“A part of him lives off the craft of it, off the ability to read other people and entice them and then betray them. His ability to destroy them. But for this to be fully satisfactory, they must meet certain conditions. They must be bright and wary and dangerous. They must be bad and even better than bad, they must exude a palpable evil. And his sense of these conditions is eroding. In his head he hears Garcia talking about his children, Gloria is leaning over to show a photograph of a grandchild, or her daughter is on the phone making conversation, or Irma is sitting there acting foolish and looking spectacular. He is flooded with impressions of the humdrum details of their lives, the utter normalcy of their needs and their loves and little fears and vanities.
The sense of being on the right side of some line is getting harder to sustain.”
You couldn’t write fiction like this. Bowden takes reality and whittles it down to complicated truth.