Take the shot. Pull the trigger. Bourbon and Lead just walked in the door…

The whole world is about three drinks behind.

The publisher shifted uneasily in his seat as rain beat on the window.

“The contract,” the leggy writer said. “I’d like to see it, first.”

He chewed his cigarette slowly as he considered throwing back the manuscript. She looked like trouble. Then again, all writers were.

You know the drill. You know the game like the darkest alleys of your own heart…

Bourbon and Lead is available now on Kindle and paperback.

Not sure you’ll take the case?

Run a background check with an excerpt from…

A Cold Death in A Faraway Place by Geoff Holder.

I knocked lightly. She opened up, her expression sharp. She studied me for a moment, her head tilted to one side, then nodded me in. She indicated a hard, wooden chair and poured me a glass of something dark and poisonous-looking.

“Santé,” she said, swallowing a glass of her own in one gulp.

“Santé,” I replied, mirroring her gesture. I coughed as the liquid hit the back of my throat. The fire in the grate had gone out, so the room was bone-chilling cold, but the drink made up for that, burning all the way down into my gut. I’d heard the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon were forbidden from touching the vast quantities of foreign booze that passed through the islands. There weren’t any crops or trees on the islands, so God knows what the moonshine was made of.

“Mademoiselle Panjas—”

“It’s Madame Fourgeon.” Her interruption was swift and brutal. “My husband is from here. He fought in the war. I met him in France; he brought me back here.” She shrugged as if that was the entire story.

“Ah.” I got my brain in gear, summoning up the phantom of my distant French vocabulary. “And your husband is…?”

“Away. Fishing.” Another shrug. “He will be back in a week. Or two. It is a hard life, the fishing.”

I didn’t know how to push the conversation forward. She must have read the confusion in my face because she did the work for me. “You made me a promise once. Long ago and far away.”

“Yes. And I’m sorry I couldn’t… There were orders…nothing I could do…”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “Do not give me excuses. Men always have excuses.” She lit an unfiltered cigarette. Gauloises, I noticed. She offered me one, and we smoked in silence for a moment. The strong, distinctive aroma took me back: my cramped office in France, the piles of paperwork, strong black coffee served in tiny cups, the smell of boot polish, a half-eaten baguette.

“What happened to you after the war?” she asked.

“I guess I got the same deal as a lot of guys. There weren’t many jobs, and something about those who came back from the war… Well, people just didn’t want to hire us. P’haps they thought we were dangerous. And maybe we were. So, you know how it is. I did some day-laboring, got some construction work here and there, hit the road, got a job for a few days, hit the road again. Even tried bare-knuckle fighting for a time.”

“You have the size for it.” She took another drag.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t for me.”

“And now you are a bootlegger.”

“Yeah. This guy I knew in the war worked with explosives. Jelly. Kind of an engineer. He got me hired.”

“Does it pay well?”

I managed a bitter laugh. “Not really. But it’s better than nothing.”

Madame Fourgeon poured us both another shot of liquor and held them up in front of me, just out of my reach. There was something in her face, something I couldn’t read. “He is here, you know,” she said.

“Who is?”

“The man who… The one you were looking for.”