Easy Street

by Elizabeth Sims

  Back in Detroit I would visit Lt. Stonehauser and receive a severe talking-to. I would phone Tom Ciesla and receive a severe talking-to. I would place a timothy nugget on Todd's grave and shed a tear for my beloved little friend. I would sit over coffee with Mrs. McVittie and eat some of the gingerbread she would bake for me and feel a little better.

  I would visit Porrocks at home, attended by her sister, and receive a severe talking-to. Then Porrocks, lying back on her couch and asking her sister to leave the room, would ask me worriedly for advice on how to discourage Lou from being so attentive, and I would counsel her to be gentle and know that Lou is one of the best humans ever to walk the earth. I would suspect that one day I would see them holding hands at a movie or a café.

  Porrocks's doorbell would ring and I would answer it. The two guys she'd hired to bust out the wall in the boathouse would be standing there wanting to know if she had any more walls that needed busting. They wore new Rolexes, we would notice, and had hangovers, and after questioning by Porrocks would admit that they'd found $28,000 in the wall and had gone to Atlantic City, had a rousing time, and were now broke except for the watches.

  I would have a quiet dinner with Billie. She would offer to give me a puppy, and I would say no thank you.

  All this would occur, one thing after the other, until one day I would be alone in my apartment with nothing to do but think about what to do next.

  ----

  But in the meantime I stood on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, shifting to keep my balance on the heaving deck, looking down at Beverly Austin as she lay staring up at the jagged sky. I looked at her and knew what it was to take a life in hot blood. I knew I was a different person now. Exactly what kind of person I'd become, I didn't know. I wondered whose business it was to forgive me for what I'd done.

  I wasn't sorry.

  I lifted my head and slowly and deeply breathed the clean ocean air. "I'd do it again," I swore to the wide world, and wondered whether I'd ever have to.

  __________

  GET THE STARTER PACK

  THREE COMPLETE SHORT WORKS BY ELIZABETH FOR FREE

  I love connecting with my readers! Occasionally I send out email newschats about forthcoming work, events, and other this-n-that. If you sign up, I’ll send you this free stuff as a special thank-you:

  1.

  Deep Trouble, a novelette featuring Lillian Byrd, my alter ego and heroine of the Lillian Byrd Crime Series.

  2.

  Nine Fast Character Hacks, a brief for writers on how to efficiently write compelling characters. Even if you’re more a reader than a writer, you might find this piece an enriching behind-the-scenes glimpse.

  3.

  The Lake Effect, a personal essay about being a writer from the Midwest.

  You’ll never be spammed. And every email has an easy unsubscribe link.

  GET FREE STUFF AND SIGN UP FOR NEWSCHAT

  And if you’d simply like to BUY more of my books, this works nicely:

  Elizabeth's Amazon Author Page

  I might add that you can download Amazon’s spam-free Kindle app, for use on any device, HERE.

  Special Note

  Thank you for reading this book! Did you know that people who recommend books are considered more beautiful and accomplished than average humans? If you got a kick out of this book, spread the joy and tell your friends! Post an online review now. Ratings and reviews—even just a word or two—help draw new readers to a possibly valuable experience. If you feel at a loss, here are sample one-sentence reviews, which you may use verbatim:

  “I definitely both laughed and cried while reading this.”

  “One of the finest novels I’ve come across in a decade.”

  “My gosh, what a writer!”

  Your opinion counts! Needless to say, more reviews and good word-of-mouth mean I can spend more time writing new stuff! With thanks and love,

  Elizabeth

  Get book group discussion stuff about Easy Street here.

  Read on!

  Here’s the first chapter of Left Field, the fifth and next in the Lillian Byrd series.

  1

  Ever since I’d killed a person in hot-blooded self-defense, my life had been kind of sketchy. During that messy time—two years ago, it was—I’d had to abandon my car, euthanize my best friend, and come to realize that my taste in women was really, really shitty.

  Well, was that last thing entirely true? My luck in love was calamitous, but how could I know at the start that a woman was going to turn out bad? Love is like reason in reverse: instead of starting with some little idea or premise and developing a logical body of thought from there, you start with this thunderbolt, this immense passionate storm of pelvis and heart; you jump into it, and one day you realize you’re in so deep you can’t even see the place you jumped from anymore. So the possibility of making a measured, considered descent is impossible. It’s past. You’re in.

  I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to figure that out.

  The best friend I referred to a minute ago was my beloved pet rabbit, Todd. I’d had to mourn him and my 1985 Chevrolet Caprice, and I’d had to come to grips with the new capacities I’d discovered in myself. (Fortunately, my best human friend, Truby, was alive and well in California.)

  You’re probably wondering about the life I took in self-defense and how it happened. She was a lover who turned out to be a murderer, and she was in the act of trying to kill me, because I had uncovered the things she had done. So, yes, self-defense. Still, it’s a pretty heavy trip when you feel the heart that you were at one time ready to defend to the death quiver, then stop beating, through the haft of your knife.

  Had the capacity for killing always been inside me, the product of some unknowable synapse development, buried deep? Or had it developed on the instant of necessity and from now on was my quiet little companion, to be called up at will?

  Will I go to heaven or hell?

  Should these questions ever plague you, and you arrive at something solid, give me a call.

  Eventually I figured out that mystery and ambiguity form the core of an active human life, and the only way to stay sane—or return to sanity—is to accept that fact. And live with it. And thrive with it.

  That’s the trick.

  While my mind and spirit were occupied with all that, I retreated into brainless temp jobs where I threw around cartons of cheddar popcorn and jam in a food warehouse; rotated the stop/slow sign on a godforsaken road project in Lapeer County; and collected garbage at the Renaissance festival in wench costume.

  No, I hadn’t gotten a new pet. There was no way. Todd had been such a wonderful little companion, so warm and sensible, that—well, there could be no replacement.

  By now, however, I was more or less in the process of collecting myself. I’d gotten a regular gig as a phony private detective, which I felt was at least a start toward normalcy.

  I was thinking about normalcy when I parked in front of the Pomeroy mansion in Detroit one warm June morning, intent on taking advantage of the two eccentric women who lived there. The neighborhood magnolias had escaped frost this year and were busy heaving open their sweet-tart hearts. Spring had come late. Buds swelled on the apple trees.

  I told myself what I was about to do was OK because: 1) I had to pay my rent; 2) I couldn’t take a lot of stress yet; 3) they needed somebody to order around for reassurance; and 4) they could afford it. Four solid rationalizations.

  The front door appeared to have been torn from a German cathedral—thick oak, with black iron hinges and a square leaded-glass window. The bell didn’t work, so to get the attention of either Flora or Domenica Pomeroy you had to ball your fist and pound on the weathered planks like you were trying to break out of a dungeon.

  I always set down whatever I was carrying and used both fists.

  I pounded my usual seven times—both fists in unison—then added one more bam after a brief pause so Flora would know it was me.

  One would exp
ect such a door on such a mansion to be opened slowly and with much rusty creaking. But Flora was in pretty good shape, and she flung it open as she squinted into the sun, shading her eyes with a box of Kix cereal. A few pieces dribbled out of the open end of the box and I sensed a squirrel behind me, ready to pounce.

  I stood on the palace-width stone stoop in my standard uniform of linen blouse, blue jeans, and Bass Weejun loafers.

  Flora said, “Dear, come in! Dear-m’-dear, come in! We’ve been waiting like starving artists!”

  Flora Pomeroy was a middle-aged woman who somehow had kept her waist through the years. It looked all the trimmer in contrast to her meaty, curving hips, which seemed built to ride horses in a rodeo. Her eyes were large and light gray and could look a little blind sometimes when she drifted away from the situation at hand. But her face had that French spareness—high cheekbones, strong chin, long, tapering nose—that communicated social competence, and, perhaps, a readiness to be amused. I suppose Pomeroy was originally spelled Pomerai or the like.

  “We have a new problem, but for once, I think we’ve come up with a solution!”

  If Flora liked you, she would touch you. She took my hand and pulled me into the vast, cool foyer. Four stone gargoyles, little fat men in hats, leered down from the corners.

  Flora eyed my canvas messenger bag. “Well, did you track it down?”

  I patted the bag. “Yes, I did. I have it right here.”

  She smiled with cautious happiness.

  About ten rooms opened off the main-floor hallway; dim gray light spilled from all of them. Junk littered the hallway—not low-class hoarder junk like newspapers and crates of baby clothes but stuff like a festoon of colorful scarves on a coat hanger hooked to a chandelier, a dented globe on a gaudy stand, and about a dozen unfinished needlepoint projects, some of them left on side tables, some on the floor. For a while they’d had a nephew from Philadelphia living with them while he attended Cranbrook, so you would also come across stuff like a lacrosse stick, an old copy of Wired, a necktie draped over the back of a chair.

  Then there was the crap art they collected: pottery pieces with cracks and holes pretentiously built in, as well as paintings of feral-looking people that you couldn’t tell whether they were meant to look that way or if they came out that way inadvertently, due to a lack of skill.

  Flora saw me glance at some of the stuff in the hallway. “Yeah,” she said with a bit of pride, “I’ve been tidying.”

  A huge staircase that widened grandly at the bottom seemed to gather us into its banister arms, and we started up.

  “Domenica!” Flora shouted as we ascended. “Lillian’s here, and”—her shout turned musical—“I think she’s brought us something!” Her clear enunciation rang in the high cavern of the staircase.

  Domenica, Flora’s mother, welcomed us into the throne room on the third and topmost floor of the house. It used to be the master bedroom, but the (doubtless massive) bed had been removed and a large chair installed.

  Chair is a poor word to describe the setup, so I called it a throne, even though the chair was not gilded. It was at least six feet tall and made of heavy old wood—mahogany?—with a carved-leather back. Garbo had sat in it, I was told, in a scene in Queen Christina that was cut from the finished movie.

  Needle-pointed cushions supported the thin, elderly shanks of Domenica Pomeroy, who ate, drank, napped, and lounged in the chair most of the day and night. When she wanted to get horizontal, she hobbled a few steps to a maroon velvet couch in a bay window that overlooked the excessively lush back lot.

  She liked the windows open most of the time. They had no screens, therefore the occasional member of the natural world took up residency in her room: mostly spiders and mosquitoes. They didn’t seem to bother her. The breeze was pleasant.

  Domenica said, “Yes, yes. You’ve found it, Madame Detective?”

  Slightly nervous now, I said, “Yes.”

  “She tracked it down!” Flora slapped my back and pulled me close to Domenica. “Now don’t bother her, give her time to tell it. Sit there.” I took my customary spot in a straight chair, one of two on opposite sides of an exquisite small table inlaid with multicolored parquet.

  Flora kept bustling. “We’ll have coffee! We should celebrate with a morning meal! I’ll start the Sanka. Where did I put that cereal?” She turned toward the huge bathroom, where they kept a hot plate, a bin of cookware, and no refrigerator.

  “Wait,” I said quickly, “I brought some bagels and stuff.”

  “Oh!” they said.

  I pulled a paper sack of fresh bagels from my bag, plus a thing of cream cheese and a pound of ground actual coffee. “This’ll do, don’t you think?” I said. “I even have a knife.”

  The last time I’d come at breakfast, Flora had fed me bacon that made me sick for two days. I don’t know how their stomachs took it. And Sanka, my God.

  “Ohh, I’ve died and gone to heaven!” said Flora, feeling the still-warm bagels. “Straight to heaven!”

  “You can’t die yet, you have to hold my funeral,” said Domenica. She was in her early eighties, gray and elegant, with the same angular French nose as her daughter.

  “All in good time,” muttered Flora, taking the coffee bag.

  In a few minutes we were all enjoying a nice little breakfast.

  “So?” said Domenica.

  I swallowed and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. “This one wasn’t easy,” I began, and that much was true.

  [End of chapter one of Left Field. You can easily order yours by clicking below:

  Buy Left Field]

  About Elizabeth

  Elizabeth Sims is the author of the Rita Farmer Mysteries, the Lambda and GCLS Goldie Award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series, and other fiction, including the standalone novel Crimes in a Second Language, which won the Florida Book Awards silver medal. Her work has been published by a major press (Macmillan) as well as several smaller houses, and she’s written short works for numerous collections and magazines. She publishes independently under her personal imprint, Spruce Park Press.

  In addition, Elizabeth is an internationally recognized authority on writing. She’s written dozens of feature articles on the craft of writing for Writer's Digest magazine, where she’s a contributing editor. Her instructional title, You've Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams (Writer's Digest Books) has been specially recognized by National Novel Writing Month and hundreds of other web sites and bloggers. She has taught creative writing at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and when time permits, she teaches at conferences and workshops around the United States.

  Elizabeth earned degrees in English from Michigan State University and Wayne State University, where she won the Tompkins Award for graduate fiction. She's worked as a reporter, photographer, technical writer, bookseller, street busker, ranch hand, corporate executive, certified lifeguard, and symphonic percussionist. Elizabeth belongs to several literary societies as well as American Mensa.

  Books by Elizabeth Sims

  Have you read them all?

  Nonfiction

  You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams

  Writing a book is easy and fun—yes, EASY AND FUN—but it may not always feel that way. How do you find the time to write? How do you keep momentum? How do you deal with the horror of showing anyone a single sentence of your work-in-progress? The answers remain fun and easy, and author Elizabeth Sims will take your hand, dispel your worries, and show you how it’s done in this stress-free guide to accomplishing your dream of writing your book.

  Buy it HERE.

  Fiction

  It’s not necessary to read either series in order.

  The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

  Holy Hell [#1]

  Lillian Byrd is a small-time reporter with a flair for making big-time mistakes—like getting fired for fending off the boss's son with an X-Acto knife and
breaking up with her girlfriend for no good reason—so her investigation into the disappearances of women in the Detroit area might not be the best idea. But when one of the missing women turns up dead and Lillian recognizes the bizarrely mutilated corpse, she's in too deep to get out. Of course, it doesn't help that she's still fighting off the boss's son and ducking the intensely aggressive amorous overtures of the roughest dyke in town. Now, after simultaneously blowing the case for the police and revealing herself to the off-kilter killers, she's completely on her own. Can she catch the murderers before they catch up with her?

  Buy it HERE.

  Damn Straight [#2]

  - Lambda Literary Award Winner -

  After her narrow brush with death in Holy Hell, you'd think Lillian Byrd would have learned to keep her head down, but when a friend in crisis calls from California, Lillian jumps on a plane and wings her way from Detroit to Palm Springs—and danger. It's the weekend of the Dinah Shore golf tournament, the wildest women's sporting event in the world, when thousands of lesbians descend on the desert community and take over.

  At a pre-championship party, Lillian leaps into a slippery romance with a top LPGA star. But her superstar athlete has a secret: Someone is quietly terrorizing her. Lillian, eager to help, goes undercover as a high-profile reporter, an unhinged nun, and a professional caddie while uncovering layer after disturbing layer of the golfer's past. Finally, with violence erupting at every turn, Lillian discovers her lover's ultimate horrifying secret—and it is not at all what she had guessed. Damn Straight sizzles and zings and will have you laughing through your shivers.