His ID badge hung on a chain over the shirt. The boys in the room, in uniform, wore purple and white polo shirts, and khaki pants. In Leo’s hand was a slim Avon paperback of a novel called The Hunter. Its author credit read “Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark.” The cover art collage feat...
I stood amid a group of eight tourists on the ground level, around a brightly lit, U-shaped counter. A gangly Park Service employee was giving us a brief history of the Post Office. He mumbled into a microphone in a barely intelligible, nasal voice. The man next to me was taping him with a video ...
I was spread out on top of the sheets, soaked with sweat, still dressed right down to my shoes. My cat was lying sphinx-style on my chest, kneading her claws through my shirt, her face tight against mine. Starved for food or attention, it didn’t matter which. I got up and opened a can of salmon a...
He grabbed his 10 × 50 binoculars from the trunk, locked the car down, jogged around a fenced-in area holding a propane tank, and ran into the woods. He went diagonally in the direction that McKinley and his sidekick had gone, hoping that they were headed for a house set back not too far off Whee...
Mary’s County, following Bernie Walters’s pickup all the way. They stopped for coffee, then stopped again for ammunition and bait, and made one last stop at a drive-through liquor store, where Karras watched the clerk pass a case of beer through the window of Walters’s truck. Pulling out of the l...
Next to the lamp, a General Electric clock radio, the dial set on WHUR, played softly in the room: Norman Conners, “You Are My Starship.” Isaac loved that one. He rubbed the oilskin down the barrel of the Colt, and sang along. He had cleaned and oiled the gun while Nettie,...
There was a footlocker in his room and a nightstand he had bought at a consignment shop, with a lamp and an alarm clock on the nightstand and four or five paperback westerns stacked beside the clock. There were no pictures or posters of any kind on the bedroom walls.Quinn rubbed his temples. He h...
The diner seated twenty-seven: fifteen stools covered in blue vinyl and three blue vinyl booths that each fit four. Old photographs of the village were hung on the blue-and-white tiled walls, as well as formal-suit portraits of the owner’s immigrant parents. Near the front door stood a D.C. Vendi...
The temperature was in the teens, but there was no wind and my Dart cruised effortlessly down the highway beneath a steel sheet of clouds. At Waldorf I cracked a window and huffed a Camel, and in La Plata I stopped for a burger and a Coke. A half hour later I was on the Island and sitting on a br...