Leandros's favorite place had turned out not to be vegetarian, but vegan, which was for people who preferred their suicide slow.

What're you still doing up? You know all good little ninjas should be in bed, visions of homicidal sugarplums dancing in their heads.

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

As I stood, I took in a last breath of spring-scented air, listened to the birdsong, and then saw a member of wildlife the conservationists hadn't planned on reviving in this place. A perv in a white shirt and polyester pants. A standard hide-in-the-bushes-and-whack-it perv. Fat and balding, it was as appealing as watching a giant marshmallow go at it.

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.

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

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.