Gritty, suspenseful short fiction about criminals and other characters on the edge from an Edgar Award–winning author.
A hit man who refuses a commission goes into hiding, afraid that everybody who looks twice at him may be carrying a bullet with his name on it. A Vietnam veteran plots revenge on the commanding officer who sent his troops into a cloud of Agent Orange; a ward of hospitalized WWII soldiers schemes to find the whereabouts of the lost love of one of their mates before he dies. A has-been boxer trains for a big bout without realizing he’s been set up; a New Orleans clarinet player skips around town one step ahead of a creditor’s enforcers long enough to audition for the Jazz Hall of Fame. . . . In every case, there’s no mystery about who’s guilty . . . but only about whether they will succeed in their fatal plots, get rescued from their own worst nature, or, in the trickiest of these nine stories, succeed but fail anyway.
