Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  The redhead stops picking at the scab and half rises. “In the dining room, bitch. Gimme my fucking remote.”

  Babs throws the remote behind the television to another chorus of abuse, and I follow her through the kitchen into a dark room where a man in what I take to be a blackjack dealer’s vest and starched white shirt sits with an overhead light shining down on him.

  He’s playing solitaire and wearing a clear green visor, which gives him the pallor of a reanimated corpse and makes him look to my eye more like a dealer from a film than a real one. Remembering my role, I lean against the doorframe and fold my arms across my chest while Babs walks up to the table. I’m expecting something out of a movie, a tense, quiet negotiation followed by a quick exit, so I’m feeling suave and invulnerable, especially with the gun down my pants. It feels pretty cool, actually, like a second dick.

  Babs opens with, “You lying, ripping — off piece of shit.”

  This gets the man to glance up from his game for the first time. “You owe me, Kleindienst.”

  “I don’t owe you shit.” He looks over at me. I rise to my full height and move my hand toward my crotch. The adrenaline is pumping. “Who’s this cunt?” he asks. “One of your Johns?”

  He has just insulted the woman I sort of love, and I’m still feeling the effect of too many cross — tops — I just remembered numbers seven and eight, popped at a filling station around 8 p.m. just in case — and between those and my instinctive gallantry and the drama of the thing, I commit what will in retrospect seem an error in tactics: I pull out the gun and point it at Kleindienst’s face.

  Babs looks at me for a millisecond, stricken. Then she pulls another pistol out of her bag and points it at the man’s face as well. “Turn the light on, Tate.”

  “Tate?” Kleindienst says. “Your muscle’s name is Tate? Oh, my goodness gracious.”

  I turn the light on. “Family name,” I say, trying to sound like a killer.

  The room is white with brass fittings and mirrors. It doesn’t look as cool now as it did in the dark, and I see that Kleindienst is quite a bit younger than I’d imagined, maybe thirty or thirty-five. “Tell that bitch Darva to get in here with everything you got,” Babs tells him.

  He yells through the kitchen and a girl appears who looks like a teenage runaway in a TV movie, complete with cutoff hot pants and a shirt tied at the midriff. “Run fetch me the whole batch,” he says. Then the three of us stand there feeling awkward, or at least the two men do. Babs looks perfectly comfortable.

  A minute later, Darva reappears in the doorway holding up four good — sized packages wrapped in aluminum foil.

  “Take ‘em,” Kleindienst says. “No hard feelings?”

  “You douchebag,” Babs says, and she opens one of the packages, snorts a little bit off the end of her finger. Jangly as I am, I’m relieved when she doesn’t offer me a taste, and after a cursory glance at the other three packages, she seals them back up. “Don’t ever fuck around like that again.”

  We start toward the living room and before we get there Kleindienst yells something at us. I turn to find him holding a big fucking gun pointed in our general direction. I yelp and pull the trigger, and to my horror it just makes a clicking sound. I click again and again in Kleindienst’s direction as Babs fires, hitting him in the knee. He drops his gun, which sounds like a dumbell hitting the wooden floor, and falls clutching the gory knee, howling in an almost canine register. Poor Darva stands in the doorway of the dining room looking like she’s waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

  “You’re going to need to take Billy to the hospital,” she says to the paralyzed trio of Cops fans on the way out.

  We run to the car and I peel away from the curb. I don’t speak until we pull out of the subdivision. “How come mine didn’t go off?” I ask, mortified by my own whining tone.

  “Yeah, like I’m going to give you a loaded gun. I don’t even know you,” she says, and though my heart breaks a little, the events of the last five minutes have prepared me for the idea that there may be more to Babs than I previously fantasized. “Jesus, I didn’t tell you to pull the fucking gun on him. That could have gotten us both killed.”

  “Is the mob going to hunt you down now?” I ask.

  “What mob? Why?”

  “For robbing a big — time dealer?”

  “Billy Kleindienst? Give me a break. Billy’s a fucking courier. Was until tonight, anyway, now he’s just a crippled blackjack dealer. He’s about as low as you on the totem pole. What we took belongs to me and my friend Sandra anyway.”

  “You think they’re going to drive him to the hospital or call an ambulance?”

  She shakes her head. “Don’t give a shit, really. I did feel kind of sorry for that little Darva, though. I think she’s his girlfriend, which is just as pathetic as can be.” She looks over at me, shaking her head. “It all came out good, though, except for him getting it in the leg,” she says with a rueful, easy smile. “Billy fuckin’ Kleindienst.”

  I drive her to her house, in another subdivision. It’s on a rise, and we can see the lights of the Strip in the distance. She’s calmed down considerably, and the conversation is back in the realm of friendly flirtation. “You want to come in and taste some of this?” she asks.

  “No thanks,” I reply. I halfway think she’s going to insist, that the taste of speed is just a pretext for taking me inside and fucking me, but she doesn’t push it, just hands me Skip’s share of the crank and opens her door.

  “Nice meeting you,” she says

  “If you ever come out to L.A., call me and we’ll go see an old movie,” I tell her. I wait until she gets inside before backing out of her driveway.

  Heading into town, I watch those lights blinking and illuminating the early — morning sky, no longer dreading the crashed — out sleeping jag that lies ahead, and for the first time it occurs to me that there’s something I really like about Las Vegas.

  SCOTT PHILLIPS is the author of three of the most highly acclaimed crime novels of recent years. His debut novel, The Ice Harvest, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won a California Book Award. Its follow — up, The Walkaway, continued his success, with the New York Times calling it “wicked fun.” His third novel, Cottonwood, was published by Ballantine.He lives and works in Webster Groves, Missouri.

  Ms. Grimshanks Regrets

  BY NANCY PICKARD

  My dear niece Sarah,

  While I do appreciate your mother’s effort to encourage you to write thank-you notes, I regret to say that your latest one was a bit of a mess. I mean this literally, not cruelly, dear. I realize you are “only” ten, but that is no excuse for sloppy work. Even a child such as yourself, with a so-called “learning disability” can surely do better than that.

  Let me list the ways:

  Wash your hands before you begin. Fingerprints, at your age, are no longer “precious.”

  The book I gave you is entitled Anne of Green Gables, not Ann of Green Gables. Proofreading is next to cleanliness, my dear.

  You wrote that you read the book and “loved it”, but a few examples of things you liked would go a long way toward proving the truth of that claim.

  Do not ask an old woman, “How are you?” The answer is rarely, “Fine.” Write, instead, “I hope this finds you well.”

  I hope this letter finds you willing to do better next time.

  Your loving Great-Aunt,

  Phyllis

  PS. Please tell your mother not to waste her budget on such fine stationery next time. You are but a young girl. Dime-store writing will do just fine for you.

  Phyllis Shank laid down her fountain pen, folded the notepaper in half, and inserted it in its matching envelope, which she then addressed, sealed, and stamped. She had only two more mailings to prepare on this lovely, sunny Saturday morning in June, and a stack of similar notes already completed. She would have looked forward to this weekly task were it not for the sad fact that the world needed
so much improvement and she had so little time to devote to it, what with her gardening and volunteer work now that she was retired from teaching. But at least now that she was no longer molding 9th — grade minds-or what passed for minds — she had this opportunity to address others who might benefit from her counsel.

  Dear Mrs. Carson,

  Your novel, Love’s Mystery, came highly recommended to me by a person I had long considered to be a friend. After reading only the first chapter, I now know two things that I did not know before:

  No one who would recommend any of your books to me could possibly know me very well. Apparently, she is not the friend I thought she was, a mistake for which I do not blame her, but only myself. You may rest assured that I have also written to her to tell her so.

  Publishing standards have declined shockingly, which I pointed out in my letter to your publisher. It is clear that you have some talent, which makes it even sadder that you would waste it on such a tasteless story with such offensive language in it. I’m sure you do not use those words in your own life, so I cannot imagine why you would inflict them on your would-be readers.

  I regret to tell you that I will never check out any of your other books from the library, nor can I in good conscience recommend them to my acquaintances.

  Yours truly,

  Phyllis Shank

  Proofread. Fold. Insert. Address. Seal. Stamp.

  From the stack of offenses she had collected from the past week, Phyllis picked up the thickest pile. It was composed of several articles from the local newspaper, each article marked up with strong red ink — grammar, punctuation, and spelling corrected, questions of fact circled, composition corrected with examples of improved style. When necessary, beside the reporter’s byline she wrote in legible block letters, “AAH?” which stood for “Affirmative Action Hire?” She did not have to explain the acronym, or even pen an accompanying note for this mailing, because the editor, Marvin Frolich, could count on receiving a full packet from her every Monday. He was, by now, after several years, cognizant of her abbreviations. The source of this latest mailing would pose no mystery to him.

  Phyllis sat back, satisfied with her morning’s labor.

  Then she gathered the creamy white envelopes into a neat stack and marched them outside to her mailbox for her post woman, Diane Stevens, to pick up. Phyllis always tried to time her arrival at the box with Ms. Stevens’s arrival, so that she could let her know of any problems with previous deliveries, or remind the girl to tuck in her blue shirt or comb her hair. Yes, it was a hot job, and yes, it was no doubt difficult to keep one’s clothing tidy while carrying a heavy bag, but that was no excuse for arriving looking as if she had dressed in her truck. She was, after all, an official representative of the United States Postal Service and the residents along her route were her employers.

  Lately, they seemed to miss each other, sometimes by what seemed to Phyllis to be only seconds.

  This time, Phyllis lingered longer than usual by the mailbox. When Ms. Stevens still didn’t come, Phyllis sighed, raised the flag to indicate there was mail to pick up, and returned to her house.

  It seemed a mere moment later when she glanced outside and saw that the flag was down again.

  On Monday, Sarah Bodine read the note from her Great-Aunt Phyllis and started to cry. When her mother, Amy, took the note from Sarah’s shaking hands, she started to rage.

  “I could kill her for doing that!” Amy told Sarah’s dad that evening.

  “How bad was it this time, and how did Sarah get hold of it?”

  “You read it, you’ll see how bad it is! Sarah read it because she got home before I did and picked up the mail before I could get to it first and throw the damned thing away.”

  “Why does your aunt do things like that?”

  “Because she’s a bitter, nasty old witch who doesn’t have a kind bone in her body! She called Sarah’s learning disability ‘so-called’ — ”

  “What? My God — ”

  “Yes, and she said our stationery was too good for Sarah.” Amy’s face, tearful by now, twisted with bitterness. “According to Aunt Phyllis, dime-store paper is good enough for Sarah.” She blew her nose on the tissue her husband handed her. “Sarah and I picked out that stationery together, and we picked the best we could afford, because we agreed we wanted to show people how much we appreciate it when they give us presents.”

  “If there is such a thing as karma …” her husband said, letting the implication linger. His wife took up his sentence and finished it for him, “… then my Aunt Phyllis is going to die of a thousand paper cuts!”

  He almost laughed at that, because it sounded so silly, but then he looked over at a photo of their ten-year-old daughter, thought of how hard reading was for her, how she struggled with spelling words and composing paragraphs, and a rage to equal his wife’s came over him.

  “She was a teacher!” Hal Bodine was indignant. “For how many years?”

  “A hundred and fifty,” Amy said with a half-sob, half-laugh.

  “Would you mind if I had a word with dear Aunt Phyllis?” he asked, his tone dripping cold contempt for the woman.

  “No!” Amy exclaimed, and then she said gratefully, “I wouldn’t mind at all. Somebody needs to say something.”

  Sybil Carson opened the creamy envelope with some trepidation.

  Fan mail was such a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it could lift her spirits on a bad writing day. It could propel her back to her writing feeling as if she had magic in her fingers. Mail like that made her feel blessed and grateful to get to do what she did for a living, however small that living was these days. But it could also plunge her into black despair on days like today. She was already teetering on the edge of giving up on her latest novel, even though she couldn’t afford to give up. One more hard knock might bowl her over. It wasn’t as if she could easily find another line of work. For one thing, she wasn’t young, and for another she didn’t have any other skills. She’d been writing novels for thirty years, always thinking the next one would make enough money to let her relax a little bit. So far, that hadn’t happened. People assumed writers were all rich, but she made just enough to barely hang on until she fulfilled her next book contract. And she wasn’t even doing that this time. This book had been due three months earlier, but the story just wouldn’t come. She had tried every writing trick she knew to fool herself into getting going again, and still nothing happened on the page that anybody would ever want to read. If she didn’t meet her deadlines, she didn’t get paid. If she didn’t get paid, neither did her bills …

  Please, she thought as she slowly opened the pretty envelope, please be a nice note. I just can’t take any criticism right now Nasty “fan” mail felt like a slap out of the blue, like a hand shoving out of the envelope or computer to strike her hard enough to leave marks on her psyche, if not on her face.

  Sybil pulled the notepaper out and unfolded it.

  Maybe I shouldn’t read any fan mail right now, she thought, before looking down at the words. Maybe I shouldn’t take the chance of letting it demoralize me. But then she chided herself, Don’t be a baby. Sticks and stones …

  Sybil read it clear through, and then laid it gently down in her lap

  Words can never hurt me?

  What an abominable lie that was and always had been.

  Maybe, she thought, as a sob rose in her throat, I should write a novel about killing one of my readers …

  “Hey, Boss, Ms. Grimshank rides again.”

  Marvin Frolich’s secretary tossed the weekly Monday missive onto his desktop with a grin. They had dubbed their “volunteer” editor “Ms. Grimshank” as a play on her real name, which was Phyllis Shank. Once a week, like clockwork — which she would have derided as cliché — her copies of their articles arrived, all marked up in blaring red ink.

  “Sometimes,” Marvin admitted to his secretary “I like to imagine that all that red ink is her blood …”

  “Boss!” His s
ecretary laughed. “You’d never get away with it.”

  He sighed. “I know, but wouldn’t it be nice.”

  What really ticked him off was that she was sometimes correct in the letter, if not the spirit, of her corrections. He had even learned a few things from her “editing.” But that learning wasn’t worth the price of how nasty it all seemed, and it wasn’t worth the pain it caused the reporters who had seen that awful acronym, “AAH.” Affirmative Action Hire? What colossal arrogance! One of the victims had been a young black reporter with budding talent, but no confidence to match. The bigoted remark had set her back months. Only last week, it had infuriated an editor who may have fit the definition of “handicapped” in terms of his paralyzed legs, but who was anything but handicapped when it came to brains and ability. Marvin had never meant for either of them to see the mailings from Ms. Grimshank, but both of them had, by accident.

  “One of these days,” Marvin predicted to his secretary, “our Ms. Grimshank is going to get what’s coming to her.”

  She grinned. He didn’t.

  “And what is that, Boss?”

  “She’s going to get edited out.”

  When Diane Stevens didn’t find the usual stack of ivory envelopes in Ms. Shank’s mailbox on Monday, she sensed that something was wrong. Maybe the old biddy was out of town, but Diane doubted it, because Phyllis Shank never seemed to venture beyond her own mailbox. She even had her groceries delivered.

  Probably so she can tell the boy to tuck his shirt back in, Diane thought.

  “Or maybe,” she muttered to herself as she stared at the small house down the short walkway, “so she can tell him that canned goods really should be double bagged, and what was he thinking to put the frozen vegetables in with the loaf of bread?”

  Diane tried to get herself in hand. The old woman could be sick in there.

  She went up the walk, hurrying to make up for her previous ill will. But when she reached the front door, she took the few seconds required to make sure her uniform was on straight and to pat down her hair. Not that either action would silence dear Ms. Shank. No, no, if your uniform looked good, and you’d got your hair done, she’d still ask you if you really thought those shoes were suitable.