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You can keep the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year. —Damon Runyon
“Oh bloody fucking fuck,” Musgrave growls at her tablet. It’s not true what they say: good workmen do indeed blame their tools, at least when they have to use what the department can afford.
The cost of immortality is losing part of who you were, and perhaps that’s not a bad bargain anyway.
When you stand in the hallway and smell the cold food, you realise you’ve been breathing death in the apartment. It’s not a stink of blood or bowel, but any dying leaves a trace in the air. I feel it as a kind of thinness, like the flavour of a bone broth taken off the cooker before it’s time, or the empty pages of a new colouring book.
“You mind I look in?” Garcia doesn’t mind. I look in. Susan Green looks very small with all those tubes, like the dog that believed in you.
I stop by my place to change clothes because the ones I was wearing when I was admitted are a mess. The hospital laundry got the blood out but they’re still busted at the seams and there’s a hole in the jacket and the shirt where the bullet went in. I look like the ghost of Jack Ruby.
Cop life is complicated. Three quarters of the problems they get asked to solve they can’t, and shouldn’t have to, and don’t know how. The rest are just fucking terrifying. That makes them hang together, and that causes trouble because they can’t belong to one another more than they belong to ordinary people—but they inevitably do. Add in all the ordinary human vices and cops can be a mile away and to the side of the population they’re supposed to protect. Bad things will happen. I work near cops, around cops, between cops, but I’m not one of them and that makes a difference. The difference is
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horse walking into a bar and the really small piano player?”
“Didn’t think God had much to say to a socialist.” “God has been a socialist since 1848 when Karl Marx explained things to him. Ever since.”
“I feel like you put that together so it would come out that way.” “I did. I’m a propagandist, not your fucking babysitter.”
