Items related to Gas City: A Novel (Tom Doherty Associates Books)
Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces―greed and corruption, ambition and desire―run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage.
A power struggle―between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story―turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival.
Setting this drama, Gas City, in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.
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About the Author:
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN has written more than sixty novels, including Frames, Gas City, and American Detective. His work has earned him four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards. He lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Excerpt
A couple of days before Arch Killian’s seventy-eighth birthday, he mentioned to his son that he’d outlived all his old friends and no one was left to serve as his pallbearer.
His son said, “Dad, isn’t that the idea?”
“Not when I was young. The idea was to go first and leave a lot of people to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“You’re just used to me.”
It occurred to Arch too that he was one of the few left who had a personal memory of the original Morse McGrath. The number of those who even remembered a time when the old man was alive was small, and each new harvest of obituaries in The Derrick made him wonder if he was going to keel off his porch some morning and be written up in the almanac like the last passenger pigeon. Or more accurately the last gray bird who had seen one.
He remembered that encounter every morning, when his doctor-mandated three-mile walk took him to the top of Factory Hill. That was the moment the sun struck orange crucifixes off the onion-shaped storage tanks belonging to the McGrath refinery. The play of light, crowned by the eternal flame fluttering atop the two-hundred-foot stack, painted an abstract picture of the man who had built it: fierce and florid, ablaze with a self-faith that at times licked over into fanatic, then in his final years burned there perpetually.
Arch had been twenty-six then, and had worked for Carbon Valley Surveying eighteen months. The job involved searching for buried irons and sighting along ranks of trees with ancient rusted fencing grown into the goitered trunks—in effect, reasserting property lines through archaeology. Most of the boundaries had grown over, with only the odd spent shotgun shell or calcified condom to imply the existence of civilization. He’d been bitten by stray dogs, set aflame by poison ivy, and served a feast to ticks and chiggers whose bite-scars would still be visible as high as his calves half a century later.
He’d never been happier. No straw boss crowded him, his schedule was a polite suggestion only, and his partner was loyal. Lou Pupkin was in awe of the theodolite; therefore he was in awe of Arch, and accepted his measurements like Noah.
It was like being a cowboy. He’d dressed like one, in a floppy hat, flannel shirt, leather-reinforced breeches, and stovepipe boots, and cultivated a Buffalo Bill goatee. Times were gaudy, just after a war, lots of money around, and he’d had no wife to moderate his tastes. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have caught the old man’s eye and his life would have been different.
So surveyors were an independent lot. Because they drew up the property lines there was an unspoken understanding that the lines didn’t apply to them. The understanding didn’t include most property owners, some of whose fathers and uncles had been tried and acquitted of burying trespassers on grounds of justifiable homicide. The law had changed its view, but the owners’ sons and nephews hadn’t. It wasn’t unusual in the old days for surveyors to disappear, their remains and equipment showing up a year or two later, after a hard rain and deer hunters got into places no one else ever went. By then it was next to impossible to convict anyone of murder, however heavily suspicion might lie upon the owner of the property where the bones were discovered. Shotguns were as common as Bibles and the pellets weren’t traceable. Arch had taken the advice of veterans and carried a broom-handled Mauser in a flap holster on his hip.
On a thick day late in June, he and Lou Pupkin were in search of the western boundary of the old railroad right-of-way along the river. The city had bought a section to develop a park. The property ran bang up against undeveloped land belonging to McGrath, but it hadn’t been surveyed since before the old courthouse had burned down. The irons had long since returned to corruption and all Arch and Lou had to work from were restored plat maps and petrified stumps where the tree line had stood before clear-cutting.
Most of the way ran through swamp. Lou was afraid of snakes. It took him half an hour to walk two hundred yards, spreading the tall grass in front of him with the stakes and probing old muskrat huts before he’d plant a foot. They started at seven and by noon both men were plastered with black and green muck, lumped all over with mosquito bites, and barely speaking to each other.
“Arch.”
Arch, elevating one foot of his tripod with a hunk of bark, heard the motor at the same time Lou saw the car, its pistons ticking crazily like a watch without a balance wheel. He straightened to observe the vehicle approaching across the field bordering the swamp. It was a boxy old touring car with a high center of gravity and a flat windshield that caught the sun in sheets. The body rocked independently of its suspension and the hoop wheels bucked and dipped over the cornstubs and furrows, warping and bouncing back like a car in a cartoon. Any modern vehicle would have stuck or snapped an axle. Any modern driver wouldn’t have attempted the journey except in a half-track.
He’d expected it to stop on the edge of the swamp. It kept coming, dashing water out of the wiggler-infested puddles, until it hung up on a toppled elm, whose tarantula of mossy roots snagged in the undercarriage. The driver tried reverse, then forward. Gears crunched, the ticking of the motor quickened to a clatter and began to shake itself apart. The car stalled. Then damned if the maniac behind the wheel didn’t try to start it again. The starter ground and ground. It grew mushy and then the battery died with a dry rattle. Steam poured as thick as lager from the radiator. The door on the driver’s side popped open and Morse McGrath climbed down and plunged ahead on foot.
He looked taller and thinner than he did in photographs, an animated jackstraw in a black suit and a gray homburg with the brim square across his forehead. He was pale and clean-shaven and although he carried a cane he didn’t lean on it, pumping it instead in one hand like a drive-rod and holding down his hat with the other. Whatever propelled this assembly had simply abandoned one machine for another, smaller and more agile. He hopped over snarls of weed and sank up to his knees in scum, but his line of advance never altered. His deep-set black eyes remained on Arch, fixed like a swooping owl’s on a movement in the grass. It was the unbreakable stare of a madman. Arch unbuttoned the flap on his holster.
McGrath stopped; not, Arch was sure, because of the defensive gesture, but because the old man had reached the last dry patch before the grassy knob where the survey team stood. A black pool of unknown depth separated them for a distance of fifteen feet.
“You’re on private land.”
He spoke in the sharp nasal twang Arch had heard in newsreels. Brown and ochre mud had turned his black broadcloth into camouflage.
Arch explained they were taking a shortcut through the swamp.
“I don’t want you driving no stakes on my property.”
“We’re not. We’re just trying to get to the other side.”
“Who sent you, kneelers?”
“We’re surveying for the city.”
“Kneelers, the bunch of them. Papists. You’re not passing through, you’re taking measurements. I won’t have Roman idolatry on my own soil.”
Arch admitted he was using the firm ground to line up a reading. The tripod’s feet kept sinking into the earth on the city side.
“You a kneeler?”
He had been raised Catholic. No priest had heard his confession since the army. “With respect, Mr. McGrath, I don’t see it’s any of your business.”
Lou sucked air through his teeth. He held his bundle of stakes on his shoulder like a rifle on parade.
“So you know who I am. Who are you, or ain’t that my business neither?”
Arch told him his name.
“Shanty Irish. You’re one of them, all right. What’s the matter, ashamed to own up to it?”
“You’ve got a right to throw me off your property, Mr. McGrath. You’ve even got the right to ask personal questions. I just don’t have to answer them.”
“I bought the right to throw you off. Hard cash. Your people would call that Mammon, though you didn’t when you squeezed it out of Jews and atheists on the rack. You’re still on my land,” he added.
“We wouldn’t be if you’d stop talking.”
The narrow pale face went deep copper. The cane shot up over his head. “Get out! Get off my land!” He was shrieking. An acre away, a flock of startled grouse took to the sky, their wings jackhammering.
Arch looked away from McGrath for the first time, making eye contact with Lou, whose mouth hung open. Arch jerked his head and folded his tripod.
The old man’s high-pitched shouting ended in a strangled rattle. The sound made Arch turn. McGrath was on the ground, apparently wrestling with himself. He was still holding the cane above his head as if he were standing, but one of his old-fashioned high-topped shoes kicked its heel on the edge of the brackish pool, splattering lichen-stained water as far as his vest. His face was magenta and he was still making the strangling noise.
“Jesus God, he’s rabid.” Lou crossed himself.
Arch dropped the tripod from his shoulder and plunged into the water. It was thigh ...
A couple of days before Arch Killian’s seventy-eighth birthday, he mentioned to his son that he’d outlived all his old friends and no one was left to serve as his pallbearer.
His son said, “Dad, isn’t that the idea?”
“Not when I was young. The idea was to go first and leave a lot of people to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“You’re just used to me.”
It occurred to Arch too that he was one of the few left who had a personal memory of the original Morse McGrath. The number of those who even remembered a time when the old man was alive was small, and each new harvest of obituaries in The Derrick made him wonder if he was going to keel off his porch some morning and be written up in the almanac like the last passenger pigeon. Or more accurately the last gray bird who had seen one.
He remembered that encounter every morning, when his doctor-mandated three-mile walk took him to the top of Factory Hill. That was the moment the sun struck orange crucifixes off the onion-shaped storage tanks belonging to the McGrath refinery. The play of light, crowned by the eternal flame fluttering atop the two-hundred-foot stack, painted an abstract picture of the man who had built it: fierce and florid, ablaze with a self-faith that at times licked over into fanatic, then in his final years burned there perpetually.
Arch had been twenty-six then, and had worked for Carbon Valley Surveying eighteen months. The job involved searching for buried irons and sighting along ranks of trees with ancient rusted fencing grown into the goitered trunks—in effect, reasserting property lines through archaeology. Most of the boundaries had grown over, with only the odd spent shotgun shell or calcified condom to imply the existence of civilization. He’d been bitten by stray dogs, set aflame by poison ivy, and served a feast to ticks and chiggers whose bite-scars would still be visible as high as his calves half a century later.
He’d never been happier. No straw boss crowded him, his schedule was a polite suggestion only, and his partner was loyal. Lou Pupkin was in awe of the theodolite; therefore he was in awe of Arch, and accepted his measurements like Noah.
It was like being a cowboy. He’d dressed like one, in a floppy hat, flannel shirt, leather-reinforced breeches, and stovepipe boots, and cultivated a Buffalo Bill goatee. Times were gaudy, just after a war, lots of money around, and he’d had no wife to moderate his tastes. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have caught the old man’s eye and his life would have been different.
So surveyors were an independent lot. Because they drew up the property lines there was an unspoken understanding that the lines didn’t apply to them. The understanding didn’t include most property owners, some of whose fathers and uncles had been tried and acquitted of burying trespassers on grounds of justifiable homicide. The law had changed its view, but the owners’ sons and nephews hadn’t. It wasn’t unusual in the old days for surveyors to disappear, their remains and equipment showing up a year or two later, after a hard rain and deer hunters got into places no one else ever went. By then it was next to impossible to convict anyone of murder, however heavily suspicion might lie upon the owner of the property where the bones were discovered. Shotguns were as common as Bibles and the pellets weren’t traceable. Arch had taken the advice of veterans and carried a broom-handled Mauser in a flap holster on his hip.
On a thick day late in June, he and Lou Pupkin were in search of the western boundary of the old railroad right-of-way along the river. The city had bought a section to develop a park. The property ran bang up against undeveloped land belonging to McGrath, but it hadn’t been surveyed since before the old courthouse had burned down. The irons had long since returned to corruption and all Arch and Lou had to work from were restored plat maps and petrified stumps where the tree line had stood before clear-cutting.
Most of the way ran through swamp. Lou was afraid of snakes. It took him half an hour to walk two hundred yards, spreading the tall grass in front of him with the stakes and probing old muskrat huts before he’d plant a foot. They started at seven and by noon both men were plastered with black and green muck, lumped all over with mosquito bites, and barely speaking to each other.
“Arch.”
Arch, elevating one foot of his tripod with a hunk of bark, heard the motor at the same time Lou saw the car, its pistons ticking crazily like a watch without a balance wheel. He straightened to observe the vehicle approaching across the field bordering the swamp. It was a boxy old touring car with a high center of gravity and a flat windshield that caught the sun in sheets. The body rocked independently of its suspension and the hoop wheels bucked and dipped over the cornstubs and furrows, warping and bouncing back like a car in a cartoon. Any modern vehicle would have stuck or snapped an axle. Any modern driver wouldn’t have attempted the journey except in a half-track.
He’d expected it to stop on the edge of the swamp. It kept coming, dashing water out of the wiggler-infested puddles, until it hung up on a toppled elm, whose tarantula of mossy roots snagged in the undercarriage. The driver tried reverse, then forward. Gears crunched, the ticking of the motor quickened to a clatter and began to shake itself apart. The car stalled. Then damned if the maniac behind the wheel didn’t try to start it again. The starter ground and ground. It grew mushy and then the battery died with a dry rattle. Steam poured as thick as lager from the radiator. The door on the driver’s side popped open and Morse McGrath climbed down and plunged ahead on foot.
He looked taller and thinner than he did in photographs, an animated jackstraw in a black suit and a gray homburg with the brim square across his forehead. He was pale and clean-shaven and although he carried a cane he didn’t lean on it, pumping it instead in one hand like a drive-rod and holding down his hat with the other. Whatever propelled this assembly had simply abandoned one machine for another, smaller and more agile. He hopped over snarls of weed and sank up to his knees in scum, but his line of advance never altered. His deep-set black eyes remained on Arch, fixed like a swooping owl’s on a movement in the grass. It was the unbreakable stare of a madman. Arch unbuttoned the flap on his holster.
McGrath stopped; not, Arch was sure, because of the defensive gesture, but because the old man had reached the last dry patch before the grassy knob where the survey team stood. A black pool of unknown depth separated them for a distance of fifteen feet.
“You’re on private land.”
He spoke in the sharp nasal twang Arch had heard in newsreels. Brown and ochre mud had turned his black broadcloth into camouflage.
Arch explained they were taking a shortcut through the swamp.
“I don’t want you driving no stakes on my property.”
“We’re not. We’re just trying to get to the other side.”
“Who sent you, kneelers?”
“We’re surveying for the city.”
“Kneelers, the bunch of them. Papists. You’re not passing through, you’re taking measurements. I won’t have Roman idolatry on my own soil.”
Arch admitted he was using the firm ground to line up a reading. The tripod’s feet kept sinking into the earth on the city side.
“You a kneeler?”
He had been raised Catholic. No priest had heard his confession since the army. “With respect, Mr. McGrath, I don’t see it’s any of your business.”
Lou sucked air through his teeth. He held his bundle of stakes on his shoulder like a rifle on parade.
“So you know who I am. Who are you, or ain’t that my business neither?”
Arch told him his name.
“Shanty Irish. You’re one of them, all right. What’s the matter, ashamed to own up to it?”
“You’ve got a right to throw me off your property, Mr. McGrath. You’ve even got the right to ask personal questions. I just don’t have to answer them.”
“I bought the right to throw you off. Hard cash. Your people would call that Mammon, though you didn’t when you squeezed it out of Jews and atheists on the rack. You’re still on my land,” he added.
“We wouldn’t be if you’d stop talking.”
The narrow pale face went deep copper. The cane shot up over his head. “Get out! Get off my land!” He was shrieking. An acre away, a flock of startled grouse took to the sky, their wings jackhammering.
Arch looked away from McGrath for the first time, making eye contact with Lou, whose mouth hung open. Arch jerked his head and folded his tripod.
The old man’s high-pitched shouting ended in a strangled rattle. The sound made Arch turn. McGrath was on the ground, apparently wrestling with himself. He was still holding the cane above his head as if he were standing, but one of his old-fashioned high-topped shoes kicked its heel on the edge of the brackish pool, splattering lichen-stained water as far as his vest. His face was magenta and he was still making the strangling noise.
“Jesus God, he’s rabid.” Lou crossed himself.
Arch dropped the tripod from his shoulder and plunged into the water. It was thigh ...
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- ISBN 13 9780765319593
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Book Description Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces-greed and corruption, ambition and desire-run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage.A power struggle-between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story-turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival.Setting this drama, Gas City, in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition. Seller Inventory # 9780765319593
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