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Show Acting Alone Page 405 Ironically enough, it had been Mrs. Wamsutter herself who'd made her son feel guilty about destroying the Edwine boy's face. It had been she who, in all her bounteous motherly kindness, had coerced Sgt. Spikewell into infuriating the whole powerful Nimrod tribe by repenting of his murderousness and reopening negotiations with Nimrod, Jr.'s competitor. The call from the degenerate tropics of Escondido to the vapid English secretary at KSU had merely firmed things up in Sammy's mind. For the sake of his own interests, as opposed to those of the Nimrods' , Elder Cicerone had seen to it that the boy got back across the border in one piece and unapprehended. Nomadic desert-dwelling polygamist tribes, sects splintered from the main trunk of the Elder's otherwise redoubtably unified church, control the greater portion of the border region "and will cooperate with anybody for a price (usually virgins or lomotil in bulk); they can somehow spirit even a shady character like Sammy - a perfect fit for the border police's smuggler profile - across to America with no problem, no body cavity searches nor seven-year detentions nor anything of the kind, even if his rancid knapsack is full of contraband fungi rotting and bursting with nefarious leftist poison, and a mindless, bestial little slut is clinging to his shirttails, fairly reeking of Mann Act violation. There was a definite chance, after all that international bother, after all the silly dossier business and the tedium of extracting Sammy from the paws of the promiscuous brat, that his work might simply fail to capture America's popular imagination. The Elder's rather inspired idea of having Sammy couch the urgent message of Armageddon in the climactic passages of a thinly-disguised "psychosexual biography" might simply turn out, in terms |
