Here he comes now

I'm sorry

"There's a lady is sick!" The other boy blurts. "Dying!"

The Ray house is the only one still standing on Caryton hill when Vic and her girls come screaming up it in their old Jeep Cherokee.

Anton Pike had stale Wheaties for breakfast, and then he was hit by a bus, and then he died, and none of those was the worst thing to happen to him that day. The worst was the girl in the bear hat and her lucky numbers; but that is getting ahead of things.

Quintus arrived last and late—but there are things a man needs to do before undertaking an exorcism, and those things can't be rushed. 

I had always imagined that when the time came for Lord Brian to upgrade me, I would feel a sort of satisfied resignation. The sort of feeling one might have after retiring from a life spent pursuing a difficult, but loved, profession. I imagined even feeling a nonsensical sorrow at the prospect that I would, somehow, miss him when I was gone.

As it turns out, though, to my very great surprise, I am angry. 

If you drive the Maricopa Freeway through the scrub south of Tempe, and you stop just where the mountains begin to flicker on the horizon to the west, and you get out of the car and walk towards them for an hour, you might find me.

Please don't.

Please don't, Mary.

I know she means trouble the minute she walks in to homeroom.

There are places where a man goes to be silent among other men. Other places, a man goes to talk, or to hear other men talk, about war or women, the sea or the sky. I had been spending too much time in the first kind of place, in the years since I had lost my arm and the better part of my right lung in the air over New France. I was in danger of becoming an old soldier's ghost before I had the chance to become an old soldier. I did not much resist, then, when André, a friend of recent acquaintance, dragged me into the raucous confines of the Grouper's Nest.

When the news broke of protestors dancing on the wall, I knew immediately that I would have to return to Berlin. It wasn't the wall that drew me, though, or at least it was not that wall, and so I waited almost a year before I bought my ticket. I waited until I heard that the station had reopened.

When Buck tossed his letter on the kitchen table, I knew my days as a single girl were over. He didn't need to open it. All we needed to see was the color. Puke yellow. My brother was going to war, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Walt Zimmer watched the rocket go up on the hotel TV. Assembling the rifle was taking longer than usual. He probably should have waited to hit the mini-bar until after the assignment, but he never could resist a martini or two.