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. Gwen and Bill
were tailed up behind me. Gwen had her purse hooked over her neck and was
guarding the bonsai maple with one arm and clinging to my ankle with her other
hand; Bill was holding on to one of her ankles and towing a package wrapped in
Macy's wrapping, with Macy's logo prominent on it. I don't know what that
wrapping paper originally covered but it now concealed Gwen's smaller case, her
not-clothes.
Our other baggage? Following the first principle of saving one's neck, we'd
chucked it. It would have marked us as phony-for a one-day side trip Shriners on
holiday do not carry great loads of baggage. Gwen's smaller case we could
salvage because, disguised with Macy's wrapping, it looked like the sort of
shopping many of the Shriners had obviously done. And so did the little
tree-just the sort of awkward, silly purchase tourists indulge in. But the rest
of our baggage had to be abandoned.
Oh, perhaps it could be shipped to us someday, if safe means could be
worked out. But I had written it off our books. Doc Schultz, by scolding me for
crabbing over the cost of the deal Gwen had arranged, had reoriented me. I had
let myself become soft and sedentary and domesticated-he had forced me to shift
gears to the real world, where there are only two sorts:
the quick and the dead.
A truth of which I again became acutely aware in crossing that waiting
room: Chief Franco came in behind us
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