Burke Devore is a paper company manager, a man who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about bleaching processes and the edible wood pulp they put in ice cream. For twenty-five years Burke has provided for his family and played by the rules. Until now. Now Devore is slipping away: from his wife, his family, and from all norms of civilized behavior. Burke Devore wants his life back. And he will do anything to get it. From his attempts to land a new job, to the growing rift between him and his loved ones, Devore knows that he is running out of time. Believing that there is just one way to earn the only job he has a chance of getting, he sets off on a path from which there can be no turning back--no matter how bizarre and violent, no matter who gets in the way; no matter how evil Burke Devore becomes. Burke Devore is gunning for his competition, and it's getting easier every time. . . . In this relentlessly fascinating novel, the masterful Donald Westlake takes us on a journey of obsession and outrage inside a quiet man's desperate world. And as we follow in Devore's blood-soaked footsteps, the question begins to echo darkly:
1
I've never actually killed anybody before, murdered another
person, snuffed out another human being. In a way, oddly enough, I wish
I could talk to my father about this, since he did have the experience,
had what we in the corporate world call the background in that area of
expertise, he having been an infantryman in the Second World War, having
seen "action" in the final march across France into Germany in '44-'45,
having shot at and certainly wounded and more than likely killed any
number of men in dark gray wool, and having been quite calm about it all
in retrospect. How do you know beforehand that you can do it? That's the
question.
Well, of course, I couldn't ask my father that, discuss it with him, not
even if he were still alive, which he isn't, the cigarettes and the lung
cancer having caught up with him in his sixty-third year, putting him
down as surely if not as efficiently as if he had been a distant enemy
in dark gray wool.
The question, in any case, will answer itself, won't it? I mean, this is
the sticking point. Either I can do it, or I can't. If I can't, then all
the preparation, all the planning, the files I've maintained, the
expense I've put myself to (when God knows I can't afford it), have been
in vain, and I might as well throw it all away, run no more ads, do no
more scheming, simply allow myself to fall back into the herd of steer
mindlessly lurching toward the big dark barn where the mooing stops.
Today decides it. Three days ago, Monday, I told Marjorie I had another
appointment, this one at a small plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that
my appointment was for Friday morning, and that my plan was to drive to
Albany Thursday, take a late afternoon flight to Harrisburg, stay over
in a motel, taxi to the plant Friday morning, and then fly back to
Albany Friday afternoon. Looking a bit worried, she said, "Would that
mean we'd have to relocate? Move to Pennsylvania?"
"If that's the worst of our problems," I told her, "I'll be grateful."
After all this time, Marjorie still doesn't understand just how severe
our problems are. Of course, I've done my best to hide the extent of the
calamity from her, so I shouldn't blame Marjorie if I'm successful in
keeping her more or less worry-free. Still, I do feel alone sometimes.
This has to work. I have to get out of this morass, and soon.
Which means I'd better be capable of murder.
The Luger went into my overnight bag, in the same plastic bag as my
black shoes. The Luger had been my father's, his one souvenir from the
war, a sidearm he'd taken from a dead German officer that either he or
someone else had shot, earlier that day, from the other side of the
hedgerow. My father had removed the clip full of bullets from the Luger
and transported it in a sock, with the gun itself traveling in a small
dirty pillowcase he'd taken from a half-wrecked house somewhere in muddy
France.
My father never fired that gun, so far as I know. It was simply his
trophy, his version of the scalp you take from your defeated enemy.
Everybody shot at everybody and he was still standing at the end, so he
took a gun from one of the fallen.
I too had never fired that gun, nor any other. It frightened me, in
fact. For all I knew, if I were to pull the trigger with the clip in
place in the butt, the thing would blow up in my hands. Still, it was a
weapon, and the only one to which I had ready access. And there was
certainly no record of its existence, at least not in America.
