Anybody ever tell you you’re a cute little trick?
Mat. A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch.
Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.
She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.
She sighed. All men are the same. So are all women—after the first nine.
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.
Racket beer, sonny, he said sadly. Tasteless as a roadhouse blonde. (Spanish Blood)
Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.
Oh sure, I'm her husband. That's what the record says. I'm the three white steps and the bug green front door and the brass knocker you rap one long and two short and the maid lets you into the hundre...
No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.
It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.
If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.
I'm all done with hating you. It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long.
I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the...
I didn't have anything really exiting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger breath.
Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too t...
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.
Call me Sunset. I'm always moving west.