It was a slow week. Business at the end of the summer usually slowed down but the fall always saw an uptick in work. And then she walked into my office. Sexy and seductive. I should have known better. She was a knock-out beauty, sensuous, and thoroughly dangerous. She lied to my face with a soft, sultry voice that somehow made it all sound okay. My gut still told me that every word that passed through those pouty, red-painted lips was a bald-faced lie. She told me that she wanted to hire me to find her long-lost and dearest friend somewhere in the city and laid down a big enough retainer that made me almost think twice about the lies. Velma had her pegged from the minute she walked through my office door, but I took the case anyway. Besides, like I said, it was a slow week and for fifty-bucks-a-day-plus-expenses, a job is a job. From day one, somehow I knew there was more to the case than just an innocent, runaway girl from New York City. It wasn’t long before I found that my client wasn’t at all what she said she was and she wasn’t the only one looking for this dame, either. I’d find out fast just how treacherous the search would become. I got the sense that I was constantly being tailed and knowing I was in somebody’s crosshairs with a target painted on my back kept me on my toes the whole time. I wasn’t wrong. Gangsters, street thugs and more lawyers than I could shake a stick at, I finally put it all together and the ugly truth came out. I found a loophole to slip through their loopholes, and when I did, it stopped everyone involved dead in their tracks. A true edge-of-your-seat yarn in the great tradition of American noir detective stories. Readers will keep guessing until the sucker-punch at the end.
