Claire Dewitt And The Bohemian Highway: A Mystery (Claire DeWitt Novels Book 2)

by Sara Gran

Jacques Silette, the great detective, would have said we knew. That we knew what was coming and made the choice to pursue it. “Karma,” he said once, “is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses.”

There were only a few of us Silettians and we did get more than our share of negative attention. Our enemies said it was because we were strange and unreliable, theatrical in our methods, dramatic in our solutions.

The law was for people who needed instructions, she would later tell me. The same people who needed to be told not to put a baby in the dryer or a dog in the microwave.

I drove back to the hotel and used a sewing needle and the ink from a ballpoint pen to give myself a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on the top of my left foot, where it hurt the most. Maybe someday someone would ask me about it, and I would get to tell them about today. This day when everything changed. And then everything would change again, because someone cared enough to ask.

The world didn’t hire me to be smart and happy. It hired me to be a detective, and solve mysteries.

Neither of us was doing very well or really even passing the grade with this humanity business.

If you hate yourself enough, you’ll start to hate anyone who reminds you of you. And if you stick with it, you’ll come to hate anyone who doesn’t see how just awful you are.

I sat on top of my kitchen counter and emptied out what was left of my cocaine and cut it with a business card from Jon’s store in Marin. I started to roll up a five for a straw but felt cheap and instead found one of the crisp new hundreds I’d tried to bribe Bix with.

Karma can’t be negotiated. But it does take interesting twists and turns. It’s like you’re given a series of words and it’s up to you what kind of story you fit them into.”