Pike said, This is dim mak. That’s Chinese. It means death touch. Dim mak was the dark side of acupuncture; in one, pressure points were used to heal, in the other, to damage.
Pike jogged back across Mulholland, and found Rose Platt squatting beside Rainey. He tried to understand what he felt about her, but he mostly felt nothing. Rose stood when she saw him, and Pike slowe...
Pike got out of the car, took off the long-sleeved shirt, then went to the trunk. He looked through the things Ronnie had left. He drank half a bottle of Arrowhead water, then collected his SOG fighti...
Officer Pike took off his dark glasses, and looked at her. She felt her breath catch. His eyes were the most liquid blue, the blue of the sky over the high deserts of Sonora, the blue of the ocean whe...
Nope. I hung up, bought an iced tea from a sausage grill, then stared at the bay. The water was clean and blue, and Catalina was in sharp relief twenty-six miles away. A young woman in short-shorts an...
Mrs. Bartello opened the screen wider, her eyes bunching with sorrow. I’m sorry. You don’t know. I’m sorry. Donna passed away. Holman felt himself slow as if he had been drugged; as if his heart and b...
Moths swarmed around the parking lot lamps, banging into the glass with a steady tap-tap-tap, and I wondered if they welcomed the dawn. At dawn, they could stop slamming their heads into the thing tha...
More overblown, effusive praise for Daniel’s efforts. Thank
Maybe if I didn’t think about Mimi Warren or Traci Louise Fishman or Eddie Tang they would all disappear and living would be easy. Elvis Cole, Existential Detective. I liked that. Not thinking, proper...
Maybe he’s just some guy. Maybe he doesn’t have anything to do with why she left or why she took the money. Meryl Lawrence made a tiny self-loathing snort. I’ll ask her if you can find her. I took the...
Martin nodded, his head snapping up and down. He was wearing baggy gray sweatpants and no shirt. His torso was soft and undeveloped and covered with a thick growth of fine hair. He squinted against th...
Lucy said, The law is an adversarial contest that defines justice as staying within the rules and seeing the game to its conclusion. Justice is reaching a conclusion. It has very little to do with rig...
Lucy blew me a kiss and hung up and I lay back on the kitchen floor with the phone on my stomach, grinning at the ceiling. The cat stopped purring and came closer to stare into my face. He looked conc...
Louise Earle was credible, cogent, in full command of her faculties, and did not seem to be a person who would miss seeing a cop carrying a bag of funny money through her living room. Of
Levy introduced them to Mike Fowler’s widow and four sons, Mellon’s wife, and Ash’s parents. All of them seemed drained, and Holman thought Fowler’s wife was probably sedated. Everyone treated him pol...
Lehder was a supplier? One of the fellas who popped up when the Cali and Medellín cartels fell. Little operations popped up all over down there, maybe thirty or forty of’m. Some of’m aren’t so little...
Larkin hooked her arm around his, as though the Santa Anas would blow her away if she wasn’t anchored. She glanced into the market.
Khat runner. Check out these teeth. Fuckers get green teeth from chewing the khat. Ain’t this green rotten? Stop
Kara Sykes held the door. That’s fine. You’ll go on in a few minutes, so we don’t have much time. Please come this way. We followed her down a long hall, then through a newsroom filled with desks and...
Jon started up the steps, and then he was gone. Amy wouldn’t see him at first. She’d be lost in her thoughts, checking off the rational steps that led to her rational death, and each of those steps wo...