The White Van E-Book

Patrick Hoffman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger At a dive bar in San Francisco's edgy Tenderloin district, the dishevelled Emily Rosario is drinking whiskey and looking for an escape. When she is approached by a mysterious and wealthy Russian, she thinks she has found an exit from her drifter lifestyle and drug-addict boyfriend. A week later she finds herself drugged, disoriented and wanted for robbery. On the other side of town, cop Leo Elias is broke, alcoholic and desperate. When he hears about an unsolved bank robbery, the stolen money proves too strong a temptation. Elias takes the case into his own hands, hoping to find the criminal and the money before anyone else does. With sharply drawn characters and twists that surprise until the end, The White Van introduces a strong new talent.

Leseprobe

The White Van

THE WHITE VAN

Patrick Hoffman

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2014 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright ©Patrick Hoffman, 2014

The moral right of Patrick Hoffman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, entities or persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 61185 559 3

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 970 6

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For Nana and Patricia Coyne

PART I

1

The man who had been following her stepped into the bar. Emily remembered that. At the time she didn’t know he had been following her, but she remembered the way he had stepped into the bar. She remembered the door opening. She remembered him backing into the bar and closing the door. She remembered him turning to face the bar. He was big and white and dressed like someone who had a job in an office. He hesitated at the doorway and then continued in.

Emily was sitting in the back. An old Chinese man sat toward the front. There was only the bar and fifteen stools, nothing fancy. The bartender, a woman with thick makeup, seemed happy to see the new man. She greeted him with a smile. It was a Tuesday night. There were only four people in the Kum Bak Klub.

“I’ll have a whiskey,” said the man, having already looked toward Emily’s drink and seen something brown. There was just enough light to make out the color of it. The man had an accent of some kind. An accent and a silver watch. That was a lot. She looked him over. He seemed handsome. He was a big guy with a watch in the Tenderloin. Maybe he was here for a convention or something. He sat on his stool and sipped his drink. She sized him up.

Emily was thirty-one years old. Her hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail; she had on tight blue jeans, men’s basketball shoes, and a red 49ers jacket with gold trim and snap buttons. She was pretty, but in a beat-up way. She would have been prettier in a different life. She had on black eyeliner. Her teeth were not straight, or white. Her nails were bitten down. She had a star-shaped scar on her forehead.

She sat there and watched the man’s reflection in the mirror until she got distracted by the baseball game on the television. The Giants were playing; the playoffs were coming, and it was cold outside; San Francisco weather. The bartender and the old man near the door watched the game, too. Later she tried to remember how they had started talking. He was doing something. He had been writing in a notebook.

“You writing a memo?” she’d asked.

The man said, “I know it’s rude to work in a bar.” He put the pen back into his jacket pocket.

Emily barely understood what he had said. She heard the words but only vaguely. “It’s all right,” she said. She waved her hand toward him the way people talking in bars do. “You could keep doing it.”