Thomas Pynchon

Inherent vice in a maritime insurance policy is anything that you can't avoid. Eggs break, chocolate melts, glass shatters, and Doc wondered what that meant when it applied to ex-old ladies.

Well Mornin' Sam, like a bad luck planet in today's horoscope, here's the old hippie-hating mad dog himself in the flesh: Lieutenant Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen. SAG member, John Wayne walk, flat top of Flintstone proportions and that evil, little shit-twinkle in his eye that says Civil Rights Violations.

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish t-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.

Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, freak-in, here up north, back east, where ever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday? All they could sweep up for the ancient forces of greed and fear? Gee he thought... I don't know.

Back when they were together she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on Doc that he couldn't read at all.

On principle he tried to spend as little time around the glass house as possible. All this strange alternative cop history and cop politics, cop dynasties, cop heroes and evil doers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good, insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all been given the control.

Coy's band, The Boards, were currently renting a place in Topanga Canyon from a bass player turned record company executive, which trend watchers took as further evidence of the end of Hollywood, if not the world, as they had known it.

Doc ran through all the things he hadn't asked Shasta. Like how much she'd come to depend on Wolfmann's guaranteed level of ease and power? And least askable of all, how passionately did she really feel about old Mickey? Doc knew the likely reply, "I love him", what else? With the unspoken footnote that the word these days was being way too overused.

Pssst. Doper's ESP, Doc… doper's ESP… ohhhhh, no, Bigfoot, you motherfucker! Okay, Doc, you have what looks to be a 20-kilo inconvenience in your trunk.

If it's a quiet night out at the beach and your ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire- developer boyfriend, and his wife, and her boyfriend, and a plot to kidnap the billionaire and throw him in a loony bin…