Sonny had to get rid of her once he found out, of course, but by then he’d already begun to grow weary of her. She was one of those save-the-trees, stop-global-warming, Che-is-cool-and-so-is-Obama kin...
Something about the bright sun shining down on a palm tree gauchely planted next to a dentist’s office gave the whole place an unreality, as though I was living on some movie studio backlot. Los Angel...
Some primal instinct tells the parent, or the person down on their luck, than if we let it go — the child's hand, or our dignity — all is lost, and we’ll never get it back. That’s why, if you even bot...
Some places, such as Paris, have a magic best experienced for brief periods so the romantic feeling doesn’t become tainted by a day to day reality. But Mykonos was different in that respect. Mykonos m...
She ran her finger along the smooth book cover affectionately, finding comfort in the beautiful words she knew were within. She was privy to love's secrets, and its depth and breadth in a way so few i...
Rick was stretched out on the floor taking a nap. He was the lightest sleeper I'd ever known. He could doze just about anywhere and be up and alert in an instant. His ability to drop off and then wake...
Probably just someone on their way into Tucson, like us. We’d better check it out, though. The Southerner pulled his Winchester 73 from its sheath and laid it across his waist in the saddle. He’d kill...
Only when I’d see a young girl I’d known in high school, walking down the street hand-in-hand with her returned soldier, did the deeper pain return.
One of those Los Angeles legends that add mystery to the bright lights and glamour.
No one knows more about regret than an old drunk, and no old drunk knew more about living with it than Harry.
Many people nowadays don't believe in things, she said softly. Oh, they think they're all special, playing around with witchery and the dark stuff, but real miracles, things that can't be explained aw...
Lonesome tried to hide his surprise that Katie and Tommy lived in an old line-shack. It jutted out in the back where someone had slapped on a narrow rectangular room maybe six feet wide and eight feet...
Lone Tree was a cow-town without the cow. No one I ever talked to had an answer as to how it had sprung up here in the middle of nowhere, nor did they know who the genius was who had thought it a good...
Katie Wells stood looking out her window down to the street below. She could still feel the effects of the hard-rock miner getting his money's worth in every way he could. Angry that he could not affo...
I’d sought out these lonely roads because I was hurt and lonely, and that’s what the hurt and lonely do; seek out a place far from people, far from the happiness which is painfully just out of their r...
I’d landed in Los Angeles after the war, and spent the past three years working as a private detective; mostly dodging trouble while trying to help this mug or that one get out of a jam of his own mak...
It was raining so hard on that lonely stretch of rural Illinois backroad that I couldn’t see the painted white lines on the worn cracked asphalt.
If there was a divine plan, some otherworldly force at work here, it couldn't be such a cruel one as to allow me a glimpse of heaven then take it away, could it?
I wasn't sure when you'd be in so I thought you wouldn't mind me waiting here. I had the feeling he knew exactly when I was going to arrive. That he knew a lot of things he wasn't ever going to tell m...
I was empty and lonely, unable to remember the last time I'd felt any real happiness, or if I ever had at all. I knew I had seen it a few times in the eyes of others, and in movies made a lifetime ago...