The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux #1)

  p. 1

	The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

p. 49

	“Oh, my, you shouldn't have done that,” the man in the raincoat said.
	Erik grabbed my hair and slammed my head against the side of the tub.  I kicked at all of them blindly, but my feet struck at empty air.  Then Bobby Joe locked his powerful arms around my neck and took me over the rim again, his body trembling rigidly with a cruel and murderous energy, and I knew that all my past fears of being shotgunned by a psychotic , of being shanked by an addict, of stepping on a Claymore mine in Vietnam, were just the foolish preoccupation of youth; that my real nemesis had always been a redneck lover who would hold me upside down against his chest while my soul slipped through a green, watery porcelain hole in the earth, down through the depths of the Mekong River, where floated the bodies of other fatigue-clad men and whole families of civilians, their faces still filled with disbelief and the shock of an artillery burst, and farther still to the mossy base of an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where my father waited for me in his hardhat, coveralls, and steel-tipped drilling boots after having drowned there twenty years ago.

p. 80

	“Why are you so obnoxious, Motley?” Clete said. “Is it because you're fat and ugly, or is it because you're fat and dumb?  It's a mystery to us all.”

p. 121

	I slept through the rest of the afternoon and woke in the cooling dusk when the cicadas were loud in the purple haze and the fireflies were lighting in the trees. I showered and felt some of the misery begin to go out of my mind and body, then I took a taxi to the Hertz agency and rented a small Ford.
	Because most of the Quarter was closed to automobile traffic at night, I parked the car near the French Market, by the river, and walked back to Bourbon.  The street was loud with music from the bars and strip houses, and the sidewalks were filled with tourists, drunks, and street people who were trying to hold on to their last little piece of American geography.  My favorite bunch of hustlers and scam artists, the black sidewalk tap dancers, were out in force.  They wore enormous iron taps that clipped onto their shoes, and when they danced to the music from the bars, their feet rang on the concrete like horseshoes.  A tap dancer would stop a tourist, rivet him in the eyes, and say, “I bet you a half-dollar I can tell you where you got yo' shoes.” If the tourist accepted the wager, the dancer would then say, “You got yo' shoes on yo' feet, and yo' feet is on Bourbon Street.  You ain't the kind, now, to back out on yo' bet, is you?”