The Road to Ruin by Westlake Donald E

Author:Westlake, Donald E. [Westlake, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 089296801X
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

30

DORTMUNDER WAS NEVER happy outside the five boroughs. There was always something wrong with the rest of the world, some way it had figured out to make him uncomfortable. For instance, at the moment, in the uncharted middle of Pennsylvania, he had to sleep on the kitchen floor.

Chester and his jolly wife, Grace, lived in a very small house in a very small town. Because Tiny and Stan, in their new persons from Jim Green, didn’t know each other or anybody else in this area, they could stay at nice motels along the Susquehanna River while waiting to be employed by Monroe Hall, but Kelp had given the employment agency Chester as his kinsman and local contact, and Kelp and Dortmunder had to already know each other because they’d both allegedly worked at the same embassy down in Washington, D.C., so they both had to stay with Kelp’s “relative” at least the one night, and even before the coin toss Dortmunder had known which of them was going to get the living room sofa. So it was on some folded blankets on the kitchen floor that Dortmunder was expected to get his night’s rest, and fat chance.

The problems were many. The floor, to begin with, but beyond that the very fact of kitchen. Even a small kitchen in a small house in a small town, like this one, is as full of gleaming machinery as that inside the villain’s mountain in a James Bond movie. The stove, the microwave, and the clock radio all had sharply bright numbers to tell you the time, in two shades of green and one shade of red, and of course they were all a minute apart except for a few seconds every now and then when two of them pretended to agree. So they were irritating, and they were also bright.

Then there was the refrigerator. At least it didn’t have any shiny numbers glaring off it, but that was about the only good thing you could say about it. Occasionally it was silent, but that in a way was the worst, because that meant the victim had to wait, never knowing when the motor would suddenly thrug-ug-ug-ug . . . And then also the icemaker, from time to time, with a muffled crash like somebody disposing of a skeleton in a Hefty bag, would spit out another strip of ice cubes onto the previously existing cubes below.

A very busy place, all in all, this kitchen, at the bottom of which, like at the bottom of a well, Dortmunder lay in discomfort and tried to grab a little sleep before morning, when he was supposed to be bright and rested enough to go play butler, an impersonation he’d never tried before.

Well, he’d gone into training for it, with May’s help. May was a movie fan, which meant she went to movies and remembered them, and which also meant she had recently added a time-flashing machine to their own lives, a DVD player, in the living room.

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