Tuesday, June 10, 2014

DonaldEWestlake AKA RichardStark. TheParkerNovels. Thefirstsentences.


1.      HunterThe1962
a)      When a fresh faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell. The guy said, “Screw you, buddy,” yanked his Chevy back into the stream of traffic, and roared on down to the tollbooths. Parker spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked across the George Washington Bridge.
2.      ManWithTheGetawayFaceThe1963
a)      When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.  He nodded to the stranger and looked beyond at the reflection of Dr. Alder.
3.      OutfitThe1963
a)      When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.  He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been.
4.      MournerThe1964
a)      When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away. The asthmatic hit the carpet, but there’d been another one out there, and he landed on Parker’s back like a duffel bag with arms. Parker fell turning, so that the duffel bag would be on the bottom, but it didn’t quite work out that way. They landed sideways, joltingly, and the gun skittered away in the darkness.
5.      ScoreThe1964
a)      When the bellboy left, Parker went over to the house phone and made his call. He gave the operator downstairs the number he wanted, and waited while the phone clicked and ticked and snicked in his ear. He was feeling impatient, and he was about to go downstairs and put in the call from a pay phone when all the clicking finally quit and a ringing sound started instead.
6.      JuggerThe1965
a)      When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page.  He put the paper down and looked around the room, and everything was clean and ordinary.  He walked over and opened the door.
7.      SeventhThe1966
a)      When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. Only the cheap bolt lock was fastened; the chain lock and the police lock were both open. Parker raised his foot and kicked the flat of his shoe just above the knob just one time, and the door popped open like it was surprised. It went with a dry cracking sound as pieces of the doorway ripped away from around the bolt. It was dry old wood in a rotten old building and it split easy.
8.      HandleThe1966
a)      When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around. The mainland was nearly out of sight now, just a gray smudge on the horizon between the dark blue of the water and lighter blue of the sky.
9.      RareCoinScoreThe1967
a)      Parker spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, but he was restless, and one day without thinking about it he checked out and sent a forwarding address to Handy McKay and move on to New Orleans.  He took a room in a downtown motel and connected with a girl folk singer the first night, but all she did was complain how her manager was lousing up her career, so three days later he ditched her and took up with a Bourbon Street stripper instead.
10.   GreenEagleScoreThe1967
a)      Parker looked in at the beach and there was a guy in a black suit standing there, surrounded by all the bodies in bathing suits.  He was standing near Parker’s gear, not facing anywhere in particular, and he looked like a rip in the picture.  The hotel loomed up behind him, white and windowed, the Puerto Rican sun beat down, the sea foamed white on the beach, and he stood there like a homesick mortician.
11.   BlackIceScoreThe1968
a)      Parker walked into his hotel room, and there was a guy in there going through his suitcase laid out on his bed. He looked over when Parker came in and calmly said, “That’ll be all right.” He had some kind of accent.
12.   SourLemonScoreThe1969
a)      Parker put the revolver away and looked out the windshield. The bank was half a block away along the sunny street. Andrews hadn’t come out yet.
13.   DeadlyEagle1971
a)      Up here, the music was just a throbbing under the feet, a distant pulse.  Down below, down through the roof, through and beneath the offices, down in the amphitheater shaped like a soup bowl, the crowd was roaring and pounding and yelling down at the four musicians in the bottom of the bowl. The musicians scooped up the roars coming in at them, pushed them through electric guitars and amplifiers, and sent back howls of sound that dwarfed the noise of the crowd, till the roaring was like a blast of heat on the face. But up here it was no more than a continuing throb in the gravelly surface of the roof.
14.   Slayground1971
a)      Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosives in the other. Grofield was out and running, too, and Laufman stayed hunched over the wheel, his foot tapping the accelerator.
15.   PlunderSquad1972
a)      Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left. The bullet furrowed a line through the plans on the table, the sound of the shot echoed loud and long in the closed room, and Parker rolled amid suddenly scrambling feet, his arms folded in tight over his chest. He didn’t have a gun on him, and the first thing to do was get away from the guy who did.
16.   Butcher’sMoon1974
a)      Running toward the light, Parker fired twice over his left shoulder, not caring whether he hit anything or not. It was just to slow them down, keep the cops in front of the store while he and the others got out.
17.   Comeback1997
a)      When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness of the cinder block corridor beneath the stage. A hymn filtered discordantly through the rough walls; thousands of voices, raggedly together. The angel said, “I’m not sure about this…”
18.   Backflahs1998
a)      When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first. He slid to the left, around the tree that had made the Seville finally jolt to a stop, and listened. The siren receded, far upslope. These woods held a shocked silence, after the crash; every animal ear in a hundred yards was alert as Parker’s.
19.   Flashfire2000
a)      When the dashboard clock read 2:40, Parker drve out of the drugstore parking lot and across the sunlint road to the convenience store/gas station. He stopped beside the pumps, the only car here, hit the button to pop the trunk lid, and got out of the car. A bright day in July, temperature in the low seventies, a moderate-sized town not two hundred miles from Omaha, a few shoppers driving past in both directions. A dozen blocks away, Melander and Carlson and Ross would be just entering the bank.
20.   Firebreak2001
a)      When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man. His knees pressed down on the interloper’s back, his hands were clasped around his forehead. He heard the phone ring, distantly, in the house, as he jerked his forearms back; heard the neck snap; heard the phone’s second ring, cut off, as Claire answered, somewhere in the house.
21.   Breakout2002
a)      When the alarm went off, Parker and Armiston were far to the rear of the warehouse, Armiston with the clipboard, checking off the boxes they’d want. The white cartons were stacked six feet high to make aisles that stretched to the unpainted concrete block side walls of the building. A wider central aisle ran straight to the loading dock where they’d come in, dismantling the alrams and raising the overhead door.
22.   NobodyRunsForever2004
a)      When he saw that the one called Harbin was wearing a wire, Parker said, “Deal me out a hand,” and got to his feet. They’d all come to this late-night meeting in suits and ties, traveling businessmen taking a break with a little seven-card stud. Harbin, a nervous man unused to the dress shirt, kept twitching and moving around, bending forward to squint at his cards. and finally Parker, a quarter around the table to Harbin’s left, saw in the gap between shirt buttons that flash of clear tape holding the wire down.
23.   AskTheParrot2006
a)      When the helicopter swept northward and lifted out of sight over the top of the hill, Parker stepped away from the tree he’d waited beside and continued his climb. Whatever was on the other side of this hill had to be better than the dogs baying down there at the foot of the slope behind him, running around, straining at their leashes, finding his scent,starting up. He couldn’t see the bottom of the hill any more, the police cars congregated around his former Dodge rental in the diner parking lot, but he didn’t need to. The excited yelp of the dogs was enough.
24.   DirtyMoney2008
a)      When the silver Toyota Avalon bumped down the dirt road out of the woods and across the railroad tracks, Parker put the Infiniti into low and stepped out onto the gravel. The Infiniti jerked forward toward the river as the Toyota slewed around behind it to a stop. Parker picked up the full duffel bag from where he’d tossed iton the ground, and behind him, the Infiniti rolled down the slope into the river, all its windows open; it slid into the gray dawn water like a bear into a trout stream.

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