Quotes About Pendergast

Not in my swamp, with my alligators. -Pendergast

At the rear of the courtyard, several chairs had been placed beneath a vined trellis, and it was here Pickett at last spied Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. He was wearing a white linen suit similar to the one Pickett recalled from their meeting a fortnight or so earlier at a rooftop bar in Miami Beach. One leg was flung over the other, and beautifully made loafers of buttery leather were on his feet.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us," Pendergast murmured.

There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. "I prefer hypocrisy to poverty." "Come to think of it, there is a rationale. Leng didn't make his money from killing. He made it from speculating in railroads, oil, and precious metals." Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "I did not know that." "There is much you still don't know about him.

She felt his shoulders began to convulse, faintly, regularly, almost as if he was weeping. But that was, of course, impossible, as Pendergast would never cry.

He stepped back to let Pendergast do his thing, but he was surprised to see the agent not going through his usual rigmarole, with the test tubes and tweezers and loupes appearing out of nowhere and interminable fussing around.

Intuition, Pendergast knew, was the end result of the most sophisticated kind of reasoning.

spaces again. I guess one citation wasn't enough." Pendergast pulled out the previous ticket. "You mean this?" "That's right." Pendergast neatly tore it in half and tucked the pieces back into his pocket. The chief frowned.

Coldmoon shook his head. The case had gone from being open, to closed, to open again, so fast he felt almost dizzy. "Let this be a lesson to you, my friend, on the dangers of drawing conclusions too early," Pendergast told him. "As H. L. Mencken once said, 'There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.' This was that neat, plausible, and wrong solution.

I like your custom 1911," the man said, glancing at Pendergast's weapon. "Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special? Nice-looking piece.

And as Coldmoon closed the door behind him, he could still hear the faint sound of Pendergast's laughter—dulcet, melodious, yet infinitely sad—as he maintained his sanity by skipping from one tiny sliver of time to another, between the beat of a hummingbird's wings.

Back in their special forces days, there were times when Pendergast had disappeared just like this—no word to anyone—only to reappear later with some important objective accomplished. It had happened often enough that their team developed a slang term for it—Don't pull a Pendergast meant "Don't disappear without explanation.

Hezekiah Pendergast," Constance continued, "was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius—and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own 'medicine': Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.

Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.

shot him in the butt from three feet away and Pendergast