when a pitch black SUV with tinted windows pulls up to the valet station. This must be the bigwig the busboy mentioned.
Senator Mitchell Parsons steps out, wearing an ill-fitting plain suit that highlights his portly appearance. The cold evening wind dishevels his thinning hair as he concludes a conversation on his cell phone. Even though Luke had seen this piece of shit on television, touting (with a movie-like rage and conviction) his sponsorship of an anti-abortion bill that would secure the phony holy-roller’s re-election, he was struck by how ordinary the man seemed in person, even pathetic.
Luke’s blood turns cold.
He watches the man as he helps an attractive woman who is half Parsons’ age exit the vehicle. Parsons’ wedding band glints in the light of the street lamps. There’s no wedding ring on her.
The pair is followed by a tense, burly security guard, undoubtedly armed and dressed in a freshly-pressed black suit with sunglasses, reflecting the glare of passing headlights. The entourage enters the restaurant.
Luke has to steady himself against a parked car as a wave of nausea and dizziness sweeps across him. It’s a revulsion as swift as the memory of his little sister dying in her hospital bed.
He suddenly retches and vomits that morning’s bourbon and Snickers onto the sidewalk as a valet gawks at him. A gaunt and sallow reflection stares back at him in the car window.
There was a colleague he worked with in the beginning—a decent guy Luke drank bourbon with years ago—who told him that insane coincidences like this happen more often than one thinks. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but remembered discovering his body after he had swallowed the barrel of a gun and pulled the trigger on a New Year’s Eve. Luke hadn’t understood what the fuck the guy was talking about then.
But now he does. Now the universe, in all of its darkness and cruelty, is presenting Luke with a glorious opportunity.
Luke couldn’t look at his baby sister’s dead face, which was drenched in the harsh light of a fluorescent strip above her bed. The heart monitor stopped beeping 20 minutes ago. He couldn’t ignore the smell of his sister’s blood from her delivery which hung heavily in the air and stained the bed sheets like a grotesque painting made by a madman.
His hands clenched and unclenched in the gloom as a nursing aide in wrinkled scrubs entered and started disassembling the equipment that had kept Maria alive for an hour. After she had given birth to her infant girl, Maria’s vitals plummeted, just as the doctor warned would happen.
Luke gripped the photograph he kept in his wallet. It depicted a teenage Maria, smiling ear to ear, with a younger and healthier version of Luke towering over her, his right arm slung over her shoulder, and their mother (who no longer spoke to Luke because he reminded her of his father) posed in front of a church. The photo was taken after the premiere of a play based on a Maya Angelou short story Maria had written and directed. Luke and their mother’s pride burned through the photograph.
They thought she was going to make something of her life, make a shining example of their broken family.
But he also had another memory of her from that day. She told him with total conviction that he could change the world one day, make something of himself, if only he stayed out of trouble.
He wondered then why she thought he even wanted to do something charitable. From a very young age, he couldn’t escape the belief that he was truly his father’s son, that it ran in his blood. A no-good failure of a man destined to live as his father did, reckless and violent, despite the best efforts of his mother and sister.
But like so many things in the past, it didn’t matter now. Just like Maria’s desire not to have the baby. All he knew was that the law wouldn’t allow her to abort. And it was the law that murdered her. He soon abandoned trying to sort out the morass in his mind.
The nursing aide began to exit, but stopped in the doorway without turning around. “Awfully sorry about your sister, sir. Godforsaken law. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” Luke muttered while staring off into space.
He stood outside her hospital room, unable to identify the feelings that bunched in the pit of his stomach. Unable to walk to the nursery where his newborn niece lay, already an orphan.
After they rolled Maria on a stretcher to the morgue, he fled the hospital and went on a week-long bender, desperately hoping to tamp down the toxic sludge of emptiness roiling within.
Luke chuckles to himself as momentary joy floods his mind. He’s amazed by how quickly that emptiness is now filled with a purifying rage as he stands there, watching Parsons and his entourage enter the restaurant. For a moment, he almost feels whole again as he wipes a thin coating of vomit from his mouth with the back of a hand.
Hands shaking, he takes a bump of white powder from the small vial in his coat pocket, and it hits. Fuck does it hit. He stumbles across the street, nearly oblivious to the honking horns and screeching brakes, and unlocks the passenger door to his car. His fingers graze the .32 pistol in the glove compartment. He lingers over the piece for a moment as indecision, confusion, seize him.
Would Maria want him to do this? The answer came back to him as quickly as a gunshot: No. But that doesn’t matter now.
This world stomped on her without hesitation, so why should he show mercy now and not play by their rules? There was no justice for her in life. But she would have it in death, and he would help deliver.
He quickly tucks the gun into the rear waistband of his jeans and returns to the restaurant.
He enters and walks up to the host’s stand. A pencil-thin man sizes up Luke’s cheap clothes and wired eyes.
“I’m here to pick up a delivery,” Luke says. He feels like some unseen force outside of his body is now guiding his every move and thought.
“We don’t have delivery service,” the man replies with an air meant to make Luke feel three feet tall.
“There must be some mistake,” Luke says as calmly as possible. The meth courses through his veins as his vision narrows and the clatter and conversation of the restaurant recedes. His gaze drifts to Parsons, who sits at a table with his mistress near the back of the restaurant. The Senator’s protection stands five feet away.
“Definitely no mistake. You need to leave. Now.”
Luke laughs and nods as he brushes by the host’s stand. The man tries to grab his arm, but Luke’s left elbow slams into the man’s stomach and with the other hand he sends the shit stain’s head crashing into the stand,down for the count. The man is annoying anyway.
Gasps and cries float up from some of the patrons.
Luke glides across the room. He pulls out the pistol. He’s now watching himself from above as he aims squarely for the bodyguard’s chest. The guard pulls his gun out. Everything is in slow motion now. Fully detached from his body, Luke pulls the trigger.
Two loud pops in quick succession ring across the restaurant. Flesh and blood splatter the wall behind him as Luke’s round bores into the man’s chest. Luke’s ears ring dimly as he fires again. The second round explodes the back of the protection’s head.
Blood, tissue, and skull shower the air. The man crumples to the ground with a permanent expression of surprise etched onto what is left of his face as the gun drops from his hand.
Luke’s trancelike state delays the recognition that the bodyguard lodged a round in Luke’s stomach, but it registers somehow. He glances down, and blood is seeping generously between his fingers. He laughs.
The Senator gasps and abruptly stands up from the table, his eyes round with terror. Luke hears the distant sounds of patrons clamoring toward the front doors and the back kitchen. Distant police sirens mingle with the mournful jazz drifting through the restaurant’s speakers as he aims the gun at the fucker’s head.
The man starts quivering like jelly.
“I owe you one for sponsoring the bill that murdered my baby sister,” Luke says with a grin.
He hears the pitter-patter of his own blood dripping onto the posh carpeting. Still no pain.
“You don’t need to do this,” Parsons pleads as he kneels. He continues to shake. “We-we can t-talk this out.”
“Please forgive me, Maria,” Luke says under his breath as tears roll down his cheeks for the first time since her death.
Parsons starts weeping. “I w-was just d-doing w-what the people want—“
Luke pulls the trigger. The left side of the Senator’s jaw explodes, blood and bits of teeth showering his mistress and the food on their table.
“OH MY GOD!” she screams, ducking under the table, viscera covering her now-childlike face like some obscene spa facial treatment.
“God’s got nothing to do with it, honey,” Luke says, as he puts another round into Parsons’ head.
He winces, drops to his knees. He sets the pistol down gently on the gore-spattered table and places his hands behind his head, waiting to be cuffed by the cops storming into the restaurant.
Luke suddenly returns to his body. Head spinning as blood pours down his jeans and tears flow. He recalls his sister’s belief that he could make a difference in the world, as he collapses to the floor.
[Image Credit : Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash]
by 
Dustin Michael Slaughter
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- God’s Got Nothing To Do With It - May 3, 2026
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