The Mourner by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake [Westlake, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, General, Suspense, Fiction, Parker (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9780226771038
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

P02 The Mourner

2

MENLO was dreaming.

First, there was a beach. There were great round beach umbrellas, and crowds of people swimming and splashing in the shallow water. Women wearing wool bathing suits and big floppy hats shading their eyes looked out over the water, and men and other women lay face down on blankets, sunbathing. There was a steady roar of sound, shouting and splashing and laughing, ebbing and flowing like the waves that trickled up the flat beach and down again. And children running, people hurrying this way and that. But it was all muted, all slowed down. The shouting and splashing sounded far off as if under water, and all the running and scurrying was like a moving picture run in slow motion.

A woman came walking towards Menlo across the beach. She was tall and golden and blonde and slender, with pleasing fullnesses where they should be, and she was totally nude. But no one else paid her any attention. She came closer and closer to him, smiling with a smile that offered everything, and he recognized her, but he couldn't remember her name. He stared at her, trying to remember, and wondering why no one at the beach was alarmed by her nudity. Then the sun got into his eyes, making them sting and water, and he closed them for relief. When he opened them again the woman was closer, but now she was wearing Parker's face.

“No!” Menlo screamed, and in a sudden great gout of flame and smoke she disappeared. He looked out over the water, and a huge ship with tremendous white sails was racing towards him, bombarding the beach. The gouts of flame and smoke roared up all around him. People were screaming, and running every which way.

He dropped to his knees and began scrabbling in the sand, digging a hole to hide in, when a voice said, “Why not just clamp down hard on the capsule, my friend, and save all that digging?”

He looked up, there was Spannick, sitting on a kitchen chair and smiling at him. The kitchen chair was very slowly sinking into the sand under Spannick's weight.

“You're dead,” he shouted, and Spannick's face changed to Parker's. He closed his eyes, knowing he was doomed. He opened them again, and he was in a motel room with one green wall and one white wall and one yellow and one wall of glass covered by draperies of the three colours all combined, and he was alone.

He sat up, and slowly the realization came to him that this was truth, that he was awake and the nightmare was over. His elbows were trembling, and his mouth hung open. He tried to close it, but his jaw immediately fell slack again. He tried again, and it fell slack again. He kept trying, sitting mounded in the middle of the bed like a squat pink fish, his elbows trembling and his mouth closing and falling open, closing and falling open. But reality was returning to him, and in a minute he got up from the bed and stood in the middle of the room.

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