“There are advantages to being a seven-foot tall, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Indian with a face like a leather football helmet, but this wasn’t one of them.” - Butch Quick

I need to start this with a story of my own. Several years ago I was hired to ghost a book about bounty hunters. The everyday kind. Not the Dog ones or any of the other melodramatic kind. The ones whose big signs you pass by in the area near the city and/or county lock ups. Regular folk in other words.

The celebrity I was working with had a show that went in the tank, so the project was scrapped. But since I’d spent two months interviewing twenty-some bounty hunters about their jobs I had a decent idea about how they functioned in the world. Some surprises: A good share of bounty hunters are women. Male and female bounty hunters alike tend to ask the police to go along if they think there’s going to be trouble. Bounty hunters rely on computers even more than hackers and writers. Yes, there’s always the prospect of danger but unless you’re involved in a reality show you try to hold it to a minimum.

Right off I liked Brian Knight’s version of a bounty hunter because it seemed realistic.

The other thing I liked, the thing that made this unique and fascinating story even better, was the voice. We read different books for different reasons. There are writers I read for plot. Their characters never strike me as more than spear carriers and there’s never much wit or insight in the psychology but by God, I’m up till three a.m. turning those pages. Then there are writers I read for the way they present and understand their characters. Their plots may not dazzle me that much, but I’m hooked on the human drama. And then there’s voice. To me this is the rarest of all writerly gifts.

All you have to read are two or three paragraphs and you know you’re reading Elmore Leonard. Or Ray Bradbury. Or Lucius Shepard. Brian Knight is young, but with Sex, Death & Honey he’s developing a voice all his own. For me the first-person voice lends itself to a kind of ongoing confession. “I” narrative is filled with opinions whether the writer always intends them or not. And in opinions are truths about how the protagonist (and likely the writer) feels about the world he’s presenting.

I liked this book a great deal. I will now make sure to read everything else Brian Knight publishes if that tells you anything.

Oh—and the story itself. Funny thing. Every time I synopsize a book or movie on my blog readers bitch about how lame I am at boiling things down.

So let me say that Mr. Knight presents a) a plot that will keep you up late at night b) insights into various kinds of life that are rich with wisdom and wit, and c) and a voice you’ll remember for a long, long time to come.

Enjoy.

Ed Gorman,

January 2012

This is Paradise Valley.

The city sits cradled in a valley at the furthest western foot of the Rocky Mountains. Two rivers run through it, the Snake River from south to north, the Clearwater River from east to west, and meet at the port district. Its major exports are paper, lumber, and grain. Its major imports are drugs and pain.

Paradise Valley is also a tourist hot spot. We have the gateway to Hells Canyon, America’s deepest river gorge, and the Nez Perce Indian Casino a few miles east just across the Idaho border.

One hundred thousand souls give or take, roughly half of them either lost or getting there. We have meth and marijuana, hookers and pimps, bums and burnouts, and a per capita murder rate that makes our local politicians blush. We don’t have mimes and street performers, the pushers and pimps won’t tolerate that caliber of scum, so it’s not all bad I suppose.

East Paradise Valley, the half of our city east of the Snake River, is the better half, almost respectable. West Paradise Valley... not so much.

Hang with me for a while and I’ll show you a side to this city that you won’t find on the Chamber of Commerce website.

Welcome to Paradise.

* * *

The West Valley Friday Street Fair was like a low rent Mardi Gras with a family friendly veneer so thin it was almost transparent. On top there were the pretzel and hot dog stands, the coffee bar, even the beer garden tucked back behind Station 3, and every other business along Main Street with a booth or display set up on sidewalks or in the middle of the road. The city closed off four blocks of Main Street every Friday afternoon from Easter to Halloween, and it seemed half the city turned out. There were also pushers, pickpockets, and other assorted lowlife present. This was their half of the city after all. It would be rude not to invite them.

I never had much to do with the street fair. Too many damned people for my liking, and there was never anything there I was particularly interested in.

That late September evening was an exception to the general rule. There was something there that day I was very interested in, and after only a half-hour of ignoring the vendors and dodging hyperactive kids on the peaks of sugar highs, I found her.

Kecia Wilson.

Dark-haired and pale-skinned, slim and short, she looked like a young librarian in her horn-rimmed glasses. I spotted her loitering in a graveled square between buildings usually reserved for Elks Lodge parking. That day there were no cars, just two rows of Porta Potties, six in a row lined up against the sides of the buildings, arranged by the city for its citizens’ shitting convenience.

I slipped into the recessed entrance of a closed insurance office and watched as dusk deepened.

Foot traffic in and out of shit-house square was sparse and fluid, never more than a handful at a time and never for longer than it took to do their business and sanitize their hands.

Except for Kecia.

Kecia stayed on the move, never stood in one place for more than a minute, but never left the square. Like she was waiting for someone.

I was counting on that.

Kecia wasn’t the person I was after that day. My night’s target was a glowing example of West Paradise Valley street-shit named Phil Shepard. Kecia Wilson was a girlfriend and likely partner in crime, but I didn’t have any business with her. My business was with Phil.

A skinny young skunk of a man emerged from a crowd around a tattoo booth, leaving a swath of turned heads and grimaces in his wake, and jittered his way over to her. A few moments of conversation, then she nodded curtly toward the second to last stall on the left and turned her back on him.

I watched, waited.

The young tweaker jittered his way over to the stall, hesitated, knocked.

The door opened a crack, and a few seconds later a little more. Enough to see the man inside, his face half illuminated by the flickering glow of streetlamps.

Phil Shepard.

Jackpot!

A hand slid out, rubbed palms with the tweaker standing outside, a quick exchange, meth for cash, then withdrew.

I waited for the tweaker to clear out, then crossed the road.

A kid with a plush top hat and a cotton candy ran into me and bounced backward, falling on his ass. His carnival top hat went askew and his cotton candy hit the pavement to be trampled a moment later.

“Watch where you’re going, you big turd!”

The boy dusted himself off and glared at me before pounding away.

Heads turned to regard me with disapproval and disgust, Kecia among them.

Shit!

There are advantages to being a seven-foot tall, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Indian with a face like a leather football helmet, but this wasn’t one of them. Once someone noticed me, they usually kept noticing me.

Kecia marked my approach with suspicion, and gasped when I stopped and turned to face her.

“Whatchu lookin’ at, dickhead?” She stared up into my face from her not quite five-foot vantage point, held her ground but remained ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

I lifted the hem of my shirt, uncovered my badge and cuffs. This move also exposed a bulge in my front pocket; my insurance against the unexpected in what can sometimes be a rough-and-tumble profession.

Kecia’s eyes darted from badge to cuffs to bulge, and widened in alarm.

When a young woman sees a bulge in a man’s pants, the Ruger LC9 is not the kind of ‘Pocket Pistol’ that leaps immediately to her mind, but I just let them think whatever the hell they want. The Ruger LC9 is a tiny little gun, it looked like a toy pistol in my hand. Flashing it would be more likely to elicit laughter than respect, so I leave it in its pocket holster unless I need to use it.

I’ve never tried to be Dirty Harry. I’d rather people didn’t know I’m packing until my handy little Ruger is pointed at their nose. It looks a little less like a toy from that perspective.

“Move along please,” I said, as pleasantly as I could.

She moved along, and quickly.

I watched until she was lost in the crowd, then proceeded to the magic stall.

I knocked.

“What’s the word, amigo?” His voice was muffled behind the closed stall door.

Word?

So that was his girlfriend’s job, to screen the legitimate customers from those who just needed to have a shit. The stall door was locked from the inside, no way to get at him unless he opened it.

I didn’t have the word, so I knocked again.

“Ocupado, asshole!”

I knocked again.

“I said go shit somewhere else!”

I knocked again. I could keep this up all night if I needed to.

“Fuck!”

The Occupied sign slid to Open and the door followed suit.

“You little...” He stopped in mid-scream, then tilted his face up to mine.

I grabbed the door before he could pull it closed. He knew who I was, my face is hard to forget, but I spoke the words anyway. That’s just the way it’s done.

“Eagle Eye Bail Bonds.”

He moved forward as if to run for it, and I shifted myself in front of him. For a second I thought he was going try to fight his way out, but he seemed to think better of it. People almost always panic when they realize they’ve been caught, and in those moments I find being large and scary looking very much to my advantage.

“You missed your court date,” I said. “I gotta take you back in.”

He smiled, nodded. “I figured you’d come looking for me.”

He released the door and raised his arms to me, wrists close together and ready for the cuffs.

I relaxed. He was going to come quietly. I like it when things go smoothly.

His grin stretched to the edges of his acne-pitted face.

I realized belatedly that I had fucked up.

I’ve never been bitten in the ass by an electric eel, but if I ever am I have a good idea of what to expect.

I was reaching for my cuffs and keeping both eyes on Phil’s grinning face when Kecia hit me from behind with the juice. The next several seconds were lost in a blaze of white-hot pain originating in my right ass-cheek and filling my whole body. My arms snapped down to my sides and my jaw slammed shut. My spine did a musical kind of snap, crackle and pop as it stiffened.

Phil’s smug smile faded in a wash of white light.

And when I could see again, I was laying in the gravel in front of the abandoned shitter, watching Phil and Kecia run toward the crowded street.

“Ditch that,” Phil shouted, and snatched a short yellow wand from Kecia’s hand, tossed it between the last two stalls before dragging her into the crowd. Seconds later they were gone, and I was left alone and twitching on the ground.

The party on Main Street continued unabated, only the occasional bored pedestrian glancing my way.

Someone passed me on the right, and another stepped over me on their way to Phil’s abandoned stall, snickering.

Later, thirty seconds or thirty minutes maybe, all I knew for sure is that it was darker, I regained the use of my body and removed it from shit-house square. I paused only to retrieve Kecia’s Wasp from where Phil had ditched it. It was a handy little thing. Under a foot long and packing somewhere around 5,000 volts. She’d probably kept it in her bag for just such an occasion.

I decided to hold on to it, maybe for the next time I ran into Phil Shepard and his girlfriend.