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449 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2016
Domestics are mostly slam-dunks; the question isn't whether you can arrest your guy, or girl, it's whether you can build a case that'll hold up in court. A lot of people love that - it pretties up your solve rate, looks good to the brass - but not me: it means domestics get you fuck-all respect from the squad, where I could do with it, because everyone knows the solve came easy. Which is also the other reason they piss me off: they've got a whole special level of idiotic all to themselves. You take out your wife or your husband or your Shag of the Day, what the fuck do you think is gonna happen? We're gonna be standing there with our mouths open, scratching our heads at the mind-blowing mystery of it all, Duh, I dunno, musta been the Mafia? Surprise: we're gonna go straight for you, the evidence is gonna pile up way over your head, and you're gonna wind up with a life sentence. If you want to kill someone, have enough respect for my time to make it someone, anyone, other than the most gobsmackingly obvious person in the world.
“I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn't change who I am. This isn't something I'm proud of; as far as I'm concerned, it's a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.”![]()
“In any squad, people last a lot longer than two years. My two years have been special. The cases aren’t a problem—I could take back-to-back cannibals and kid-killers, never miss a wink of sleep. Like I said, you can beat one killer. Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.”
“Two years of watching my back, watching every step and every word, in fight mode all day every day: my instincts are fried to smoking wisps.”
“I didn’t use to be like this. I’ve always had a temper on me, but I’ve always kept it under control, no matter how hard I had to bite down. Even when I was a kid, I knew how to hold it loaded and cocked while I got my target in range, lined up my sights and picked my moment to blow the bastard away. Since I made Murder, that’s been changing—slowly, I never lose a lot of ground at once, but I never gain any back, and it’s starting to show. The last few months, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life. I wasn’t kidding about telling that witness he was too stupid to live: my mouth was opening to do it, when Steve came in with some soothing question. I know, dead certain, that someday soon neither of us is gonna catch me in time.
And I know, dead certain, that the rest of the squad is gonna be on that moment like sharks on chum.”
“It’s not that Steve has no ego—all Ds do—just that his isn’t tied to being Mr. Big Balls all the time. It’s tied to getting stuff done, which is good, and to people liking him, which comes in useful and which I watch like hell.”
“You take out your wife or your husband or your Shag of the Day, what the fuck do you think is gonna happen? We’re gonna be standing there with our mouths open, scratching our heads at the mind-blowing mystery of it all, Duh, I dunno, musta been the Mafia?”I love Steve for his faith in humanity, optimism, and unfailing dedication to friendship. I love how his loyalty and trust are in the right place. I love his self-deprecation and humor and decency. And I love the friendship strong enough where no words need to be said for perfect understanding.
“Ah, background checks,' I say. 'The foundation of every beautiful romance.”
“We sit there, drinking, while the stuff we should probably be saying out loud get itself done in the silence.”
“They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too.”
“I take one more look up at the rest of my life, waiting for me inside those neat sturdy squares of gold light. Then we start off across the courtyard, arguing, to get a few pints and a few hours’ kip before it’s time to head back and find out what’s in there.”
1. the likeness (#2)
2. in the woods (#1)
3. the trespasser (#6)
4. faithful place (#3)
5. secret place (#5)
6. broken harbour (#4)
What-if-maybe crap is for weak people. It belongs to the ones who don’t have the strength to make actual situations go their way, so they have to hide away in daydreams where they can play at controlling what comes next. And that makes them even weaker. Every what-if is a gift to anyone who’s looking for a hold on you, and that means us. If a guy’s whole head is in reality, then reality is the only route we can take to get to him. If he’s letting his mind prance off down dozens of twisty hypothetical fairy tales, every one of those is a crack we can use to prize him open.
The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all.
You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.
The thing about daydreams is that they don’t last. One brush up against reality, and that’s the end of them.