• Complain

Donald Westlake - Watch Your Back!

Here you can read online Donald Westlake - Watch Your Back! full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2005, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Donald Westlake Watch Your Back!

Watch Your Back!: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Watch Your Back!" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Its the score of a lifetime: easy access to a lavish New York City apartment, hordes of valuables, and an absentee owner avoiding the lawyers of his unhappy ex-wives. But before they pull the job, Dortmunders crew is startled to find their beloved gin joint, the OJ, in the clutches of the Mafia who consider it perfect for a little fraud, courtesy of a nice big fire. For tactical and highly superstitious reasons, the fate of the OJ is ever more important to the crew than the enormous score. Now, Dortmunder and his gang are determined to split their time, fighting the mob and robbing the rich simultaneously.

Donald Westlake: author's other books


Who wrote Watch Your Back!? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Watch Your Back! — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Watch Your Back!" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
WATCH YOUR BACK By Donald E Westlake A book in the John Dortmunder series - photo 1

WATCH YOUR BACK!

By

Donald E. Westlake

A book in the John Dortmunder series

To Susan Richman, who wasn't sure it was such a good idea, but who marched forward anyway God bless.

1

WHEN JOHN DORTMUNDER, a free man, not even on parole, walked into the O.J. Bar Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that Friday night in July, just before ten o'clock, the regulars were discussing the afterlife. "What I don't get," said one of them, as Dortmunder angled toward where Rollo the bartender was busy with something far over to the right end of the bar, "is all these clouds."

A second regular put down his foaming beerglass to say, "Clouds? Which clouds are these?"

"That they're sitting on!" The first regular waved an arm dangerously, but did no damage.

"You look at all these pictures, Jesus sitting on a cloud, that other God sitting on a cloud, Mary sitting on a cloud"

"A little lower down," suggested a third.

"Well, yeah, but the point is, can't Heaven come up with furniture?"

As Dortmunder approached Rollo, he saw that the beefy bartender in his once-white apron was deeply absorbed in making five very complicated drinks in glasses Dortmunder had never seen before and would not have suspected the O.J. of possessing: curled, twisted, wider than deep, they looked mostly like crystal hubcaps, though smaller. But not much smaller.

Another regular, meantime, was objecting to the concept of furniture in the beyond, saying, "Whadaya want with furniture? Heaven isn't Westchester, you know."

A fifth regular weighed in, saying, "Yeah? What about all those fields of plenty?"

"Land of milk and honey," added the third regular, as though it were an indictment.

The first regular lifted a skeptical glass and a skeptical brow to say, "Do they give out overshoes?"

What Rollo was doing with those glasses was just about everything. He had already sluiced in some crushed ice, and now he was adding some red liquid and some yellow liquid and some brown liquid and some clear liquid, all of them channeling around through the shards of ice and combining to form pools that looked like a lab test you didn't want the results of.

The second regular was now saying, "What gets me is this fruitcake Muslim Heaven with the seventy-two virgins."

"There aren't seventy-two virgins," the first regular objected.

"Well, no," the second regular conceded, "not all at one time, but still, what kinda Heaven is this? It would be like being assigned to an all-girls' high school."

"Ouch," said the third regular.

"Can you imagine," the second regular said, "what it sounds like in the cafeteria at lunchtime?"

The fourth regular, the one with something against Westchester, said, "Would you have to learn volleyball?"

This introduction of sports stymied everybody for a minute, as Dortmunder watched Rollo slice up a banana and drop the chunks into the glasses like depth charges. Next he reached for a lime, as Dortmunder looked around and saw what must have happened. It was summertime in New York City, late July, and the sluggish tide of tourists had washed up on this unlikely shore five ladies who did each other's silvery wavy hair, and who were seated now at one of the booths on the right. They perched very straight on just the front edge of the seat, their backs not touching the seatbacks, like freshmen in military academy, and they gazed around the unlovely precincts of the O.J. with an anthropologist's guarded delight. Their clothing combined many of the colors Rollo was injecting into their drinks. One of them, Dortmunder saw, had a cell phone-camera and was sending pictures of the O.J. to the folks back home.

Well, being a free person and not on parole was all well and good, but there was no point in overdoing it. Hunching a shoulder against the spy-cam, Dortmunder said, "Whadaya say, Rollo?"

"With you in a minute," Rollo said. Inside each glass now, it looked as though an elf had blown up, but Rollo was not done. To cap it all, he dropped a shiny red spheroid on top of each; could those be related to cherries somehow?

Surely that was all even these glasses could stand, but no. Turning to a little-used drawer under the backbar, Rollo came up with five Oriental pastel parasols and plopped one onto each drink, as though some poor shipwrecked son of a bitch were marooned on each of them.

And now they actually were done. Since apparently total concentration was not necessary while loading glasses onto a tray not even glasses like these while Rollo did that operation he said, "You already got the beer and salt back there."

"Good."

Tray full, Rollo reached under the bar and came up with a bottle of sluggish brown liquid behind a label reading,

Amsterdam Liquor Store Bourbon

"Our Own Brand"

Placing this bottle on the bar before Dortmunder, he said, "The other bourbon and ice? He coming?"

"Yeah."

"I'll get you two glasses," Rollo said, and while he did, Dortmunder told him, "Also the rye and water, the one that tinkles his ice cubes all the time."

"Haven't seen him for a while." Rollo knew everybody not by their name but by their drink, which struck him as the professional way to go about things.

"He's the one called this meeting," Dortmunder said. "Let's hope it's good news."

"I'll drink to that," Rollo said, though he didn't. Instead, he carried the tray of weirdness toward the five tourist ladies, who filmed his approach.

Picking up the bottle and the two glasses with their own discrete burdens of ice cubes, Dortmunder made his way around the regulars, who were still gnawing the same bone, the third regular now saying, "What if you can't play cards in Heaven? What if you can't dance?"

"Big deal," the second regular said. "I can't dance on Earth."

Leaving the theologians, Dortmunder made his way down the hall, past the doors defined by neat dog silhouettes labeled pointers and setters and past the phone booth that was now a helplessly gaping unofficial portal to cyberspace, and into a small square room with a concrete floor. The walls were fronted, floor to ceiling, by beer and liquor cases, leaving just room for a battered old round table with a stained green felt top and half a dozen armless wooden chairs, at one of which the one most completely facing the door sat a carroty-headed guy with a glass of beer in front of his right hand, a salt shaker in front of where his left hand should be, and his left hand actually holding a cell phone to his ear. "Here's John now," he said into it. "I'll tell him."

"Hello, Stan," Dortmunder said, and sat to his left, so he, too, could have an unobstructed view of the door.

Hanging up and secreting his cell on his person, Stan said, "I think the Williamsburg is gonna be all right."

"That's good," Dortmunder said. Stan Murch was a driver, and as a result he gave more than the usual consideration to the routes he chose.

"For many years," Stan said, "the Williamsburg Bridge was where you went if you wanted to sleep in your car. Only now the construction's done, turns out, that humongous expressway Robert Moses wanted to put across Manhattan from the Williamsburg to the Holland Tunnel, slice the island in half like the Great Wall of China, only he didn't get it, that's fine, turns out it didn't have to happen anyway. Canal Street's a great run across, the West Side Highway's a snap coming up, I'm here so early this is my second saltshaker." Being a driver, Stan liked to pace his alcohol intake, but he hated it when his beer went flat; hence the salt. Every once in a while, a judicious spray, the head comes right back.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Watch Your Back!»

Look at similar books to Watch Your Back!. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Donald Westlake - The Hot Rock
The Hot Rock
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Cops and Robbers
Cops and Robbers
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes
Drowned Hopes
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Jimmy The Kid
Jimmy The Kid
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Bank Shot
Bank Shot
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Get Real
Get Real
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Thieves' Dozen
Thieves' Dozen
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Bad News
Bad News
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?
What's So Funny?
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Why Me?
Why Me?
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - Nobody's Perfect
Nobody's Perfect
Donald Westlake
Donald Westlake - The Road To Ruin
The Road To Ruin
Donald Westlake
Reviews about «Watch Your Back!»

Discussion, reviews of the book Watch Your Back! and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.