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I’m still right and she’s still wrong, but I cannot just let her be gone.
The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months.
Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.
“Sir,” I say, as quickly and clearly as I can manage. “My sister is missing. I have to find her. That’s all. I have to find her before the end of the world.”
I can feel it, a feeling I never had occasion to notice until it disappeared, the odorless colorless presence of the future.
He stops talking, just shakes his head, but this is good. This is what we need. All you need is a conversation. To work toward the information you need, to get what you want from a suspect or a witness—all you need is a conversation to begin, and then you shape it, push it.
I listen because I have to, to show empathy and build trust, but I do not care at all about her lineage, her faith and family. I am a question mark aimed at an answer.
life is a series of trap doors, and you fall through them, one by one, tumbling down and down and down, one hole to the next.
But everybody does everything for a reason. That’s lesson number one of police work; it’s lesson number one of life.
You would think I would have figured it out by now, that a person’s outward presentation is just a trap waiting to be sprung.
I don’t care if we both die here, locked in our improbable clench for however long is left. He can tell the truth or both of us can die.
almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.
I say, “Everyone lower your weapons.” Nobody lowers their weapons.
Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.
