The Killing Kind

I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.

You must be careful where you step. And you must be ready for what you might find.

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

..her lips were as red as a stop light..

There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others.

When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.

He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.

The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.

Okay," I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.

what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had.

wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.

Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

Lester Bargus was what people liked to call 'two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.