Written in Time by Jerry Ahern

data and the conversation ended . . .  
    Ellen waited as long as she dared before the answering machine would pick up. Jack wasn’t answering the telephone. She lifted the receiver, shook her hair back and put the receiver to her ear. “Hi. Can I help you?”  
    And Ellen almost passed out. It was their old agent, Lars Benson. A very nice guy, Lars had also been the most incompetent literary agent imaginable. “Jack around?”  
    “What’s up, Lars?”  
    “I got you guys a sale, Ellen!”  
    Ellen Naile thought that she’d heard Lars Benson, who, in the first place, hadn’t been their literary agent for more than five years and, in the second place, couldn’t sell a space suit to a naked astronaut, let alone a book to a publisher, say that he had sold something.  
    “Let me find Jack, Lars. Okay? Hold on.”  
    “Let me tell ya! I gotta tell ya!”  
    “Alright, Lars. Tell me.” Sometimes, she wished that she still smoked. A Salem at this moment would have cleared her sinuses and given her something to think about besides how dear, sweet, honest and ineffectual Lars had gone off the deep end. “What did you sell, Lars?”  
    “Remember when you guys wrote Angel Street?”  
    Ellen wanted to say, “No, I forgot.” Instead, she answered, “And?”  
    “One of the majors in Hollywood—and I don’t mean an indie—wants to option it for a western.”  
    Ellen Naile almost said, “shit” but didn’t. “Lars,” she pointed out, “that book was set in the present day—at least the present day in the mid-1980s.”  
    “Don’t you get it, sweetheart?! They’re movin’ it to the 1880s. Or somethin’. We could be talkin’ the Austrian Oak here makin’ his first western, or—”  
    “He made a western with Kirk Douglas and Ann-Margaret. It’s really funny, like a cartoon with people in it. It was intended to be that way.”  
    “Well, I don’t know who the hell’s gonna be in it, but they’re talkin’ twenty-five large up front—”  
    “You’ve gotta stop watching Miami Vice, Lars.”  
    “Twenty-five grand, alright?! And if they exercise the option and decide to lens it, we’re talkin’ major bucks city here, a hundred grand extra and a piece. A little piece, for sure . . .”  
    “Ohh, for sure. I’ll get Jack, Lars.”  
    Ellen pushed the hold button and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Jack! Pick up on line one! Now, Jack!”  
    Ellen had been on the kitchen telephone and ran toward the office, her fists under her breasts because she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath the loose-fitting T-shirt.  
    Jack was on the phone as she came in and they exchanged glances. His eyes mirrored her thoughts—poor Lars had finally gone off the deep end, withdrawn into a fantasy world.  
    “Angel Street,” Ellen whispered barely aloud as she sat down at her desk. As a western? Angel Street had been a book Jack had liked a lot more than she had. The hero of the story had been a hard-as-nails P.I. named “Angela Street” who takes a charity case, going after the drug lord responsible for the death of a teenage runaway.  
    The P.I. is closing in on the drug lord, about to get the goods on him, when the drug lord’s gang ambushes her and kills her.  
    An actual angel—her guardian angel—appears and offers Angela Street the chance to return to life long enough to get the drug lord and his gang. Angela agrees. The angel—a very good-looking male angel—stays with her, helping her. It is a risk for the guardian angel, because, in order to help her, he must take on human form. And, should something happen to him while in human form, he would die, would be unable to return to life as an angel. He’d be dead-dead. Angela and her guardian angel fall in love—which Ellen had thought was way too predictable. More predictable had been the ending. Angela Street triumphs against the drug lord, of course, and the guardian angel gets fatally shot. As he dies, she kisses him and,