28
" Never had the pleasure.” “Every fall the female elk releases this musk in her urine, see. Tells the bull elks she’s ready to mate. The bull elks can smell the musk, and they start fighting each other over the female. Charge at each other, butting heads, locking antlers, making this unbelievable racket, this loud bugling, until one of them gives up, and the winner gets the girl.” “I’ve seen bar fights like that.” “That’s how the females can tell which bulls are the fittest. They mate with the winners. Otherwise, the weak genes get passed on, and the elks are gonna die out. This is how it works in nature. "
― Joseph Finder , Power Play
39
" The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden. They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach. "
― Joseph Finder , Vanished (Nick Heller, #1)