Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  Neil rubbed his hands on his pristine shirt. “Is that what you thought?”

  “Of course,” Pamela said. “Every house he hit, we’re all military families.”

  “Who happened to be flying flags, even at night.” There was a bit of judgment in Neil’s voice.

  She knew what he was thinking. People who knew how to handle flags took them down at dusk. But she couldn’t bear to touch hers. She hadn’t asked Becky why hers remained up, but she would wager the reason was similar.

  And it probably was for every other family Jeremy and his friends had targeted.

  “That’s the important factor?” she asked. “Night?”

  “And beer,” Neil said. “They lost a football game, went out and drank, and that fueled their anger. So they decided to act out.”

  “By burning flags?” Her voice rose.

  “A few weeks before, they knocked down mailboxes. I’m going to hate to charge them. There won’t be much left of the football team.”

  “That’s all right,” Pamela said bitterly. “Petty property crimes shouldn’t take them off the roster long.”

  “It’s going to be more than that,” Neil said. “They’re showing a destructive pattern. This one isn’t going to be fun.”

  “For any of us,” Pamela said.

  Her hands were shaking as she left. She had wanted the crime to mean something. The flag had meant something to her. It should have meant something to them too.

  God, Mom, for an old hippie, you’re such a prude. Jenny’s voice, so close that Pamela actually looked around, expecting to see her daughter’s face.

  “I’m not a prude,” she whispered, and then realized she was reliving an old argument between them.

  Sure you are. Judgmental and dried up. I thought you protested so that people could do what they wanted.

  Pamela sat in the car, her creaky knees no longer holding her.

  No, I protested so that people wouldn’t have to die in another senseless war, she had said to her daughter on that May afternoon.

  What year was that?

  It had to be 1990, just before Jenny graduated from high school.

  I’m not going to die in a stupid war, Jenny had said with such conviction that Pamela almost believed her. We don’t do wars any more. I’m going to get an education. That way, you don’t have to struggle to pay for Travis. I know how hard it’s been with Steve.

  Jenny, taking care of things. Jenny, who wasn’t going to let her cash-strapped mother pay for her education. Jenny, being so sure of herself, so sure that the peace she’d known most of her life would continue.

  To Jenny, going into the military to get a free education hadn’t been a gamble at all.

  Things’ll change, honey, Pamela had said. They always do.

  And by then I’ll be out. I’ll be educated, and moving on with my life.

  Only Jenny hadn’t moved on. She’d liked the military. After the First Gulf War, she’d gone to officer training, one of the first women to do it.

  I’m a feminist, Mom, just like you, she’d said when she told Pamela.

  Pamela had smiled, keeping her response to herself. She hadn’t been that kind of feminist. She wouldn’t have stayed in the military. She wasn’t sure she believed in the military — not then.

  And now? She wasn’t sure what she believed. All she knew was that she had become a military mother, one who cried when a flag was burned.

  Not just a flag.

  Jenny’s flag.

  And that’s when Pamela knew.

  She wanted the crime to mean something, so she would make sure that it did.

  She brought her memories to court. Not just the scrapbooks she’d kept for Jenny, like she had for all three kids, but the pictures from her own past, including the badly framed front page of the Oregonian.

  Five burly boys had destroyed Jenny’s flag. They stood in a row, their lawyers beside them, and pled to misdemeanors. Their parents sat on the blond bench seats in the 1970s courtroom. A reporter from the local paper took notes in the back. The judge listened to the pleadings.

  Otherwise, the room was empty. No one cheered when the judge gave the boys six months of counseling. No one complained at the nine months of community service, and even though a few of them winced when the judge announced the huge fines that they (and not their parents) had to pay, no one said a word.

  Until Pamela asked if she could speak.

  The judge — primed by Neil — let her.

  Only she really didn’t speak. She showed them Jenny. From the baby pictures to the dress uniform. From the brave eleven-year-old walking her brother to school to the dust-covered woman who had smiled with some Iraqi children in Baghdad.

  Then Pamela showed them her Oregonian cover.

  “I thought you were protesting,” she said to the boys. “I thought you were trying to let someone know that you don’t approve of what your country is doing.”

  Her voice was shaking.

  “I thought you were being patriotic.” She shook her head. “And instead you were just being stupid.”

  To their credit, they watched her. They listened. She couldn’t tell if they understood. If they knew how her heart ached — not that sharp pain she’d felt when she found the flag, but just an ache for everything she’d lost.

  Including the idealism of the girl in the picture. And the idealism of the girl she’d raised.

  When she finished, she sat down. And she didn’t move as the judge gaveled the session closed. She didn’t look up as some of the boys tried to apologize. And she didn’t watch as their parents hustled them out of court.

  Finally, Neil sat beside her. He picked up the framed Oregonian photograph in his big, scarred hands.

  “Do you regret it?” he asked.

  She touched the edge of the frame.

  “No,” she said.

  “Because it was a protest?”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t articulate it. The anger, the rage, the fear she had felt then. Which had been nothing like the fear she had felt every day her daughter had been overseas.

  The fear she felt now when she looked at Stephen’s daughters and wondered what they’d choose in this never-ending war.

  “If I hadn’t burned that flag,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had Jenny.”

  Because she might have married Neil. And even if they had made babies, none of those babies would have been Jenny or Stephen or Travis. There would have been other babies who would have grown into other people.

  Neil wasn’t insulted. They had known each other too long for insults.

  Instead, he put his hand over hers. It felt warm and good and familiar. She put her head on his shoulder.

  And they sat like that, until the court reconvened an hour later, for another crime, another upset family, and another broken heart.

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH is an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. Her novels have made the bestseller lists-even in London-and have been published in 14 countries and 13 different languages. Her awards range from the Ellery Queen Readers Choice Award to the John W. Campbell Award. Her short work has been reprinted in thirteen Year’s Best collections. In 2007, she became one of a handful of writers to twice win the Best Mystery Novel award given for the best mystery published in the Northwest (for her Kris Nelscott books). She lives and works with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, on the Oregon Coast.

  The Quick Brown Fox

  BY ROBERT S. LEVINSON

  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  The quick brown dog jumps over the lazy fox.

  The lazy brown dog-

  As far as Gus Ebersole got before deleting the most words he had put on the computer screen in the fifteen, no, now sixteen months he’d been fighting the good fight against writer’s block. Writer’s block, hell.

  He was suffering a doomsd
ay bomb that had exploded in his head while he slept, taking out those parts of the brain responsible for creativity. The right side. No, the left side. One of the sides. He’d know which if it were still functioning, instead of the side he was stuck with now, the side forcing him to consider abandoning his writing career, check Craigslist for work more suited to his current mental status.

  He thought about McDonald’s, maybe the kitchen assembly line, squirting on the mustard and the ketchup, layering the beef patties with tomatoes and lettuce; or maybe manning the deep fry, pumping out those devilishly delicious, blood-congealing Frenchies, and —

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Gus Ebersole.

  Now is the time for all brown dogs —

  The cell phone sang out, interrupting his train of thought.

  He punched on hungrily, happy for the distraction.

  Nobody he knew.

  A Commander Dennis Foley of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Correctional Services Division apologizing for his call at what might be an inconvenient time, in a nicotine-damaged voice that reeked of authority.

  “I am in the middle of something,” Ebersole said, “but I’m never too busy for those who protect and serve.”

  “A new story in your Inspector Phogg series, I hope.”

  “Possibly the greatest adventure of the inspector’s life,” Ebersole said, flattered by this proof he hadn’t been entirely forgotten or forsaken since the creative well turned drier than the Mojave.

  “Wonderful, he’s my favorite, even more than grand old Mrs. Marlowe, although it’s hard for me to imagine how you’ll ever be able to top the last Phogg, Strangers on a Plane. Been what, two or three years since I read it in Crime & Punishment Magazine? Or anything, not even another Bogey Brothers, L.L.C.”

  Ebersole muttered something about interrupting the flow of short stories to focus on a novel and pushed the commander to explain the reason for his call.

  “Over to our Men’s Central Jail, got a classroom full of wannabe writers looking for a pro to steer them in the right direction — no pun intended — and my first thought naturally was you, Mr. Ebersole. An hour or two at one of the Tuesday or Thursday meetings would sure do the trick.”

  Ebersole hummed his way through a minute, playing at having to think hard about the invitation, masking his delight over this unexpected excuse to avoid, even if for only a couple of hours, the torture of staring at a blank, snow white computer screen, unable to untangle ideas he once translated so effortlessly into a tale well told.

  “It doesn’t pay much,” the commander said, misinterpreting his silence. “An honorarium certainly nowhere close to what your time must be worth, sir.”

  “Hmmmmm … Send it to your memorial foundation, Commander Foley. I’m honored to accept and to serve,” Ebersole said. Accept and to serve. Wordplay on law enforcement’s motto. A positive omen the fires of creativity still burned inside him, yes?

  Yes!

  No McDonald’s for Gus Ebersole, not yet, anyway.

  Ebersole reached Men’s Central Jail during morning visiting hours and angled his SUV into the reserved space waiting for him a half block away in the public parking lot on Bauchet Street, a mangy stretch of street within sight of the 101 and 110 freeways, full of stiff-backed law enforcement personnel and a United Nations of civilians who’d come to share time with inmates at Central or its neighbor across the way, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, a complex built and christened before its name took on a significance far more tragic than any story any prisoner could tell.

  He was no stranger to his surroundings, but it had been six or eight years since his last visit to Central, a research tour that formed the basis for his series of “High Security” stories. Twin Towers was no country club, but it was Central, the largest jail in the free world, where they housed the high-risk population.

  Commander Foley was waiting at the check-in desk, looking nothing like he’d sounded on the phone, in a uniform that might have fit him twenty pounds ago, his ear-to-ear smile half lost under a thick salt-and-pepper mustache that fit above his mouth like a limp hot dog.

  He shook Ebersole’s hand like he was pumping for water and led him off and briefed him on the writing class members during the ten minutes it took to reach the meeting room, a space about ten by twelve feet, the walls bare except for a green chalkboard mounted behind a scarred teacher’s desk fronting a semicircle of cheap student tablet chair-desks.

  Applause greeted their arrival, led by an inmate in the white top and blue bottom uniform combination that identified him as a trustee. He’d been using the teacher’s desk as his own. He was in his mid-to-late sixties, maybe five five or six feet in height and a hundred twenty pounds on a rail-thin frame, his angelic face home to a halo of hair, as bedsheet white as his complexion, hanging in a knotted braid past his shoulder blades.

  He matched Foley’s description of Chester “Smiley” Burdette. A career criminal halfway through a ten-year sentence for first-degree armed robbery, and one of dozens of prisoners transferred to Central when the county ended its contract with the state.

  “Smiley’s also a fan of yours and the one who’s been fronting the program since he got here,” Foley had said. “He’s first-rate when it comes to keeping the others in line, if anyone gets out of line for any reason.”

  “Like what kind of reason?”

  “You never know until it happens,” Foley said.

  “If you’re trying to scare me, Commander, it’s working.”

  “Just making conversation, Mr. Ebersole. We haven’t lost an author yet.” He showed off his smile again. “Of course, there’s always a first time,” he said, turning his smile into a burst of laughter and giving Ebersole’s shoulder a series of reassuring pats.

  Ebersole was not reassured.

  He thought about canceling out then and there, fleeing Central Jail, but that would have meant returning home to a blank computer screen.

  Ebersole wrote his name on the board in large block letters and launched into a lengthy introduction, sparing his audience no adjective or noun that enhanced his reputation and standing in the literary fraternity; much of what he said was true.

  Then it was their turn.

  Smiley Burdette went first, playing his own history like stand-up comedy, drawing his biggest laughs describing the armed robbery that got him back behind bars. “Was meant to be burglary, which is my specialty,” he said. “Climbed into the Bar None through a window off the alley, not thinking to check first if the joint was still open for business. It was, so that made my burglary a robbery and how I found myself staring down the barrel of the barkeep’s twin-gauge. My priors turned my sentence into five years times two, so here I am, my swan song to a home away from home.”

  He took a bow and spread his arms grandly to the applause he’d generated from seven of the eight other inmates.

  “Plain stupid, you ask me,” said the lone dissenter, earning a unanimous chorus of hisses as he dismissed Burdette with a throwaway gesture.

  Burdette said, “I didn’t ask, but you definitely are, Cooke. Nothing’s more stupid than a dirty cop who gets caught stepping over the line. You bend over a lot in the shower or why else do they let you out of segregation and into the general pop for our class?”

  Al Cooke pushed up from his seat, unfolding a six-foot frame and a weightlifter’s ripple of muscles inside the orange uniform that identified a connection to law enforcement. He reared back, fists clenched, cold-cocking Burdette with his pit bull eyes, and stepped toward him.

  Burdette rose to the challenge and egged Cooke forward with his hands.

  Two of the inmates leaped to their feet and blocked Cooke’s way, while another latched onto Burdette’s arm and urged him to shut up and settle down, insisting, “Smiley, a DRB or the hole’s nothing you need right now.”

  The air remained heavy with acrimony. Burdette an
d Cooke grunted between labored breaths, neither man showing any inclination to step away from a fight and be seen as a loser.

  Ebersole wiped at the fright sweat blanketing his forehead and upper lip and reached over to press the call button installed on the underside of the desk. It would bring guards running, the commander had told him.

  Burdette recognized the move and shook his head at Ebersole.

  Pumped a laugh to the ceiling and sank into his chair.

  Said, “Only playacting, Mr. Ebersole, maybe give you something to write about in one of your Bogey Brothers stories. Our way of showing our thanks for your being here today, ain’t that so, Cookie?”

  Cooke hesitated before answering. “Why not?” he said, and waved off the inmates who had blocked his access to Burdette. “What’s to know about me, I’ll make it short and sweet. I’m a bad cop who got caught, honored the Blue Wall and refused to turn state’s, got sentenced to the max, and is now sitting out an appeal hearing among this bunch of losers.” A cacophony of nasty sounds erupted. Cooke answered them with a wagging upright middle finger. “I’ve been writing a book I’m calling Cop-Out.”

  “Cop-In more like it,” somebody said, winning applause.

  Cooke ignored the interruption. “So I went and scored this program hoping to maybe pick up a handy hint or three along the way from a writer like you,” he said, and sat down.

  Ebersole thanked him and pointed to an inmate who’d seemed more interested in playing with his fingernails than being in the class. Early-to-mid forties, Coke-bottle glasses on an otherwise ordinary face.

  He didn’t bother standing but remained focused on his nails. “Name’s Bob Rauschenberg, no relation to the painter of the same name,” he said, like he was sharing a state secret. “Been writing all my life. Checks mainly. What helped get me here. What I call creative enterprise, others call forgery.” He blew on his nails, brushed them on his uniform, and signaled he was through.

  “Who’d like to speak next?” Ebersole said, any fears for his personal safety erased by the realization these inmates were a garden of story ideas ripe for picking.