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“That’s okay, it gives me a chance to show contempt for the establishment.”
“You’re nowhere near as funny as you think you are, Mr. Spenser, but you’re a hell of a lot better than I figured. What do you want?”
“Sweetie, no one ever tells me everything he knows; it is the nature of the beast.”
“There are whole days at a time, Lieutenant, that go by without me ever giving a real goddamn about what you want.”
But don’t laugh at us. We’re perfectly serious and perfectly right.” “Yeah, so is everyone I know.”
“I don’t do piecework, Tower. I take hold of one end of the thread and I keep pulling it in till it’s all unraveled.
I would have bet against a Phi Beta key, but little is sure in life.
“Get far enough away and it looks kinda pretty, don’t it?” she said. “You only get order from a distance. Close up is always messy.” “Yeah,” I said, “but your own life is always close up. You only see other people’s lives at long range.”
She was as lean and hard as a canoe paddle, and nearly as sexy.
“Why is that?” I said. “Because you’ll get hurt.” “No,” I said. “You’re not saying it right. Keep the lips almost motionless, and squinch your eyes up.”
“Everyone gets scared when they are over-matched in the dark; it’s not something to be ashamed of, kid.”
Maybe on the way home I could stop and rough up a Girl Scout.
At first it was almost a pleasant reminder that I was alive and hadn’t bled to death in Jamaica Pond. But by now I was used to being alive and was again accepting it as my due, the common course of things; and the pain now served no other purpose than to remind me of my mortality.
It was the first time I could recall sitting in a director’s chair. I had missed little, I decided.
Christ, a secret code. Made you wish Ian Fleming had taken up music or something.