John Davenport Quotes

Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.

It’s the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves.

They were shot with a shotgun and put in garbage bags and thrown under a bridge," Shrake said. "If it wasn't murder, it was a really weird accident.

The thing about Botox is that when you've had too much, you then have to fake reactions just to look human--and it's impossible to distinguish real fake reactions from fake fake reactions.

First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn’t work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn’t help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn’t work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she’s still drinking.

Her Pan-Cake makeup was cracking like a dried-out Dakota lake bed.

If there were honorary degrees for assholes, he’d be a doctor of everything,” Lily said.

Does Raggedy Ann have a cotton crotch?

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to Virgil Flowers. He'd probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he'd done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas's humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he'd find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he'd be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.

I'll bring pajamas " she said. "Yeah? You have any idea how old I am?" "Not nearly as old as you're gonna be by midnight.

Flowers said, “I got two bottles of water in the car.” “Get them. And get your gun,” Lucas said. “The gun? You think?” “No. I just like to see you wearing the fuckin’ gun for a change,” Lucas said. “C’mon, let’s get moving.

Even thinking was hard.

Lucas’s position was supine: that is, whenever he heard people arguing about it, he wanted to lie down and take a nap.

Carol Druze Was A Stone Killer.

Some people would say bullshit is the grease that gets people through life,” Weather said. “Other people,” Letty said. “Not me.

Cinnamon Girl" wasn't right for this day, for this time, for what was about to happen. If he were to have music, he thought, maybe Shostakovich, a few measures from the Lyric Waltz in Jazz Suite Number 2. Something sweet, yet pensive, with a taste of tragedy; Qatar was an intellectual, and he knew his music.

You’re saying the media is dangerous, immoral, and antidemocratic?” “Well . . . yes,” Henderson said. “They don’t recognize it in themselves, but they’re basically criminals. In the classic sense of that word.

For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.

LIKE ANY GOOD MINNESOTAN, Lucas rarely missed the TV weather before going to bed.

Never been there, the Middle East," Qatar said vaguely.

But the laughter was like a water bug on a pond, skating across the surface of his mind. He was amused and he laughed, but nothing was deeply funny; life was simply stupid most of the time.

Felt the dark finger of hypocrisy stroking his soul.

There are more numb-nuts around here than in the Florida state legislature, which, believe me, was a whole passel of numb-nuts.

I could live here,” Del said. “No, you couldn’t. You’d turn into a coot and hang out at the general store, with your fly down,” Lucas said. “You’d be known for goosing middle-aged women. You’d be the town embarrassment.

Fresh ideas from this group was virtually an oxymoron, Marlys thought, wriggling her butt against the comfortless chair.

You’re saying the media is dangerous, immoral, and antidemocratic?

NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER: Has excessive feelings of self-importance. Reacts to criticism with rage. Takes advantage of other people. Disregards the feelings of others. Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence. •   •   •

We ought to go up north. It’d be nice now, out on the lakes,” said the taller one. “It’s been too warm. Too many mosquitoes.” The tall man laughed. ‘Bullshit, mosquitoes. We’re Indians, dickhead.

vegetables in your restaurants are not so good.” “Better in Russia?” Reynolds asked, interested. “I should say so,” Nadya said. “Also better in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Italy, in Israel.

Now Flowers was arguing the same thing back to him. If Dannon and Carver had killed Tubbs, Lucas wouldn’t find out about it except by accident. If justice were to be done, it would have to be extrajudicial.

THE EXCHANGE KEPT LUCAS warm all the way out to the car. He’d jump off a high building before he betrayed Weather, but a little extracurricular flirtation kept the blood circulating; not that all of it went to the brain.

The day after the assignation with Barstad, the low stacked-heels of Charlotte Neumann, an ordained Episcopalian priest, author of New Art Modalities: Woman/Sin, Sin/Woman, S/in/ister, which, the week before, had broken through the top-10,000 barrier of the Barnes & Noble on-line bestseller list, and who was, not incidentally, the department chairperson, echoed down the hallway and stopped at his door.

DDT stood for Dangerous Darrell Thomas. Thomas had given himself the name when he was riding with a motorcycle club and was interviewed for a public radio magazine. The magazine writer got it wrong, though, and referred to him as TDT--Terrible Darrell Thompson--which lost something of its intent when expressed as initials; and since the writer got the last name wrong, too, Thomas never again trusted the media.

I used to be a Catholic, and when I first started police work, I worried about that. I saw a lot of people dead or dying for no apparent reason . . . not people I killed, just people. Little kids who'd drowned, people dying in auto accidents and with heart attacks and strokes. I saw a lineman burn to death, up on a pole, little bits and pieces, and nobody could help . . . . I watched them go, screaming and crying and sometimes just lying there with their tongues stuck out, heaving, with all the screaming and hollering from friends and relatives . . . and I never saw anyone looking beyond. I think, Michael, I think they just blink out. That's all. I think they go where the words on a computer screen go, when you turn it off. One minute they exist, maybe they're even profound, maybe the result of a great deal of work. The next . . . . Whiff. Gone.

What Lucas would feel, instead, would be a murderous anger, an iceberg of hate. He would kill anyone who hurt Weather, Sam, or Letty. He’d be cold about it, he’d plan it, but the anger would never go away, and sooner or later, he would find them and kill them.

The regular campaign staff, including the regular campaign manager, had no idea that the shadow staff existed.

I’m not a responsible human being before noon. I don’t daylight; I really don’t.

THE DAY WAS PERFECT: low eighties, bluebird sky, the slightest touch of a breeze. If the Minnesota August lasted all year, nobody would live anywhere else.

The science of public happiness was how Keynes saw his work as an economist.

depression was to be feared—and he could feel it sniffing around outside his door, looking for a way in.

Uh-uh, not the way it works,” Means said. He was a fleshy man, with nicotine-stained teeth and drooping cheeks. And, “Say, didn’t you work for Virgil Flowers for a while, up in Minnesota?

argued that depression is a terrible word for the affliction. Should be called something like mindstorm. Still, Lucas’s intuition told him that mindstorms didn’t just show up: they needed something to chew on.

grew up with guns and I needed them. Most people don’t. All these high-capacity guns flashed by the nutcakes? They’re a disaster. If I had my way, there’d be no guns but single-shot hunting rifles and single-shot shotguns. You could do all the target shooting you want with those. You could hunt to your heart’s content. Of course, you’d actually have to learn how to hunt or how to hit a target, and most of those dimwits don’t want to be bothered.

But as cops began to develop FBI-like attitudes, and to build FBI-like fortresses, as they sealed themselves away in patrol cars, as they fended off contact with the public, they began to resemble a paramilitary force, rather than peace officers.

The local farmers, of course, were bitching because the bean and corn harvests were going to be huge and the prices depressed. Of course, if it hadn’t rained, they’d be bitching because their crops were small, even if the prices were high. You couldn’t win with farmers.

SCHIFFER WAS LEAVING, Dannon asked Carver to do a serious look around the yard. One of the radar buzzers had been going off, Dannon said, and he hadn’t been able to isolate why. “Probably another goddamn skunk,” Carver said. He pulled his jacket back on and went to look.

Marlys was a sturdy woman in her fifties, white curls clinging to her scalp like vanilla frosting. She wore rimless glasses, a homemade red-checked gingham dress, and low-topped Nikes. Short-nosed and pale, she had a small pink mouth that habitually pursed in thought, or disapproval.

What joke?” “The one about the guy who rolls a wheelbarrow full of sawdust out of a construction site every night.” “I don’t know that one,” Cochran said. Lucas said, “The security guy keeps checking and checking and checking the wheelbarrow, thinking the guy had to be stealing something. Never found anything hidden in the sawdust, and nobody cared about the sawdust. Couple of years later, they bump into each other, and the security guy says, ‘Look, it’s all in the past, you can tell me now. I know you were stealing something. What was it?’ And the guy says, ‘Wheelbarrows.

Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark,” Carver said. “He’s gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case.” “In case of what?” Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself. “Well . . . body gases,” Carver said. “The ground was a little wet, you wouldn’t want him popping up.

He thought Emily Dickinson was perhaps the best writer America had ever produced; but on this day, heading east out of the Cities, then south down the river, he thought of how some of the writers, Poe and Hemingway in particular, used the weather to create the mood and reflect the meanings of their stories.

They both knew what they were thinking, though neither said it: Taryn Grant had what it took to be president. She had the business background, she understood economics and finance, she had the money wrapped up, she looked terrific, she had a mind that understood the necessary treacheries: a silken Machiavelli.

All right. I’ll keep it quiet.” “Attaboy. This thing is going to work out, Lucas. For us. It really shouldn’t matter whether we get the killer this week or in two weeks. What matters right now is to try to square up this election. Let’s focus on that: you do what you do, and let me try to get things straight with the voters.

GRAY-EYED COLE SAT in his bedroom window, looking out over the road, a scoped Ruger 10/22 in his hands. Squirrel rifle. Below him, a quilt hung on the wire clothesline, airing out. Before the end of the day, the quilt would smell like early-summer fields, with a little gravel dust mixed in. A wonderful smell, a smell like home.

We’ll have set back New York heroin dealing by at least an hour and only cost the American taxpayers a couple of million.

Ruining you now would be like shooting a squirrel and mounting its head. Nobody would be impressed.

If that ain’t a fact, God’s a possum,

That’s why we’re called the Secret Service. Nobody tells anyone anything.

Scratching their nails on the blackboard of futility.

they listened to Otis Taylor’s Banjo album as they made the short trip across town.

Call it what you want, a bump stock turns an AR into a machine gun.

All Wrongdoing Arises Because of Mind.

I’m pretty delicate,” Lucas admitted. “You know, when I’m not beating somebody senseless.

California is like a Nazi state with palm trees

Haven’t seen so much screaming and yelling since I went to a goat-fuck out in South

You mean, we should only beat up young people?” Davenport asked. “There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old.

Cops and schoolteachers,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.

It’s a game, you know,” he said, testing her. “You can’t back off in a game and win. You either go balls to the wall, or somebody takes you out and you’re no good anymore.

John,” I whispered, and he nodded. “It’s okay, Kitten, your little girl is fine too.

stopped by the door

The bird came after Lucas again and he swatted at it with his gun, smacked it hard, two or three small feathers flying.

Focus on our ignorance.” She didn’t quite grasp the concept. She’d never been ignorant.

We ain’t in California no more,” Pilate said. “Every fuckin’ body up here’s got a gun. Even that old lady in the hamburger shop, shot Michelle.

Impossible to know. The thing is, you take a fork in the road, it doesn’t always work out for the better . . . but sometimes it does. It must.

Hey, people get killed from time to time, that’s just the way of the world, let’s not bust a budget about it . . .

Lucas’s Colt .45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up

and

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted.

Her voice was stark as a winter crow.

O'Dell's driver was a broad man with a Korean War crew cut, his hair the color of rolled steel. A hatchet nose split basalt eyes, and his lips were dry and thick: a Gila monster's.

Our old ideas are not so much overthrown as upset. The old is not destroyed; it is replaced. We simply learn to see new things in a different light.

He was conservative, especially on the abortion issue, and he was death on taxes; on the other hand, he had a Clintonesque attitude about women, and even a sense of humor about his own peccadilloes.

Guy goes to the doc, and he says, ‘Doc, you gotta help me. I got this terrible headache. It feels like somebody is pounding a nail through my forehead. Like I got a big pair of pliers squeezing behind my ears. It’s tension from my job. I can’t stop working right now, but the headache’s killing me. You gotta help.’ So the doc says, ‘You know, I do have a cure. Exactly the same thing happened to me—I was working too much, and I got exactly the same headache. Then one night I was performing oral sex on my wife, and her legs were squeezing my head really tight, really hard, and the pressure must have done something, because the headache was a lot better. So I did this every night for two weeks, and at the end of two weeks, the headache was gone.’ And the guy says, ‘I’m desperate, Doc, I’ll try anything.’ The doc said, ‘Well, then, I’ll see you in two weeks.’ So the guy goes away, and two weeks later he comes back for his appointment and he’s the most cheerful guy in the world. And he says, ‘Doc, you’re a miracle worker. I did just what you told me, and the headache’s gone. Vanished. I feel great. I think it’s got to be the pressure, and—by the way, you’ve got a beautiful home.

Though wickedly aware of his surroundings, he didn’t look around; looking around attracted the eye. People who saw him would ask themselves, “Why’s that guy looking around like that?” He’d learned not to do it.

They gathered around the living room TV and the media woman plugged a thumb drive into the digital port and brought the advertisement up: Smalls was dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, bankerish, but with a pale blue shirt open at the collar. He was in his Minnesota Senate office, with a hint of the American flag to his right, a couple of red and white stripes—not enough of a flag display to invite sarcasm, but it was there.

I understand. Does he have names?” “No. All he has is some basic descriptions. He said the candidate from the North saw you and a fellow he believed was related to you, and passed along the description. If he starts asking around among our people, he’s going to find you. I won’t ask if . . . you know . . . you’re planning something. I’m already in enough trouble, lying about not knowing you.” “I appreciate that,” Marlys said.

Yeah, I can do that,” Sandy said. “How long will it take?” Lucas asked. “Mmm, five, six minutes.” “Sandy, I will give you four dollars if you can get it to me in five minutes,” Lucas said. “Call you back,” she said.

The Minneapolis City Hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.

LEONARD WAS A THICK, dark-haired man, Lucas’s height but heavier, both in the arms and the gut. He was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and yellow work boots. The scars around his pale, suspicious eyes and a withered nose made him into a brawler.

You know, I believe every word you’ve said, but I don’t need this. I’ve got six officers working for me full-time, plus four reserve deputies and a dog, and the dog got his feet cut up on broken glass yesterday and he’s out of it for a week. That means two guys for busy shifts, one guy for others. The dog has the most experience. Not counting the part-timers, he might even be the smartest. I include myself in that. I’ve never investigated anything more complicated than mailbox theft.

Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things that should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national.

Letty dozed in the webbing of her recliner, a copy of The Quarterly Journal of Economics covering her face. Beneath that, pressing against her nose, was a paperback version of J. D. Robb’s Celebrity in Death, which Letty estimated was the fortieth of the In Death novels she’d read. While not as prestigious as the Journal, the Robb novel was distinctly more intelligent and certainly better written; but, a girl has to maintain her intellectual status with the D.C. deep state, so the Journal went on top.

Murdered? Somebody murdered him?” Palmer was agog. A thin, soft man with a pitted nose and a bald, bumpy egg-shaped head dotted with dime-sized freckles, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said, “NSA, Our Customer Service Pledge: You Talk, We Listen.

Clay pulled Lucas along and as they were approaching the back door, he called, “Madam Secretary . . . I need you to meet this guy.” She stopped and turned and looked at Lucas and then Clay, did a quick price check on Lucas’s suit, and asked, “How do you do?

She made a moue, then said, “There’s one exception. If he is, in fact, in love with Ms. Grant, he might take one for her . . . if she’s involved. If he thinks Carver acted alone, he might also turn on Carver. Not because he wanted to, but to protect Ms. Grant.

The Times, whose editorial portentousness approached traumatic constipation, tried to suppress its glee under the bushel basket of feigned sadness that another civil servant had been caught in a sexual misadventure; they hadn’t even bothered to use the word “alleged.

As Bowden worked the room, Jubek took Lucas around to all the other security people and told them to take a good look. “If this guy tells you something, you listen,” he told them. He gave Lucas his cell phone number, and said, as Lucas was leaving, “I sincerely hope you’re a self-aggrandizing bullshitter who’s trying to get attention for himself, but I looked you up and I’ve got the bad feeling you’re not.” “‘Self-aggrandizing.’ Pretty big words for a former lineman,” Lucas said. Jubek grinned and slapped him on the shoulder and said, “See ya.

Schiffer recoiled: “Oh, Jesus Christ, Taryn, don’t give me a heart attack,” she said, clutching at her chest. “Remember: no sense of humor. How many times do I have to tell you that: No sense of humor. Humor can get you in all kinds of shit and we’ve got this won, if we don’t get funny.

I have this theory that everyone is a little mentally ill,” Letty said. “No such thing as perfectly normal. You’ve got all these branches extending out of some kind of theoretical normalcy. You’ve got the schizophrenic branch, the paranoid branch, the psychopathic branch, the sociopathic branch, the manic-depressive branch, the clinically depressive branch, the OCD branch, and so on. Nobody is dead center. Everybody is out on one of those branches. Or more than one. If you’re too far out, you’re nuts. If you’re just a little way out, you’re fine, but you have a tendency.” “Where

He went on like that for a while, and before he was done, Lucas had dismissed him as being ineffectually goofy, although his ideas about the killing were roughly the same as Lucas’s own. Holly said he had no idea who on the staff might have been involved with Tubbs, or might be working as a spy.

She shook her head. “I don’t know the details, exactly, but he was a lobbyist for the Minnesota Apiary Association.” “You mean, archery?” Jeff asked. “No, apiary, Daddy. You know, honey bees. There was some kind of licensing thing going on,” Brittany said. “The state was going to put on a fee, and some of the bee guys said they wouldn’t bring their hives into Minnesota if that happened, and Tubbs thought that the bees were interstate commerce and so only the feds were allowed to regulate it. Or something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t interested enough to follow it. But Bob was around.

I don’t know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . .” Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas’s status.

Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world—the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

You think we could get them around by the pool?” Taryn asked. “Well, we could, but why would we?” “Because it looks rich. The point is, if this hurts me, I’ll be hurt with the more conservative voters out here,” Taryn said. “The richer ones. I want to make the point, ‘I’m one of you.’ I’ve got the liberals no matter what.

The aisles of the Varied Industries building had grown too coagulated, so Marlys led the girl around the building, the girl’s legs churning to keep up. They came out directly behind the fire hydrant that they’d planted the night before, separated from it by the dense crowd. Marlys asked a tall man at the back, “Do you see them yet?

He glanced at her: “Sure. You guys must be really close.” She was blunt: “Close enough to get your ass fired if you’re suggesting that Colles and I are sleeping together.” “I wasn’t suggesting that,” he muttered, rapidly backing off. “Try harder not to suggest it,” she said; her tone did everything but smear blood on the windshield. (Page 16)

The gun locked open and he slammed another magazine in. As he did it, he either saw or imagined he saw a ripple moving through the cornfield and fired four more shots at it, then stopped, crouched, and stepped sideways across the nose of the truck, saw Robertson facedown in the driveway gravel. He was alive, pushing up with his hands, getting nowhere.

We need to know who it is, if he or she is there,” Lucas said. “That person’s life could be in danger from the same people who killed Tubbs . . . unless he or she did it. Then, that’d mean you’re working with a cold-blooded killer.” “Okay. I’ll think about it,” MacGuire said. “I’m not lying to you here, I really don’t know—but I’ll think about it, and ask around.

I’ll have to think about it, but I can do that,” Taryn said. “Of course you can,” Dannon said. “But don’t think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don’t know anything, but you’re willing to speculate, and you’d like some information from them—to hear what they think.” “What about you and Carver?” “We can handle it,” Dannon said. “We’ve spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us.” “Let’s do that,” Taryn said. “Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work.” “I’ll talk to Ron,” Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, “Here comes Alice.

She had to think seriously about Carver and Dannon. Dannon was well under control—he’d been her security man for four years, and for all four years had hungered for her. Not just for sex. He was in love with her. That was useful. Carver was cruder. He didn’t want her total being, he just wanted to fuck her. If she wasn’t available, somebody else would do. So her grip on him was more precarious.

MARLYS WAS A WOMAN of ordinary appearance, if seen in a supermarket or a library, dressed in homemade or Walmart dresses or slacks, a little too heavy, but fighting it, white-haired, ruddy-faced. In her heart, though, she housed a rage that knew no bounds. The rage fully possessed her at times, and she might be seen sitting in her truck at a stoplight, pounding the steering wheel with the palms of her hands, or walking through the noodle aisle at the supermarket with a teeth-baring snarl. She had frightened strangers, who might look at her and catch the flames of rage, quickly extinguished when Marlys realized she was being watched. The rage was social and political and occasionally personal, based on her hatred of obvious injustice, the crushing of the small and helpless by the steel wheels of American plutocracy.

Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little, and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. G. H. Hardy

She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.” “So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began. “I promise you, they are,” Marvel said. Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.” Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.

As he ran, he thought about everything and anything, about the life he’d led, the children, the snatches of time frozen in his mind: a moment when he’d gotten shot in an alley, and the flash of the man who’d shot him; the first sight of a newborn daughter; his mother’s face, crabby with an early morning slice of toast in her hand, her image as clear in his mind as it had been twenty-five years earlier, on the day she died…. They all came up like portraits and landscapes hanging on the wall of his memory, flashes of color in the black-and-white night.

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

Did he ever ask you . . . or suggest to you . . . that he might want to pull some kind of dirty trick on Senator Smalls?” “Oh, no, he would never have done that,” Fey said. “I mean, he might have tried to pull a dirty trick, but he wouldn’t have spoken to me about it. I like Senator Smalls and Robert knew that. The senator and I have common interests. He likes classical piano and he likes Postimpressionist art. If Robert had asked me to do a dirty trick on Senator Smalls, I would have refused and I would have told Senator Smalls. Robert teased me about that. About me being loyal.

operations, trying to get things straight. He now had so much metal in his pelvis that he carried a TSA Notification Card just to get on an airplane. Despite the lingering disability, he’d gone back to full-time in April. He sat back down again. “I found Brett Givens working as a sign man for a real estate dealership over in Edina,” he said. “He drives a pickup, goes around putting up signs, or taking them down.” Lucas knew Givens: “Better than working at the chop shop.” “Yeah. Anyway, he says Cory is definitely back, because he saw him up in Cambridge last week, at Kenyon’s. He said Cory didn’t see him, because he ducked out—I think he was afraid that Cory might try to talk him into something. He likes the sign job.” “Givens didn’t know where Cory’s living?” “No. But he said there were random people in the bar who seemed to know Cory, like he might be a regular. He said Cory doesn’t look especially prosperous, so he might still have the safe. I thought I’d go up this afternoon, have a few beers.” “All right. Take care. Jenkins and Shrake are out of pocket. If you need backup, call me, and I’ll either come up or get Jon to send somebody.” Dale Cory was believed to be in possession of a safe that contained two million dollars in diamond jewelry, at wholesale prices, taken from a jewelry store in St. Paul

SALLY FEY SHRANK in her office chair when Lucas asked the question, her shoulders turning in, her neck seeming almost to shorten, as though she were trying to pull her head into a turtle shell. She looked up at Lucas and said, “Robert and I had an ambiguous relationship. . . .” She was twisting her hands, as she spoke. She was a slight woman, who might have been attractive if she’d done anything to make it so. But she didn’t: her clothing—she wore dresses—might have come from the 1950s. She wore neither jewelry nor makeup, but did wear square, clunky shoes. She looked at Lucas from under her eyebrows, and at an angle, as though she were worried that he might strike her.

LUCAS HUNG ON, and Bob said to Rae, “If this works, I’m probably going to have to kiss Lucas’s ass. You might not want to be here for that.” “No time for it anyway,” Lucas said. “If this works, we need to get down to Quantico and check this stuff out.” Rae: “Why? We’ll just have him email it to us.” Lucas rubbed his face, and sighed. “Shit. You know, deep in my heart, I don’t understand that we don’t always have to go places to get things anymore,” Lucas said. “I was about to drive an hour over to the Medical Examiner’s Office to look at Ritter’s belt. The investigator sent me the iPhone photos in seven minutes. Kind of scizzes me out, the way it comes out of the sky now.

Lucas tried to be as soft as he could be; it wasn’t his natural attitude. “Ambiguous . . . how? Was this a sexual relationship?” “Yes. Twice. I mean, we . . . yes, we slept together twice. When he went away, wherever he went, it’s hard to believe that he might be dead, because he was so upbeat when I last saw him. . . . Anyway, I thought maybe the police would ask me about him, but nobody did, and I didn’t know what to do about that. I was scared. . . . I didn’t know what happened to him, and when he didn’t call me Saturday or Sunday, I thought he wasn’t interested anymore.” “When was the last time you heard from him?” Lucas asked. “Friday night, about . . . nine o’clock,” she said.

THEY WALKED UP TO the front door, rang the bell. Del scratched his neck and looked at the yellow bug light and said, “I feel like a bug.” “You look like a bug. You fall down out there?” “About four times. We weren’t running so much as staggering around. Potholes full of water . . . I see you kept your French shoes nice and dry.” “English. English shoes . . . French shirts. Italian suits. Try to remember that.” “Makes my nose bleed,” Del said. The door opened, and Green looked out: she was still fully dressed, including the jacket that covered her gun and the fashionable shoes that she could run in. She took a long look at Del, and asked, “Where’re Dannon and Carver?” “Dead,” Lucas said. “Where’s Grant?” “In the living room.” “You want to invite us in?” She opened the door, and they stepped inside, and followed her to the living room. Grant was there, still dressed as she had been on the stage; she was curled in an easy chair, with a drink in her hand, high heels on the floor beside her. Schiffer was lying on a couch, barefoot; a couple of Taryn’s staff people, a young woman and a young man, were sitting on the floor, making a circle. Another man, heavier and older, was sitting in a leather chair facing Grant. Lucas didn’t recognize him, but recognized the type: a guy who knew where all the notional bodies were buried, a guy who could get the vice president on the telephone.

You've got pretty good taste." She pulled out a suit, looked at it, put it back, pulled out another. "I can remember, you always wore good suits, good-looking suits, even before you were rich." "I like suits," he said. "They feel good. I like Italian suits, actually. I've had a couple of British suits, and they were okay, but they felt ... constructed. Like I was wearing a building. But the Italians - they know how to make a suit." "Ever try French suits?" "Yeah, three or four times. They're okay, but a little ... sharp-looking. They made me feel like a watch salesman." "How about American suits?" :Efficient," he said. "Do the job; don't feel like much. You always wear an American suit if you don't want people to notice you.

He looked directly at Grant: “I will tell them that I think you are guilty of the murder of three people and that you were the sponsor of the child-pornography smear, and that I think a person of your brand of social pathology—I believe you are a psychopath, and I will tell them that—has no place in the Senate. And I will continue to argue that here in Minnesota for the full six years of your term, and do everything I can to wreck any possible political career that you might otherwise have had.” Grant smiled at him and said, “Fuck you.” The governor said, “Okay, okay, Porter. Now, Taryn, do you have anything for us?” “No, not really. I’ll be the best senator I can be, I reject any notion that I was involved in this craziness.” She looked at Smalls: “As for you, bring it on. If you want to spend six years fighting over this, by the time we’re done, you’ll be unemployable and broke. I would have no problem setting aside, say, a hundred million dollars for a media campaign to defend myself.” “Fuck you,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.” Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.” Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.

And he still had those two big nuts in his pocket that he’d picked up from the Purdys’ barn workshop, the one with the green-and-yellow overspray on the floor, a green-and-yellow spray that didn’t match the hard green and yellow of the John Deere, but did match the green and yellow of fair fire hydrants . . . and those nuts in his pocket. Why would you need a whole bag of big nuts, but no bolts? You wouldn’t—unless they were shrapnel. And that nagging intuition he’d had by the Varied Industries building: he’d been walking by fire hydrants all morning, the same yellow and green as the overspray on the Purdys’ barn floor. A bomb. The Purdys had built a bomb. The farm kid who’d been brain-injured by IEDs in Iraq had built himself an IED. A bomb disguised as a fire hydrant that was probably standing on the Concourse, right where the candidates would be marching by, right on the curb.

TARYN GRANT, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE for the U.S. Senate, suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, or so she’d been told by a psychologist in her third year at the Wharton School. He’d added, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, as long as you don’t go into a life of crime. Half the people here are narcissists. The other half are psychopaths. Well, except for Roland Shafer. He’s normal enough.” Taryn didn’t know Roland Shafer, but all these years later, she sometimes thought about him, and wondered what happened to him, being . . . “normal.” The shrink had explained the disorder to her, in sketchy terms, perhaps trying to be kind. When she left his office, she’d gone straight to the library and looked it up, because she knew in her heart that she was far too perfect to have any kind of disorder. •   •   • NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER: Has excessive feelings of self-importance. Reacts to criticism with rage. Takes advantage of other people. Disregards the feelings of others. Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence. •   •   • EXCESSIVE FEELINGS OF SELF-IMPORTANCE? Did that idiot shrink know she’d inherit the better part of a billion dollars, that she already had enough money to buy an entire industry? She was important. Reacts to criticism with rage? Well, what do you do when you’re mistreated? Shy away from conflict and go snuffle into a Kleenex? Hell no: you get up in their face, straighten them out. Takes advantage of other people? You don’t get anywhere in this world by being a cupcake, cupcake. Disregards the feelings of others? Look: half the people in the world were below average, and “average” isn’t anything to brag about. We should pay attention to the dumbasses in life? How about, “Preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, and intelligence”? Hey, had he taken a good look at her and her CV? She was in the running for class valedictorian; she looked like Marilyn Monroe, without the black spot on her cheek; and she had, at age twenty-two, thirty million dollars of her own, with twenty or thirty times more than that, yet to come. What fantasies? Welcome to my world, bub. •   •   • THAT HAD BEEN more than a decade ago.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

cold as Martin.

party passions led to muddled or dishonest thinking, made people unreasonable or stereotypical, and lacked long-term perspective.

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality.

floor, his chest

sheriff

go

saturnine

Gimme a Grande . . . Pike Place, and two vanilla scones.

Goat cheese has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial qualities

burial

Mick Herron Slow Horses

You know the big problem with women?” Virgil asked. “Yeah. They’re all good,” Lucas said.

Groups of people have trouble deciding anything. They also have a tendency to panic. Sometimes, for the safety of the group, you must act in secrecy, on your own, to protect the group. You have to do it even if the group is against it, because they are too frightened or too divided. You must act! That is the thing. To act!

He plays poker in Vegas. He wins. I mean, not really. He doesn’t actually play. He buys the chips with cash, takes back checks when he cashes out, so he has the checks from the casinos to prove his so-called winnings. Declares it on his income tax. Not all of it, but a pretty big chunk. He spreads that over two or three years.

off the couch when they walked in, and said, “Whelp, I got a lesson in twenty minutes, I better get to work.” “Work” was a golf course, where he was a teaching pro. When Rex had gone in the Cadillac, Lucas introduced Mattsson and Elle; Jorgenson settled the other two women on the couch, and Lucas in a La-Z-Boy. “I have to tell you that I’m a little upset by all this,” she said. “I never believed that Horn was still out there. I thought he’d crawled off somewhere and died, or was gone to Brazil or something. I mean, I am so scared. I got Rex to put his gun under the bed.” “I think he’d have a hard time finding you, that you wouldn’t hear about it before he got here,” Lucas said. “Oh, pish,” she said. “If he knows anything about computers, he could find me in

Why do crazy people have guns?” Coil asked. “You’d know the answer to that better than I would, Senator,” Lucas said.

The light was going out. The country was being invaded by people of inferior cultures and inferior races. The real, vital, white America was being submerged.

paper,

Logan Septic Service: Satisfaction Guaranteed or Double Your Shit Back.

the police don’t stop crime; they simply record it, and sometimes they catch the people who do it.

across

An agent named Dillon Koch picked them up at the Staten Island terminal in a Chevy Equinox, a small gray SUV picked, Koch said, for its anonymity. “You look at it, and you don’t see it,” he said.

Taking a little undertime today?

town a a couple of hours ago, from New Orleans, named Richard, or Ricardo, Santos. You really want to talk to him: this is probably his work. He’s got a car we don’t know about. He could be checked into Caesars. You can get a full bio on Beauchamps from Luanne Rocha, who’s a sergeant in the Robbery Special Section of the LA cops. I’ve got her number for you.” Harvey wrote down Rocha’s information. Another plainclothes guy, this one in a baby blue golf shirt over lightweight chinos, had come up to listen in and now said, “Shit, Tom, you already cleared the case. There’s nothing left to do. Go down to Caesars and grab the guy.” Rae: “Let me tell you something. If you start running this thing down and you stumble over Deese, you can’t go in with a sissy baby blue golf shirt. Deese killed a lot of people and ate some of them. He’s

A digital clock punched red electronic minutes into the silence.

She looked at him through the screen door; her face had a sullen aspect, but a full lower lip hinted at a concealed sensuality.

Hostas were the hot fudge sundaes of the deer world.

If you think that haircut makes you look like a Ranger, it doesn’t. It makes you look like a fuckin’ whorehouse doorknob.” “Yeah, well, fuck you, too,” the younger cop said.

kata,

Jack was on him like holy on the pope.

They kept the American mushrooms—the people kept in the dark and fed bullshit

Mick Herron

As the saying went, you could sometimes talk to crazy, but there was no dealing with stupid.

Scratching their fingernails on blackboards of futility.

It's about time you got here, you hunk." He gave her a little squeeze an asked, "Why don't you run away with me?" "Then you wouldn't have a job and I'd have to support you." Weather said. "Then he'd be dead and you wouldn't have to support him," Davenport said. "Still, couple good days at a Motel 6 in Mankato . . . might be worth it," Virgil said to her. Davenport said, "Yeah it would be. When you're right, you're right.

house, and she asked, “Have you seen, uh,

THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said

What it is, is what it is.

crazier than a barrel of hair.

Well . . . everybody has guns. A burglar comes to this neighborhood, he’s dead meat. I personally have a Mossberg 500 and I know how to use it. That baby’d blow a hole in a burglar the size of a picture window.

going over and over it in my head,

all

Wood.

China was worse, the biggest burner of the stuff, followed

Look at this,” he told Cartwright, tapping the back of a book. “John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud. Great stuff.

Baxter laughed as Letty fumed and looked out the passenger window, but finally she couldn’t stand it any longer, and said, “Women are not simple. Not as simple as men.” “Then how come they’re so easy to manipulate?” Baxter asked. “You tell the pretty ones that they’re smart, and the smart ones that they’re pretty, and badda-bing, you got them in bed.” “That’s the most cynical thing I ever heard.” “And you work in the Senate? I don’t believe you,” Baxter said. “Okay. It’s one of the most cynical things I’ve heard.” “Not even in the top hundred.” Letty had to think about that for a while, finally admitted, “Okay, not in the top hundred. But still cynical.” Baxter laughed again.

really. It’s over. It’s all over. I’m going to go ustairs,

Armasight generation-3 night-vision monoculars.

the bump stocks and ghost guns and silencers . . . this is crazy. The people with this stuff aren’t hunters or sportsmen or competitors; they want to kill somebody.

You got a good eye,” Lucas said. “You might make a cop someday.” The kid looked away. “Naw, I couldn’t do that,” he said. His mother prodded him, but he went on. “Cops gotta fuck with people. I couldn’t do that for a living.

You wanna see a game, kid? They ain’t the Cubs, but what the hell.” Lucas lifted Sarah to straddle the back of his neck and she grabbed his ear and him with the pacifier. What felt like a gob of saliva hit him in the part of his hair. “I’ll teach you how to boo. Maybe we can get you a bag to put on your head.

I think they go where the words on a computer screen go, when you turn it off.

Martha Grimes’s thriller Send Bygraves,

to somebody. It’s hard to believe he’d get a break

said "let's send that fuckin' Flowers up there. He hasn't done anything for us lately." "He's off today," somebody said. Davenport said, "So what?

the combo gave him gas, but the taste was unparalleled, and Arnold lived alone, except for the chickens and his yellow Lab, so the gas wasn’t a critical problem, though the dog sometimes got watery eyes.

Having some guy shine his flashlight up my asshole isn’t gonna improve my addition,” he said.

for a few moments, and he went inside. Halfway down the hall and around a corner, he

I’m gonna apply for law school for next year. I already took the LSATs and I did good.” “You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.” “Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking . . .

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Someplace crookeder than here.” “You know a place crookeder than Dallas?” “Sure.

He didn’t know if that was good or bad: concealed-carry people actually committed fewer felonies per year than cops did 

phone, twisted it out of her hand, and slammed it on the hook. “I cry good, don’t I?” she asked with a grin, and she was out the door.   “Davenport, Davenport,” Daniel moaned. He gripped handfuls of hair on the side of his head as he watched Jennifer finish the broadcast. “ . . . called by some the smartest man in the department, told me personally that he did not believe that Smithe is guilty of the spectacular murders and that he fears the premature arrest could destroy Smithe’s burgeoning career with the welfare department . . .” “Burgeoning career? TV people shouldn’t be allowed to use big words,” Lucas muttered. “So now what?” Daniel asked angrily. “How in the hell could you do this?” “I didn’t know I was,” Lucas said mildly. “I thought we were having a personal conversation.” “I told you that your dick was going to get you in trouble with that woman,” Daniel said. “What the hell am I going to tell Lester? He’s been out there in front of the cameras making his case and you’re talking to this puss behind his back. You cut his legs out from under him. He’ll be after your head.” “Tell him you’re suspending me. What’s bad? Two weeks? Then I’ll appeal to the civil-service board. Even if the board okays the suspension, it’ll be months from now. We should be able to put it off until this thing is settled, one way or another.” “Okay. That might do it.” Daniel nodded and then laughed unpleasantly, shaking his head. “Christ, I’m glad that wasn’t me getting grilled. You better get out of here before Lester arrives or we’ll be busting him for assault.”   At two o’clock in the morning the telephone rang. Lucas looked up from the drawing table where he was working on Everwhen, reached over, and picked it up. “Hello?” “Still mad?” Jennifer asked. “ You bitch. Daniel’s suspending me. I’m giving interviews to everybody except you guys, you can go suck—” “Nasty, nasty—” He slammed the receiver back on the hook. A moment later the phone rang again. He watched it like a cobra, then picked it up, unable to resist. “I’m coming over,” she said, and hung up. Lucas reached for it, to call her, to tell her not to come, but stopped with his hand on the receiver.   Jennifer wore a black leather jacket, jeans, black boots, and driving

either lived in, or recently had lived

The anger that was coursing through America deeply worried her. Although she was too young to remember the beginnings of the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist movements, she was also a student of history. Her sense was that as bad as things had been in the sixties, people of goodwill still dominated. The

up

After a fast lunch, Lucas, Letty, and Skye went over to Swede Hollow Park to look for other travelers. They found three, sitting together, passing a joint, and Skye told them about Henry—one of the three knew him—and asked about Pilate. None of them knew him, or had heard about him.

Because they’re

Smalls looked around the office and asked, “Where do you want me to stick the shovel?

You know the problem with the Senate? It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks. There’s never a second during the whole darn day that somebody doesn’t want to talk to you—and, most of the time, doesn’t need to. People want to talk to you, so they can say, ‘I was talking to Senator Grant yesterday,’ and then they start lying.

right. There’s DNA on those sheets. You got her, even if you don’t get

I'm a picture of abject fear. If I had my choice between flying to El Paso or getting a colonoscopy, I'd have to think about it.

table, a chest of drawers, a window seat, a color television with a working remote, and a closet with a light that came on automatically when he opened it. He went to the closet, pulled out a briefcase and opened it on the bed. Inside was a monocular, a cassette recorder with a phone clip, and a Polaroid Spectra camera with a half-dozen rolls of film. Excellent. He closed the briefcase, made a quick trip to the bathroom, and rode back down to the street. A bellhop, loitering in the phone-booth-sized lobby, said, “Cab, Mr. Davenport?” “No. I’ve got a car coming,” he said. Outside, he hurried down the street to a breakfast bar, got a pint of orange juice in a wax carton, and went back outside. After leaving Fell the night before, he’d gone to Lily’s apartment and given her the key impressions. Lily knew an intelligence officer

I talked to Sandra Burton a few minutes ago, and she said Grace was a little crazy back then, always

a short distance ahead of him, once behind him, artillery shells fired with cell phones. He hadn’t exactly been wounded either time, but he’d been hurt. He couldn’t hear anything for a while after the second explosion and never could hear as well as he had when he enlisted. Right