I don't like to bust drunk drivers. I don't like to listen to their explanations, watch their pitiful attempts to affect sobriety, or see the sheen of fear break out in their eyes when they realize...

Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and...

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better, I said.

The word criminal is more an emotional than legal term. Go to any U.S. post office and view the faces on the wanted posters. Like Dick Tracy caricatures, they stare out of the black-and-white...

But I was falling prey to that old self-serving notion that well-intended rhetoric can remove a stone bruise from the soul.

No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It.

Joe Molinari's role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord...

how many decisions did you make that at the time seemed inconsequential but down the track had enormous influence on either you or others?

What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn't do to him, or the Mob or his enemies inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on the half shell, and calamitous affairs with...

The rumors that he did business with the Giacanos were I'm sure true. To what degree was up for debate. In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state's culture, mind-set,...

His round, pink face was smiling and happy, his green eyes lighted with an alcoholic shine.

The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality...

The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another

Maybe justice is finally catching up with this asshole.

But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to...

No, I ain't wanted there, I don't like it there, I ain't coming in there . . . Good-bye.

I'm so strong I got muscles in my shit

degree of civility I normally possess," he said. "What'd she say?