I raised another shot. "That sound you hear is the heads of moral conservatives spontaneously exploding in the distance.

Pick up your clothes. I am not your maid. How do I know this? A maid cannot kill you with a tube sock. I can.

You're so very good at that. The temper, the scowl. You must drink shots of testosterone in your morning coffee.

Pooh hater,' I muttered under my breath. 'Winnie-the-Pooh was not a koala--why am I even arguing about this with you?

All I cared was that she had never lied. She was honest in a world just the opposite, and a cool oasis in my life. She was who she said she was, and everything Sophia, my mother, the pathologically manipulative liar, had never been.

At least that's what his note said, along with a scathing reminder that dishes didn't wash themselves and the fungus in the bathroom was one day away from evolving into sentient life. I folded the note into an airplane and sailed it across the room. It ended up perched jauntily on top of the ancient television. It looked good there and I left it as a tribute to freedom-loving fungi everywhere.

Niko caught my hand and slapped it lightly down on the bar. “Pistol whipping elderly women isn’t precisely our mission statement, Cal.” I hadn’t been going to pistol-whip her. Yell at her a little more, then pick her up and toss her out into the street. Some risk of a broken hip there, but that wasn’t pistol-whipping… unless she tried to come back in.