While She Was Out (4 page)

“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.

“I think,” Della said to her husband, “that we need to talk.”

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

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