Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  As it was, what he had done to her in less than fifteen minutes took three operations and several months to repair. Even then it wasn’t perfect. The scar that ran down the side of Ellie’s face would always be with her. A reminder not only of Perdue, but of Ernesto.

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” the man said.

  It was a Monday evening, and in less than an hour the place would be packed for the weekly body-painting contest. But at that moment we were only half full.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Something to drink?” Ellie asked the man. Since returning to work a couple weeks earlier, she had asked if she could work behind the bar with Kat. Who was I to say no?

  “Just some water, please,” the man said.

  He was the nervous type, who probably felt a lot more comfortable in a suit than in the casual wear he had on at that moment.

  Ellie set a cold plastic bottle of water in front of him.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I’m Wade Norris,” I said.

  “Curtis Knowles.” He held out his hand and we shook.

  “What can I do for you, Curtis?” I said, already knowing what he was going to ask.

  “I’m with the FBI,” he said.

  “A little out of your territory, aren’t you?”

  He smiled. “I’m just part of an investigation, that’s all.”

  “And your investigation brought you here?”

  Knowles looked around. “It is one of the more unusual settings I’ve been in. I’ll tell you that much.” He unscrewed the top of his water, but didn’t take a drink. “I’m looking into the disappearance of a federal employee.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Joseph Perdue, right?”

  “I realize someone’s already talked to you about this.”

  “You’re the third person in two months. One of the others told me Perdue’d been kidnapped.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure.”

  “He said it was in retaliation for that kid he killed, if I remember right.”

  “Terrorist.”

  “What?”

  “The terrorist he killed. Perdue had uncovered information that linked the man to potential attacks that would have happened right here on your street, Mr. Norris.”

  “Really?” I said. “Hadn’t heard that part.”

  “It was in the paper.”

  “I stopped reading the paper years ago. Too depressing.”

  Knowles removed a small notebook from his breast pocket, and opened it to one of the pages. “According to my notes, you said you remember Perdue coming into the bar twice, is that correct?”

  “I haven’t thought about this since the last time one of you guys came by. But that sounds about right.”

  “People have reported seeing him with… a woman.”

  I smiled. “So he was getting in a little fun while he was here.”

  “The woman was not someone he was seeing,” Knowles said. “Perdue was a good family man.”

  “Was?”

  Knowles paused, caught by his own words. “At this point, we believe he is most likely dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “We also believe he was in contact with this woman as a potential information source. One of the people we talked to thought she might work here.”

  “Get you another beer, Papa?” Ellie said.

  “Yes. Thanks.” I looked at Knowles. “She wasn’t one of ours. I remember everyone who takes one of the girls out.”

  “Everyone?”

  “It’s my job.”

  Ellie replaced my old bottle with a new one.

  “He probably just met her on the outside.”

  “I would have found out,” I said, then took a drink of my beer. “Mr. Knowles, there are a couple thousand girls who work in the bars here. Who knows where she came from?”

  Knowles nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Why do you think she’s so important?”

  “We don’t know for sure, but we think maybe she set him up.”

  “Sounds like you’re reaching,” I said, trying to appear sympathetic.

  Another nod from Knowles. “I won’t take up any more of your time.” As he pushed himself off the stool, he said, “If we have any more questions, we’ll get back to you.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said, then saluted him with my bottle. Knowles smiled, then walked around our new stage and out the front door.

  I knew Perdue was trouble when he’d stared at me after I told him I didn’t recognize the picture of Ernesto. There was no bluff in his gaze, no false toughness. What I had seen was the look of a man who didn’t like to be crossed. I’d seen it before, back in my service days in the corps. Other marines who were more like machines than real men — in their minds, they felt like all they had to do was look at the enemy, and their adversary would crumple to the ground.

  They were hard. They were single-minded. They were dangerous as all hell.

  And I’d been one of them.

  After Kat found Ellie and we’d gotten her to the hospital, I’d gone alone in search of Perdue. I found him easily enough. He was in his room at the Paradise Hotel. I knocked on his door, told him I was looking for Ellie and wondered if he knew where she was. Of course he let me in.

  I eased the door closed behind me, then I buried the pointed metal rod I’d been holding against my leg under his rib cage and into one of his lungs. I watched his face for a moment as he realized too late the danger I represented. I was just a lazy old Papasan, after all. Drunk half the time, and mellowed by the women that surrounded me. He tried to grab for me, but he was already too weak. I should have probably said something damning, something to sum up his failures as a human being. Instead I pulled the rod out and shoved it up again. This time into his heart.

  See, I was Homeland Security, too. It was just that my homeland extended only a couple miles beyond the door of my bar.

  By morning, the old stage in the bar had been ripped out, and a hole dug deep into the ground beneath. Perdue went into the hole, along with some dirt and rocks and concrete. Then we got to work on the new stage. I made this one a little wider.

  The girls love it.

  “Thanks, Papa,” Ellie said after Knowles had left.

  “Nothing to thank me for. How about a dance?”

  “Not today,” she said. But this time, unlike all the previous times I’d asked her to try out the new stage, she actually smiled.

  I was breaking her down. One day, she’d get up there and she’d dance again.

  On that day, drinks will be on the house.

  BRETT BATTLES lives in Los Angeles and is the author of three acclaimed novels in the Jonathan Quinn series: The Cleaner, which was nominated for a Barry Award for Best Thriller and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel, The Deceived, and Shadow of Betrayal. He is also one of the founding members of Killer Year, a group of novelists who all had their debut books come out in 2007, and a member of both International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America.

  Road Dogs

  BY NORMAN PARTRIDGE

  PART ONE

  Kim Barlow was two months in the ground when her brother first learned she was dead.

  Glen got an e-mail from a deputy sheriff up in Arizona. Of course, the message had been gathering virtual dust for a couple of months in Glen’s inbox, because Glen hardly ever checked his mail. Not because he couldn’t. Sure, the rig was forty miles off the Texas coast, but there were computers around. What there wasn’t was anyone Glen Barlow heard from that way. Except for Kim, and Kim had been pretty quiet since Glen tossed her boyfriend through her living room window last Christmas Eve.

  Glen had only clocked a couple months with the company, but the Installation Manager liked him well enough to okay emergency leave. Some young suit from Houston was headed back to the mainland after touring the rig, and Glen caught a ride into Galveston on the company chopper. Seventeen hours later he parked his truck in front
of the El Pasito sheriff’s office. He’d already talked to that emailing deputy on a cell phone he’d forgotten in the Ford’s glove compartment when he ditched the mainland for his time offshore. Glen used that cell phone about as much as he used his email account.

  The deputy — whose name was J. J. Bryce — had spent most of the day waiting for Glen to show up. One look at the guy and Bryce shook his head. He shook his head when he saw Glen’s pickup, too. Try to describe that old hunk of Ford in a report, he’d note the color as rust or primer, take your pick. And the guy who drove it was pretty much the same way. Headed towards forty with the years starting to show. Bryce was real familiar with the type. A drifter — one of those guys who was wiry as a half-starved animal. And that might mean you were talking jackrabbit, or it might mean you were talking coyote. Sometimes it was hard to tell going in.

  But Bryce already had an opinion about this guy. He’d heard all about Barlow tossing Kale Howard through that living room window last Christmas Eve. In fact, he’d heard more about it than the talk that went around the cop shop. Not that any of that mattered right now. The way the deputy saw it, right now things were all business.

  The two of them sat down in the deputy’s cramped office and ran the drill. There wasn’t much to look at. Not in the office. Not in the file Bryce had on Kim Barlow’s death. But Glen looked, and he took his time about it, and that wasn’t something the deputy much liked.

  After a while, Glen closed the folder and slid it across the desk.

  “Having a hard time buying this,” he said.

  “No buying it, really. It’s what happened.”

  “You don’t have a suspect?”

  “You read the report, Mr. Barlow. You don’t have a suspect in a case like this.”

  “You talk to that asshole Howard?”

  “Yeah. I talked to Kale. Read his file, too.”

  “Then you know he used to beat up my sister.”

  “I know that. But I also know that Howard didn’t do this. No man could have.”

  Glen just looked at the guy — kind of grinned, didn’t say one word — and Bryce all of a sudden felt his pulse hammering, because it most definitely wasn’t the kind of look you got from a jackrabbit.

  Glen Barlow said: “You’d be surprised what some men can do.”

  There it was. Cards on the table, and all in the space of ten minutes. But the gents named Bryce and Barlow hadn’t quite played out the deck, so they went a few more hands. Bryce reminding Glen about the restraining order, warning him how hard he’d go if Glen went after Kale Howard. Glen asking questions, the deputy batting them off or not answering them at all. The words exchanged weren’t getting either man anywhere he wanted to go, or anywhere he wanted to take the other. The two of them were running neck and neck, and neither seemed to like that very much.

  Finally, Glen said: “I want to see the pictures.”

  “Look, Barlow. I understand that your sister was your only living relative. You know the land out there. As far as we can figure it, she was alone, rock-climbing at Tres Manos. She must have taken a fall. After that … well, she was hurt pretty bad. She had a broken leg. It was a couple days before anyone found her. Something got hold of her before then … a pack of coyotes, or maybe a big cat. We had some experts in and they said — ”

  “I don’t care what they said. Kale’s mixed up in this some way. Wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted a little protection after I tossed him through that window. Maybe he got himself a pit bull.”

  “We checked that out, Mr. Barlow. Kale doesn’t have a dog.”

  “That doesn’t change anything. I still want to see the pictures.”

  “Trust me on this. You don’t.”

  “How many times you want to hear me say it?”

  The deputy drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper.

  “You want me to, I’ll say it again.”

  Bryce was so pissed off, he could barely unclench his jaw, but he got the job done. “Okay, Barlow. You want pictures, pictures is what you’ll get.”

  The deputy yanked open a file cabinet harder than he should have and tossed another manila folder across the desk. Barlow looked at those photos for a long time — the way Bryce figured time, anyway.

  “All right,” Glen said finally. He closed the folder, slid it across the desk, and got up so quickly that he took Bryce by surprise. There was more that the deputy needed to say, but Barlow didn’t give him the chance. He slammed Bryce’s office door before the deputy could say another word, and a handful of seconds later he slammed the door to his busted-ass pickup hard enough to leave a shower of rust on the ground. Then he drove straight out of El Pasito, foot hard on the gas. Past the town’s lone bar … past the funeral home … past the gun shop ….

  Two miles into the desert, Glen Barlow laid rubber and pulled over.

  The goddamn deputy was right about those pictures.

  At the base of a dying yucca tree, Glen puked his guts dry.

  J. J. Bryce filed the folders on the Kim Barlow case and shared the story of his run-in with her older brother with the sheriff. He sat around the office killing time, but he just couldn’t take it sitting there with the sunset slicing through the Venetian blinds and the edge of the desk marred by cigarette burns from the lazy-ass deputy who’d had it before him.

  So he clocked out and got in his own pickup, a brand new Ford which was a hell of a lot shinier than the one Glen Barlow drove. That didn’t make Bryce feel any better, though. He was still boiling, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment — El Pasito only had one bar and Sheriff Randall didn’t like anyone who wore a badge drinking there.

  So Bryce drove out of town, south, towards Guadalupe. He figured he’d swing by a Mexican grocery store he knew in Dos Gatos. The place was about thirty miles out of his way, but that’d give him some time to cool off before heading home. Besides, you could get pork carnitas at the grocery, already marinated and ready to go. Bryce figured he’d grab a sixer and some tortillas while he was at it. Later on, he’d drop those carnitas in the banged-up cast-iron skillet he used on the barbeque, watch the stars wink on in the sky while he downed a couple of brews, and the night would go down easy.

  Or easier, anyway.

  By the time the deputy edged his speedometer past seventy and got the A/C cranking just right, Glen Barlow had chugged half a warm Dr Pepper that had been playing tag with a bunch of burger wrappers on the floor of his truck. The good Dr didn’t do much for him besides wash the taste of puke out of his mouth. Still, that was a plus.

  Glen drove south. Same road as Bryce, but in the opposite direction. He didn’t plan to be on the road long. There was a crossroad just ahead, a narrow unpaved lane jagging west through creosote, coyote brush, and amaranth.

  Down that road was where Glen Barlow was headed, because there was other stuff he needed to know. Stuff a guy like Bryce wouldn’t tell him. But that was okay — Glen knew where he could find some answers. It was the same place he’d left a whole mess of questions when he cut out of town last December.

  That thought chewed on him. He hung a left, pulled over at the side of the dirt road and took another swallow of warm Dr P. For the first time that day, he felt nervous. And that was strange, considering the cards he’d been dealt in the last few hours.

  A yank on the handle and the truck door creaked open. Glen climbed out of the cab and stood there in the dry heat. He was dog-tired after a full day behind the wheel, but he couldn’t relax. Still, he tried. He needed to catch his breath before going any further.

  He closed his eyes for a minute. There were crickets out there somewhere … sawing a high, even whine that wouldn’t go away. Glen was so used to being on the rig, listening to the sea and the gulls and the equipment. It was weird listening to something different. But he wasn’t really listening, no matter how hard he tried. He was thinking. Remembering last Christmas Eve … remembering pulling to a stop right here, as a cold December moon shone above.


  Right here in the same place that he was standing now. Glen churned the last gulp of soda in his mouth. He thought about that night and the nights that had come since then, and he thought about where those nights had taken him. Full circle. Right back to the place he’d begun.

  He shook his head, glancing at his reflection in the banged-up driver’s door mirror.

  Guess you only have one gear, you stupid bastard.

  Glen almost laughed at that. But he didn’t. Instead, he spit warm Dr P on the dirt road. Then he climbed in the truck, keyed the engine, and kicked up some roadbed, leaving that wet patch on the ground for the thirsty red earth to drink up.

  Lisa Allen was still beautiful, of course. That hadn’t changed in the handful of months since Glen left town. But a whole lot had. Glen knew that coming through the door of the house they’d once shared.

  No kiss for him tonight. Not even a hug. They sat in the kitchen, a couple of beers on the table. The back door was open behind Glen’s shoulder, and he could smell the herbs in the little patch of garden scrabbling along the side of the house. Sage, rosemary, thyme … probably a whole lot of other stuff out there that Lisa’s hippie parents had sung about back in the sixties when they built the adobe on a scrubby patch of Arizona notmuch. Of course, Glen didn’t say that, even though it was the kind of thing that would have made Lisa laugh back in the days when his coat hung in a closet down the hall.

  Back then, things were different.

  Those crickets were still out there somewhere, sawing that high, even whine. But Glen ignored them. Instead he listened to the words coming out of his own mouth, surer and steadier than he could have imagined. And he listened to Lisa’s answers, which were just as sure and just as steady.

  “You saw those photos, Glen. Kale couldn’t have done that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “The cops told you what they pieced together, didn’t they? Kim was out at Tres Manos … you know how she loved it out there. They found her rock-climbing gear. She was on that wall south of the third fist, and she must have had an accident. God knows how long she was out there alone — ”