Thom
Johns

Two days before the wedding, they killed her. Then they told the police he did it.

Deke Mercer cracks safes. Good work, quiet work, strictly small-time, and that's how he wants it, because there was another Deke Mercer once, in another place, doing things the world's better off not remembering. Then a rigged job sets the wrong box in front of him: the Vetri Family's tribute, four hundred thousand in Mafia cash headed for New York. The Family doesn't eat a loss like that quietly. They go find the woman he meant to marry, and they fix it so he can never prove he didn't take the money and do it himself.

They should have asked who the box man used to be. Before the locks, before Philadelphia, Deke Mercer spent five years in the jungle running recon with the Montagnards, taking a whole structure apart one man at a time and never once being seen. The men who taught him that work taught him how to finish it.

So now he's coming up through the Vetri Family from the bottom, fence to soldier to capo to boss, and he leaves the same card on every body he makes. The ace of spades. A debt that settles one way only. In blood, and in full.

The whole country is hunting him. He's hunting the men who own it.

The Vetri Family is finished, and the men who sat above them have noticed. The Mafia's national Commission does the one thing it almost never does and puts an open contract on the man the papers are calling the Debt Collector: no territory, no permission needed, any button man in America, name your price.

Deke Mercer's answer is to stop running and start reading. A dead assassin left a list, the quiet market that sells killers to the families, and Deke means to work all the way up it. Detroit. Chicago. A horse farm in Virginia where the money wears a good coat and calls itself something else.

At the top of that list is the officer who built the machine, who spent the Montagnards like ammunition and walked away clean. He knows the one thing that can send Deke Mercer back to a war everyone swears is over.

The bombs fell. The rich went underground. Now they want their planet back.

Twenty years ago the wealthy sealed themselves into a luxury bunker and left the world to burn. The survivors called them the Undug, the ones who should have stayed buried. Now they're crawling back up in spotless white armor, and they've brought paperwork.

The Mongrels are five strays and a war-rig: a grizzled old mechanic holding it together with scrap and spite, a mute kid who talks in clicks, a widow who names every bullet after someone the Reserve killed, a scarred soldier with impeccable manners, and a punk who swings a Fender bass like a warhammer. When the water town of Sump hires them to stand off an eviction notice, it looks like easy money.

Then they crack a courier's case and find the truth. The Reserve doesn't want the town. It wants the pump, and what they mean to put in the water will quietly end the whole low country in a generation, while everyone left alive thanks them for it. Sump is going to sell the Mongrels out. They're going back anyway.