Sin City: The Big Fat Kill by Frank Miller.
Title: Sin City: The Big Fat Kill.
Author: Frank Miller.
Genre: Graphic novels, fiction, crime, political dissent.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1994-1995.
Summary: For Dwight, sometimes standing up for his friends means killing a whole lot of people... Not for revenge. Not because they deserve it. Not because it'll make the world a better place. There's nothing righteous or noble about it. Dwight's gotta kill them because he needs them dead. And now, when the shaky truce between Sin City's lawless Old Town and the police is threatened to be broken, bringing back the dark times before the girls ran Old Town themselves, Dwight knows just what he has to do.
My rating: 8.5/10
My review:
♥ "Us girls," she chuckles, "us helpless little girls." She tosses me an all-business smile that only a dead man could ignore.
But that's what I am. A dead man. And that's how I want to stay. That's how I have to say.
Don't look at her, the smart part of me says. Stay calm. Stay cold. Don't play with fire. You know what happens when you play with fire. Murderer, never forget: you've got innocent blood on your hands and nothing's ever going to wash it off.
♥ It wasn't "stop." Shellie wasn't saying "stop." If I'd waited and listened I would've known. I could've warned the girls to go easy. To settle for scaring them off.
Shellie didn't say "stop." She said "cop." He's a cop. Detective Lieutenant Jack Rafferty. "Iron Jack," the papers call him. A god damn hero cop.
It's held for years, the shaky truce. The cops get a slice of the profits and free entertainment when they throw a party. The girls get to administer their own brand of justice. They get to defend their own turf. If a cop blunders into the neighborhood and he's not shopping for what the girls are selling, they send him packing. Sure, they'll shoot up his squad car. They'll steal his gun and his pants. Maybe they'll send him back wearing a dress, just for laughs. But they'll send him back. Alive. That's the rules. That's the truce.
The truce. The cops stay out. That leaves the girls free to keep the pimps and the mob out. The mob. This'd be the a dream come true for the mob. Iron Jack Rafferty, hero cop, tortured, mutilated, murdered by the girls of Old Town. The cops will come down on us like the wrath of God if they find out. Old town will be left wide open.
It'll be war. The streets will run red with blood. Women's blood. All because one slob tossed back a few too many. A slob with a badge. Jackie-boy. You son of a bitch.
♥ My warrior woman. She almost yanks my head clean off, shoving my mouth into hers so hard it hurts, her kiss a savage thing, savage and endlessly angry, an explosion that blasts away all the dull gray years between the now and that one fiery night when she was mine. She'll always be mine. My warrior woman. My Valkyrie. You'll always be mine, always and never. Never.
The fire, baby. It'll burn us both. It'll kill us both. There's no place in this world for our kind of fire. Always and never. If I have to die for you tonight, I will.
♥ The whole time I'm giving orders, Gail's eyes are burning into the back of my skull like a pair of laser beams. She doesn't say a word. If that kiss was our last goodbye it was a damn good one and we'd both just as soon leave it that way.
♥ This time I can't bring myself to tell him to shut up. Sure he's an asshole. Sure he's dead. Sure I'm just imagining that he's talking to me. None of that stops the bastard from being absolutely right about everything he's saying.
♥ Almost makes me burst out laughing. Feels like it;'s been a month since then, and here it's only been three hours. Three hours--and a lifetime's worth of bad calls and bad breaks and ugly, nasty business...
♥ 450 B.C.
King Leonidas of Sparta and his personal guard of three hundred men ready themselves for battle. The fate of humanity is at stake.
Out of Persia thunders the mightiest military force ever assembled. The earth shudders with the impact of its march. It drinks the rivers dry. It devours livestock like some hungry, angry god.
It pauses, posed to vanquish tiny Greece, to crush her impertinent invention of democracy and extinguish the only light of reason in the world.
The Spartans are outnumbered a hundred thousand to one--but Leonidas has chosen his battle site with care: the mountain pass called Hot Gates. Funneled into this narrow corridor, the Persians find their numbers useless. The Spartans hold their ground just long enough for slumbering Greece to wake and rally her sons for war.
The hope of the civilization is kept alive by Spartan courage--and a careful choice of where to fight.
♥ My companions. Dallas. Miho. A hooker and her assassin pal. Nobody's call them the last hope of civilization, but they're my friends and you gotta stand up for your friends.
♥ No more false moves. No more dumb mistakes. Stay smart. Stay cool. Stay steady. It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn.
You gotta stand up for your friends. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.
♥ The storm kicks up a bigger fuss than ever. It's pounding, pummelling, drench-you-to-the-bone rain, the kind that doesn't hit Sin City more than once a year.
I hate the rain. It makes it so damn hard to think straight.
I shake the snot out of my brain and think straight anyway. I grab poor Dallas's car phone and make the most important call of my life. I tell Miho what we're gonna do and how we're gonna do it.
First we gotta rescue Gail. Then comes the kill. The big, fat kill.
♥ Out back. Dozens of them. Armed to the teeth. I'm outnumbered. Outgunned. But the alley is crooked. Dark. And very, very narrow. Funneled into it, they get in each other's way. They can't surround me. Their numbers don't count for so much. Sometimes you can beat the odds--with a careful choice of where to fight.
♥ Where to fight. It counts for a lot. But there's nothing like having your friends show up with lots of guns.
Sudden thunder. The girls all know the score. I made it plain as hell to Daisy when I called her, and she passed it on. They know what we gotta do. No escape. No surrender. No mercy. We gotta kill every last rat-bastard one of them.
Every last one. Not for revenge. Not because they deserve it. Not because it'll make the world a better place. There's nothing righteous or noble about it. We gotta kill them because we need them dead. We need a heap of bloody bodies so when mob boss Wallenquist looks over his charts of profits and losses he'll see what it cost him to mess with the girls of Old Town.
The thunder doesn't stop. We fire and reload and fire and reload and fire and watch their heads explode and their guts fly like butcher's scraps and the alley walls get caked with wet wads of skin and meat and the smoke gets so thick that the things we're pumping bullets into are nothing bit twisted toppling screaming smudges of movement.
The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter and so am I.