Quotes from Jeff Lindsay

Steady, Dexter, I thought. This is just a small, painful reminder of who you are and where you came from, brought on by stress. It has nothing to do with operatic cattle.

After a moment, in which he stood with his mouth open, and scratched himself, and looked like he was modeling for a statue of the Greek god of Stupidity

Dexter siempre aplaude el espíritu caritativo, por supuesto. Pero en general, soy tan partidario de él porque casi siempre constituye una señal de advertencia de que algo inicuo, perverso e inquietante está sucediendo detrás de la máscara de la Madre Teresa.

By the time I got back to my office it was past time for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a 2:30 appointment with her minister. And by "minister" I don't mean the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are ever compelled to visit one for some reason.

Deke looked at me anxiously, reminding me very much of a large and handsome dog who needs a stick to fetch.

And why did I actually give a single hummingbird's fart what it meant?

Oh, my God, he's doing that thing again," Jackie said, staring at me as if I was a piece of alien technology that had just turned itself on. "You know, where he goes inside the guy's head.

Is that really a good idea?" I asked. He tilted his head at Vince's conga line, which was collapsing in a heap of spastic hilarity. "Is that?" he said. And of course he had a point, although in terms of sheer lethal pain and terror a conga line on the floor couldn't really compete with Dr. Danco. Still, I suppose one has to consider human dignity, if it truly exists somewhere.

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn't the only one who could quote Shakespeare. I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown—and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head.

The elevator thumped to a stop. The doors slid open and a dozen people began to stampede inside. "Walk me to my car," Alana said above the crowd, and she moved forward through the pedestrians with absolute confidence that they would melt away at her approach. Somehow, they all did. Deborah

No injury I could imagine would justify the repulsive clamor coming from the revelers. They sounded like sheep who had been lobotomized and then beaten with heavy clubs festooned with fishhooks.

Special Agent Recht looked at me, then stared across the room to where Deborah was talking to the captain. "What a family," she said, and walked past me to rejoin her generic-looking partner. I thought of several very good comebacks that would have put her neatly in her place, but after all, her place was actually several rungs above mine on the food chain, so I just called out, "Have a nice day," to her back and headed out the door to my car.

Chutsky gave me such a warm, tolerant, patronizing smile that I would gladly have turned the pistol on him and pulled the trigger. "It's a pistol, buddy," he said. "What do you think it's for?

Just one more small sign that Poor Old Dexter was drifting off into Deep Water. Making that last painless transition from sociopath to psychopath.

But once again, Lily Anne proved that she saw things a little more clearly and shrewdly than her dunderheaded father. As I wrestled with all the concepts of foreclosure and moving and personal inconvenience, she cut right to the heart of the matter with an insight that was sharp and compelling. She bounced three times on her powerful little legs and said, "Da. Da da da." And for emphasis, she reached out and pulled on my earlobe. I

Well," I said, and I realized that it was at least the third time I'd said "well" since Deborah arrived. Was I really so flustered that I couldn't even manage basic conversation? "You caught the Hammer Killer. Congratulations, sis.

I was the New Age guru who had attained a perfect state of Enough Already, and if the world wanted any more from me they could damn well come and get it.

HERNANDO MEZA LIVED IN A SECTION OF CORAL Gables that was nice, but not too nice, and so, protected by its own mediocrity, it hadn't changed much over the last twenty years, unlike most of the rest of Miami.

In short, it is Detective Anderson. He looks up and sees me through the glass, and he smiles. It is not a smile that encourages in me any of the finer feelings. It is instead a smile that says to me, quite clearly, it is time for all Hope to die. Hope obliges.

But she wasn't, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance.

I looked at Anderson. His face was full of anger, venom, dislike for me, and above all, impenetrable stupidity. It was possible that he actually thought I was guilty, or had talked himself into believing it. I didn't think so. "If you say it enough times, you might actually believe it," I say.

But the little I did know about Chutsky indicated that he was a member in good standing of the shadow government, the deliberately nonmonitored and unconnected clan of people who worked for various alphabet agencies that were more or less affiliated with the federal government, and sometimes even with one another.

Deborah looked at me with a frown, and I frowned back. What Alana said made sense, of course, especially to someone untroubled by human feelings, like I used to be. It was clinically cold reasoning, serpentine but clear, and that certainly fit what we were coming to know about Alana. And yet—something was wrong with it, whether it was the way she said it or something else, I couldn't say; it didn't quite add up for me.

Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. "Grasshopper," he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down Miami Hoy for the third time. "When temple bell rings, crane must fly.