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3c9e20a
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parking
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Greg Iles |
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8c35199
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Just because you will not see the work completed, does not mean you are free not to take it up.
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Greg Iles |
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treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism--the most destructive forces available to man.
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Greg Iles |
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19d7f34
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PET scan and gene therapy. "I need you"
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Greg Iles |
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6eb9b88
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The colonel had a single vice--whiskey--and he looked forward to the anesthetic burn of the Kentucky bourbon with sublime anticipation.
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Greg Iles |
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e6d7a4c
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trees
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Greg Iles |
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2276d72
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into another identity. And I
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Greg Iles |
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2bc0299
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There is always something.
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Greg Iles |
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elbowed Danny. "You think Shields is the father of that baby?"
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Greg Iles |
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e774766
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White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, 'What's the problem with the blacks?' The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.
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Greg Iles |
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1c3083e
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masked man beats her with the bottle, which doesn't break, thank God. But then he rips off her panties and rapes her with it. Both holes. Serious trauma, but mostly in the back.
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Greg Iles |
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ae13ea9
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William Faulkner ever said wasn't written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it's not even past.
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Greg Iles |
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fervent, will not cure the afflicted. Nor
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Greg Iles |
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65bb425
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Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim drama..
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Greg Iles |
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51993b9
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carefully negotiated his way
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Greg Iles |
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a5911b1
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Sheriff Dennis lifts an Ole Miss coffee mug off the desk and spits tobacco juice into it. "I like spitting on the Rebels," he says distractedly."
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Greg Iles |
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notebooks.
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Greg Iles |
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be1e252
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kidnaping.
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Greg Iles |
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40d849a
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Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish
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Greg Iles |
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sleeve,
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Greg Iles |
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lot. She saw a guy carrying a small suitcase out
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Greg Iles |
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Quentin finishes with the limb and sits up. "Who wears the pants in your family, man?" "That depends on the issue." --
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Greg Iles |
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c98c4f2
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Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.
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Greg Iles |
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Mia's eyes for too long would send me straight down the road Drew has already traveled. The reality of a stunningly beautiful and intelligent young woman explaining why it's all right for you to make love to her is enough to make any male lose all capacity for rational thought. In my mind I hear Wade Anders telling me that the hardest thing he ever did was turn down the girls who've come on to him in his office. Those girls, I am certain, w..
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Greg Iles |
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8e78166
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But what refuses to leave my mind is the image of Drew and Kate making love before the camera. Mia viewed that photograph with me and felt no embarrassment at all. On the contrary, she wants to experience the same intensity she saw there with me. More than that, she's telling me beforehand that I'll have no obligation to her. Evolutionary nirvana, Caitlin called it. God, was she right.
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Greg Iles |
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d0370ad
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Will on the phone, the sooner you stop bleeding." Hickey dialed a number and"
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Greg Iles |
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e5e1171
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hair. He's bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged." I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired. "I figured you'd be waiting for me." "Dad, we've got to talk." Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face..
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Greg Iles |
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d2fe460
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The naivete of human beings is truly breathtaking
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Greg Iles |
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9312e8b
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chopper's
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Greg Iles |
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b65aa19
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God is merely a part of the human brain, an evolutionary coping mechanism that developed to make bearable our awareness of our own deaths. When
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Greg Iles |
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92e6009
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But now that I've seen the reality up close, I understand white frustration. Black people here are just different. Not all of them, but so many. I don't know why. Maybe it's because this was one of the biggest slaveholding cotton counties along the river. I don't know. I used to think it was ignorance, but I'm starting to see it as willful ignorance, and maybe worse.
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Greg Iles |
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ba6aa1a
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Their belligerence in public places, their rudeness...there's almost a pride in ignorance here. Black employees refuse to wait on white customers in stores. They treat incompetence as though it's some kind of act of civil disobedience. I'm sick of it, Penn.
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Greg Iles |
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And the black politicians...my God. I've watched black aldermen do patently illegal things and then brag about it. They don't care whether something is legal or not." "White politicians abused the system for years, Caitlin. They just did it in a more subtle way." "I know that. But is that an excuse for blacks to repeat the abuses of the old system? The system Martin Luther King and Malcolm X died to dismantle?"
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Greg Iles |
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f503fa0
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fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended
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Greg Iles |
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63bda4b
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The system is broken! And one of the reasons it's broken down here is that it's largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise any longer." I can't believe it. Like so many Yankee transplants, Caitlin has had a dramatic change of heart on the issue of race. But though I've seen it before, I would never have expected it from her. "That's a pretty racist..
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Greg Iles |
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down to brass tacks. What have you
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Greg Iles |
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ca06611
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Caitlin is right, although her argument would probably offend every woman on the jury.
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Greg Iles |
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some of what she said actually offended me. Caitlin truly was a liberal when she arrived in Natchez, and she routinely chastised me for being too conservative. But now it seems that her liberal "convictions" weren't convictions at all, but rather easy opinions based on the lectures of Ivy League professors. After a few years in the South, she's ready to give up on racial harmony and flee to more "enlightened"--read homogenous--environs."
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Greg Iles |
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As I ponder Sonny's life and death, it strikes me that, whatever his prejudices, he was one of the quiet heroes of this country.
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Greg Iles |
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daaad33
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wait
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Greg Iles |
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I'm not sure Shad's worried about that. You said it yourself, his concern is the special election. That means making good on his promise to make the system equal, i.e., to nail a rich white man. That's what will get Shad a unified black vote. I expect Judge Minor to move as fast as legally possible.
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Greg Iles |
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8456103
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I've sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what's around them--light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep,
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Greg Iles |
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55c6c6c
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Of course you have. I'm a man, and I respond to all that you are. But I also feel things that a father feels for a daughter. Mainly, I feel very protective of you. And my first duty is to protect you from me.
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Greg Iles |
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cd76617
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When drug dealers get killed--black or white--the public perception is that the victims simply got what was coming to them. When a young girl is raped and murdered--black or white--our knowledge of the primitive laws of attraction and male sexual dominance informs our response. But when middle-aged white people minding their own business are murdered in their home in the safest part of town, the fundamental order of Southern life is thrown ..
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Greg Iles |