“...the bus is full of German tourists in shorts so short that they required a Brazilian wax for the men as well as the women. There had been thighs as bountiful as baking bread, as wobbly as Jello, and as pitted as the surface of the moon.”

“I'd be a monster fighter who rode the bus. It didn't get any more bad-ass than that.”

“All of his life had been about making sure I kept mine.”

“Spartacus," I called, "how's it hanging?" Probably not too well. Once you're dead, had your organs removed, and are resurrected as an undead mummified cat, your testicles probably looked like old raisins that had rolled under the couch. Raisins didn't tend to...hang.”

“All I cared was that she had never lied. She was honest in a world just the opposite, and a cool oasis in my life. She was who she said she was, and everything Sophia, my mother, the pathologically manipulative liar, had never been.”

“The front door had been secure at some point in time, I suppose, but now it usually hung ajar by a few inches, the gap‐toothed grin of a dirty old man.”

“Niko caught my hand and slapped it lightly down on the bar. “Pistol whipping elderly women isn’t precisely our mission statement, Cal.” I hadn’t been going to pistol-whip her. Yell at her a little more, then pick her up and toss her out into the street. Some risk of a broken hip there, but that wasn’t pistol-whipping… unless she tried to come back in.”