The Man with the Getaway Face: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) Read online

  Praise for THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE:

  “Richard Stark's Parker novels, a cluster of which were written in an extraordinary burst of creativity in the early '60s, are among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time.”

  —John Banville, Bookforum

  “Richard Stark is the Prince of Noir.”

  —Martin Cruz-Smith

  “This super-crook, named Parker, disguised by facial surgery, needs cash—oh, 50 thou—to pay his hospital debts. The quickest way to round up that much dough, in one fell swoop, would be an armored car robbery. But there's this dame, named Alma, who—well, let's just say that from these few facts on the action waxes fast and furious, and charmingly deplorable.”

  —Nick B. Williams, Los Angeles Times

  “Parker is a brillant invention. . . . What chiefly distinguishes Westlake, under whatever name, is his passion for process and mechanics. . . . Parker appears to have eliminated everything from his program but machine logic, but this is merely protective coloration. He is a romantic vestige, a free-market anarchist whose independent status is becoming a thing of the past.”

  —Luc Sante, New York Review of Books

  “Westlake is among the smoothest, most engaging writers on the planet.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  “One of the most original characters in mystery fiction has returned without a loss of step, savvy, sheer bravado, street smarts, or sense of survival.”

  —Mystery News

  “Gritty and chillingly noir. . . . [Westlake] succeeds in demonstrating his total mastery of crime fiction.”

  —Booklist

  “The Parker novels . . . are among the greatest hard-boiled writing of all time.”

  —Financial Times (London)

  “No one can turn a phrase like Westlake.”

  —Detroit News and Free Press

  “Westlake's ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Stark, a pseudonym of the venerable and wildly prolific author Donald E. Westlake, is a mystery connoisseur's delight. . . . A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Elmore Leonard wouldn't write what he does if Stark hadn't been there before. And Quentin Tarantino wouldn't write what he does without Leonard. . . . Old master that he is, Stark does them all one better.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  BOOKS BY RICHARD STARK

  The Hunter [Payback]

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Outfit

  The Mourner

  The Score

  The Jugger

  The Seventh

  The Handle

  The Damsel

  The Rare Coin Score

  The Green Eagle Score

  The Dame

  The Black Ice Score

  The Sour Lemon Score

  Deadly Edge

  The Blackbird

  Slayground

  Lemons Never Lie

  Plunder Squad

  Butcher's Moon

  Comeback

  Backflash

  Flashfire

  Firebreak

  Ask the Parrot

  Dirty Money

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  RICHARD STARK

  The University of Chicago Press

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  © 1963 by Richard Stark

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published by Avon Books.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77100-7 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77100-8 (paper)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933–

  The man with the getaway face/Richard Stark.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77100-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77100-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77286-8 (electronic)

  1. Parker (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Criminals—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.E9M3 2008

  813′.54—dc22

  2008012333

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  ONE

  1

  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. Adler.

  Parker had been at the sanitarium a little over four weeks now. He had come in with a face that the New York syndicate wanted to put a bullet in, and now he was going back out with a face that meant nothing to anyone. The face had cost him nearly eighteen thousand, leaving him about nine from his last job to tide him over till he got rolling again. The syndicate trouble had been a bad time, but that was over now.

  Parker stood a while longer at the mirror, studying the stranger. He had a long narrow nose, flat cheeks, a wide lipless mouth, a jutting jaw. There were tiny bunchings of flesh beneath the brows, forcing them out just a bit from the forehead, subtly changing the contours of the face. Only the eyes were familiar, flawed onyx, cold and hard.

  It was a good job. Paid for in advance, it should be. Parker nodded again at his new face, turned away from the mirror, and watched the doctor drop the bandaging into a wastebasket. “When can I get out of here?”

  “Any time you're ready.”

  Dr. Adler was tall and bony and gray-haired. From 1931 till 1939 he had worked with the California Communist Party, setting up strike camps. After the Second World War, in which he had done plastic surgery in an Army hospital in Oregon, he had set up private practice in San Francisco. But in 1949 a Congressional Committee had exploded his past in his face. He wasn't stripped of his license, just of his livelihood. Since 1951 he had made his living as a plastic surgeon to those outside the law, operating a sanitarium front near Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Dr. Adler crossed the room again, going to the door, where he paused. “When you're dressed, come down to the office. I have a letter for you.”

  “From Joe Sheer?”

  “I think so.”

  Joe Sheer was the retired jugger who'd vouched for him with the doctor. When the doctor left, Parker opened the closet door and took out the new suit, a dark brown he'd bought on the way here and never worn. He chucked out of the white pajamas and into his clothes, and took one last look at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. He was a big man, flat and squared-off, with boxy shoulders and a narrow waist. He had big hands, corrugated with veins, and long hard arms.
He looked like a man who'd made money, but who'd made it without sitting behind a desk.

  The new face went with the rest of him as well as the old one had. Satisfied, he picked up his suitcase and left the room and went downstairs to the office. The sanitarium was one large building, office and waiting room and staff living quarters on the first floor, patients' rooms on the second. There was space for twenty-three patients, and Dr. Adler maintained a staff of four—two nurses, a cook, and a handyman. There was rarely more than one patient in the place and half the time there were no patients at all. But he had state licenses to worry about, and Federal taxes, so a large part of his take went for false front.

  Parker went into the doctor's office. “I left some old clothes upstairs. You can throw them away for me.”

  “All right. Here.” He held out an envelope.

  Parker took it and ripped it open. Inside was a brief pencil-scrawled note:

  Mr. Anson,

  I understand you might be interested in a fast-moving investment with triple level protection, guaranteed to turn over a profit of at least fifty thousand in an incredibly short length of time. The stock is automotive, of course, and I understand its course has been carefully plotted against future profits. If you are interested, get in touch with Mr. Lasker in Cincinnati at your earliest convenience. He's at the Warwick.

  JOE

  Parker read the letter, then turned the envelope over and studied the flap. Dr. Adler said, “Yes, I steamed it open.”

  “You did a bad job,” Parker told him. He dropped letter and envelope on the desk.

  The doctor shrugged. “I get bored sometimes,” he said. “So I read other people's mail.”

  “Joe said I could trust you.”

  “With your face. Not with your mail.” He smiled, thinly. “I am a doctor, Mr. Anson. That is all I want to be. If circumstances had been different, I'd be a doctor in San Francisco today with more reputable patients and a more lucrative practice. It doesn't matter, I'm still a doctor. And that's all. A doctor, not an informer, not a thief. I've taken all the money from you I intend to take, and once you leave here we will undoubtedly never have dealings again. Unless you recommend someone else, of course, or need yet another face. I read that letter on a whim.”

  “You get whims often?”

  “I never get whims that would cut off my supply of patients, Mr. Anson.”

  Parker considered, studying him. Joe had said he was a little off, but that it was nothing to worry about. Parker shrugged. “All right. Do you know what the letter meant?”

  “I have no idea. I'd be fascinated to know, however.”

  “It's an armored car holdup. Three guards. The job is figured to make the grab while it's on a highway, instead of in a city. Fifty grand is what they figure my share would be.” Parker reached down and flipped the letter closer to the doctor. “You see it there?”

  The doctor read the letter, slowly, holding it in both hands. His hands were so clean they looked bleached. He nodded. “Yes, I see.”

  “Can your man give me a ride to town?”

  “Of course. You'll probably find him in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks. I'll take my case.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot.” The doctor stood up, went over to the dark green safe in the corner and twisted the combination. He opened the door and took out a light brown typewriter case. The typewriter case contained eight thousand five hundred dollars, all of Parker's cash.

  Parker took the case and picked up the suitcase. “I'll be seeing you around.”

  “I doubt it.”

  When Parker left, the doctor was studying the letter again, a thin smile on his lips.

  2

  Dr. Adler's handyman was punch-drunk, though he'd never been in the ring. He'd been a Party organizer in the thirties, among the migrant crop harvesters, and scab-wielded two-by-fours had scrambled his brains. His former fluency with dialectic was gone; these days the driving of a hydromatic Chrysler was the most complicated exercise his brain could handle. He was fifty-four and his face was lumpy, with scar tissue around the eyes. The doctor called him “Stubbs.”

  Parker found him in the kitchen, a stainless-steel room kept spotless because most of its equipment was never used. Stubbs sat on a steel table against one wall, holding a white coffee mug in both hands. The cook, a thin ex-whore named May, was reading the back of a box of Fab.

  Parker said to Stubbs, “You're supposed to drive me into Lincoln.”

  Stubbs frowned at him. “We got a Chrysler.”

  “Am I being kidded, friend?”

  “No,” May said. To Stubbs, she said, “To the city, Stubbs. He wants you to drive him to the city.” She turned back to Parker. “Did the doctor say it's okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stubbs got down from the table, laboriously. “I never drove a Lincoln,” he said. “I drove a Rolls once. It belonged to a sympathizer. That was down south someplace, near Dago. They killed a Joe Goss that time, blew the whole thing wide open. It would of been a good strike up to then, a deputy drove over this little girl, broke her leg. But then—the guys had to kill that Joe Goss, and it was all over.” He scratched his cheek. The flesh was soft, and gave like dough under his fingernails. “Where you want to go?”

  May answered him. “Down into town, Stubbs. The freight yards, I guess.”

  “You betcha.”

  Stubbs led the way through the garbage room and out the back door. The sanitarium property, wooded, climbed up a slope back of the building. The garage was a separate brick structure to the left of the building, with a cock weather vane atop the peaked roof. There was room for four cars, but aside from the Chrysler there was only one other vehicle, a Volkswagen MicroBus.

  Parker stowed his suitcase and typewriter case on the back seat of the Chrysler and climbed in front next to Stubbs. Stubbs backed out, left the car long enough to pull down the garage door, and then maneuvered in a wide U-turn and around the building and down the blacktop road to the three-lane concrete highway to the city.

  They rode in silence, Parker smoking and watching the scenery. The new face was beginning to feel strange. His forehead and cheeks were tight, as though glue had dried on them.

  Before they reached the city, Stubbs pulled over to the shoulder of the road and stopped. He carefully shifted to neutral and put on the emergency brake, and then turned to Parker. His face was creased in concentration, as though he was having a hard time remembering the words. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “I talk to all the patients, when they're ready to go.”

  Parker flipped his cigarette out the window, and waited.

  “One time,” said Stubbs, “there was a guy came here to get a new face. Doc gave it to him, and then he figured the best thing was to kill Doc, because then nobody'd know who it was under the new face. He didn't have to do that, because the Doc is one man you can trust with your life. But this guy wouldn't take that, so I had to take the new face away from him again. You follow me?”

  Parker smiled at him. “You think you could take this face away from me?”

  “No trouble at all,” said Stubbs. “Don't come back, mister.”

  Parker studied him, but challenges were for punks. He shrugged. “A fella named Joe Sheer told me the doctor was straight. It's his word I take.”

  Stubbs' belligerence faded. “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Sure,” Parker said.

  They rode the rest of the way in silence. Stubbs let him off at the railroad station, and Parker bought a ticket for Cincinnati. He had a three-hour wait, so he checked his luggage and went to a movie.

  3

  The man calling himself Lasker was sitting on the edge of the bed when Parker came into the room. The Warwick was a fourth-rate Transient & Permanent hotel with a dirty stone face and no marquee, and Lasker's room was what Parker had expected, complete with green paint on plaster walls and a faded imitation Persian on the floor. The wood of the window frame was spreading along the grain, looking lik
e eroded farmland.

  The man calling himself Lasker, but whose name was really Skimm, looked up as Parker came into the room. He dropped the pint and reached under the pillow. Parker said, “Didn't Joe tell you about the new face?”

  Skimm paused with the Colt Woodsman half out from under the pillow. He squinted and said, “Parker?”

  “That's right.”

  Skimm held onto the Woodsman. “What name'd you use in Nebraska?”

  “Anson.”

  Skimm nodded and shoved the Woodsman back under the pillow. “They did a good job on you,” he said. “You made me drop my whisky.”

  Parker went over to the window and looked out—at brick building backs and rusted black metal constructions on roofs. Down below he could see a trapezoidal concrete-covered yard, scattered with garbage cans and bits of paper. “You picked a bad neighborhood, Skimm,” he said.

  Skimm was picking up the pint. Some had spilled, soaking into the carpet. He looked over at Parker and shrugged in embarrassment. “We haven't been bankrolled yet.” He held the pint up and squinted at the inch of whisky left in the bottom of it. “I need this job,” he said. “I admit it.”