Pike knew how to remain calm during the chaos of combat. He had been trained for it, and had survived withering fire in overwhelming combat situations dozens of times. He had learned to keep his head...
Pike heard a car door slam and once more shifted to the window. Larkin Conner Barkley had gotten out of the limo to meet her father and Kline. She had a heart-shaped face with a narrow nose that bent...
Pike glanced over at her again. What’s your name? She took off her glasses and frowned at him as if he were retarded. What are you talking about? What’s your name? I don’t get it. Is this some kind of...
Pike glanced in the rearview. Civilians? I don’t understand. Stone jabbed him with the rifle. Women and children, dipshit. A family. You got innocent people living in there, or just dead men like you?...
Pike dug his index finger into the soft tissue beneath the man’s collarbone where twenty-six individual nerves joined into the brachial plexus. The supraclavicular nerve, which carried information int...
Pike didn’t like this business about guns. He studied her face, trying to read her. Her eyes were light brown, almost hazel, but not. A vertical line cut the skin between her eyebrows, matched by a sc...
Pike didn’t believe he would find anything, but he had to check, so he did, ignoring her. Pike had learned this with the Marines—the one time a man didn’t clean his rifle, that’s when it jammed; the o...
People often die from love, and this is a secret we all keep, even from ourselves.
Not yet, but they made a very interesting offer. Her green eyes were amazing. Absolutely without bottom.
Maggie reached the door well before Scott, and saw another door ahead. The intruder and another man were waiting beyond it. Ten thousand generations filled her with a guardian’s rage. Scott was hers t...
Jonathan Green sat in one of the leather director’s chairs across from my desk and the two lesser attorneys went to the couch. Truly stayed on his feet. The videographer noticed the Pinocchio clock on...
It should die down in a few days. And if it doesn’t? Truly shrugged. Enjoy the idolatry. You earned it, my friend. You really came through for us. A tall thin guy from one of the national networks yel...
I walked away. Too bad you couldn’t get a restraining order against negativity.
I love L.A. It's a great, sprawling, spread-to-hell city that protects us by its sheer size. Four hundred sixty-five square miles. Eleven million beating hearts in Los Angeles County, documented and n...
I left them to their lives and walked out into the sun. You want to do the right thing, but sometimes there is no right thing to be done.
I drove back to Belmont Pier, parked in front of a shop that sold whale-watching tickets, and used a pay phone there to call Lou Poitras. He said, Bubba, you really take advantage. Funny. Your wife sa...
I don’t get the new shoe business. You walk around, step on stuff, the heel gets nicked, the sole picks up dings and cuts. A pattern develops, right? It’s called a Schallamach pattern. And since no tw...
He snuggled closer, spooning into her back, both of them staring at nothing. Jack wondered what she was seeing. Krista
He pursed his lips as if wrestling with how much he wanted to say, then finally told me. Have you seen news accounts of the mass graves found south of the border? I nodded. Mass graves containing scor...
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.