Quotes from Jeff Lindsay

I watched as Brian led Ivan to a dental chair, which was bolted to the floor and apparently complete with the hydraulic lifting function. It had also been slightly modified with a set of metal-mesh restraints for hands, feet, chest, and head, and these my brother fastened carefully onto our guest, whistling tunelessly the while, not quite loud enough to cover the sound of Ivan's nasty wet whimpering.

He also had on a T-shirt that said I'M WITH BUTTHEAD, and he was draped with a camera and pensively clutching a bouquet. And although I say pensively, it was a very different kind of pensing, because his head had been neatly removed and replaced with a gaudy spray of tropical flowers.

Oh," I said, and I remembered that she had said something about this recently—but, of course, it had slipped my mind, since I was dwelling so selfishly on my one little problem of being on the verge of death and dishonor. "Well," I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, and Brian agreed.

I'm. Not. Stupid." "I never thought you were," I said, which was actually true: amazingly scatterbrained, yes, but not stupid. "Is that why you're crying?" She

And on the trip home, with brand-new shiny silver bands on her teeth, she was just as silent, but more aggressively so.

So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach.

There comes a point in every conversation where at least one of the people involved has to know what is being talked about, and I decided that point had arrived.

Do you want some aspirin?" "I took four or five," she said. "They'll kick in in a minute." She pursed her lips and sighed heavily. "It's this guy. The stalker. Patrick Whatsit." "Bergmann," I said helpfully. "Yeah," she said. "I just kept thinking, He's out there, probably watching me right now, maybe sneaking into the hotel and picking the lock on my door.…

And as I pondered this in my pork-induced demi-doze, a soft and sibilant voice that had not been fed and so was not at all sleepy whispered one sly question in my inner ear: Was she still alive when he did it?

They put it here because this guy is such a bugero.

It didn't really make sense. The ID on the fingerprint could not have come back yet—there was no way it could have worked its way through all the layers of ossified bureaucracy in just a few hours—but as far as I knew that was the only lead. Besides, she would never do something insanely risky without me along to take the hit for her, and cornering a homicidal psycho with a hammer certainly fit in the category of "risky." Of

But now, when Chutsky suggested it, the idea seemed wrong, like singing the real words to "Barnacle Bill" in church.

But a large part of learning to be an adult is admitting to yourself that nothing is ever perfect. We all have to sacrifice small indulgences from time to time in order to achieve our larger goals, and I would just have to behave like a grown-up and accept that the results were more important than my petty personal gratification.

For no reason at all a synonym for unformed popped into my head: inchoate. I don't know why I thought of that word right now. I didn't need a synonym. What I needed was a sea change, a paradigm shift, an evolution in the zeitgeist, something to make the entire world get off my back and pick on somebody else for a while.

And, apparently, extremely effective. "All right," she said, and she actually squeezed my hand. "I won't say anything." I

And of course the Passenger finds this highly amusing: that moments ago I was sniffing the bright buds of spring and forswearing the way of all flesh, and now I am once again up on point and eager to slay—but this is different.

I woke up again on Monday morning in the middle of an enormous sneeze and feeling like a Turkish weight lifter had spent the entire weekend squeezing every bone in my body.

joy. For the first time in my memory, as these passionate strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away—for the first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome. I was afraid.

Once more I had the sensation of being in the middle of a conversation that had started a few minutes ago without me. But on a morning so full of bright hope, I could be patient. "It was very good paella," I said. "What did you forget to tell me?

teeth. I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

Several brilliantly funny remarks crowded into my mouth and fought for space on my tongue, but once again I somehow made myself stay focused on the larger point, which was that I still had no idea what Rita was talking about. "I'll be there at two thirty," I said. "If you promise to tell me where it is and why I'm going there." Astor

This man's suit has a life of its own. It sparkles with vitality and wit, and seems to glow with the same perfect health as the man wearing it. This suit is the kind of thing ambitious tailors dream of making when they hear that royalty is in town.

For the first time in my memory, as these passionate strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away—for the first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome. I was afraid. I could not say why, or of what, which made it much worse, a lonely unknown fear that roiled through me and echoed off the empty places and drove away everything but the picture of that bull's head and the fear.

They were all milling about in clusters, a kind of colloidal motion made up of groups—some doing question and answer, some forensics, and others just staring around for something important to do to justify the expense of driving over here and standing at a crime scene. Deborah