He rarely assigned his tools any kind of personality, since most of them could be used for many things, good or ill. A pair of diagonal-cutting pliers might be used in one movie to cut a phone cord before a murder, and in the next save the heroine when the hero used them to cut the wires to the bomb at the last second. But the saw . . . it occupied the whole center of the tray, its teeth bared. It wanted to taste flesh and blood and sinew.