Caught Stealing

Zusatztext “Wow! Brutal! visceral! violent! edgy! and brilliant.” —HARLAN COBEN! author of No Second Chance “ Caught Stealing reads like The Maltese Falcon on crack. Tarantino meets Hitchcock meets Westlake meets Bukowski in a wild! relentlessly entertaining ride filled with vivid and colorful—but always believable—characters.” —WALLACE STROBY! author of The Barbed-Wire Kiss “It’s hard enough for a writer to hit his mark! but Charlie Huston shreds his target with his first bullet fired. A frighteningly assured debut novel.” —JOHN RIDLEY! author of Stray Dogs and The Drift Informationen zum Autor Charles Huston is a novelist and screenwriter. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife, the actress Virginia Louise Smith. Klappentext "[A] fantastically hopped-up thriller . . . a wrong-man plot worthy of Hitchcock."-Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) It's three thousand miles from the green fields of glory, where Henry "call me Hank" Thompson once played California baseball, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the tenements are old, the rents are high, and the drunks are dirty. But now Hank is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud who is surely going to get him killed. It begins when Hank's neighbor, Russ, has to leave town in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn't until two Russians in tracksuits drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn't know what it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn't have it. Within twenty-four hours Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet spot of a guy's head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor. All because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever assembled in one place. All because of Bud. All because once, in another life, in another world, the only thing Hank wanted was to take third base-without getting caught.My feet hurt. The nightmare still in my head, I walk across the cold wood floor, shuffling my feet in the light grit. I’m half-drunk and I have to pee. I’m not sure which woke me, the piss or the nightmare. My john is just a bit smaller than the average port-o-potty. I sit on the pot and rest my forehead against the opposite wall. I have a pee hard-on and if I try to take a leak standing up, I’ll end up hosing the whole can. I know this from experience. Plus my feet still hurt. It takes a while. By the time I finish I’m just about asleep again. I get up, flush, and shuffle back to bed. On the way, a last bit of piss dribbles onto my thigh. I pick up a dirty sock from the floor, wipe the urine off and toss the sock in a corner. I crawl back under the covers and twist around a bit until I’m arranged. I start to drift back asleep and the nightmare begins to rise up again in my mind. I force myself fully awake to keep it from getting back in. I think happy thoughts. I think about a dog I used to have. I think about Yvonne. I think about baseball: long, lazy games of baseball, plastic cups of cold beer between my thighs, peanut shells crunching beneath my sneakers. Fly balls soaring over loping outfielders. The beautiful ease of the long pop fly out . . . No! Wrong! Baseball is a mistake and the nightmare is rushing back in. I think about home. Home does the trick and I start to ease back asleep. And only then as I finally fall asleep do I register the blood I saw on the sock when I wiped my leg, the blood from my piss. I sleep. * * * These things are not related: my aching feet, the nightmare, the blood. My feet have hurt for years b...

Product details

• Authors: Charlie Huston
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.05.2005
• EAN: 9780345464781
• ISBN: 978-0-345-46478-1
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 205 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Ballantine Books; Henry Thompson; Henry Thompson
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense