Starktober: Internal Dialogue

Momentum kept him rolling. He wasn't sure himself any more how much was a tough front to impress the organization and how much was himself. He knew he was hard, he knew that he worried less about emotion than other people. But he'd never enjoyed the idea of a killing. And now he wasn't sure himself whether he'd just been putting a scare into Fairfax or if he really meant it.

It was momentum, that was all. Eighteen years in one business, doing one or two clean fast simple operations in a year, living relaxed and easy in the resort hotels the rest of the time with a woman he liked, and then all of a sudden it all got twisted around. The woman was gone, the pattern was gone, the relaxation was gone, the clean swiftness was gone.

He spent months as a vag in a prison farm; he spent over a month coming across the country like an O. Henry tramp; he devoted time and effort and thought on an operation that wasn't clean or fast or simple and that didn't net him a dime -- the finding and killing of Mal Resnick. And more killing, and more bucking the syndicate more for the mean hell of it than anything else, as though for eighteen years he'd been storing up all the meanness, all the viciousness, and now it had to come rushing out.

He didn't know if he was going to make it, if he was going to hold up the syndicate and get away with it, and he didn't really care. He was doing it, and rolling along with the momentum, and that was all that mattered.

Richard Stark, The Hunter, pp.171-172

Starktober Introduction and Index