by Ed Bryant
Oh God! thought Della.
“You want me to pass on any messages?”
“You little bastard!” She cried it out without thinking.
“Touchy, huh?” Chuckie slopped across the wet snow in her direction. “Come on out of the trees, Della-honey.”
Della said nothing. She crouched behind a deadfall of brush and dead limbs. She was perfectly still.
Chuckie stood equally still, not more than twenty feet away. He stared directly at her hiding place, as though he could see through the night and brush. “Listen,” he said. “This is getting real, you know, boring.” He waited. “We could be out here all night, you know? All my buddies are gone now, and it’s thanks to you, lady. Who the hell you think you are, Clint Eastwood?”
Della assumed that was a rhetorical question.
Chuckie hawked deep in his throat and spat on the ground. He rubbed the base of this throat gingerly with a free hand. “You hurt me, Della-honey. I think you busted my collarbone.” He giggled. “But I don’t hold grudges. In fact-” He paused contemplatively. “Listen now, I’ve got an idea. You know about droogs? You know, like in that movie?”
Clockwork Orange, she thought. Della didn’t respond.
“Ending was stupid, but the start was pretty cool.” Chuckie’s personality seemed to have mutated into a manic stage. “Well, me droogs is all gone. I need a new gang, and you’re real good, Della- honey. I want you should join me.”
“Give me a break,” said Della in the darkness.
“No, really,” Chuckie said. “You’re a born killer. I can tell. You and me, we’d be perfect. We’ll blow this popsicle stand and have some real fun. Whaddaya say?”
He’s serious, she thought. There was a ring of complete honesty in his voice. She floundered for some answer. “I’ve got kids,” she said.
“We’ll take ‘em along,” said Chuckie. “I like kids, always took care of my brothers and sisters.” He paused. “Listen, I’ll bet you’re on the outs with your old man.”
Della said nothing. It would be like running away to be a pirate. Wouldn’t it?
Chuckie hawked and spat again. “Yeah, I figured. When we pickup your kids, we can waste him. You like that? I can do it, or you can. Your choice.”
You’re crazy, she thought. “I want to,” she found herself saying aloud.
“So come out and we’ll talk about it.”
“You’ll kill me.”
“Hey,” he said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t come out. I got the light and the gun, remember? This way we can learn to trust each other right from the start. I won’t kill you. I won’t do nothing. Just talk.”
“Okay.” Why not, she thought. Sooner or later, he’ll find his way in here and put the gun in my mouth and- Della stood up. -but maybe, just maybe- Agony laced through her knees.
Chuckie cocked his head, staring her way. “Leave the tools.” “I already did. The one I didn’t use.”
“Yeah,” said Chuckie. “The ones you used, you used real good.” He lowered the beam of the flashlight. “Here you go. I don’t want you stumbling and falling and maybe breaking your neck.”
Della stepped around the deadfall and slowly walked toward him. His hands were at his sides. She couldn’t see if he was holding the gun. She stopped when she was a few feet away.
“Hell of a night, huh?” said Chuckie. “It’ll be really good to go inside where it’s warm and get some coffee.” He held the flashlight so that the beam speared into the sky between them.
Della could make out his thin, pain-pinched features. She imagined he could see hers. “I was only going out to the mall for a few things,” she said.
Chuckie laughed. “Shit happens.”
“What now?” Della said.
“Time for the horror show.” His teeth showed ferally as his lips drew back in a smile. “Guess maybe I sort of fibbed.” He brought up his hand, glinting of metal.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, feeling a cold and distant sense of loss. “Huey, there, going to help?” She nodded to point past his shoulder.
“Huey?” Chuckie looked puzzled just for a second as he glanced to the side. “Huey’s-”
Della leapt with all the spring left in her legs. Her fingers closed around his wrist and the hand with the gun. “Christ!” Chuckie screamed, as her shoulder crashed against the spongy place where his broken collarbone pushed out against the skin.
They tumbled on the December ground, Chuckie underneath, Della wrapping her legs around him as though pulling a lover tight. She burrowed her chin into the area of his collarbone and he screamed again. Kenneth had always joked about the sharpness of her chin.
The gun went off. The flash was blinding, the report hurt her ears. Wet snow plumped down from the overhanging pine branches, a large chunk plopping into Chuckie’s wide-open mouth. He startedto choke.
Then the pistol was in Della’s hands. She pulled back from him, getting to her feet, back-pedaling furiously to get out of his reach. She stared down at him along the blued-steel barrel. The pirate captain struggled to his knees.
“Back to the original deal,” he said. “Okay?”
I wish, she almost said. Della pulled the trigger. Again. And again.
“Where the hell have you been?” said Kenneth as she closed the front door behind her. “You’ve been gone for close to three hours.” He inspected her more closely. “Della, honey, are you all right?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Please.” She had hoped she would look better, more normal. Unruffled. Once Della had pulled the Subaru up to the drive beside the house, she had spent several minutes using spit and Kleenex trying to fix her mascara. Such makeup as she’d had along was in her handbag, and she had no idea where that was. Probably the police had it; three cruisers with lights flashing had passed her, going the other way, as she was driving north of Southeast Plaza.
“Your clothes.” Kenneth gestured. He stood where he was.
Della looked down at herself. She’d tried to wash off the mud, using snow and a rag from the trunk. There was blood too, some of it Chuckie’s, the rest doubtless from Vinh and Tomas.
“Honey, was there an accident?”
She had looked at the driver’s side of the Subaru for along minute after getting home. At least the car drove; it must just have been flooded before. But the insurance company wouldn’t be happy. The entire side would need a new paint job.
“Sort of,” she said.
“Are you hurt?”
To top it all off, she had felt the slow stickiness between her legs as she’d come up the walk. Terrific. She could hardly wait for the cramps to intensify.
“Hurt?” She shook her head. No. “How are the twins?”
“Oh, they’re in bed. I checked a half hour ago. They’re asleep.”
“Good.” Della heard sirens in the distance, getting louder, nearing the neighborhood. Probably the police had found her driver’s license in Chuckie’s pocket. She’d forgotten that.
“So,” said Kenneth. It was obvious to Della that he didn’t know at this point whether to be angry, solicitous or funny. “What’d you bring me from the mall?”
Della’s right hand was nestled in her jacket pocket. She felt the solid bulk, the cool grip of the pistol.
Outside, the volume of sirens increased.
She touched the trigger. She withdrew her hand from the pocket and aimed the pistol at Kenneth. He looked back at her strangely.
The sirens went past. Through the window, Della caught a glimpse of a speeding ambulance. The sound Dopplered down to a silence as distant as the dream that flashed through her head.
Della pulled the trigger and the click seemed to echo through the entire house.
Shocked, Kenneth stared at the barrel of the gun, then up at her eyes. It was okay. She’d counted the shots. Just like in the movies.<
br />
“I think,” Della said to her husband, “that we need to talk.”
Afterword:
While I Was Out
Along with such works as Shark, I’ll admit that While She Was Out is one of my favorites of my own stories. A long time ago (well, nearly fifteen years), Kris Rusch was putting together the very first of the twelve hardbound Pulphouse anthologies and asked me for a contribution. I tend to say yes to editors when they do that sort of thing, usually before I ever really consider what I’m getting into. After committing myself to Ms. Rusch, I then let almost all my allowed time go by because of flop sweat. It was panic time. I knew this was going to be a showcase volume; I frankly didn’t know what the heck I could write that would fit in.
Then came the morning when I tried to park at Cinderella City, a now defunct and razed Denver mall that once was the commercial showcase of the city. The parking lot was packed as I cruised the rows like a shark looking for chum. Then I thought I saw an open space. I swung around the end of a van and stopped—my intended space was actually one of two parking places taken up by a huge and well-dented old sedan. Grumbling—well. to be truthful, cursing in colorful terms—I kept cruising and eventually found a vacant spot about twelve miles out from the mall door. Hey, it was good exercise hoofing my way in. As it happened, I passed the decrepit vehicle that had fooled me. That’s when I thought seriously about leaving a nasty note about learning manners and sticking it under a wiper blade.
The thing about fantasies is that many of us elaborate on things we’ve never really done in real life. But if we just had the opportunity...and the gumption. And that’s the underpinning of While She Was Out.
In her introduction to While She Was Out in 1991’s The Best of Pulphouse, Kris wrote: “The story is tough, yet sensitive, just like we wanted the magazine to be.” Tough, yet sensitive. Thank you, Ms. Rusch.
All these years now, I’ve resisted the perverse impulse to put that on my business card.
Time has demonstrated to me that Della’s story struck a popular chord. Maybe part of it’s because the plot uses a familiar (and fairly paranoid) theme of entrapment and loss of control. Male and female alike, most of us are leery of ending up through terrible mischance in such a situation of jeopardy. But Della’s resourceful; I like her quite a lot. And to me, the difficult family relationship played off against the violent, brutal melodrama was what made the story work. When I thought of the pirate fantasy along with the last line of the story, I knew I had a tale worth telling.
This story has stubbornly hung in the public eye for quite a while now, thanks in no little part to Ed Gorman, that talented and enormously undervalued crime novelist whom I now venerate as the patron saint of editors. Ed’s used my story in god knows how many anthologies. And people have continued to confront it.
That’s why it was turned into an hour-long episode of the Lifetime Cable anthology series The Hidden Room with Stephanie Zimbalist playing my protagonist. For years the story was under option to become a feature film—one year it was the French Canadian investors who ultimately finked out, another year it was the Persians. Hollywood writer Rospo Pallenberg, he of Emerald Forest and Ex-calibur, was a marvel of patience.
This story was adapted to be a portfolio piece, the pilot episode for a cable hardboiled noir anthology series, but never was filmed, alas again. Somewhere along the line, I know there’s just the right actress who will take one look at this and say, cool, here’s the perfect tough, edgy, relationship- driven action vehicle. At least that’s one of my fantasies.
In the meantime, I’m delighted Wormhole has chosen to present the story in a handsome new venue. And I still have the very devil of a time finding close-in parking spots at malls.
Toughly, yet sensitively,
Edward Bryant
10 October 2001
Denver, Colorado
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ed Bryant
ISBN 978-1-4976-3538-8
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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