Backflash by Donald E. Westlake & Richard Stark

Author:Donald E. Westlake & Richard Stark [Westlake, Donald E. & Stark, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, noir, crime
ISBN: 9780226770604
Google: KNaRbI4y5ZIC
Amazon: 0226770605
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: 1998-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

4

Ray Becker sat in an old wooden Adirondack chair on the screened porch at the back of the cabin, the bottle of Gatorade at his side, and watched the sunset over the river. It's a new day, he thought. I'm starting over, and this time I'm gonna get it right. He was a fuckup, and he knew it. He'd been a fuckup all his life, third of five sons of a hardware store owner who was never any problem for any of his boys so long as they worked their ass off. Being in the middle, Ray had never been big enough or strong enough to compete with his meaner older brothers, and never been cute enough or sly enough to compete with his guileful younger brothers, so he was just the fuckup in the middle, and grew up knowing that about himself, and had never done anything in his life to make him change his opinion of himself.

God knows he tried. He liked the Army, for instance. Go in there and do your job and don't sweat about promotion, and the Army was never any problem for anybody, so long as they worked their ass off. But drink and bad companions have taken down many a better man than Ray Becker, and he did wind up with a bunch of clowns that had it in mind to rob the base PX, and of course they got caught, and of course Ray was the first to crack, so of course he was the one who wound up with the deal and testified against everybody else, and they went to Leavenworth while he didn't even have a bad mark on his record; a general discharge under honorable conditions. Only the Army wouldn't ever want him back.

Policing turned out to be like the Army, only with different-colored uniforms. But the concept was the same; a strict set of rules, easy to understand. Stay within them, you'll be all right. And in police work, particularly small-town police work, you didn't even have to work your ass off.

But the other little glitch was money. The old man had been as cheap a son of a bitch as it was possible to find, and still was, no doubt; Ray had had no contact at all with the family for more than ten years. What would be in it for him? Work for the old man, and get nothing out of it. The only reason the old man would know Ray wasn't there was if he had to get somebody else to do the heavy lifting.

Thirty-seven years old. A born fuckup who didn't really want much in life, but who simply couldn't keep himself from conniving. Show him a rule, and he'll say, "Oh, thank God, there's rules," and absolutely mean it, and at the same time scheme from the get-go for some sneaky way to get around the rule, subvert it, defy it and ignore it. Maybe that was an inheritance from the old man, too.

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