Psychopaths

There was only one guy in the whole, Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise,

Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys,

He was a convicted thief, being executed,

So don't knock the guys on death row, Maybe they know something you don't.  

The silence just allowed the echoes of the question to play out in Nox’s mind, 

Reminding him of his own unwinnable war against the never-ending tide of conmen and criminals,

He was trying to clean up these parts, but every time he rubbed away a stain, he found another layer of dirt beneath, So, you could give up—or you could keep on scrubbing.  

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting, Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defence,

If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim, 

If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens,

To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, 

From the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization, 

After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; 

The victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; 

And in any case, it is time to forget the past and move on, 

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.  

Police are inevitably corrupted,

Police always observe that criminals prosper, 

It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss; the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.  

Hale!' The girl cried, 

But the boy only stared at her. 'Fine,' she conceded. 'I love your boat.'  

'Ship.'  

'Ship ... Your ship is beautiful.  

Your people, your guards – they’re nothing more than killers, rapists, and thieves,

The only difference between them and criminals is the uniforms they wear,

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.  

Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals,

It was not hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margret thought,

As it says in the sagas, Opt er flago i fogru skinni, 

A witch often has fair skin.  

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality, 

As to my own little practice, 

It seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding schools.  

You can make laws against weapons, 

But they will be observed only by those who don't intend to use them anyway, The lawless can always smuggle or steal or even make a gun, 

By refusing to wear a gun you allow the criminal to operate with impunity. 

Her heartbeat picks up, her pulse fluttering through her neck and wrists,

She loves this part, loves the moment before she pulls off a job—the heat, the cold, the rush,

It’s terrifying and delicious, like teetering out over the edge of a building, her fingers tight on the safety railing,

She can see how everything could go horribly wrong, but that rational part of her is tamped down, silenced by the beauty of the fall. 

This was true to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths, 

The raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven-day stretches,

The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better,

There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. 

When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls,

As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, 

The patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another,

What's a crook, only a businessman without a shop.