The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut. I rewrapped the … - Raymond Chandler

Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.

A man who indulges in parenthood for the first time at the age of fifty-four deserves all he gets.