Score gone sour.
Parker
and three other outlaws - Weiss, Andrews, Uhl - pull off a bank robbery
with perfect execution: preparation, at the bank itself, getaway, all
textbook. Of course, there's no academic textbook on how to rob a bank
but if such a textbook existed, the author could use this heist as a
case study - how to do it right without getting caught.
But then
it happens: the boys reach their farmhouse hideout twenty miles from
town and are about to sit down at the kitchen table to divvy up the loot
when young, feisty George Uhl shoots Weiss in the head. Uhl then shoots
Andrews. Uhl doesn't shoot Parker 'cause Parker dives through the
window and runs behind the barn.
Parker would square off against
George Uhl right then and there if he had a gun. But, as bad luck has
it, when Parker crashed through the window and rolled on the ground, his
pistol fell out of its holster. All Parker can do now is make a dash
for the woods and leave George and the money for later.
Thus, The Sour Lemon Score
is the tale of a manhunt, Parker hunting George Uhl across the Midwest
and then up and down the East Coast, from New York City to Alexandria,
Virginia. Special call-out for Parker's durable green Pontiac.
Many Westlake/Stark aficionados judge Sour Lemon
as one of the top novels in the series - reasons include the variety of
colorful and sometimes dangerous characters, examination of underlying
psychology and motivation propelling men and women to do what they do,
sharp sketches, especially in Part 3 where point-of-view rotates through
six different players.
I myself became totally absorbed. Once I
started listening to the 4-hour audio book while taking my evening walk,
I simply couldn't stop. Oh, Donald E. Westlake! You propelled me into
walking nonstop for hours. Enjoyed every minute.
As Parker makes
the rounds, he comes in contact with an old lady selling guns under the
table in her antique shop, the owner of a Greenwich Village record
store who is openly gay, a jaded hipster babe on Manhattan's Upper West
Side, a crook living the lifestyle of a typical suburban businessman, a
heister with a sadistic streak, a beauty running her own dance/physical
fitness studio and eventually (background music to build suspense)
George Uhl.
Ah, George Uhl. I think we've all met this type of
dude. In high school he might have been the class clown but he
definitely was the cool slicker, the one who knew all the angles, the
smooth-talking teenage con artist, they guy who claimed to get all the
chicks and who could usually swindle and cheat his way into getting much
of everything else he wanted. Hard word? No way, José! He knew he could
use a certain kind of smarts to outflank the hardest workers, even if
it meant skirting the law. Books and school? Are you kidding! What a
waste of time.
So there he is, George Uhl, age 31, tall, thin,
receding black hair, working his sixth heist. George is the driver for
the bank robbery and George is being unusually jumpy - a real case of
nerves. Meanwhile, Parker is in the back seat and wonders if George's
nerves will sour the whole job, if George's jumpiness will cause George
to race away in the car, leaving all three of them stranded when they run out of the bank. Parker is getting this weird negative vibe from
George but Parker hasn't worked with Uhl before so lets it go.
Oh,
Parker. If you only knew what was really causing George Uhl to sweat
all over - George, you see, knows all along that this job is THE job,
his big chance to score all the cash. Hey, unlike the past five jobs,
there are only three other chumps with him on this one. All George has
to do is POW! POW! POW! - shoot the other three suckers dead and all the
dough, every single dollar, is his.
As it turned out, after he
leaves the farmhouse with all the loot, George Uhl thinks maybe he
should have shot Parker first. Nah. He did it right. It was only dumb
luck that Parker managed to jump out of that window. But lady luck
turned him a favor - Parker dropped his gun when he ran for the hills.
"But
it wasn't all that bad. Parker and Uhl didn't know each other, so how
could Parker make trouble for him later on even if he wanted to? And
besides, since Uhl was going to leave him unarmed and on foot out here,
he was more than likely to be picked up by the cops. Let Parker do
twenty years in a federal pen somewhere and then come looking for Uhl."
There's no doubt you're a slick dude, George. But you just might find out the hard way what it means to underestimate Parker.
How hard? Read all about it in The Sour Lemon Score.
American author Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008
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