I don't rock the lifeboat. I bully informants. I shack with whores. I keep the streets clean. I work my beat in Manhattan and rise through the ranks. The mayor personally pins medals on my chest. The headlines hail a hero. I do what's expected of me, mostly. On occasion, when the world gr...
Blake tried to take another swipe, drawing the blade back in reverse, but I blocked his wrist with my forearm, ducked, and gave him a left-handed jab to the mouth, same as the other guy who had beat him up. He let out a startled sound but he was too high to really notice. Nox was still tweaking t...
once said from behind his sunglasses as the girls looked on. But that minute is always moving away. Transient, baby, ephemeral, know what I'm sayin'? Know who I'm layin'? The women nodded in agreement as if he'd spoken some unbearable truth, never knowing that Shake's definition of himself pr...
The dog is chewing into his chest, about to crack through the breastbone and get to the thick meat of his heart inside. Lash took the little bastard in because it was shivering under an abandoned Chevy with six saturate tickets beneath the busted wiper, rain sluicing off the hood and running hig...
I couldn't make out the time and decided to visit early tomorrow. In the morgue parking lot I spotted Anna's van. I pulled over a few spaces down and decided to wait outside rather than walk into Wallace's office and put him even more on the spot. The morgue had been designed to be a morgue and y...
Churches showed the architectural touches of the Byzantine and Crusader eras. Eight gates in the wall of Suleyman the Magnificent opened to the smell of spices and the sound of meuzzins calling Muslims to prayer.Along with hundreds of others, I'd spent hours last night outside the hotel watching ...
After examining it for evidence, the cops had towed it to his parking lot and plunked it down in the exact spot he’d always parked in, practically outside his patio. What the police expected to find in a car washed to the bottom of the Long Island Sound, he didn’t know, but they seemed to run in ...
She’d never friended me on Facebook. I didn’t blame her. Not all of us need our pasts as urgently as I apparently needed mine. Her mother was a librarian who enjoyed recommending volumes of classic literature to me when I was a kid. Most afternoons after school I’d read there seated at a shadowed...