Smoke Read online

  SMOKE. Copyright © 1995 by Donald Westlake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  The “Grand Central Publishing” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2294-7

  A hard cover edition of this book was published in 1995 by Mysterious Press.

  First eBook edition: June 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  PRAISE FOR

  DONALD E. WESTLAKE AND

  S M O K E

  “Explaining what happens in a Donald Westlake novel is like reading a recipe for meringue instead of eating the results. . . . I strongly suggest you buy a copy now and squirrel it away for emergency use the next time you find yourself stuck in an airport lounge with a departure time of maybe. The bartender may resent the fact that you’re too busy laughing to order another drink, but you’ll definitely feel better in the morning.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Westlake is a consummate pro. . . . SMOKE is one of his best books in years.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “This is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. The dialogue is outrageous, the situations implausible, the humor nonstop. Freddie is the most likable fictional scamp you’re likely to ever encounter.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “More effective than a nicotine patch, and much funnier.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Glorious Westlake comedy. . . . Full of hilarious characters, crackpot conversations and narrative sleight of hand.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A funny mystery writer. . . . Only Westlake could have come up with this one.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  “No one’s touch is as quixotically cockeyed as Westlake’s, no one can keep you chuckling as continuously.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Rousing . . . full of fun. . . . The anti-tobacco satire hits square on the mark.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Westlake’s delightful and absurd new novel . . . delivers the laughs. No one can turn a phrase or pen a comedy caper like Westlake.”

  —Detroit News and Free Press

  “Full of chuckles . . . SMOKE is deft entertainment.”

  —Booklist

  “Donald Westlake is very funny and weirdly enlightening.”

  —Newsweek

  “Westlake [is] establishing himself as one of the hippest, coolest, funniest mystery writers out there.”

  —New York magazine

  “Mystery connoisseurs will feel driven to rush to their nearest bookstore for a copy of SMOKE.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “Donald E. Westlake [is] the Noel Coward of crime. . . . He displays an excellent ear for bitter-salty urban humor, composed of equal parts of raunch and cynicism.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Donald Westlake keeps showing me people I’d like to meet.”

  —Rex Stout

  “Westlake tosses the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machine of the thriller.”

  —TIME

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

  —San Diego Tribune

  “A glorious Westlake comedy.”

  —Hackensack Record

  “There is never a dull moment in this tale . . . a merry romp that is clever and memorable.”

  —Rainbo Electronic Reviews

  “If you like humor in your mysteries, you’ll love this one.”

  —Abilene Reporter-News

  “Suspend disbelief, get a few hankies for those tears of mirth, and spend an evening with this book. It’s fun.”

  —Baton Rouge Advocate

  By Donald E. Westlake

  NOVELS

  Humans • Sacred Monster • A Likely Story

  Kahawa • Brothers Keepers • I Gave at the Office

  Adios, Scheherazade • Up Your Banners

  COMIC CRIME NOVELS

  Trust Me on This • High Adventure

  Castle in the Air • Enough • Dancing Aztecs

  Two Much • Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

  Cops and Robbers • Somebody Owes Me Money

  Who Stole Sassi Manoon? • God Save the Mark

  The Spy in the Ointment • The Busy Body

  The Fugitive Pigeon • Smoke

  THE DORTMUNDER SERIES

  Don’t Ask • Drowned Hopes • Good Behavior

  Why Me • Nobody’s Perfect

  Jimmy the Kid • Bank Shot • The Hot Rock

  CRIME NOVELS

  Pity Him Afterwards • Killy • 361

  Killing Time • The Mercenaries

  JUVENILE

  Philip

  WESTERN

  Gangway (with Brian Garfield)

  REPORTAGE

  Under an English Heaven

  SHORT STORIES

  Tomorrow’s Crimes • Levine

  The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions

  ANTHOLOGY

  Once Against the Law (coedited by William Tenn)

  This is for Knox Burger and Kitty Sprague, with

  affection, admiration, and gratitude

  1

  Freddie was a liar. Freddie was a thief.

  Freddie Noon his name was, the fourth child of nine in a small tract house in Ozone Park. That’s in Queens in New York City, next door to John F. Kennedy International Airport, directly beneath the approach path of every big plane coming in from Europe, except when the wind is from the southeast, which it very rarely is. Throughout his childhood, the loud gray shadows of the wide-body jets swept across and across and across Freddie Noon and his brothers and his sisters and his house as though to wipe them clear of the table of life; but every shadow passed and they were still there.

  Freddie’s father worked
, and still does, for the New York City Department of Sanitation, hanging off the back of a garbage truck. He’s in a good union, and gets a decent salary and benefits, but not quite enough for a family with nine kids. And that may be why, at the age of seven, in the local five-and-dime’s toy department, Freddie Noon became a thief.

  His becoming a thief is why he became a liar. The two go hand in hand.

  Freddie’s junior high school was the big rock-candy mountain. In no time at all, Freddie became enthralled by, and in thrall to, any number of products that could set him up to soar above the flight paths of the inbound jets. The trouble was, the more potent the product and the higher it let him soar, the more it cost. By the age of fourteen, Freddie’s reason for being a thief had changed; he did it now, as they say in the solemn magazine articles, to support his habit. His other habit, really, since his original long-term habit was already set: to be a thief. Habit number one supported habit number two.

  Freddie took his first fall at sixteen, when he set off a silent alarm in an empty house he was burglarizing out in Massapequa Park on Long Island—they hadn’t stopped their Newsday delivery when they went on vacation—an error he didn’t know he’d committed until all those police cars showed up outside. He was sent to a juvenile detention center upstate, where he met youths his own age who were much worse than he was. A survivalist, Freddie quickly caught up. Fortunately, the joint was as awash in drugs as any high school, so the time passed more quickly than it otherwise might.

  That was the end of Freddie’s formal schooling, though not the end of his incarceration. He did one more term as a juvenile, then two clicks as an adult, before he found himself in a drug-free cell block, a situation that almost seemed against nature. What had happened, the white inmates who’d been born again as Christian fundamentalists and the black inmates who’d converted to Islam joined together for once, and policed that prison like a vacuum cleaner. They were more efficient, and they were a lot more mean, than the regular authorities, and they kept that building of that joint clean. You’re found with so much as a Tylenol on you, you’d better have a damn good explanation.

  Freddie was twenty-five when he went in for that stretch. He’d been flying above the flight paths for eleven years. The landing he made inside that clean house was a bumpy one, but he did walk away from it, and as the pilots say, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.

  And here Freddie met a new self. He hadn’t made his own acquaintance since he was fourteen years old, and he was surprised to find he liked the guy he’d become. He was quick-witted, once he had his wits about him. He was short and skinny, but also wiry and strong. He looked pretty good, in a feral-foxy sort of way. He liked what he saw himself doing, liked what he heard himself thinking, liked how he handled himself in the ebb and flow of life.

  He never reformed, exactly, never became born again or changed his name to Freddie X, but once he was clear of drugs he saw no reason to go back. It would be like infecting yourself with the flu all over again; back to the stuffy nose, the dull headache, the dulled thought processes, the dry and itchy skin. Who needed it?

  So that was why, when Freddie Noon hit the street once more, two years later, at twenty-seven years of age, he did not go back on drugs. He stayed clean, alert, quick-witted, wiry, good-looking in a feral-foxy way. He met a girl named Peg Briscoe, who worked sporadically as a dental technician, quitting every time she decided she couldn’t stand to look into one more dirty mouth, and she also liked this new Freddie Noon, and so they set up housekeeping together. And Freddie went back to being a thief. Only now, he did it for a different reason, a third reason. Now he was a thief because he liked it.

  And then one night—just last June, this was—when he was twenty-nine and had been two years out of prison, Freddie broke into a townhouse on East Forty-ninth Street, in Manhattan, way east over near the UN Building. He chose this particular townhouse because the front entry looked like a piece of cake, and because the bottom three floors of the four-story building were dark, and because a little brass plaque beside the main entrance read

  LOOMIS-HEIMHOCKER

  RESEARCH FACILITY

  A research facility, in Freddie’s extensive experience, was a place with many small valuable portable salable machines: word processors, faxes, microscopes, telephone switchboards, darkroom equipment; oh, all sorts of stuff. It made this particular townhouse seem a worthwhile place to visit.

  So Freddie found a legal parking space for his van only a few doors away from the target, which was already a good omen, to find a parking place at all in Manhattan, and he sat there in the dark, eleven o’clock at night, and he watched the research facility across the street, and he bided his time. Faint candlelight flickered behind the top-floor windows, but that was okay. Whoever lived up there wouldn’t get in Freddie’s way. He’d be quick and quiet, and he wouldn’t go above the second floor.

  No cars coming. No pedestrians on the sidewalks. Freddie stepped out of the van, whose interior light he had long since removed, and stepped briskly across the street. He hardly paused at the front door for his busy fingers to do their stuff, and then he was in.

  2

  “Uh-oh,” said David.

  Peter peered across the candle flame, then turned his head to follow the trajectory of David’s eyes. In the dimness beyond the kitchen alcove, in the hall, on the elaborate alarm panel mounted on the wall beside the maroon elevator door, a dull red light burned. “Ah-huh” Peter said.

  “Do you suppose it’s a malfunction?” David asked. It was clear he hoped it was.

  But a sudden idea had come into Peter’s mind, connected with what they’d just been discussing. “Someone has broken in,” he said, sure of it and glad of it, and got to his feet, dropping his napkin beside his plate.

  Dr. David Loomis and Dr. Peter Heimhocker were lovers. They were also medical researchers, both forty-three years of age, currently funded by the American Tobacco Research Institute to do blue-sky cancer research. Their work, reports of which looked good in tobacco-company annual reports, and references to which invariably formed a part of tobacco-industry spokespeople’s testimony before congressional committees, was sincere, intelligent, and well funded. (Even the alarm system had been paid for with tobacco money.) David and Peter were encouraged by their funders to come up with anything and everything that might help in the human race’s battle against the scourge of cancer, except, of course, further evidence that might recommend the giving up of the smoking of cigarettes.

  David and Peter had met twenty years earlier, in medical school, and had soon realized how much they had in common, including a love of non-result-oriented research and an infinite capacity for guile and subterfuge in the suspicious sight of the outside world. Their coming together strengthened both. They’d been inseparable ever since.

  The tobacco-money project was now in its fourth year. Early on, David and Peter had decided to focus their efforts in the direction of melanoma, the fatal form of skin cancer, for the avoidance of which one was advised to keep away from the sun, not cigarettes. It seemed both a safe and a worthwhile area of study, but it had also proved, so far, quite frustrating.

  It seemed to David and Peter that the key lay in the pigment. Pigmentation is what gives our skin and hair and blood and eyes and all of us their color. David and Peter did not think pigment was the culprit, they thought it was the carrier. They thought that certain cancers could be reduced or even reversed if particular pigments could be temporarily eliminated. They had been working on various formulas for some time, and felt they were near a breakthrough, but they were stymied by an inability to perform a real-world practical test.

  They had two formulas at this time, both more or less ready to go, neither of which seemed quite to do the job, though there was no way at this stage to be sure. One of these formulas was in the shape of a serum, to be injected into the buttock. The other was a kind of small black cake or cookie, looking much like an after-dinner mint, which was mea
nt to be eaten. The serum was called LHRX1, and the mint was called LHRX2.

  Both formulas had been tested on animals, as a result of which two translucent cats now roamed the townhouse on East Forty-ninth Street. Buffy had been given LHRX1 and Muffy LHRX2. These cats were quite startling, at first, for David and Peter’s friends from the worlds of ballet, fashion, art, academe, and retail, when they would come over to the townhouse for parties. “No one else has cats you can see through!” everybody cried, giving in to both admiration and envy, watching these gray ghosts amble around, silent as the fog.

  But what was needed, and what David and Peter had been discussing over late dinner when the alarm’s red light went on, was human volunteers. The research had gone as far as it could without real test data, which meant actual human beings. Translucent cats can only tell so much. To finish refining the formulas, to be certain which of the two was the likelier candidate for further study, to achieve the breakthrough they could sense was out there, just beyond their grasp, they needed to try the stuff on people.

  It was true, of course, that there were two formulas and two researchers, being David and Peter, so that in theory they could experiment on themselves, as so many heroic nineteenth-century medical discoverers were alleged to have done, but David and Peter were not mad scientists. Who knew what side effects there might be, what long-term consequences? Who would be around to record the data if something were to go wrong? And how could a translucent scientist hope to be taken seriously in the medical journals?

  No, the volunteers must come from elsewhere, from outside David and Peter and their immediate circle. They had been discussing this problem over dinner. Could the governor of New York be approached, to offer inmates from the state prisons as guinea pigs? Would a tobacco company be prepared to open a clinic somewhere in the Third World? Could they advertise on the back page of the Village Voice?

  Then that red light bounced on, and a sudden idea clicked on, a much brighter light, in Peter’s mind. He stood, and dropped his napkin beside his plate. “Our problems may be solved,” he said. “Just wait while I get my gun.”