Breakout: A Parker Novel

By Richard Stark and Chris Holm

A master thief must build a team to escape a correctional center in this fast-paced, hard-boiled crime novel by the author of Firebreak.

With Parker locked up and about to be unmasked, Breakout follows his Houdini-like escape from prison with a team of convicts. But when a new heist and new dangers—con artists, snitches, busybodies, eccentrics, and cops—loom among the dark alleys and old stone buildings of the big city to which they’ve fled, Parker soon learns that not all prisons have bars.

Praise for Breakout

“Fiercely distracting. . . . Westlake is an expert plotter; and while Parker is a blunt instrument of a human being depicted in rudimentary short grunts of sentences, his take on other characters reveals a writer of great humor and human understanding.” —John Hodgman

“Stark . . . applies his great wit and dexterous mental skills to a series of . . . ingenious exits and entrances in (what else?) Breakout. . . . Jampacked. . . . He writes with ruthless efficiency.” —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

“Stark invites readers to project themselves onto the always-assured Parker, making him a frighteningly easy sociopath to root for. And watching knowledgeable bad guys ply their shadowy trade under pressure is always fun. An immensely pleasurable entry in the Parker series. . . . Simply put, Breakout is great escapist fiction.” —Booklist,starred review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226508344

Book preview

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

© 2002 by Richard Stark

Foreword © 2017 by Chris Holm

All rights reserved.

Originally published by Mysterious Press.

University of Chicago Press edition 2017

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17      1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50820-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50834-4 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stark, Richard, 1933–2008, author. | Holm, Chris F., writer of foreword.

Title: Breakout : a Parker novel / Richard Stark ; with a new foreword by Chris Holm.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017011471 | ISBN 9780226508207 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226508344 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Parker (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3573.E9 B74 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011471

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

BREAKOUT

A Parker Novel

RICHARD STARK

With a New Foreword by Chris Holm

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

PRAISE FOR BREAKOUT AND RICHARD STARK:

"Writing once again as Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake delivers an immensely pleasurable entry in the Parker series. . . . Simply put, Breakout is great escapist fiction."—Booklist, Starred Review

This fifth book about master criminal Parker since his welcome return from a 20-year hiatus is packed so tightly with the painstaking details. . . . that it comes as a shock to realize the volume isn’t bigger than it is. . . . Watching artists like Stark and Parker at work is a great pleasure, which an increasing audience will be delighted to share.—Publishers Weekly

His prose is sharp and glinting; he can create a complete sketch of a doomed character in a single page with about as much deftness as any writer I’ve ever seen; and he had an ability to shift tones, dramatic to comedic, from book to book—and even from page to page—that many others, both in and out of the genre, just don’t possess.—Michael Weinreb, Grantland

The Nobel Prize for literature should go to the American comic-mystery writer Donald Westlake. Enough with honoring self-consciously solemn, angst-ridden and pseudo-deep chroniclers of the human condition. Westlake is smart, clever and witty—a prolific craftsman—and quite deep.—William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

[T]here is nothing more fun than reading all the Parkers in order. . . . Crime fiction, crime movies, and crime comics today wouldn’t be the same without Richard Stark.—Ethan Iverson, Do the Math

PARKER NOVELS 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 Rare Coin Score

The Green Eagle Score

The Black Ice Score

The Sour Lemon Score

Deadly Edge

Slayground

Plunder Squad

Butcher’s Moon

Comeback

Backflash

Flashfire (Parker)

Firebreak

Breakout

Nobody Runs Forever

Ask the Parrot

Dirty Money

GROFIELD NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

The Damsel

The Dame

The Blackbird

Lemons Never Lie

Information about Richard Stark books published by the University of Chicago Press—and electronic versions of them—can be found on our website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.

FOREWORD

When.

It’s a word that brings a smile to the faces of Donald Westlake fans, and for good reason. Sixteen of the twenty-four books in his beloved Parker series—credited to his dark reflection, Richard Stark—begin with it, including the one you’re holding in your hand. That’s three-quarters of ’em, for those of you who aren’t mathematically inclined. Here are a few of my favorites (from The Mourner, Backflash, and Firebreak, respectively):

When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.

When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

Examined individually, each sentence is as brutal and direct as a blunt instrument—but taken together, their underlying elegance is revealed. Westlake’s first lines are thrillers in miniature. They open in media res, the action already underway. The dependent clause (When . . .) builds suspense by forcing you to play catch-up—to race to the end of the sentence to find out what’s going on. And every unnecessary word has been jettisoned to ensure you achieve maximum velocity as soon as possible, so you’re neck-deep in the story before you realize what hit you. From the jump, it’s obvious you’re in the hands of a master.

I had the misfortune of entering the world during Parker’s long hiatus. The sixteenth Parker book, Butcher’s Moon, came out in 1974, three years before my birth. By the time the seventeenth, Comeback, was published in 1997, I was in college and had no time for pleasure reading. (I thought then that I’d become a scientist. Turns out, it didn’t take.) So, like Parker and his crew infiltrating the old armory in Breakout (see what I did there?), I approached the series late and kinda sideways. If not for the combined efforts of Stephen King, Charles Ardai, and the University of Chicago Press, I might never have read it.

My family were avid, if indiscriminate, readers while I was growing up. They—we—plowed through mass-market paperbacks, largely culled from the New York Times’ bestseller list, at an impressive clip. My grandfather, a cop, was partial to detective stories. My parents mostly stuck to thrillers. I, like many children of the ’80s who would grow up to become writers, was obsessed with Stephen King.

Lord knows I could’ve done worse. Not only was King’s own output prodigious, he was (and is) also a tireless champion of other writers’ work. He pushed me to read outside my steady diet of bestsellers and turned me on to everyone from Elmore Leonard to H. P. Lovecraft, Michael McDowell to Anne Rivers Siddons.

King’s career is littered with nods to Donald Westlake. His pen name, Richard Bachman, was inspired in part by Westlake’s most famous nom de plume, Richard Stark, and in part by the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song that was playing on the radio when he cooked it up. And a pseudonymous Stark—this one George—crops up in King’s novel The Dark Half, which is about an author who tries to retire his violent-crime-writing alter ego to disastrous effect.

I don’t recall connecting Richard Stark and Donald Westlake at the time, but I knew that if King was such a fan of this Stark fellow, I had to check him out. The problem was his books were out of print.

After college (and a brief, disastrous stint in grad school), I rekindled my love for genre fiction. By then, I’d developed a taste for the hard-boiled. I devoured the obvious classics by the form’s early masters—James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett—but had no idea where to go from there. Enter Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime.

Ardai’s imprint, which lovingly revived the style and content of the pulp era, introduced me to several of my favorite authors—some new, others seasoned veterans. One of Hard Case’s first releases was Donald Westlake’s 361. It knocked me flat, so I picked up a couple of his Dortmunder books. They were terrific but not at all what I expected. Then I did some digging and realized Donald Westlake was none other than that Stark fellow King kept going on about.

I read Hard Case’s reprint of Stark’s Grofield novel Lemons Never Lie, and picked up Ask the Parrot in hardcover, but felt as if I was cheating by starting with Parker there. That’s when the University of Chicago Press came to the rescue by reissuing the series from the beginning.

As a writer with a predilection for antiheroes, it’s impossible for me to overstate the impact the Parker books have had on my career. (Fair warning: I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on spoilers; I’d venture it’s something shy of fifty years. Still, if you haven’t read The Hunter yet, set this book down and do so now. It won’t take long.) The moment I laid eyes on The Hunter’s indelible first sentence—When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell—I knew that I was in for a treat. By the end of the first chapter—in which a penniless Parker blows into New York City like a bitter wind and cons his way into a steak dinner, a new wardrobe, and a place to stay—I was hooked. Two chapters later, when he callously disposes of his estranged wife’s corpse so he can hide out in her apartment, I felt the ground beneath me shift. I’d never read the likes of Parker before.

The fact is, no one had.

It’s not simply that Parker’s a criminal. James Cain and Jim Thompson wrote plenty of criminal protagonists—but their stories were essentially lurid morality plays, and their characters’ appetites inevitably proved their undoing. Patricia Highsmith’s urbane sociopath Tom Ripley was similarly afflicted, even if he had an impressive knack for escaping justice (poetic or otherwise). Parker’s an altogether different animal. He isn’t governed by his appetites (in twenty-four novels, he scarcely evinces any) but by his own iron will—and the closest thing to justice in the series is what’s meted out by Parker whenever someone’s dumb enough to double-cross him. Morality never enters the equation. In Parker’s world, good and evil are irrelevant; there is only strength and weakness, cunning and stupidity.

Add to that Westlake’s fiendishly inventive plots (which invariably fit together with surgical precision despite being made up on the fly), his agile and inimitable narrative voice, and a sprawling cast of characters as unsavory as they are fully fleshed, and the result is a series that paints a singularly jaundiced portrait of American society. It’d be disturbing if the books weren’t so damned fun to read.

Is that how Westlake intended them? Beats me. To my great regret, we never met. He passed away on New Year’s Eve 2008, as my career was just beginning. I suspect that—like most folks who put fingers to keyboard—he just wanted to tell some ripping good yarns.

Which brings us once more to the book in your hand.

Breakout is the twenty-first Parker book. The fifth since Westlake resurrected the series in 1997, not that you’d know to read it. The occasional nod to modernity aside (cell phones, computers), Breakout feels as though it exists outside of time—which makes sense, because Parker’s even less a man of the 2000s than he was of the 1960s.

Reading Breakout’s opening section (of four, ever four, a series staple), you’d be forgiven for thinking Parker might’ve lost a step. The story opens with his apprehension—Parker’s first since he snapped a guard’s neck and vanished from a California prison farm immediately prior to the events of The Hunter. (I guess nobody runs forever. Say, that’d make for a swell title.) The cops take him without a fight. And in custody, Parker comes off ever-so-slightly . . . I dunno . . . warmer? Chummier? Or, at the very least, a tad less misanthropic than the violent sociopath we’ve come to know and (from a safe distance) love.

Then the story kicks into gear, and any reservations you might have vanish in the rearview.

Breakout isn’t Parker at his most hard-boiled. It is, however, a beautifully constructed puzzle box of a novel—jam-packed with botched jobs, manhunts, and daring escapes—that pits two consummate professionals against one another to great effect. I’m of the opinion that a protagonist is only as interesting as his or her antagonist. Parker is one of the most fascinating protagonists in all of crime fiction—possibly because his Moriarty is no less than the diabolical mind of Donald Westlake. Watching them square off in Breakout is a joy.

And if Parker leaves fewer bodies in his wake than he might’ve in his early days, who am I to complain? I’m a biologist by training. When observing a predator in captivity, I know better than to tap the glass.

Chris Holm

CONTENTS

ONE

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

TWO

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

THREE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

FOUR

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

ONE

1

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 alarms and raising the overhead door.

Then what was this alarm, five minutes after they’d broken in? That idiot Bruhl, Armiston said, throwing the clipboard away in exasperation. He went into the office.

Parker was already loping toward the central aisle. Behind him, Armiston cried, "God damn it! Fingerprints!" and ran back to pick up the clipboard.

Parker turned into the main aisle, running, and saw far away the big door still open, the empty truck backed against it. George Walheim, the lockman who’d got them in here, stood by the open doorway, making jerky movements, not quite running away.

These were all generic pharmaceuticals in here, and Armiston had the customer, at an airfield half an hour north. The plan was, by tomorrow these medicines would be offshore, more valuable than in the States, and the four who’d done the job would earn a nice percentage.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Bruhl, brought in by Armiston, was supposed to have gotten a forklift truck, so he could run it down the main aisle to pick up the cartons Parker and Armiston had marked. Instead of which, he’d gone to see what he could lift from the office. But Walheim hadn’t cleared the alarm system in the office.

As Parker ran down the long aisle, Armiston a dozen paces behind, Bruhl appeared, coming fast out of the first side aisle down there. Walheim tried to clutch at him, but Bruhl hit him with a backhand that knocked the thinner man down.

Parker yelled, Bruhl! Stop! but Bruhl kept going. He jumped to the ground outside the loading dock, next to the truck, then ran toward the front of it. He was going to take it, leave the rest of them here on foot.

There was no way to stop him, no way to get there in time. Walheim was still on hands and knees, looking for his glasses, when the truck jolted away from the loading dock. Outside was the darkness of four A.M., spotted with thin lights high on the corners of other buildings in this industrial park.

The truck, big rear doors flapping, heeled hard on the right turn at the end of the blacktop lot, Bruhl still accelerating. The empty truck was top-heavy, it wasn’t going to make it.

Walheim was on his feet, patting his glasses into place, when Parker ran by. What do we—? But Parker was gone, jumping off the loading dock to run away leftward as behind him the truck crashed over onto its side and scraped along the pavement until it ran into a utility pole, knocking it over. The few lights around here went dark.

There was nothing in this area but the industrial park, empty at night. No houses, no bars, no churches, no schools. There were no pedestrians out here at four in the morning, no cars driving by.

Parker had run less than a block when he heard the sirens, far behind him but coming fast. There was nowhere to go to cover, no point trying to break into another of these buildings. Fleets of trucks here and there stood in lines behind high fences.

Parker kept running. Armiston and Walheim were wherever they wanted to be, and Parker tried to keep the sound of sirens behind him. But the sirens spread, left and right and then everywhere, slicing and dicing the night.

Parker ran down the middle of an empty street and ahead of him headlights came around a corner, a bright searchlight beam fastened on him. He stopped. He put his hands on top of his head.

2

Do you want to tell me about it? the CID man offered.

No, Parker said.

The CID man nodded, looking at him. He was small but bulky, a middleweight, carrot-topped, said his name was Turley. Inspector Turley. He had a dossier on the desk in front of him, Parker in the wooden chair opposite him, all of it watched by the two uniforms in the corners of this plain functional government-issue office. Turley opened the dossier and glanced at it with the air of a man who already knows what’s inside, the grim satisfaction of somebody whose negative prediction has come true. Ronald Kasper, he said, and frowned at Parker. That isn’t your name, is it?

Parker watched him.

Turley looked down at the dossier again, rapped the middle knuckle of the middle finger of his right hand against the information in there. That’s the name on some fingerprints, belong to a fella escaped from a prison camp in California some years ago. Killed a guard on the way out. He raised an eyebrow at Parker. You’ve got his fingerprints.

The system makes mistakes, Parker said.

Turley’s grin turned down, not finding anything funny here. So do individuals, my friend, he said. Looking into his dossier again, he said, "There is no Ronald Kasper, not before, not since. In the prison camp, out, left behind these prints, one guard dead. Do you want to know his name?"

Parker shook his head. Wouldn’t mean anything to me.

No, I suppose it wouldn’t. We have some other names for you.

Parker waited. Turley raised an eyebrow at him, also waiting, but then saw that Parker had nothing to say and went back to the dossier. "Let me know which of these names you’d rather be. Edward Johnson. Charles Willis. Edward Lynch. No? Nothing?

Reviews for Breakout

[bjkelley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great book from start to finish. The title actually refers to several "breakouts" in the book. Stark/Westlake does a great job of keeping the plot moving.

[asxz-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another fantastic Parker book. He gets caught in the opening chapter and has to breakout of jail thereafter. Cold-blooded as ever, he eventually make it back to Claire with little to show for his efforts.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, this isn't my favorite Parker novel of all time, but it is a Parker novel, so I liked it! The title says it all "Breakout", and in fact there are three breakouts in here! Out of prison, out of a botched job, and out of the whole dang thing! Parker teams up with Mackey and Williams in all 3 and they do it as only they can! If you like Parker, you'll like this book!

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another classic Richard Stark, a.k.a. Donald Westlake, or vice versa if you prefer. Again featuring that completely amoral thief, Parker, as usual, several things go wrong with the caper forcing Parker to extricate himself from a mess. Unusually, Parker finds himself in prison (again due to a colleague’s carelessness and his own use of a name that had a record from another state) and must breakout. This he and a couple of colleagues accomplish but then he reluctantly becomes involved in another theft only to again have things go terribly wrong (this hardly qualifies as a spoiler since it’s part of the formula.)

Their entrance into the armory and attempted exit is a brilliant example of Westlake’s descriptive writing making this one of the best of the Parker novels. The only problem with reading these novels is that you realize they inevitably come to an end; there is no endless supply.

[jastbrown · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If these Parker novels weren't so well written I wouldn't go to the trouble of suspending my morals and ethics for however long it takes to read one of these stories.. but they are very well written! In this one Parker finds himself incarcerated and desperate to escape before the officials find out he's not who they thought they had locked up! It's out of and back into one compromising situation after another as Parker takes his best shot at avoiding serious hard time!

[bookmarque · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For some reason, I thought this was the “real life” author that Stephen King was referencing when he wrote the character George Stark in The Dark Half. But it’s not. At least I don’t think so. And Richard Stark is the pseudonym for yet another writer.Overall, this wasn’t bad at all. He has a tight, spare style that is stripped down and bare but yet conveys so much detail and atmosphere. His style is like a film noir – mostly action with a hint of history. Fast-paced, too. With plenty of villains. It seemed to have no details of the escape or the heist, but yet somehow enough was explained for me to understand. He doesn’t dwell on details – he moves things along very quickly.Parker escapes from Stoneveldt with the help of his outside buddy who does some background checking on his fellow inmates. He comes up with a few who are looking at long stretches of time, have their shit together and aren’t assholes. They make it but the succeeding heist goes wrong and they are trapped in a high-security building with no way out. After a lot of work and anxious hours, they get out of there.Meanwhile, Parker’s outside man’s girlfriend is turned into the police for listing a false name on her gym membership. She only joined the gym because it was in the same building as the heist target. Somehow she’s held on this and connected to the band that burst out of there. The same lawyer (a friend of Parker’s sometime girlfriend, Claire) who helped Parker in jail now helps her and eventually they turn her loose. After that they need to get away from the cops and out of town. One of the jailbreakers turns into an incredibly loyal guy and helps them out of a couple of tight spots. In the very end, Parker hooks up with Claire in her apartment and we’re done. I’d read another.