Or a Chinese either. Stop for fuel, a sandwich, a chance to use the washroom, and you’d think a man had come down from Mars and propped himself up on the seat of a perfectly ordinary canary-yellow and pit-of-hell-black Stutz Bearcat roadster. (And what is a bearcat, anyway? Some hybrid monster ou...
Just that. Just walk her down the steps of Juvenile Hall, put her in the car and drive back to New York with his tail between his legs – and it wasn’t too late to go back, the house in escrow, the shopping center on the market still, the old blanket of his old life neatly folded and all ready and...
Kelius read on. The murderer, as yet faceless, spread a plastic dropcloth over the tiles in the kitchen and drew a surgeon’s hacksaw from the lining of his overcoat. He began to disremember the body. In detail. Kelius was sickened, recalled to himself that it was only fiction, and read on, oblivi...
son of a fucking bitch. the humiliation level here was climbing like a rocket. What had it taken them, six weeks to catch this joker? Six weeks to nail one sorry slump-shouldered fat-assed Nip who looked like he was about twelve years old. And now, when it was all over, when he’d been hauled in, ...
He was on the road again, his wrist draped casually over the wheel of the Studebaker, Star and Marco wedged in beside him, the roof piled high with roped-down boxes and Lydia stretched out across the backseat in a see-through blouse. He was dogging the bus, Merry and Maya making faces out the bac...
SHE WAS AT THE stove two days later, making a pot of low-cal chicken vegetable soup (tenders sautéed in safflower oil with garlic and onions, chicken stock, zucchini, tomatoes and snow peas from her garden), late afternoon, a glass of zinfandel on the counter beside her, everything as still as st...
He was willing himself to focus on the road, the weather getting worse by the minute, and he had to keep one hand on the tuner because the radio was fading in and out as they looped higher into the mountains. “It was a water spout,” she said, her face a soft pale shell floating on the undersea gl...
Saunders Company, Philadelphia, the book’s publisher—was quite prepared for the furor that greeted publication of the male volume in January of 1948. Prok had chosen Saunders, a staid and colorless publisher of medical texts, over the big commercial houses in New York (and believe me, once word w...
Like her sister, she was a big moon-faced blonde in her mid-fifties who favored false eyelashes and cocktail dresses in colors like champagne and chartreuse. Unlike her sister, however, she worked for a living. Selling real estate. “He’s rejected the bid,” she said, looking up from the sheaf of p...
What were they, fifteen, sixteen? Big ugly kids in big shorts with haircuts right out of a 1963 yearbook, all thatch and no shag, but what did they know about 1963? They were drunk, one-thirty in the afternoon, and they’d lifted a pint of tequila and a forty-ouncer from the convenience store or r...