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to have no sense of humor. |
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With a deep sigh, Mike sat down with a filled mug at the small wooden table in the cabin's kitchen area. Had he been home, he would have opened the Los Angeles Times, delivered to his door, to check the business section for any stories on Arlen's Kitchens before turning to the stock market's shenanigans. Here he did not even have a television. He was addicted to working with his hands, and he picked up the only magazines he subscribed toon do-it-yourself projectsat his weekly visit to his post office box in Barstow. He had no idea what was happening on Wall Street or in the rest of the world. He still didn't care. |
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Yet maybe he had been here too long. His mind kept flashing back to his strange hallucinations of stars that moved and emotions that did not belong to himgentler emotions that did not fit his frustration and anger. Maybe his overwrought subconscious was telling him to return to civilization. |
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No! Mike slammed the mug on the table. He did not want to go back, not even to all that was waiting for him: his business, Arlen's Kitchens, the quickest-growing fast-food chain in the West. And all the money it made him that had enabled him to afford the house in the Hollywood Hills and his wife, Dixie. |
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He still had the house to go home to. But what he had done to Dixie . . . |
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No, he was not ready to go back. He had left reliable deputies in charge, and if they ran the |
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