The Burning Soul (Charlie Parker, #10)

by John Connolly

Contrails of geese arrowed the skies like refugees fleeing a coming conflict,

I used to love watching the geese fly from where I was staying last year, always in groups of 2 or 3 within the flock as a whole, they mate for life, 1 whose lost its mate will find company in another pairing.

Sam turned to go, then paused. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘you find people, don’t you?’ ‘Yes, I find people.’ ‘You should go find the girl,’ she said, then trotted off.

From the mouths of babes … I wonder if there will be something special to her, a quintessence of love carried through somehow through the ether to breathe new breaths

but there’s a part of her that she keeps for, and to, herself; a secret part. That doesn’t come from me. That’s you in her.’

Ding ding Ding

quotidian.

New word for me

Ravens unsettled her.

I love them, but then I like Poe 🪶

And sometimes, she suspected, even when there was.

Yeah like the Ahole soldier guys from the last book, they got despatched quickly, but hey it’s not like you always have to wait until someone does something to you or yours, although technically they had, but anywho’s, it’s called a preemptive strike & Louis does them well :)

Lonny said it was funny that all those coloreds believed they were going to be saved by a white man,

Jesus was not white, as much as all the churches would love you to think he was, look at the period of time & the place & the people, they weren’t white. It’s kinda like they think if they have enough pictures & paintings etc, then it must be true. Organized religion is exactly that, it’s organized to control power & money from the masses & this Jesus / god thing was the best idea they ever had, even if 99% of it was made up or stolen from Pagans.

Traitorous birds. Apostates.

Ravens - Apostates - Traitors? You cannot blame a being for its nature on how to feed itself, if it did not show others the way to prey, they themselves would die, & any beings, alive or dead, would be the fool to die just to deny itself of what it is.

You, like I am, are wondering if there’s a possibility that the person who is taunting Randall Haight is the same person who took Anna Kore.’

Yeah, like the guy he blamed for everything, not that it helped him out, but he did throw all that doubt on someone else whilst making himself look like the hapless sidekick who only tried to stop him… What if it wasn’t even 50/50? What if most of it was HIM?

a list of everyone whom he knew in the area, including all of his business contacts and all of his acquaintances, however casual, with a particular emphasis on recent arrivals in the area, and new clients.

You missed an idea, that could even of been a plot twist, podcasts are way into true crime issues, it could of been someone hearing one & somehow connected him to it, could of pulled the podcasters into the storyline too… The Teenage Killers - Where Are They Now? That’d play out great as a series length storyline, go to even before the killing, show the community, show the boys, the poor girl, their families, the capture, the trial, the sentencing, then come to the present day, go interview people in the community, the cops, lawyers etc, see what happened since then, a n d … where are they now? I think I missed my vocation….

His brown leather blouson jacket was of the kind that was fashionable in the eighties but had been bought long after. His jeans were a faded blue, and speckled with fake paint marks. His sneakers bore the Nike swoosh, although they had never been near a Nike factory.

I wonder who…… heh

His companion was stockier, with long black hair greased back from his forehead

Ok, I take the last note back, it sounded so much like a description for Angel, I thought it had to be, but apparently not…

with only the faintest hint of something else beneath it.

Maybe he’s a relative of Angels lol

‘I said I was trying to quit. I didn’t say that I had. Anyway, do you see me smoking? No. I’m not smoking. I’m just toying with a box.’

Are these 2 long lost twins of Angel & Louis in their own relationships? Because it bloody well sounds like it!

The killing of children by children is a terrible exception, or it was until gangbangers and ignorant men began glorifying the code of living and dying by the gun in projects and ghettos.

If there’s something after all of this, how sad all those men & women who laid down their lives, dared their lives, to establish equality for black people . They must look at them now, killing each other over the color of a TShirt & weep.

No country that treats the most vulnerable of its young people in this way deserves to call itself civilized.

I think of myself when I was 13 & 14yrs old & how much I have changed & grown overtime, & immensely doesn’t even begin to describe it, & most people would say the same thing. I do believe it’s possible to do something this wrong as a child, that an event which started out just mean, can get out of hand & the fear of the repercussions could make people behave in a way like this. Children fear being found out, told off, being punished & all of that along with knowing what they were doing in the first place was wrong & the poor wee girl kicking & screaming, I could see a situation like this turning from nasty, to murderous via the innate fear we have when young.

His girlfriend had been forced to beg Dempsey to leave them in peace. Ryan had seen that happen before, and had often watched something die in the eyes of the woman involved when it did. Her boyfriend was weak, and his weakness had been publicly exposed. Somewhere deep inside, the woman always wanted the guy to fight back, to win or to take his beating.

See I’d never feel like that, I guess it’s because of my upbringing, so much fighting & nastiness in the house, that I felt I was walking on eggshells, always waiting for the next thing to happen, that confrontation, any confrontation is abhorrent to the & I wouldn’t want someone I was with to want any part of it either.

Whitey’s willingness to sell them out to the feds.

I bet the author got a good grin out of the fact that Mr Bulgers FBI contact was called John Connolly…..

Tommy knew his history. He remembered Donald Killeen, who had been top dog in Southie until, in 1972,

Uhh Whitey Bulger was in the 1920’s?…. I’m now officially lost, maybe the author just liked the name, but an odd thing to do name wise as it’s such a well known one.

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Randall Haight owned it and put bad art on its walls, but Randall Haight was an artificial creation. Perhaps, at times, William Lagenheimer moved through its rooms, but William Lagenheimer didn’t exist either. He had disappeared from the world, and was now just a memory.

Lots of people can change their lives, start a new one, for all different reasons, I did, the life I had in Aussie came to an abrupt end forcing me to return to NZ, after over 10yrs, where all I had was family, but none close really except for direct ones, parents, my nana, the rest I rarely see. So I started a new life here where all I did was work, fill in the time, sleep, & repeat. That went on for now, just over 20yrs, & while I no longer work, it’s just fill in more time & sleep. A prison started by someone else’s making that I just stayed in due to just not trusting anyone anymore & the difficulty of being an adult & trying to meet people . I’ll probably die this way, c’est La vie

They thought Lonny was a bad influence on me, but it wasn’t that simple. It never is.’

Parents always seem to think that, my Mum didn’t like my best friend I had growing up, the one who’d eventually ruin, or save, my life, depending on how you looked at it. But she always thought she was the troublemaker & just dragged me along, that wasn’t true, I wanted to do all the same things although we maybe had slightly different reasons. I’d never blame her for 90% of the things we did, however there were more things she instigated that I’d never even of thought of, but still no blame, I had free will & wasn’t stupid, any consequences went both ways. It’s like how people blame drug dealers if someone dies from taking something. Unless they did something to what they were selling, it’s not their fault if someone OD’s. You take drugs you know there’s a risk, it’s like you can’t blame a liquor store if someone drinks then drives, then kills someone.

That, in turn, raised the question of whether or not Lonny Midas had endured a similar crisis of identity.

& maybe he hasn’t, & maybe he’s pissed off his partner in crime, as it were, looks like, from the outside anyways, is doing well, maybe he’s decided to stir the pot…

Turkey Nudo sandwich and

Dunno what that is….

‘We did talk to her. She makes you seem reasonable.’ ‘She’s a lawyer. They’re only reasonable on their own terms.’

Heh I had a disagreement with my own lawyer last week, taking too long to get things done

Engel and his acolytes, Walsh and the staties, all were elsewhere.

Apart from Engel I could see only

Ok in the prior highlight he says Engel is elsewhere, Then directly after that in this highlight he says he can see him Make up your mind!

‘No,’ he replied. ‘You think you do, but you don’t understand at all.’ And he hung up the phone.

Not true, his life, his entire world was torn apart, so, I think he knows about losing things

He suspected that he had an addictive personality, and was afraid that if he started boozing, or gambling, or whoring he might never stop.

Ditto … in more ways than one … but I never did take to gambling ;)

craved order. He always had, even as a boy. He was neat, and he never lost anything. Everything in its place, and a place for everything.

Ditto, but I was brought up that way, & it has the added benefit of never having to tidy up your home, clean it yes, but it’s always tidy by default.

Whitey

I think the author put this name, used this name,to see how many readers would recognize it, along with a little nod to another John Connolly…

17

So now we know why the FBI are so interested…

formed a council to help ensure the safety of black pupils at his son’s high school.

It seems like another lifetime, another world, & yet it wasn’t really that long ago at all. It wasn’t something I saw here that much< or not that I noticed, schools were & had been integrated for ages by the time I went, but I remember my intermediate school, that you go to here when your 11 & 12yrs old, was boasted as being a ‘Maori’ school as it integrated a lot of their culture into the school, reading & writing, learning about their heritage & the past history between Pakeha & Maori etc etc, but we kids just took it as school, not anything different.

Denny Kraus

Thank god for X-Ray as I’d forgotten who this was

Then Nosh opened and folk started tasting the burgers, and a general agreement was reached that, yes, maybe we had needed just one more bar selling burgers, as long as the food was this good.

Had to look it up & read the menu, it’s very small, but it can be switched around a lot by the look of it, but still a small menu

I ate some bacon-dusted fries

They’re not on the menu!

THE GIRL IS ANGRY

& that’s why she did run away, but not far, only to you know who’s house

The pain of a boy holding one hand over your mouth while the other fumbles beneath your skirt,

Ahh, I was thinking of the wrong girl before, forgot there was another girl with a right to be very angry….

And angry girls watch cartoons to escape for a time from their rage.

Or was I? Wrong that is…

because she was at once so young and so old.

Is he living with a ghost of his own?

If he was sorry for what they had done to the girl, it was only because of all that had resulted from it.

Hmmm…

and the girl was gone from his house forever.

Well, we’re pretty sure he’s not the kidnapper now, he was just ghosted

He didn’t have to imagine what it would be like to be old. He already felt old, and mortality seemed closer to him than it might have to even the most elderly of the diner’s aging patrons.

I feel that way, like my time is limited, that I’m not going to get old, but I feel old already. Unless you’ve suffered massive injuries & health issues, compounded by life issues, it’s hard to understand the effects of it all on people, & being told to just ‘get over it’ really doesn’t help, spoken or unspoken.

Dempsey could not understand why someone would choose to live in a coastal town with no sand upon which to walk, and no beauty upon which to gaze. Here nature was a hostile force at war with itself. The wind twisted the growth of trees, and the sea ate away at the land.

But there’s still a beauty in the savagery of nature at war with itself

He couldn’t risk being seen by Haight, assuming he hadn’t made some dramatic alteration to his appearance,

I dunno about that, there’s a lot of years in between & especially for boys looks change substantially, I’m sure I could walk past someone in the street that I knew at 14, then hadn’t seen for over 20yrs, & not know them for…..

‘Tolerant,’ I said. ‘Accepting,’ said Louis. ‘Senile,’ said Angel.

Heh, I’m with Angel!

’58

At work for 20yrs my number was #58 everyone got a number as it was easier than trying to sign things that we had dealt with. Good old hospitals when it comes down to it, your just another number…

‘What about the father?’ ‘Alekos? We tracked him down today.

He’s NOT the father, surely they know that?? He’s a stepfather at best

Aquarius

Pisces

Aquarius & Pisces = me, double whammy signs as I was born on the cusp, it probably explains a lot about me, but they’re still both water signs & not too different from each other.