Quotes from Robert Crais

Lucy blew me a kiss and hung up and I lay back on the kitchen floor with the phone on my stomach, grinning at the ceiling. The cat stopped purring and came closer to stare into my face. He looked concerned. Maybe he didn't know I was grinning. Maybe he thought I was dying of some sort of hideous facial stricture. Is that possible? Death by grinning. I said, "She's coming to see us.

The press still called, though with less frequency, and I avoided them. I listened to talk radio and gained weight, as if I felt a hunger that I couldn't satisfy.

Three men were around an oak desk that had probably been secondhand in the thirties, two of the men in their mid-fifties, the third maybe younger. The

Vincent said, "You never answered my question." "What question was that?" "Down south. You think we faced off before?" "No." "How you know that for sure?" "You'd be dead." "That's funny. The boys told me the same thing about you." Pike

She told herself it was the dry night wind and lashing hair, the way her eyes filled when her lonely race finished, but it was always the same whether the air was dry or not, whether her hair was down or up, so she knew. For those few minutes running across the city, she could be and was herself, purely and truly herself, finding herself in those moments only to lose herself once more when she slowed, falling behind as her true self ran free somewhere ahead in the empty night—

By nine o'clock the next morning I had gained some measure of control over the sappy grin and was once more feeling focused, productive, and ready to swing into investigative action. Sappy grins are fine in your personal life but somehow seem less than professional when one is representing the Big Green Defense Machine. Credibility, as they say, is everything.

Pike jogged back across Mulholland, and found Rose Platt squatting beside Rainey. He tried to understand what he felt about her, but he mostly felt nothing. Rose stood when she saw him, and Pike slowed to a walk. She still had the eyes. Smart, and complicated, and completely alive. Maybe that's what drew him to her. The life in her eyes. She

LeCedrick Earle was maybe an inch shorter than me, with dark glossy skin and a shaved head. He was wearing a prison-issue orange jumpsuit and Keds. I said, "That's right. I work for an attorney named Jonathan Green.

The first patrol car arrived in seven minutes; the paramedics three minutes later. Larkin thought it would end that night when the police finished their questions, but her nightmare had only begun. In forty-eight hours, she would meet with agents from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney's. In six days, the first attempt would be made on her life. In eleven days, she would meet a man named Joe Pike. Everything in her world was about to change. And it began that night.

The man stared at him for a time, and then said something that John Chen would recall from time to time for the rest of his life, and wonder what the man had meant, and why he had said it. "Never turn your back on love, John." The

Still, people sometimes do strange things for strange reasons, and I decided to see what Mrs. Louise Earle had to offer. I expected that she would support her son's claims, but in the doing perhaps she would add something to give them greater credence.

A fourth man entered, this guy a little shorter than the others, but wider, and hard to see when your eyes are blurring. He was in his fifties, with crinkly gray hair and a florid face and a dark blue shirt open at the neck to show a lot of grizzled chest hair. He was also holding a McDonald's soft drink cup. Large. I guess that's where Dmitri got it from.

He turned his back to the house to speak with the girl. "The attitude makes you memorable. Lose it. You want to be invisible.

Pike unscrewed the interior light so it wouldn't come on, then left the car. It was full-on dark now, and Pike enjoyed the darkness. Darkness, rain, snow, a storm—anything that hid you was good. He circled the house to check the windows, then slipped back onto the porch and let himself in.

A short, slight gentleman was standing in the living room. He had wavy marcelled hair and he was wearing a brown summer-weight suit that had probably been new twenty years ago. His hair was more gray than not, and his skin was the color of fine cocoa parchment. He was holding a small bouquet of zinnias. I made him for his late sixties, but I could've been off five years either way.

Markov nodded and the steel fingers tightened into my shoulders like pliers. Alexei backhanded me with the Glock and a starburst of pain erupted from my other ear. Some days suck. Some days you shouldn't even get out of bed. I said, "Who is Clark Hewitt and why is he so important?

Louise Earle was credible, cogent, in full command of her faculties, and did not seem to be a person who would miss seeing a cop carrying a bag of funny money through her living room. Of

First irate Russian thugs, now irate federal cops. Maybe Rod Serling was next.

As the firing stopped, Pike saw an oversized white SUV on the far side of the parking lot, only this SUV wasn't an ordinary police vehicle. The blue lettering and insignia on the side were difficult to see in the dim light, but visible. ATF. SPECIAL RESPONSE TEAM. The Special Response Team was the ATF version of SWAT. "Jon.

She didn't say anything for a time, and then she said, "Well, in this case the powers that be are probably right." I nodded, but she probably couldn't see it. "I don't believe Truly had a secret agreement with Teddy Martin. Green fabricated that, just as he fabricated the business about Pritzik and Richards.

It's me. Where's Rina?" "With Yanni. I brought her back after our tour." "Do me a favor, and go get them. The ATF knows I was at their building, and suspects I was seeing a source. They want the source." Cole made a soft whistle. "How do you know?" "I just spent three hours with them." Pike sketched out what he found at Willowbrook, what happened when Walsh had him picked up, and the information she gave him about Darko.

I don't get the new shoe business." "You walk around, step on stuff, the heel gets nicked, the sole picks up dings and cuts. A pattern develops, right? It's called a Schallamach pattern. And since no two people walk exactly alike, the Schallamach on your shoe is unique to you.

If a future judge excluded the watchband, he or she might also exclude all downstream evidence derived from the band. The downstream evidence was called "fruits of the poisonous tree," under the principle that evidence derived from bad evidence was also bad. If investigators knew they had a piece of bad fruit, they tried to find a path around the bad fruit by using unrelated evidence to reach the same result. This was called a work-around. Mills

He is defiling justice." Defiling. That was probably the merlot talking.