Lucas 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Felt the dark finger of hypocrisy stroking his soul.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

California is like a Nazi state with palm trees

stopped by the door

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Scratching their nails on the blackboard of futility.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.