”Floyd Weathers killed a man with a baseball bat when he was twenty-seven years old and foolin’ around with this hot mess of a girl in way-west Texas,”Floyd Weathers killed a man with a baseball bat when he was twenty-seven years old and foolin’ around with this hot mess of a girl in way-west Texas, town by the name of Malvado, one of those dusty wasteland settlements a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande that hadn’t known even a dull gleam in decades. Potholed streets lined with crumbling pale brick and peeled paint and boarded-up shattered windows. Grim faces watched you pass. It was a place no one paid any attention to. No one. You felt so removed from civilization that the earth was rug-flat and you were underneath it, in the deep dark with the grime and the smokybrown roaches.
Just the way Floyd liked it.”
Floyd was laying low, waiting for that phone call, the one that was going to give him a score big enough to allow himself some room to breathe for a while. He just needed to not fuck it up, and staying in a shithole town among the dregs of society was supposed to make it easier for him to stay below the radar. Even the devil won’t bother to find him in Malvado.
Sure he’s bored, but he knows there’s an end date.
Maybe too much time for contemplation, but then he’s a pro at staying away from the road graded parts of his brain. The places where his mistakes have started building skyscrapers and monuments to his colossal blunders. When you’re marking time, you have to find a nice place to burrow into your brain like a hibernating bear, keep everything very simple and ignore everything except for the first chirp of that phone call.
Now there is probably a decent looking woman in Malvado. This is the type of place where a four anywhere else becomes a six. If Floyd hung out in a bar long enough, eventually he’d find some bored housewife, maybe a bit chunky but still hanging onto the vestiges of her sex appeal. A mild distraction, but certainly nothing he’d get hung up on.
But that didn’t happen to Floyd.
Tessa Rae Jayne happened to Floyd.
”That scrumptious thing, that sweet split-cherry bottom, that twisty smile. The way she could turn an innocent gesture into a naughty come-on like she wasn’t even trying.”
Floyd was hooked.
Tessa walked like she was trying to put a brushfire out between her legs, but the fact of the matter was, a woman like her showing up in Malvado could only mean one thing…she was running from something. She was hot, hot, hot and not just between the bedsheets.
She believed her Midwest troubles stayed in the Midwest, but Texas, in my experience, always seemed to be the place where trouble finds a lot of wide open space with which to stomp the life out of someone and provide a lonely grave for what was left of them.
Floyd had had enough hard knocks to know better, but there was something about a woman like Tessa that leaves a shank broken off in the cognitive part of a man’s brain. Yes, the sex was fucking amazing. We all know about that particular short circuit of a man’s ability to process, evaluate, and say no fucking way. So when Tessa’s complications landed on them like a barrel of napalm lit by a streaking meteorite, Floyd should be blazing a trail for a new zip code, but what could a man do about a woman that kept him in a constant state of aroused, blissful, contemplative lust that was indistinguishable from…love. Well, the only thing he could do is ratchet the shotgun, tighten his sphincter, and jump right in the fucking middle of it.
I described this book to someone as sipping gin from a lit molotov cocktail. Not that I’ve ever done that…because…that would be crazy, but being a man possessing a vivid imagination, I can simulate just about anything. If I were reading this book without knowing who the author was, my first thought would be to believe this was a Charles Willeford book, but with the Texas elements, the name that floats to the cloudy surface of my brain is the Nacogdoches spin wizard of hardboiled hijinks Joe R. Lansdale.
Floyd Tillman Weathers, with his self-destructive tendencies, could have walked right out of the pages of a Jim Thompson novel.
But the thing is, neither Willeford, nor Lansdale, nor Thompson wrote this book. It was the clever Colorado master of mayhem Jason Bovberg, a name I’ve come to associate with high quality, hardboiled entertainment. He’s going to drop you into a whirlwind of pandemonium, so you better buckle up your seatbelt. (Doesn’t everyone have a seatbelt on their reading chair or is it just me?)
Hey, if you are like me and already sizzling from this historic, hellish heat wave, you are probably in desperate need for a provocative, titillating, sultry distraction that also provides nonstop, breakneck, tumultuous action, so pour some Jack in your lemonade and get ready to listen to the radials humming on the pavement across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma as Floyd tries to find a happy ending that he never, ever thought would be in the cards.
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