The Colonel had missed his initial briefing, which was bad. But the really disastrous thing was that he was, in his own way, a man of action, so when he entered the Mainframe Basement and saw the floor and walls covered with rats, he immediately brought Pest Control into the lab.
“Young man,” said President Lincoln. When he used that tone, you remembered that he had fought and won the bloodiest war in the New World. “The Treasury isn’t far from the White House, and I’m sure they still have an electric printer somewhere.”
The case of the woman who broke your heart began simply enough, as a cluster of pillbox felonies just on the other side of statistical significance. Another detective would have let it pass, but you had a personal grudge against pillbox breakers, who usually began their business day by hurting or killing an old person.
I killed my first one when I was twenty-two. He was half my age, a tall Brazilian kid with a serious face who had walked over the waters in front of Rio to save a drowning man.