Timothy Hallinan

The chuckle is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.

I let one of the men rename me. A man gave me the name Rose _ you didn__ know that, did you, Poke?_He said, this man, he said that Kwan was too hard to remember, even though it__ a good name and it means __pirit,_ and that the rose was the queen of flowers and I was the queen of Patpong._ She laughs, rough as a cough. __he queen of Patpong. A kingdom of whores and viruses. Death with a smile.

Life is just there, to be made the best of, until it isn't. And that's all right, too.

So you don't think the government is responsible for anything?" "Oh, it's responsible," Rafferty says. "It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,