Once Upon a Time...

The sun was only half as hot as he had known sun to be, but it was hot enough to keep him confused and dizzy. He was very weak. He had not eaten for 72 hours, or taken water for 48. Not weak. He was dying, and he knew it.

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Judge Rollins drew a handgun from beneath his black robes, pointed the snub-nosed barrel at Jimmy Payne’s chest and said, “Who you pimping for, you low-life shyster?”

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My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

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(Odd, to intrude on adarkjewel's posting ground—but I assume it's allowed and this first paragraph is too good to pass up.)

Joel Cohen, the disheveled assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was a world-class bastard with a degenerate slouch.

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I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: something lyric like Nabokov's "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins"; or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." People remember those words even when they have forgotten everything else about the books. When it comes to openers, though, the best in my view has to be the beginning of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." I've read that one dozens of times and it still knocks my socks off.

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No two ways about it. Dying was a bitch.

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When I saw the body, my first thought was to just keep on walking. This one had nothing to do with me. There was no logical reason to get involved.

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A man like me is not supposed to have doubts.

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On the day my old life died, the air smelled of springtime -- budding trees and just born flowers, fresh grass and hope. I should have known right then that something was coming.

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Stabbing flesh was no big deal. That was the way to think about it. The boy was just another piece of meat...

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The warm glow from the cabin's window told a lie. The scream from within told the truth.

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He was alone, horny and in possession of a partially scorched demon bone. Perfect.

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Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot thought it was a great shame that she had to spend one of the most beautiful days of the year so far at a crime scene, especially a hanging.

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It was early April, about nine o'clock in the morning, when I first met Laura Halston. Well, I didn't exactly "meet" her. It was more that I almost ran her down.

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Joel Cohen, the disheveled assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was a world-class bastard with a degenerate slouch. When I was arraigned the following day, he tried to convince the female magistrate to deny me bail on the grounds that I was a born liar, a compulsive cheater, a habitual whoremonger, a hopeless drug addict, a serial witness-tamperer, and, above all things, the greatest flight risk since Amelia Earhart.

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For months, Joe Riddley had been threatening to shackle me to my desk to keep me from "meddling in murder." I never believed he'd do it.

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Revenge is like any other religion: There’s always a lot more preaching than there is practicing. And most of that preaching is about what not to practice.

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When Mitch Hrlicka heard that his high school football coach had gotten another teenage girl pregnant, he was 40 bushels beyond bamboozled.

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The world was already falling apart when her first contractions hit.

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Four days before he died, a 30-year-old backhoe operator named Hollis Farley drove 30 miles to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Marble Falls, Texas, and purchased a $4,000 60-inch plasma television. It had a high-definition screen, of course, along with a built-in digital tuner, picture-in-picture, and, as the salesman put it, "a whole shitload of pixels." Whatever those were.

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