Re: Gotham: Penny & Jake & Clem
[Jake sagged like air let loose from a real old balloon, the rubber wrinkling as it emptied. The subject passed over, like one door shutting tight and another opening wide and he didn't have to talk one minute about the dead and what that felt like, or where he'd been when the dead had begun on being something he thought about at all. He hadn't seen Penny in near a year, driving on around looking for whoever had ordered up his momma's death like it was an expensive a la carte menu option and he missed her, but he wriggled away from the pressure of inquiry with relief.]
You want to go doctoring the police? [The police, to Jake, were a bunch of folk his daddy's age who drove around and stopped for long lunches at the diner and ate the last slice of pie of an evening with the best of the pot of coffee kept on warm. Police were real familiar faces at home, and Gotham was another world. He didn't think doctoring the ones in Gotham would go easy. And he looked at Clem, and said without a whole lot of thinking on it, mostly because it was true and partly because Clem expected it.] You look real pretty, Aunt Clem.
[He'd learned something about compliments, about the way Aunt Clem sparked up like a lightbulb burning when you gave them off right, and maybe it came close on over to the sissy way of seeing things in colors and shades, but he thought the robin's egg was as close as it got to the color of the sky right out on the edges of town when dawn broke for real.]