Excerpt: Urge

A filet so rare it’s practically bloody on the plate, the wonderful sensation of warm on the outside and cool on the inside, even though lots of restaurants don’t like to serve steak that way these days because you might get salmonella or botulism or trichinosis, some horrible raw meat disease where tiny worms gnaw out your intestines and you have chronic diarrhea and vomiting and there was probably some kind of pus involved, wasn’t pus usually involved with something like that? A miserable fate, but since Liza was going to be executed the next morning anyway it didn’t really matter. Plus, her last meal ought to be something she’d really enjoy, right?