“Singletary arched an eyebrow then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button on a homemade jetpack.”

“Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.”

“She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.”

“I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon," said the kid, gravely mistaken.”

“He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.”

“Valetta," he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. "Damn.”

“I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole." From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, and I was momentarily very jealous of Arthur. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.”