Bret hadn't really changed, but he had taken on weight during his nine months in the hospital. It had altered the lines of his cheek and jaw and made his old gray uniform seem too small for him. She could never wholly free her mind of the suspicion that this Bret Taylor was an imposter, living a healthy vegitative life in a dead man's clothes ...........
Three Roads
Ross MacDonald
1950
The summer heat of the valley came up to meet us as we circled in. Heat lay like a fine ash on the rubbish lots and fields and half-built suburbs, slowing the tiny cars on the roads and boulevards, clogging the air.
The Moving Target
Ross MacDonald
1949
Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.
Ross MacDonald
Once Upon a Time in America
The smile that folded the puffed eyelids and creased the sagging cheeks and was fixed and forced. I'd seen such smiles in mortuaries on the false face of death. It reminded me that i was going to grow old and die.
Ross MacDonald
Moving Target
1949
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The Red Barn was a many-windowed building which stood in the centre of a blacktop lot. It's squat pentagonal structure was accentuated by neon tubing along the eaves and corners. Inside his brilliant red cage, a tall-hatted short-order cook kept several waitresses running between his counter and the cars in the lot. The waitresses wore red uniforms and little red caps which made them look like bellhops in skirts. The blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease changed in my nostrils to a foolish old hot-rod sorrow, nostalgia for other drive-ins along roads i knew in pre-war places before people started dying on me.
The Doomsters
Ross MacDonald
1958
