Forever and a Death Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

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  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

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  Two

  1

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  21

  Three

  1

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  3

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  Four

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  Afterword by Jeff Kleeman

  Acclaim for the Work of DONALD E. WESTLAKE!

  “Dark and delicious.”

  —New York Times

  “[A] book by this guy is cause for happiness.”

  —Stephen King

  “Donald Westlake must be one of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.”

  —George F. Will

  “Westlake is a national literary treasure.”

  —Booklist

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Brilliant.”

  —GQ

  “A wonderful read.”

  —Playboy

  “Marvelous.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Tantalizing.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A brilliant invention.”

  —New York Review of Books

  “A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Suspenseful…As always, [Westlake] writes like the consummate pro he is.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Westlake remains in perfect command; there’s not a word…out of place.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Westlake is one of the best.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Curtis couldn’t stop staring at the island, as they moved out away from the Mallory.

  Mud. Soup, as Manville had predicted, in which every mark of man had sunk and crumbled and disappeared. And when he was ready, the same thing, the same sudden stripping away and finality, would happen again, on a much vaster scale. The buildings that fell then, when he was ready, the buildings that would crumble and melt away into the sudden soup, would not be low half-rotted barracks, but skyscrapers, concrete and metal and glass, some of which he himself had built, or helped to build.

  I gave them, he thought, I’ll take them away. And with just as much pleasure, just as much skill, just as much efficiency, the buildings he had helped put up he would knock down again…

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

  BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE:

  361

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED

  THE CUTIE

  FOREVER AND A DEATH

  LEMONS NEVER LIE (writing as Richard Stark)

  MEMORY

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  EASY DEATH by Daniel Boyd

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain

  THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES by Lawrence Block

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SOHO SINS by Richard Vine

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED by Erle Stanley Gardner

  SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

  FOREVER

  and a

  DEATH

  by Donald E. Westlake

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-129)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: June 2017

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 OUP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2017 by the Estate of Donald E. Westlake

  Cover painting copyright © 2017 by Paul Mann

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78565-423-7

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-424-4

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  ONE

  1

  The helicopter sped eastward under a clear blue sky, low over the Coral Sea. Its flattened footprint scudded beneath it, rolling out the slate-gray waves, then immediately gone, and the waves leaped up again.

  Inside, the copter had been custom refitted with light blue industrial carpet over a plywood floor on which stood eight broad swivel chairs in two rows of four, upholstered in a darker blue vinyl. A gray bulkhead up front with a curtain in its doorway separated this main cabin from a small galley, with the pilot’s compartment beyond that. On the bulkhead wall, next to the doorway, was imprinted a large symbol of an entwined RC, in dark red, looking vaguely snakelike or like an espaliered tree.

  Richard Curtis, owner of the initials and the helicopter and almost everything else he could see, occupied the rear seat on the right. The other three passengers, two men and a woman, all venture capitalists with whom Curtis had had dealings in the past, were his guests, seated where he could look at them, consider them. There was too much noise inside here from engine and wind to make conversation possible, but Curtis didn’t need conversation, not now. What these three knew of his business and the reason for this flight was what they needed to know, and what they di
dn’t know was everything that mattered.

  They had flown out here from Townsville, on Australia’s northeast coast, into the clear morning air, crossing over the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, past Tregosse Island and Diamond Island and the Lihou Cays, and now Curtis felt the craft veer slightly to the right, which must mean the pilot had found the Mallory.

  Yes, tugging gently at its sea anchor in the modest ocean swell, the yacht Mallory, named for Curtis’s father and with the entwined RC next to the name on both sides of the bow, stood offshore from Kanowit Island, where the final preparations were underway. George Manville, the engineer, would be over there on the island; this experiment was his baby. But he’d return to the Mallory when he saw the chopper arrive.

  The circular white landing pad was aft, above and just forward of the observation area at the fantail. The helicopter lowered slowly, delicately, toward that constantly shifting white circle, then at last gently touched it and immediately seemed to sag, as though to clutch and hold onto the moving ship.

  Even before the rotor blades had stopped turning, two groups of men ran forward, crouched, converging on the copter. The four men in gray work jumpers secured the craft to guy cables fixed in the deck, while the two in white steward uniforms slid open the side door, lowered the metal stairs, and stood by to offer a helping hand.

  Curtis debarked first, nodding at the stewards, needing no help. An ocean breeze ruffled his thin gray hair as he crossed the pad, and he patted it down. He looked toward Kanowit and yes, the launch was coming this way, almost invisible against the gray sea except for its white wake.

  Glass doors slid automatically open as Curtis entered the lounge, where a third steward waited, smiling a greeting, saying, “Morning, Mr. Curtis. Good flight?”

  Curtis never thought about journeys, only destinations. What was a good flight? One where you weren’t killed? He ignored the question, saying, “Tell Manville to come see me in my cabin as soon as possible.” Turning to his three guests, who had followed him in here, he said, “The stewards will show you your cabins. You’ll have time to freshen up before the show starts.”

  “A beautiful boat,” Bill Hardy said, smiling as he looked around in honest envy. An Australian, he was both the most candid and the shrewdest of the three.

  “Thank you,” Curtis said, returning Hardy’s smile, though not with as much candor. “I like the Mallory, it relaxes me.” In fact nothing relaxed him.

  Then he nodded to them all, and went away to his cabin, forward, just behind the bridge, where he could be alone until Manville arrived. He was consumed with so much anger, so much hatred, that he found it hard to be around other people for very long. The snarl beneath the surface kept wanting to break through.

  And of course, everybody knew about it, which only made things worse. Everybody knew they’d driven Richard Curtis out of Hong Kong, those mainland bastards, once they’d taken over. Everybody knew they’d cheated him, and robbed him, and driven him out of his home, his industry, his life. Everybody knew Richard Curtis’s great humiliation. But what nobody knew was that the game wasn’t over.

  Binoculars were kept in the drawer of the table by the large picture window in the parlor of his two-room cabin suite. Looking through them, Curtis saw Manville’s launch almost here, and far away—brought much closer through the lenses— Kanowit Island, a round low hillock of scrub in the sea, with the rotten bent shapes of the Japanese army’s barracks and sheds, nearly sixty years old, standing here and there on the island like the ghost town remnants they were.

  Curtis watched the island through the binoculars. Manville’s people were still at work over there, just visible, scurrying like ants, completing the preparations.

  In how long—two hours?—Kanowit Island would be changed completely from what it now was, wrenched into a new existence. If Manville were right, it would change into something good and useful; if he were wrong, it would become something destroyed and irreparable. But Manville had to be right, Curtis needed him to be right.

  In how long—two hours?—step one.

  2

  Kim Baldur stepped out of her jeans, lost her balance, and grabbed the upright post of the bunkbed beside her to keep her feet. The Planetwatch III had been steaming serenely forward through the sea, at a regular and pleasing rhythm, and had made that one little faltering jounce at just the wrong second.

  Kim decided, to be on the safe side, she should sit down on the lower bunk—it belonged to Angela, her bunkmate, already up on deck—while she finished removing the jeans and then pushed her feet down into the legs of the wetsuit. The neoprene felt, as always, a little slick and slimy when she first put it on, but her body would slowly warm it, and later, if she was in the water, it would be the most comfortable thing you could imagine.

  Would she go into the water? She wanted to, she always did, but who knew what would happen today, when they finally got to the island? Something, I hope, she thought. Let something happen.

  This was her first run on Planetwatch III, the first time she’d volunteered with this ecological guardian group, and she was reluctant to admit to herself that so far it had been mostly boring. She was 23, she had nothing behind her but college and a few discarded boyfriends, and it had seemed to her, before she would have to settle down into an ordinary career, that she should put her time and her intelligence and her enthusiasm to work somehow, for some greater good. To join the volunteers of Planetwatch, to use the SCUBA-diving skills she’d learned as a teenager in the Caribbean, to sail the high seas on a mission to save the world, had seemed beforehand the height of adventure. But it was strange how the days on the ship were merely drudgery, and stranger still how indifferent to her heroism the world remained.

  Dressed, and with her flippers tucked under her left arm, Kim left the small metal-walled cabin. Outside, the narrow corridor was empty, and echoed as usual with some faint distant clang; something to do with the engine room.

  As she moved along the corridor toward the ladder, which was merely a series of metal rungs bolted into the side wall and leading up to a round hatch always kept open except in heavy weather, Kim unconsciously brushed her right knuckles along the cool wall, a habit she had learned early on because of the sometimes unpredictable movements of the ship.

  A small freighter that for years, under the name Nyota, had plied the Indian Ocean out of Djibouti, this vessel had been bought cheap by supporters of Planetwatch after Planetwatch II had been sunk by an underwater explosive off a French atoll. She was a solid ship, refitted for passengers but still retaining a bluntness and a tendency to plunge hard into the waves that was a leftover from her freighter days.

  Kim climbed the ladder one-handed, lithe as a monkey, the flippers still under her left arm. At the top, she turned to the open doorway in the metal wall just beside her and stepped out onto the deck.

  Here she stood at the prow, one deck below the bridge, her ears full of the rushing hiss of the ship as it cleaved its way through the water. The sense of motion this far forward was mostly vertical, short hard slaps up and down as Planetwatch III sliced northward toward Kanowit.

  She looked first at the sea; she always did. Today it was a pebbly mid-gray, with darker tones beneath and tiny whitecaps popping here and there. A three-foot sea, at most; bliss to dive in.

  And the sky was almost completely clear, a gleaming acrylic blue, except for a bundle of gray clouds along the western horizon, toward Australia. They’d be having a beautiful sunset over there, some hours from now.

  It had at first astonished Kim that there were no real sunsets in mid-ocean, not what was meant by the phrase ‘a beautiful sunset.’ The sun did often go down behind the waves in a variegated display of color, pale shades of pink and blue and green darkening toward night, but all in a neat and controlled manner, without that bruised sky, those blazing reds and oranges, that lush riot of purple exclamation points. “What you’re looking at when you look at a sunset ashore,” Jerry had explained, early in the
trip, “is pollution. What you see out here is the natural sunset. What people ooh and aah over back home is just rotten air, clouds of toxic waste, streams of acid rain. When the sunset you see off the coast of Malibu looks like that one out there, we’ll know we’ve done our job.”

  Jerry Diedrich was Planetwatch’s leader aboard, and Kim was coming to the belief that he knew everything about everything. A lean and weathered man in his early forties, he had a starving poet’s good looks, and Kim sheepishly knew she would have developed a schoolgirl crush on him weeks ago if he hadn’t made his homosexuality so open and unquestionable. (He and Luther Rickendorf were the only couple on the ship.)

  Turning away from sea and sky, Kim looked up toward the recessed deck next above her, where Angela stood, in faded cut-offs and a dark green halter, shielding her eyes from the sun with both cupped hands as she stared out at the sea.

  “Kanowit Island,” Angela said, and pointed out toward the horizon, northward. “Dead ahead. Jerry says we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Good,” Kim said. She moved away down the narrow port deck toward the SCUBA tanks.

  3

  “This is George Manville, our genius engineer,” Curtis said. “George, this is Bill Hardy, from Australia, Abdullah Wayarabo from Indonesia, Madame Zilah Graca deCastro from Brazil.”

  They all greeted each other, Curtis smiling on them with what seemed like paternal indulgence, seeing the contrasts among them. Manville, for instance, was an engineer, and nothing but an engineer, who had made no accommodation to the fact that he was presently quartered on a ship. He still wore the same workboots, the same chinos, the same button-down work shirt with the ballpoint pen in his breast pocket, as though he were on some construction site in Chicago. He was a simple creature, George Manville, but brilliant, usefully brilliant.

  The venture capitalists were as unlike one another as they were unlike George Manville. Bill Hardy, the Australian, was open and hearty, a glad-hander, everybody’s pal, who hid his icy shrewdness as though it were a fault, rather than his greatest strength. Abdullah Wayarabo, connected through various marriages to the Indonesian royal family, had a courtier’s smile and smoothness mixed with the arrogant assurance of the extremely rich; he could command while seeming to be obsequious, and almost always get his way. Madame deCastro, the Brazilian widow of a major construction figure in South America, was a heavyset severe woman in her sixties, who had never been noticed during her husband’s life; since his death, it had become clear she’d been the brains of the company all along.