Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

This was because I had cut the soles off a pair of shoes three sizes too small and glued them to the bottom of some shoes that actually fit me, so that according to the size/depth chart the Feds use to extrapolate body measurements from footprints I was five foot four and three hundred pounds. I don’t flatter myself that this fooled the detectives, but try explaining it to a jury.

You see this all the time—not people actually killing their relatives, but people sorely disappointed when their relatives survive. It usually takes the form of someone asking you to take their mother off life support even though her surgery went great and Mom’s up and walking around and about to check out.

“R/O” means “rule out,” as in “You deal with it.”

All right, fine. A nurse there turned out to be keeping his patients tied up and sedated for days at a time while he “experimented” on them.

Time between John Gotti being nicknamed “The Teflon Don” and getting sent to prison for life: eighteen months.

People think the ocean’s about life, and freedom. But beaches are the most impassable barriers in nature. People worship them like they worship outer space, or death, or anything and anyone else that says no to them and means it.

They were tiger sharks or nurse sharks or something. Who gives a shit? Any shark that large will attack a human if it thinks it can get away with it. And all shallow-water sharks are brown on top and white underneath, so that fish above them will think they’re sand, and fish below will think they’re sky.

Toxic shock is an immune response set off by contaminants in your blood such as bacteria—which make up 20 percent by weight of human feces, all grown within your intestines. (Cows can survive on this bacteria, “eating” grass just so the bacteria, their real food, will grow on it.) During shock your veins open up to let white blood cells into your tissues to fight the infection, and the fluid that leaks out with them causes your blood pressure to crash.