Word Count

I kept thing about Vivian.

The office was one of several fronts for Sam Peronti's various enterprises: Stockton Stipping Co.

His discharge from the U.S. Army read "Other Than Honorable," and he tore it up just outside the
gates of Leavenworth, where he had sojourned for five years, accused at the Court Martial of "inciting
riot and ordering his platoon to commit rape and murder," in an insignificant Vietnam village whose
name he could not recall.

He had been staring intently at the book in his lap for perhaps forty-five minutes, before he realized he
was not reading

At eleven o'clock that night Herb Lait was still working overtime in the office of The Patterson Supply
Company.

I, Monkhaus Reaver, unmoral, enormously fit, ugly, but captivating, too tall for conventional
comprehensions touched violently by my colorful dreams, my high-powered Rolls-Royce body-machine
running in neutral as usual, lay on the silvery Gulf beach sands, and fought it out some more.

Heaving a deep sigh, he closed the entrance door, which gleamed with gold filigree and silver leaf, then
turned and strolled through the large foyer down the gleaming black steps, and into the immense living
room of the sprawling apartment.

I walked into it with my eyes wide open . . . .

Open your mouth, stick out your tough , and say, "Ah!"

It was past midnight.

I was in Florida that July, licensed, bonded, with a palm-frond hat business on the side.

They had not spoken since entering the hotel room.

He flicked on the bathroom light, blinking against its sudden glare.

It was dark. The rain had ceased.

Looking at Jeanne, across from me in the booth at The Pyramid Club, I couldn't help cursing my lot as
I compared her to Helen, my wife.

Mrs. Loretta Brady called me on the intercom.

I remember well how it started. . . .

Caroline Boswell checked again to make sure her husband was in the shower, then hurried downstairs
and over to the phone in the small alcove.

Addy clicked the inset lock on the apartment doorknob, stepped out into the hall, and closed the door.

"What is it?"

He crested the hill over the railroad underpass through the first hint of this Wednesday evening's
mid-September twilight, and plunged through the glass-like chill along the sidewalk toward the old
soot-marbled frame house where he rented a room.

Herb Forrester shifted nervously in the straight-backed leather chair and looked across the vast
expanse of gleaming desk at Doctor Connell.

It was a hot Florida morning.

Violence slowly became a part of Cullen Hammett, until he lived out his harried nights and day
watching the eternal thunder within his own mind.

I spotted the dog over by the edge of the woods.

Love Me Too walked up to the middle-aged man who was seated on the shadowed bench by the railing
overlooking the river.

"It's a squall!" Chuck shouted.

I made up my mind I was going to rob the damned jewelry company right while Henry Linkton was
talking.

Sam Dillon sat with strained immobility in the big gold-and-black wing chair in the living room of his
spacious Florida Gulf front home, and nursed his fear.

He whispered to her in the fragrant darkness of their bedroom.

When I left the apartment that morning, out at Calcutta Shores, I saw the black Olds convertible
parked across the street under a banyan.

The rain slanted down is sheets.

Elmer Webb stared at Gramp, who was seated on the sun-drenched, paintless boards of the back
porch, and said bitterly, "But I don't want to talk with Ma!

Sheriff Reb Klayville had it strong on his mind all the time he was talking with Deputy Cliff Waters this
morning.

Des Brady hugged the wall of the shadowed hotel room, watching the side window where the fire
escape was revealed, dark lattice against the glowing light from the Pig Pen Club's neon.

She turned to him in the front seat of the parked car.

Jimmy Hartman quickly crossed the trophy room of his father's lodge, high in the Sandia Mountains,
near Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Dread breathed through camp with the coming of the soft night wind.

He picked up the kid on The Tamiami Trail, not too long out of Hollywood, where he'd held up three gas
stations--Amoco, Texaco, Standard--and netted $489.00.

Tonight I saw Miriam for the first time in a month.

Brinker yawned and lumbered to the front of the shack, which was fashioned of old billboards and
corrugated iron.

Caruthers was in the basement stacking old newspapers when he heard Rose scream.

He came upon the hanging boy in the woods, at three-thirty that afternoon.

I saw this old wreck of a '59 Cad creeping along the road, but really didn't think much of it.

Owen told me she looked like a young Jayne Mansfield.

It took him two and a half years to make the break from a prison farm in Illinois.

Anxiety touched him with sickening familiarity as the door chimes echoed through the apartment.

The phone rang.

Martin Saxe leaned at the wind-torn open door of the Cessna 182, and gazed straight down at the tiny
Maryland airport, thirteen thousand feet below.

A steady, misting rain freckled the windshield as Oliver Coe drove through the night.

I stopped the coupe on the Gulf beach road out near Indian Rocks and looked across at this place.

Megs said, "No, we can't.

He looked at me with those frogs' eyes of his.

Florine pouted.

I was new. You gotta understand that, and about that panda.

They have allowed me paper and pen, and thought I am in this cell for the time being, at least I have
that much freedom.

Wilson Shay leaned against the bar at the Palmdale Country Club, and tried to keep his excitement
down as he alternately peered across the dance floor and sipped his B&B.

Roy felt only slightly nervous about the whole matter.

The African sun was a blister in the pale sky.

Morey Budd's season in hell really began on a shadowed October street in Ybor City, the old Spanish
quarter of Tampa.

They had only been married a month, and were on their way to Key West.

He could almost taste the gloriousness of the day in late May beyond the dirt-grimed curtainless
windows at the back of his head

This Florida morning was a freshly peeled blister.

It was a fine August morning.

It was pretty much of an out-and-out ruckus, what with my three deputies chasing Herm Lolly in the
north woods, and the ambulance down by the barn to pick up Des Steggins' body where he'd been
hanged on the hay fork, and Doc Gargan trying to report, and me beating down Vervy Steggins' dogs,
so I could discuss matters with her

My sister phoned and told me Dad was dead.

We were down to or last Cadillac, with a trunk full of expensive clothes and eighty-three dollars in the
till when we rolled into Bay Port on the Gulf coast of Florida at eleven o'clock on a hot Saturday night
in mid-July

"There must be some piece you can go," Lucille said.

Attenberry saw the blue steel automatic lying on the sidewalk as he left the dentist's office.

"Truth was, I'd always been leery of Uncle James.

Suddenly, then, Carlton was standing on a vast, endless plateau of white sand.

Oh, man, look at that!

I did not really notice any change in the way Elsa thought about me until the thirtieth year of our
marriage.

I remember well how it started . . . .  It was three weeks before Christmas.

It was a cheap hotel.

She was up to no damn good.

Clarence Klutts started out his bedroom window at the ice storm.

At first he could feel only a cold darkness, a wind that neither increased nor decreased, but breathed
in a steadied chill gust.