Transgressions Vol. 3 Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Introduction

  WALKING AROUND MONEY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  WALKING THE LINE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  MERELY HATE

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  When I was writing novellas for the pulp magazines back in the 1950s, we still called them “novelettes,” and all I knew about the form was that it was long and it paid half a cent a word: This meant that if I wrote 10,000 words, the average length of a novelette back then, I would sooner or later get a check for five hundred dollars. This was not bad pay for a struggling young writer.

  A novella today can run anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 words. Longer than a short story (5,000 words) but much shorter than a novel (at least 60,000 words), it combines the immediacy of the former with the depth of the latter, and it ain’t easy to write. In fact, given the difficulty of the form, and the scarcity of markets for novellas, it is surprising that any writers today are writing them at all.

  But here was the brilliant idea.

  Round up the best writers of mystery, crime, and suspense novels, and ask them to write a brand-new novella for a collection of similarly superb novellas to be published anywhere in the world for the very first time. Does that sound keen, or what? In a perfect world, yes, it is a wonderful idea, and here is your novella, sir, thank you very much for asking me to contribute.

  But many of the bestselling novelists I approached had never written a novella in their lives. (Some of them had never even written a short story!) Up went the hands in mock horror. “What! A novella? I wouldn’t even know how to begin one.” Others thought that writing a novella (“How long did you say it had to be?”) would constitute a wonderful challenge, but bestselling novelists are busy people with publishing contracts to fulfill and deadlines to meet, and however intriguing the invitation may have seemed at first, stark reality reared its ugly head, and so …

  “Gee, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m already three months behind deadline,” or …

  “My publisher would kill me if I even dreamed of writing something for another house,” or …

  “Try me again a year from now,” or …

  “Have you asked X? Or Y? Or Z?”

  What it got down to in the end was a matter of timing and luck. In some cases, a writer I desperately wanted was happily between novels and just happened to have some free time on his/her hands. In other cases, a writer had an idea that was too short for a novel but too long for a short story, so yes, what a wonderful opportunity! In yet other cases, a writer wanted to introduce a new character he or she had been thinking about for some time. In each and every case, the formidable task of writing fiction that fell somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 words seemed an exciting challenge, and the response was enthusiastic.

  Except for length and a loose adherence to crime, mystery, or suspense, I placed no restrictions upon the writers who agreed to contribute. The results are as astonishing as they are brilliant. The novellas that follow are as varied as the writers who concocted them, but they all exhibit the same devoted passion and the same extraordinary writing. More than that, there is an underlying sense here that the writer is attempting something new and unexpected, and willing to share his or her own surprises with us. Just as their names are in alphabetical order on the book cover, so do their stories follow in reverse alphabetical order: I have no favorites among them. I love them all equally.

  Enjoy!

  ED MCBAIN

  Weston, Connecticut August 2004

  DONALD E. WESTLAKE

  It’s an accepted fact that Donald E. Westlake has excelled at every single subgenre the mystery field has to offer. Humorous books such as Sacred Monster and the John Dortmunder series; terrifying books like The Ax, about a man who wants vengeance on the company that downsized him out of a job, and probably Westlake’s most accomplished novel; and hard-boiled books that include the Parker series, a benchmark in the noir world of professional thieves and to which he recently returned to great acclaim; and insider books like The Hook, a twisty thriller about the peril and pitfalls of being a writer. One learns from his novels and short stories that he is possessed of a remarkable intelligence, and that he can translate that intelligence into plot, character, and realistic prose with what appears to be astonishing ease. He is the sort of writer other writers study endlessly; every Westlake novel has something to teach authors, no matter how long they’ve been at the word processor. And he seems to have been discovered—at last and long overdue—by a mass audience. His recent books include Ask the Parrot and What’s So Funny?, the latest featuring Dortmunder.

  WALKING AROUND MONEY

  Donald E. Westlake

  1

  “Ever since I reformed,” the man called Querk said, “I been havin’ trouble to sleep at night.”

  This was a symptom Dortmunder had never heard of before; on the other hand, he didn’t know that many people who’d reformed. “Huh,” he said. He really didn’t know this man called Querk, so he didn’t have a lot to say so far.

  But Querk did. “It’s my nerves,” he explained, and he looked as though it was his nerves. A skinny little guy, maybe fifty, with a long face, heavy black eyebrows over banana nose over thin-lipped mouth over long bony chin, he fidgeted constantly on that wire-mesh chair in Paley Park, a vest-pocket park on East 53rd Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

  It’s a very nice park, Paley Park, right in the middle of midtown, just forty-two feet wide and not quite a block deep, up several steps from the level of 53rd Street. The building walls on both sides are covered in ivy, and tall honey locust trees form a kind of leafy roof in the summer, which is what at this moment it was.

  But the best thing about Paley Park is the wall of water at the back, a constant flow down the rear wall, splashing into a trough to be recycled, making a very nice kind of shooshing sound that almost completely covers the roar of the traffic, which makes for a peaceful retreat right there in the middle of everything and also makes it possible for two or three people—John Dortmunder, say, and his friend Andy Kelp, and the man called Querk, for instance—to sit near the wall of water and have a nice conversation that nobody, no matter what kind of microphone they’ve got, is going to record. It’s amazing, really, that every criminal enterprise in the city of New York isn’t plotted in Paley Park; or maybe they
are.

  “You see how it is,” the man called Querk said, and lifted both hands out of his lap to hold them in front of himself, where they trembled like a paint-mixing machine. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “I wasn’t a pickpocket before I reformed.”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder commented.

  “Or a safecracker,” Kelp said.

  “Well, I was,” Querk told him. “But I was one of your liquid nitro persuasion, you know. Drill your hole next to the combination, pour in your jelly, stuff the detonator in there, stand back. No nerves involved at all.”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said.

  Querk frowned at him. “You got asthma?” “No,” Dortmunder said. “I was just agreeing with you.”

  “If you say so.” Querk frowned at the curtain of water, which just kept shooshing down that wall in front of them, splashing in the trough, never stopping for a second. You wouldn’t want to stay in Paley Park too long.

  “The point is,” Querk said, “before I reformed, I’d always get a good night’s sleep, because I knew I was careful and everything was in its place, so I could relax. But then, the last time I went up, I decided I was too old for jail. You know, there comes a point, you say, jail is a job for the young.” He gave a sidelong look at Dortmunder. “You gonna do that huh thing again?”

  “Only if you want me to.”

  “We’ll skip it, then,” Querk said, and said, “This last time in, I learned another trade, you know how you always learn these trades on the inside. Air-conditioner repair, dry cleaning. This last time, I learned to be a printer.”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said. “I mean, that’s good, you’re a printer.”

  “Except,” Querk said, “I’m not. I get out, I go to this printing plant upstate, up near where my cousin lives, I figure I’ll stay with him, he’s always been your straight arrow, I can get a look at an honest person up close, see how it’s done, but when I go to the printer to say look at this skill the State of New York gave me, they said, we don’t do it like that any more, we use computers now.” Querk shook his head. “Is that the criminal justice system for you, right there?” he wanted to know. “They spend all this time and money, they teach me an obsolete trade.”

  Kelp said, “What you wanted to learn was computers.”

  “Well, what I got,” Querk said, “I got a job at the printing plant, only not a printer. I’m a loader, when the different papers come in, I drive around in this forklift, put the papers where they go, different papers for different jobs. But because I’m reformed,” Querk went on, “and this isn’t the trade I learned, this is just going back and forth on a forklift truck, I don’t ever feel like I done anything. No planning, no preparation, nothing to be careful about. I get uneasy, I got no structure in my life, and the result is, I sleep lousy. Then, no sleep, I’m on the forklift, half the time I almost drive it into a wall.”

  Dortmunder could see how that might happen. People are creatures of habit, and if you lose a habit that’s important to you—being on the run, for instance—it could throw off your whatayacallit. Biorhythm. Can’t sleep. Could happen.

  Dortmunder and Andy Kelp and the man called Querk sat in silence (shoosh) a while, contemplating the position Querk found himself in, sitting here together on these nice wire-mesh chairs in the middle of New York in August, which of course meant it wasn’t New York at all, not the real New York, but the other New York, the August New York.

  In August, the shrinks are all out of town, so the rest of the city population looks calmer, less stressed. Also, a lot of those are out of town, as well, replaced by American tourists in pastel polyester and foreign tourists in vinyl and corduroy. August among the tourists is like all at once living in a big herd of cows; slow, fat, dumb, and no idea where they’re going.

  What Dortmunder had no idea was where Querk was going. All he knew was, Kelp had phoned him this morning to say there was a guy they might talk to who might have something to say and the name the guy was using as a password was Harry Matlock. Well, Harry Matlock was a guy Dortmunder had worked with in the past, with Matlock’s partner Ralph Demrovsky, but it seemed to him the last time he’d seen Ralph, during a little exercise in Las Vegas, Harry wasn’t there. So how good a passport was that, after all this time? That’s why Dortmunder’s part of the conversation so far, and on into the unforeseeable future, consisted primarily of huh.

  “So finally,” the man called Querk said, breaking a long shoosh, “I couldn’t take it anymore. I’m imitating my cousin, walkin’ the straight and narrow, and that’s what it feels like, I’m imitating my cousin. Once a month I drive up to this town called Hudson, see my lady parole officer, I got nothin’ to hide. How can you talk to a parole officer in a circumstance like that? She keeps giving me these suspicious looks, and I know why. I got nothin’ to tell her but the truth.”

  “Jeez, that’s tough,” Kelp said.

  “You know it.” Querk shook his head. “And all along,” he said, “I’ve got a caper right there, right at the printing plant, staring me in the face, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to know about it, I gotta act like I’m deaf and dumb and blind.”

  Dortmunder couldn’t help himself; he said, “At the printing plant?”

  “Oh, sure, I know,” Querk said. “Your inside job, I’m first in line to get my old cell back. But that isn’t the way it works.” Querk seemed very earnest about this. “The only way this scheme works,” he said, “is if the plant never knows it happened. If they find out, we don’t make a thing.”

  Dortmunder said, “It’s a heist.”

  “A quiet heist,” Querk told him. “No hostages, no explosions, no standoffs. In, out, nobody ever knows it happened. Believe me, the only way this scores for us is if nobody ever knows anything went missing.”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “You oughta try cough drops,” Querk suggested. “But the point here is, this is a beautiful job, and I’m sick of getting no sleep, so maybe I’ll leave reform alone for a while. But.”

  “Sure,” Kelp said, because there was always a “but.”

  “I can’t do it alone,” Querk told them. “This is not a one-man job. So I was on the inside for six and a half years, and I’m both reformed and upstate for almost eighteen months, so I’m well and truly out of the picture. I try calling around, everybody’s inside or dead or disappeared, and finally I reach Harry Matlock, that I knew years ago, when he first partnered up with Ralph Demrovsky, and now Harry’s retired.”

  “I thought he maybe was,” Dortmunder said.

  Querk nodded. “He told me,” he said, “he’s not reformed, he’s retired. It’s a different thing. ‘I didn’t reform,’ he told me, ‘I just lost my nerve. So I retired.’”

  “Pretty much the same thing,” Kelp suggested.

  “But with more dignity,” Querk told him. “So he gave me your name, Andy Kelp, and now here we are, and we look each other over.”

  “Right,” Kelp said. “So what next?”

  “Well,” Querk said, “I check you guys out, and if you seem—”

  Dortmunder said, “What? You check us out?” He’d thought the interview was supposed to go in the other direction.

  “Naturally,” Querk said. “I don’t want us goin’ along and goin’ along, everything’s fine, and all of a sudden you yell surprise and pull out a badge.”

  “That would surprise the hell out of me,” Dortmunder told him.

  “We’re strangers to each other,” Querk pointed out. “I gave Kelp a few names, he could check on me, and he gave me a few names, I could check on him and you both—”

  “Huh,” Dortmunder said.

  “So after we all meet here now,” Querk said, “and we check each other out, and we think it’s gonna be okay, I’ll call Andy here, same as this time, and if you two are satisfied, we can make another meet.”

  Dortmunder said, “You didn’t tell us what the heist is.”

  “That’s right,” Querk said. Looking around, he said
, “Okay with you guys if I go first? You’ll wanna talk about me behind my back anyway.”

  “Sure,” Kelp agreed. “Nice to meet you, Kirby,” because, Querk had said, that was his first name.

  “You, too,” Querk said, and nodded at Dortmunder. “I like the way you keep your own counsel.”

  “Uh huh,” Dortmunder said.

  2

  If you walk far enough into the west side, even in August, you can find a bar without tourists, ferns, or menus, and where the lights won’t offend your eyes. In such a place, a little later that afternoon, Dortmunder and Kelp hunched over beers in a black Formica booth and muttered together, while the bartender behind his bar some distance away leaned his elbows on the Daily News, and the three other customers, here and there around the place, muttered to themselves in lieu of company.

  “I’m not sure what I think about this guy,” Dortmunder muttered.

  “He seems okay.” Kelp shrugged. “I mean, I could buy his story. Reforming and all.”

  “But he’s pretty cagy,” Dortmunder muttered.

  “Well, sure. He don’t know us.”

  “He doesn’t tell us the caper.”

  “That’s sensible, John.”

  “He’s living upstate.” Dortmunder spread his hands. “Where upstate? Where’s this printing plant? All he says is he goes to some place called Hudson to see his parole officer.”

  Kelp nodded, being open-minded. “Look at it from his point of view,” he muttered. “If things don’t work out between him and us, and he’s gonna go ahead with some other guys, why does he wanna have to worry we’re somewhere in the background, lookin’ to cut in?”

  “I mean, what kind of heist is this?” Dortmunder complained. “You steal something from this plant, and the plant isn’t supposed to notice? ‘Hey, didn’t we use to have a whatchacallit over here?’ You take something, especially you take something with some value on it, people notice.”

  “Well, that’s an intriguing part of it,” Kelp muttered.