The Turquoise Shroud Quotes

“Bad things seem to happen when you're around, don't they, Halliday?”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“Old enough to vote, too stupid to realize the consequences.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“When politicians continually campaign on saving something, that's when you can be absolutely certain of its demise.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“The tattoo craze had begun with the young and now it was simply part of a culture which got less substantive day-by-day. They wanted to be different, unique, differentiating themselves from each other, and in doing so had all become the same.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“The Coroner's Office didn't look any different from the rest of Cozumel. It was colorful in that Spanish flavor; an orange-brown background trimmed in soft yellow only slightly brighter than pastel. Palm trees kissed each corner. It was set back from the thoroughfare some distance and well-manicured shrubbery lined the long brick walkway leading to the entrance. Massive Ceiba trees -- ironically, the Mayan tree of life -- shielded curious tourists from reality. The sight of dead people was not compatible to festivity, nor would it encourage vacationing gringos to spend often and unwisely.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 the Ancient Ones, the Anasazi.
Two months later of course, the only red-spotted, sticky-beaked creature in sight would be the little blonde's flush face when she made it on TMZ for failing a breathalyzer test and cursing the cop arresting her, shouting the typical Hollywood star mantra: "Don't you know who I am?”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“We passed close to the docked cruise ships, Temptation and Fascination. Cruise ships are never named Discontent or Exasperation.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 crazy, godawful world.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 inherently decent as Jeanette Miller began talking like that.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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?”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 worshipped only facade, they were hoping for the romance found in the pages of the Harlequins and Harold Robbins novels they read in their bedrooms, a pint of ice cream at their side. Their bedroom was their sanctuary, a place where they could dream of being taken and loved, worshipped and lusted after. If they were lucky, they would take home from Cozumel a sweet memory they would make last a lifetime. Evidence that they had lived. If they were unlucky, they would cross paths with a swarthy local Lothario or worse, a butch cruising for the vulnerable. The unsafe mix of inexperience and loneliness would lead them to acts so shameful and degrading they would never be able to enjoy the innocence of another Harlequin.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 her daughter and son. The old woman had been late joining them. A man who had gone to get the morning paper stood gaping at the charred table where only moments ago his wife had sat.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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 could procure and maybe experiment with some stronger stuff. What happened in Mexico would stay in Mexico; literally for some, who would not be able to remember much of what they had done or let others do while in a stupor borne of tequila body-shots and Ecstasy. Old enough to vote, too stupid to realize the consequences.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“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.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“No one knows more about regret than an old drunk, and no old drunk knew more about living with it than Harry.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“It isn't like in books where the detective gets conked on the head, wakes up and keeps going another 48 hours straight. Exhaustion dulls the senses, impairs the brain and slows down the reflexes. Reaction time in business like this can be the difference between living and dying.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“The human heart buries memories of love, files them away somewhere when they don't work out, because it hurts too much to remember feelings that you have little hope of recapturing. The truth is, you never recapture those exact feelings anyway, because love is different every time you feel it. But the head knows this, not the heart. So the heart buries them deep.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“People think cops always know what they're doing, but a lot of times it's just poking around in the dark till you get a reaction and figure it out from there.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“But for those women too stubborn to accept their part in the failure, it would always be "his fault" for being a jerk, not theirs for being attracted to jerks. Anger would eventually turn to bitterness and before too long all men were jerks.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“I wondered as I watched people leaning out to snap digital photographs if the ability to capture the technical reality of a place took away from the feeling of it, and muted the memory forever. A picture in the mind was a picture in the heart, but a picture on paper or on a computer was only relevant when it was taken out or clicked on to view. Another way in which society was distancing itself from living, perhaps. Life could no longer be enjoyed unless we could send it on a phone so friends we rarely thought of and who rarely thought of us could see how much fun we were having.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“I'm one of the two people left on the planet who doesn't own a cell phone and doesn't want one.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“Old Harry, who knew more about boats and the sea than anybody I knew, was sleeping off last night's tequila on my big cruiser/houseboat, Stella. She'd been named after Gail Russell's character in an old classic film titled, The Uninvited. It was Harry's favorite movie.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“Nobody talks about the corrupt American police, though, do they? They only talk about the corrupt Columbian and Mexican law enforcement unable to stop it. There is plenty of corruption, sure, but that's not why it can't be stopped. We both know that. It can't be stopped because, like I said, no one has the guts to do what's necessary to stop it. It's Apocalypse Now.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“That's the way it is in Miami. There are good guys and bad guys and sometimes the twain do meet.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud

“How is Maria's mother doing, if I may ask?" His tone became less formal. "She is very well, thank you. She is quite involved in charity work and has those who love her around her, I believe. It helps." "I'm sure it does." I considered carefully my next words.”
― Bobby Underwood, The Turquoise Shroud