It involves another drifter, another loser, who finds himself involved somehow in a huge bank robbery, in murder and kidnapping. He also has a past: Jinny, the old nightmare he couldn't rid himself of. Jinny was another faithless woman. He found her one afternoon in the backroom of his shop, making it with his friend. Theirs had been an innocent pure romance, walking through the square in Santa Fe right after it rained, cutting across the park. Jim had come into the shop and saw Les "had her up on the work bench between the vise and the table saw. She wore a white fluffy dress. She squealed with delight." The blood was then all over everything amid the screaming. He explained: "Blood shot all over the workshop behind the Navajo blanket curtains of the front part of the store, as I carefully fashioned Les Pine into something that would look like a man when he wore clothes. If he lived." After several months in the asylum, Jim came home and "found Jinny in the same fluffy white dress, hanging with her arms in the bathtub, her head hanging, kneeling on the floor." "She had cut her wrists with a leather-working gouge. They hung in tepid water which faintly resembled tomato soup." Wow and that's just the background to explain Jim's state of mind. No one writes like Gil Brewer. These characters are just filled with too much emotion and pain for any human to bear.

He works as a clerk in a liquor store and is months behind in all his bills. But, this one involves a more classic femme fatale: Felice Anderson. She had a husband, but "So far that hadn't mattered, the way we'd looked at each other when she came to the store to order booze." "She could balance your libido with her eyes." "She reached and held her thick black hair up away from her head, those dark lips spread and the white teeth gleaming with an expression that was pure animal." Felice entices Jim with her rape fantasies and then pushes him to rob the bank and murder her husband, the bank manager. Meanwhile, Jim robbed the liquor store where he worked and beat a cop in the process and there's a detective using his vacation time to chase down who did it. The detective has his eye on Jim as Jim and Felice are trying to pull off the million-dollar caper.
( )