Don’t Take Your Guns To Town

“It’s time for you to die,” Dan Knight snarled at the corpulent editor. “I hope you understand that it’s nothing personal.”

Dan grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands and pounced to his feet. Raw menace was dripping from him like molasses on a thick stack of flapjacks. His hand darted inside his slate gray Clipper Mist overcoat and when it reappeared he was gripping the System Automatic 9mm revolver. His hand had never been more calm and steady as the moment when he leveled the gun barrel at Oscar’s plump and ruddy face. It would be a clean kill. One shot.

From behind the desk where he ran herd on a batch of mongrel freelance journalists, the overfed editor of the “automotive lifestyles” magazine made a barking sound like a seal. Dan’s finger twitched inside the trigger housing of the revolver and … and … and ….

BACKSPACE BACKSPACE BACKSPACE BACKSPACE

Dan’s finger twitched inside the trigger housing of the revolver. He could see the dread realization in Oscar’s eyes, the fatal resignation that … that … that …

Trace stopped typing and stared blankly at the computer monitor. The Dan Knight stories were beginning to make him feel fragmented.

Dan Knight was Trace’s fictional alter ego. Trace began writing the stories six months prior, as a tool to mitigate the creative silences between magazine and documentary assignments. In the freelance word such work is called “writing on spec” – writing on the speculation that one just might have a final product worth selling.

After writing ten Dan Knight stories Trace found a market for the pieces with Slumming Angel Press, a San Francisco imprint that published a quarterly anthology of modern and reissued pulp fiction shorts. Slumming Angel only paid ten cents a word and three comp copies of the magazine but a dollar is a dollar and a clip is another notch in the headboard.

Trace lit a Marlboro and boiled water in the microwave for instant coffee. One hundred words away from completing the new Dan Knight tale and he was stuck. It wasn’t writers block. Trace didn’t believe in that bullshit. The Dan Knight stories were easy enough to write because they were pure autobiography with one notable exception: Dan Knight always resolved conflict with gun play. Like Trace, Dan was a writer for hire in the vast disconnected wasteland of Southern California, a man who sometimes sold his skills as an investigative journalist to bidders outside the magazine racket when the realities of economic law required it.

Trace flinched when the microwave issued four sharp electronic beeps. He was still tender from the middle ear infection he endured a week before but that was child’s play compared to what his old friend Max Wiesner was going through back in Tampa Bay. Max’s wife, Juanita, had a biopsy performed the week before and the report had just come back. It was definitely carcinoma and because the lump in her breast had grown so rapidly and so large, a radical mastectomy was the only option.

When Trace received the news about Juanita from Max, the angry edge he had been wearing all day began to dissipate into a puddle at his feet. He needed that edge to finish the Dan Knight story.

Trace poured a heaping spoonful of instant Folger’s into the coffee mug, dumped in two teaspoons of sugar and Coffee Mate, and returned to the desk and the beckoning keyboard.

His eyes fell upon the latest letter from Gloria, the demented stalker he acquired after the publication of his novel, “Northfield Through A Haze.” He decided to read the letter once more. He opened it gingerly, knowing and fearing that it might turn out to be evidence someday.

“Do you realize the obsession?” Gloria wrote to Trace. “I’m so wanting to know what the point is and if there is a risk why isn’t it confronted? Why is this risk a threat? Is it because we are powerless or powerful?”

The letter arrived inside a bulky package that contained a book of graphic sexual art titled “Erotica Universalis.”

“I’m sending you a little book,” Gloria continued in her neat cursive handwriting. “I’m sure you’ve seen it all in your writing for dirty magazines but maybe you could return it in person. It’s part of a set.”

Trace lit another cigarette and sipped his coffee.

“Have you ever been to Kentucky?” Gloria asked on the third page of the five-page letter. “Do you want to meet me in Chicago and drive to the fireworks over the Ohio River on 4/23? It is awesome! Then on Sunday we could go to the stables. The facilities and bluegrass really is fascinating. Just trying to secure a date with you to check out something way cool.”

Asking someone you’ve never met – the object of a psycho-sexual obsession — to fly across country for a tour of the Ohio River was one thing but Gloria always took riveting detours into insanity in her letters and e-mails to Trace.

“I’m a little cautious these days,” she continued. “I had to change my phone number because my fictional characters are brain damaged and apparently I was/am requiring a stricter vigilance of paranoia. Unfortunately the U.S. Mail is the only way of communication I feel safe.”

Trace carefully folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope. It was postmarked, as always, in Marietta, Ohio, and Trace felt comfort in the great distance between him and Gloria. But after receiving the last letter he felt compelled to take evasive action. He called the home phone number that Gloria had provided and heaved a sigh of relief when it rolled over to her voice mail.

“Gloria, this is Trace calling from Los Angeles,” he said in a voice crackling with tension. “Look, you don’t know me. We’ve never met. You’ve only read some of my articles and my book – and it’s not a very good book at that. Why don’t you find someone new to obsess on, huh? I hear Norman Mailer isn’t doing much these days.”

Two hours after leaving the message on Gloria’s voice mail, Trace received a terse e-mail from her.

“You’re right. Sorry I bothered you. Please return my art book.”

Trace had laughed at the last line. He retained and filed away every insane letter, e-mail, and package he ever received from Gloria. There was no way in hell she was getting the book back.

Dan Knight wouldn’t have put up with Gloria as long and patiently as Trace did. Dan Knight would have casually hopped a plane to Marietta, Ohio, stalked her down like prey, and sent her miserable soul to the bowels of hell with his 9mm. But Trace wasn’t Dan Knight, even though he did own a System Automatic 9mm and when his temper flared it was a good idea to keep a safe distance between Trace and his gun. He would never turn the gun on anyone he cared about. Witnessing his mother’s battering at the hands of scores of husbands and boyfriends while growing up instilled within Trace a rage at anyone who even hints of physically abusing a loved one – those were the personality types who needed to fear Trace when he was angry and searching for an outlet.

But as he struggled to complete the latest Dan Knight tale, that angry edge was gone, spurred away into the distance like a runaway mustang by the plight of Max Wiesner’s wife back in Florida.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud. “I’ll finish it tomorrow. It’s just another goddamn Dan Knight story.”

He tossed the instant coffee down the bathroom sink, popped open a 16-ounce can of Miller High Life, and offered a toast to the framed photograph of Humphrey Bogart that rested near his computer monitor. It was a publicity still from the German release of the great Bogie film “In A Lonely Place.”

The German translation of the title was written in dark script beneath the photo of Bogart in a tuxedo nursing a drink at a bar.

“Ein Einasmer Ort.”

In A Lonely Place.

Related: Stalked