It begins with Lew Brookbank drunkenly driving up the Florida highways in the middle of the night with a bottle of gin and a bunch of signs. The mood of this piece starts right at the beginning. "The bottle is on the floor of the car. He reached in, brought it out, uncapped it, and read the label." He hated Florida and wished he could get away from it -from "every last flat wet stinking acre." "He drove sullenly now, feeling the rotten core of what was always with him, down inside his vitals, squeezing and tugging at his heart." He has plenty to drink about. It had been four months earlier "when he had swum out to Clarkson's yacht, the Bayou Belle, and found his wife, Janice, and that pop-eyed Lousiana on one of the bunks in the deck cabin. Thinking of it again, remembering the everlasting pain, his heart seemed to squeeze dry like a sponge. Like a scream." And with that, the reader is lost inside Lew's world - Lew's painful, alcoholic, depressed world. Of course, he didn't just catch Janice in the act, but remembered: "Janice's face was frozen in the throes of her lust. Whether or not death changed things, her eyes were glazed with that wild, wanton, uncaring passion."

He left that city and found another town, another name, another life. Made a sort of living painting signs and drinking. Until one night, he overhears a couple plotting what might be a kidnapping and murder of a man's wife and thinks he can figure out a way to cut himself into the boodle that is going to paid in ransom. "Somehow she didn't' appear to be the type of dame who would plot murder. Her face was faintly heart-shaped under a dark blonde mass of rich ringlets, swept up around her head." "She walked a shade on the balls of her feet, her behind bouncing, her skirt clinging tightly to her hips and thighs. It wasn't overdone, but it had tremendous sock and she knew it."

It is a terrific story. It is solidly noir. It is dark, foreboding, depressing, miserable. Boy, can Brewer write. This story just sails along and it is filled with intense emotion and solid description. ( )