"You're nothing but a double dealer, and a more ruthless bastard than ever I was," I told him. "You let all those people die so that you could retrieve this box?"

He laughed. "No one has died. No one has been hurt. Did you not wonder how you missed me when you fired 'pon me? Your companion neglected to include balls in the pistols. We deceived you with empty firearms and false blood from the stage."

It was then, over the stench from the discharged pistol, that I began to smell something else. A stench like rotted eggs-and rotted meat and rotted teeth. Then, into the room walks Farting Dan, Thomas Lane by his side.

"I knew you had the box in your rooms," Farting Dan announces, "but as you would tell no one where your rooms were, I could not sell that information. I knew the way you'd have to pass, though, so Thomas and I rode ahead of you and waited for you to glide by. You were so intent in getting home, so certain you were now safe, you did not notice us behind you."

"You've betrayed me," I shouted at Farting Dan. "Why?"

"For money," he said with a shrug.

"It's a good reason," I answered, "and I'll not fault you for it."

"Now," Dan says to Weaver, "take the box and be off with ye. That was our bargain, and I expect you'll honor it."

Weaver nodded. "I should like to bring you to justice, Fisher, but I will honor my word. You'd be wise not to cross my path in the future, however."

And so it was that he lifted the box in his arms, and he and his companion left my rooms.

In silence we waited as we heard their heavy steps down the stairs, then the slam of the front door. Farting Dan went to the window and watched for some minutes, and I watched him. Then at last he turned to me and broke the silence. "Not too tight, I hope, them ropes?"

"I done it myself," I says.

"You comfortable?" he asks.

"Shut your gob and untie me," I says. "You get the last payment?" He cut through the ropes with his knife. "Ten more guineas, as promised."

With my hands free, I stood and rubbed my wrists. "A lot of nonsense for twenty guineas," I says. "Particularly since the contents of that box must be worth a hundred times that."

"Twenty guineas is better than nothing, which is what the box was worth to us if we couldn't get it open. And we got it without fear of a hanging, or having to do business with a fence. Not bad in my thinking."

He was right, too. That Farting Dan was a practical fellow, and a clever one. I'd have never thought of this plan on my own. But that was Dan. Always thinking. And always farting.

Gregg Hurwitz

As a deputy U.S. marshal tasked with transporting inmates and hunting down fugitives, Gregg Hurwitz's protagonist, Tim Rackley, finds himself in and around prisons on a daily basis. The Kill Clause, Rackley's first thriller, begins with Rackley learning about his seven-year-old daughter's murder. From there, he's drawn into a shadowy commission of men seeking justice outside the law. The Program brought Rack-ley inside a deadly mind control cult, when he was tasked with retrieving the missing daughter of a powerful Hollywood producer. For research, Hurwitz went undercover into mind control cults and submitted himself to cult testing.

Troubleshooter, the next Rackley thriller, opens with the leader of an outlaw biker gang pulling off a daring freeway escape while being driven from sentencing to prison. Clearly, the Rackley series grapples with issues of vigilantism-justice versus the law-each book offering Rackley's ever-evolving perspective. In the course of researching each of the Tim Rackley books, Hurwitz himself spent time behind bars, getting to know the men and women who keep the prisons running.

Dirty Weather was inspired by them.

DIRTY WEATHER

He was handsome in a dirty sort of way, lank hair shoved back over his ears, muscles firm beneath a white button-up shirt he wore untucked with the sleeves cuffed past the forearms. He'd slipped into Frankie's Furlough quietly, a swirl of biting wind from the still-closing door conveying him to the far end of the bar. The rickety building stuck out from a snowdrift off the interstate as if hurled there. The interior smelled of sawdust, which layered the floor, soaking up spilled booze and the melted sludge of tracked-in earth.

Home to truckers, twelve-steppers who'd fallen off the staircase, and most often, correctional officers, the Furlough had been something of a roadside institution ever since Frankie had taken his pension from the big house and parlayed it into four walls, a roof of questionable efficacy and a red-felt pool table. He'd done well for himself, too, though it wasn't apparent from the looks of the place.

The surrounding landscape had been stripped bare by winter, trees thrusting like forked sticks out of gray rises of snow. Few signs of life persisted in the stretch of Michigan freeze: a liquor store across the frontage road, a long-closed diesel station, a sloped gravel turnoff for runaway semis. And then a stark ten-mile crawl north to the only employer of significance in the county, the Upper Ridgeway State Men's Correctional Facility, which rose from behind a stark shelf of white cedars like a secret no one had bothered to keep secret.

Laura finished twirling a pint glass on a towel, her attention drawn back to the stranger at the end of the bar. He'd walked with a slight limp, which interested her. Also, he kept his gaze on the lacquered birch veneer instead of on her breasts (her most attractive feature were she to judge by the eye traffic of Furlough's fine patrons) or her rounded but still-firm thirty-six-year-old ass. Her face wasn't bad either, this she knew, but it had collected age around the eyes and at the line of her jaw. And the skin of the neck. Nothing to be done there. His face, by contrast, was more youthful-she put him in his late twenties-but it was quite pale, almost unhealthily so, as if he were used to living in a warmer climate.

Between small, measured sips, he turned the bottle in his hands as if he'd never seen a beer before. Contemplativeness, in Frankie's Furlough, was something of a rarity. In contrast, Rick Jacobs was all swagger, shooting solids against Myron's stripes. Barrel chest, thermal undershirt, beard, weekend game-hunter- Rick was a carbon copy of a carbon copy. Ever since he'd joined up with the Asphalt Cruisers, Rick asked people to call him Spike. Despite his efforts, the nickname hadn't taken. He had a penchant for racist jokes and loud belching, and the tremors hit him if he got forty waking minutes from a bottle of Glenlivet. That's why he was here, even during a blizzard that kept the entire county shuttered in except for Laura, who would've burrowed through snow with her bare hands to get some fresh air after playing nurse, and Myron, who Rick had no doubt bullied into playing sidekick. Just good country people, Rick and Myron, quick with a grin and a left hook.

Rick paused, his ass in front of the fire that Laura persistently kept going. Her father had built the brick hearth with his own two hands, an act of masculine creation he reminded her of at least once a week, even though he'd rarely gotten around to using it when he was running the show. He didn't believe in burning resources; this was a hewn-featured man, powerful even in his decline, who still banged about the house wearing the Shetland wool sweater he'd bought on a trip to Montreal during the 1967 Expo.

The stranger caught her next glance and flared a finger from the bottle. She headed over, trailing a soft hand along the bar. "Another?"

"Nah, just a pack of Reds, please."

"No boozing and cruising," she said, sliding the cigarettes across the bar. "Smart choice. You'll wind up on the other side of the bars."