Prologue
RAND WALTER WAS ONE of the increasing number of people living in an alternate universe of drugs or alcohol. Rand preferred drugs. He preferred them to alcohol, sex, just about anything.
He hated Mondays. On any given Monday he would be high on anything he could find and on an especially fateful August Monday evening he was high as a kite on methamphetamine, driving an ancient El Camino that wasn’t his, and tearing blindly down Karen Avenue in Las Vegas at more than double the speed limit. Flashing in and out of consciousness, Rand’s last thought registered the red blur of a stoplight at Maryland Parkway a tenth of a second before he T-boned a Cadillac DeVille.
Rand Walter would never know that he had just killed Joseph “Big Joey” Vicetti, chief enforcer for Antonio Scarpone, capo di tutti capi in Las Vegas, who was driving home to meet his wife for dinner. It was their tenth anniversary and he knew that she had cooked a special dinner like she always did. For that, Rand would have been considered a hero by many of the people to whom Big Joey had applied his unique skills over the years; at least those still alive to tell about it. He would never know that, nor would he ever understand that after killing Big Joey, his own instant death was a blessed gift.
Angelica got the call from the Las Vegas police department at home. The candles on the table, the fine china, and the roast in the oven were for the dinner she planned with her husband. He had been transported to University Medical Center on West Charleston Boulevard. No, they had no information about his condition, she should contact the hospital. The candles, like the roast, were forgotten and left to burn.
Angelica, A Detective Mike Eiser Novel Description:
Angelica Cassidy knows all about survival. Since running away at seventeen, she’s danced on poles, been sawn in half on the magician’s stage, and done some things that are better left unsaid. But her most brazen act by far was marrying Big Joey Vicetti, the head enforcer for the Scarpone crime syndicate. When her husband died in a car accident, Angelica took their son and fled Las Vegas, one step ahead of the Scarpones.
Eleven years later, her nightmare past long behind her, Angelica is an upstanding citizen of Poplar Bluffs, with a thriving business and high hopes for her son, who seems destined for a major university baseball scholarship; until a name from her distant past sends a shock of foreboding and fear travelling down her spine.
Antonio Scarpone—her husband’s former boss—is facing federal trial for multiple racketeering indictments. As the aging Scarpone’s world crumbles around him, he falls into mindless obsession, focusing on one failure, and the one person who alone knows about that failure: the beautiful, young Angelica that slipped out of his control all those years ago. With senility and prison looming, Scarpone is willing to sacrifice himself and his entire organization to ensure Angelica’s death
