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f5808e7
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Even with all Caroline had lost and forgotten, she knew a lot about archaeology and past civilizations. I often wondered if knowing all those things, only saddened her that she couldn't remember the rest. Though she had made peace with her life, it wasn't the first time I'd pondered whether deep down she might need a sense of normalcy that having a brick and mortar home would give her.
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Bobby Underwood |
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3f88622
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Dead men were always a reminder that your own time would come one day.
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Bobby Underwood |
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5b25fe6
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The Bird Park." We spent more time than I had expected to there -- nearly an hour. We walked across quaint bridges, saw flamingos and macaws and toucans, and a host of others. Ellen bought the appropriate bags of nourishment to feed the ducks, swans, and various colorful larger birds, some from South America, who would eat right out of her hand. She loved it, and the aviary was beautiful, the water and trees and birds. Secretly, however, I ..
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Bobby Underwood |
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2d4a1b2
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It seemed her radar for picking the good ones was defective from the factory. It wasn't the kind of thing you could just return and swap for another one, either. Defective or not, she was stuck with it.
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Bobby Underwood |
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76c1371
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But that was over there, in Greece. This was Mykonos, a seaside sanctuary so timeless that I half expected to glimpse Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings walking along the dock as we disembarked from the ferry.
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Bobby Underwood |
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94d06d6
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There are only really two kinds of people in the world; those who love small towns, and those who hate them.
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Bobby Underwood |
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faf9535
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Some places, such as Paris, have a magic best experienced for brief periods so the romantic feeling doesn't become tainted by a day to day reality. But Mykonos was different in that respect. Mykonos made you long for the restful, happy day to day reality of life on the Greek island, and it was the brief visits that tortured the soul. Paris was a romantic respite from life, Mykonos was life itself, and living. I understood why Susan had made..
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Bobby Underwood |
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b8f4354
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We passed close to the docked cruise ships, Temptation and Fascination. Cruise ships are never named Discontent or Exasperation.
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Bobby Underwood |
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6805e69
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Wyn saw the freshly laid railroad tracks, and spotted the spires of San Felipe with its white crosses pointing toward God's home, and knew he'd finally reached Albuquerque. He glanced behind him at the dead men tied to the horses and sighed. When he turned back around in the saddle, the sight of the church shamed him. Wyn had only brought death here, and doubted these men were bound for where the crosses pointed...
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Bobby Underwood |
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16f26f9
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For months afterward I was numb, almost paralyzed from the shock. I was some emotionless automaton, speaking and answering questions and working, never feeling. My heart was empty.
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Bobby Underwood |
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1befd64
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I turned my head and saw the big lamps, and I knew it was Violet Atwater. When I turned back around Mack had slowed because of the fog. Through the mist I couldn't see Greyson Manor any longer. Violet almost caught up to us in her big Packard and then she was enveloped in the fog as well. It was the change in the air I noticed first. Fresh and clean, with something sweet like honeysuckle or jasmine drifting on the evening breeze. Mack smell..
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Bobby Underwood |
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f27b079
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The most important reason I'd changed my plan, however, had been Caroline. Jerry Carmichael's complete lack of human decency, as well as any sense of parental responsibility -- much less love -- had shaken her. I'd been up-close-and-personal with a hundred guys like Jerry Carmichael. They had jaded me about human beings and what they were capable of. Nothing that had come out of Jerry's mouth shocked me; surprised me, perhaps, but not shock..
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Bobby Underwood |
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91d2311
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Even in this state, after what had been done to her, she was beautiful. Behind the pain in her eyes lived spring, if they hadn't crushed it into a permanent winter." - Night Run"
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Bobby Underwood |
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3d86ef0
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Something about the way he had avoided looking directly at me despite his gracious manner made me think he could go from funny to dangerous in the blink of an eye.
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Bobby Underwood |
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0724026
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I heard it first. Footsteps. They were faint, and not localized in any particular area, but they were footsteps. The sound was like an echo from very far away. If they were the kind of footsteps I believed them to be, they were coming from very far away, indeed. A chilly wind blew past me and Jasper barked, which woke Deanna, who was by my side in an instant. "Did you hear it, Mike? Sometimes there's a cold." No sooner had she spoken than ..
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Bobby Underwood |
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7e030bb
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Her faith in him to protect her warmed his heart on one hand, and worried him on the other; how could he protect any of them from what he could not see, much less explain?
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Bobby Underwood |
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77928c1
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Minerals! The invaders had virtually wiped out our entire race for minerals. But then, who were we to complain, when for centuries elements of mankind had wiped out other races and peoples over oil, land and space, and differing beliefs about the hereafter? It was chilling to think we had anything in common with an alien race implementing genocide, but perhaps they were doing on a galactic scale what we had -- at least so far -- confined to..
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Bobby Underwood |
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384c5c0
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The city itself was dead. Some buildings had chunks missing. Bricks and concrete were scattered along sidewalks, debris mingling with bodies. Once this had been a thriving metropolis with a heartbeat all its own. Now it was a corpse, with no morgue big enough to house it. Nothing can ever prepare you for the eeriness of a great city emptied of humanity. In that small room in each of our souls where loneliness makes its home, our fear that w..
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Bobby Underwood |
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bc79308
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Finally he turned to me, his eyes shifting from compassion to business in a heartbeat. "You didn't bring me out here for that, you must need something. Who exactly are you, and how are you playing this?"
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Bobby Underwood |
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d4a0e75
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Jennifer and Mark were a reminder that they weren't all a lost cause. It was just a shame they were in such a minority group. Maybe they could start a movement: Decent People's Lives Matter. It could be all inclusive, even accept cops in their charter. Probably wouldn't get any traction with the PC crowd, though. Not the "right" kind of people, or the "right" kind of cause."
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Bobby Underwood |
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4ad86f3
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Wyn could never be afraid of death, because he had already died, that night, so long ago.
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Bobby Underwood |
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0fa4d61
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She began to run again, her legs shaky, her head throbbing, fear reaching into the pit of her stomach and making it difficult to breathe. Pieces of...people littered the street like gruesome confetti. She walked in a desperate dance of fading hope beside others also searching, unwilling to accept that their world had changed in an instant. A man who had no chest lay in the rubble. Someone's grandmother wailed in an unfamiliar language for h..
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Bobby Underwood |
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0eb5340
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It was after midnight by a mile when I slid off the bar stool at O'Malley's and began to walk home. O'Malley's is an old Irish pub and though I wasn't Irish, nor did I drink like a lot of other newspaper reporters I knew, I stopped by for a Coke nearly every evening. I liked listening to other reporters -- and cops, who also frequented O'Malley's -- shoot the breeze and relate old stories that hadn't been completely true the first time they..
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Bobby Underwood |
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63269e8
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The stars were out and bright, and the moon was close to full. There were no UFOs hovering over the trailer or anywhere else that I could see. It might seem strange to be so nonchalant about it all, but you get used to the weird if you live in Crystal Falls.
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Bobby Underwood |
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826350f
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Two weeks can seem like two years when people are in love, and no one had ever been in love the way we were in love. Or so we thought, of course, as all true lovers do. But when you wake up in paradise each morning, it is only natural to reach for more than heaven will allow. That was the mistake I made, and it changed everything...
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Bobby Underwood |
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93bcc02
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Jeanette once told me that video games and mainstream entertainment were like marketing tools for the confused and disconnected youth of America. She believed society and its moral center, its sense of propriety and right and wrong, black and white, had become so corrupted on a basic level that one day all decent people would become overwhelmed and disconnect from society in Howard Hughes fashion. You had to worry when someone as smart and ..
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Bobby Underwood |
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cdb8288
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And lastly were the single women. They would run the gamut from somewhat pretty to somewhat plain, dreadful, incurable diseases that had relegated them to lives of obscurity and boredom. They were hardly unattractive, each having something special to offer, but their figures and faces were more real than the latest Hollywood celebrity gracing the magazine cover at their local supermarket checkout. Outcasts in a non-substantive culture which..
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Bobby Underwood |
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36c0486
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She sounds wonderful, and just what you need, someone to rescue and adore. And she needed someone who would truly believe she's even more wonderful now than she was before. People who poo-poo sudden love do so simply because they are afraid to risk their own heart in such a manner. They dismiss that indefinable magic between two people who through some miracle we'll never understand and shouldn't try to, actually find each other in this cra..
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Bobby Underwood |
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1fbddea
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Paris is a sensuous woman every man has loved, even if only in his dreams. Once he has been deep inside her, walked her streets and tasted her delights, he can never forget her. Yet no matter how strong the memory of her remains, it cannot prepare him for the sheer beauty of her nakedness as he gazes upon her for the second time; the intoxicating fragrance of her hair as it brushes against him as it did when she let him love her; the softne..
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Bobby Underwood |
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dc65611
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He was, or had been, a heavyweight drug dealer, a smug, amoral son-of-a-bitch who thought he could murder a nice young Columbian woman who was to testify against him, then pay me to look the other way. It was an arrogance borne of experience and prior successes.
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Bobby Underwood |
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0b4bd7d
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Off in the distance big white cruise ships had pulled into port, glistening beneath the Mexican sun. Vacationers for whom murder was not on the itinerary. Throngs of young college kids on break, males and females looking to party and get laid without strings or consequence. They'd be wearing T-shirts with captions uttered by some inconsequential reality television personality, or worse, an Obama logo. They'd smoke as much cannabis as they c..
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Bobby Underwood |
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fbaf6cd
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Another tear rolled slowly down her cheek, like liquid pain escaping from her broken heart.
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Bobby Underwood |
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957ede5
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Depending on whether you were a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty sort it was either very late at night or the wee hours of morning as I cast my line into the aquamarine waters of Cozumel and saw her head sticking up out of the low tide about twenty yards to my left.
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Bobby Underwood |
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b829b3c
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I was at least four-hundred miles from life of any kind on this particular night when it began to rain. It was one of those summer rains that come down in buckets but pass quickly. I had a full load and no desire to slide off into a ditch so I gradually slowed, the air brakes whining like a lonely animal in the deep darkness. I pulled off onto the gravel shoulder and that's when I saw her. I came close to rolling over her because of the rai..
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Bobby Underwood |
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b02c382
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You rarely saw the celebs protesting anything of substance. The Glades weren't a sexy enough cause, but give the latest blonde-haired twenty-something who'd just hit it big on TV six or seven horn-tailed, red-spotted, sticky-beaked, pigeon-toed, multi-striped tree-owls who might occasionally fly over the two-mile zone pumping millions of barrels of oil out of the ground, and suddenly she began to feel a stronger connection to the land than ..
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Bobby Underwood |
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e59a463
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I hadn't seen Krista Wallace for several years and the emotions it stirred when I did set eyes on her again surprised me. We had been a summer fling on the beaches of Ecuador, a brief yet sweet encounter before my intoxicating affair with Josselyn began. Perhaps the intensity of the latter had unfairly overshadowed the former.
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Bobby Underwood |
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e285652
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Night had fallen on Manta by the time we awoke and a cooling breeze was rustling the palm fronds of the tree outside our window. We could hear laughter below as the nightlife of Manta got underway. Girls dressed for clubbing were leaving the hotel hoping to have their world rocked after a night of dancing and wake up to discover he really was Prince Charming in disguise. In truth he would be the tatted-up, dumbed-down, self-involved bad-boy..
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Bobby Underwood |
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0ae03f2
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I wondered not for the first time what it was about Spanish churches that gave them a reverence often lacking in others. Was it because those who attended them were usually poor, and more reliant on faith to see them through? Was it the symbols which gave parishioners a reminder of faith rewarded?
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Bobby Underwood |
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585a390
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It was raining hard the evening Holly died. One of those summer rains that seem to come from nowhere and catch all but the most compulsively weather-conscious off guard. She was beautiful, Holly, and much too good for me by a long stretch. Big soulful eyes. A beautiful face framed in a flowing mane of brunette hair that would lift along the edges at the slightest breeze. Full soft lips that conveyed warmth and sunshine when she smiled, and ..
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Bobby Underwood |
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a69088f
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A tall, leggy French girl on her way to work was looking at her phone and almost walked into me as I crossed the street. I dodged her just in time and she glanced back to give me a dirty look. How dare I not realize the importance of her early morning text message. I wondered how humanity managed to work and accomplish things before our time in history; the invention of electricity, the radio and the light bulb; creating the combustion engi..
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Bobby Underwood |
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a5c7af5
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I liked the beat, too -- Hollywood and the City of Angels. It had been a long time since any angels had appeared here, but enough of the old buildings and old stars still hung around to remind you of what she'd been once, in a world far, far away.
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Bobby Underwood |
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984cbaf
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He suspected in another decade or so the railroad might have laid track right into Santa Barbara. Everything would be connected soon, Wyn imagined with some sadness. Something would be lost when a man no longer had to ride his horse hundreds of miles across dangerous country to get to the next state, or territory. Already things were changing. Soon, men like Wyn would have to search for places still wild, where a man could holler in the mor..
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Bobby Underwood |
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3495b7f
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Alan Ladd as Neale Jordan Veronica Lake as Ellen Hillman Mike Mazurki as Paul Fontana Elisha Cook Jr. as Ciro Ricci Gloria Graham as May Martell Frank Lovejoy as Randolph McGraw Hugh Beaumont as Charlie Gray Lloyd Nolan as Victor Haskell June Lockhart as Janet Haskell James Craig as Eddie Lomax Laird Cregar as Frank Perkins William Bendix as Art Barker Richard Denning as Jerry Markle James Gleason as Sam Menard Tom Drake as Roy Douglas Dick..
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Bobby Underwood |
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afdbc75
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I was disappointed and relieved at the same time; disappointed because I'd wanted to meet Eddie face to face, get a bead on how all the pieces I had so far tied together; relieved because if Eddie only wanted to give me a message, we weren't at the shooting stage yet. An incurable case of lead poisoning might come later.
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Bobby Underwood |