End of Watch

Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.

Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.

It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.

Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.

You’re a Frankenstein!” “Don’t confuse the monster with the creator.

You play the game to the end. That’s how it works; play to the end.

End of watch is what they call it, but Hodges himself has found it impossible to give up watching.

That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.

One last thing. End of Watch is fiction, but the high rate of suicides—both in the United States and in many other countries where my books are read—is all too real. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline number given in this book is also real. It’s 1-800-273-TALK. If you are feeling poopy (as Holly Gibney would say), give them a call. Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do. Stephen

The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots. At

He began to understand what contentment actually was: the emotional version of the horse latitudes, where all the winds died away and one simply drifted. It ensued when one ran out of goals to grow. • • • This

Now stop fucking around and look at the fishies. You know you want to.

The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.

In southern Wales, dozens of teens hung themselves between 2007 and 2009, with messages on social networking sites stoking the craze. Even the goodbyes they left were couched in Netspeak: Me2 and CU L8er.

Holly hangs up, washes her face in the tiny lavatory, reapplies

When nurses drink, they have a tendency to go all in. They’re like cops that way.

Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.

Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared.

The Golden Tits of America!” Jason Rapsis cried from the shotgun seat. Rob had worked with any number of paramedics over his fifteen years as an EMT, and Jace Rapsis was the best: easygoing when nothing was happening, unflappable and sharply focused when everything was happening at once. “We shall be fed! God bless capitalism! Pull in, pull in!

For days it can be good, weeks, even, and then there’s something to swallow.

Memory has a way of slipping a few gears after sixty-five, when people round the third turn start down the home stretch. He

I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers – one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans – but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.

It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath. “More

The old lady goes back to her paperback (it's Fifty Shades of Grey, and not her first trip through it, from the battered look of the thing.)

It’s always darkest before the dawn. This elderly chestnut occurred to Rob Martin as the ambulance he drove rolled slowly along Upper Marlborough Street toward home base, which was Firehouse 3. It seemed to him that whoever thought that one up really got hold of something, because it was darker than a woodchuck’s asshole this morning, and dawn wasn’t far away.

He would give anything to just sleep, and sleep, and sleep. But he opens them again and forces himself to look at Brady, because you play the game to the end. That’s how it works; play to the end. “I