Potshot

Boston PI Spenser returns - heading west to the rich man’s haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. Potshot overcame its rough reputation as a rendezvous for old-time mountain men who lived off the land, thanks to a healthy infusion of new blood and even newer money. But when this western idyll is threatened by a local gang - a twenty-first-century posse of desert rats, misfits, drunks and scavengers - the local police seem powerless.

Led by a charismatic individual known only as The Preacher, this motley band of thieves selectively exploits the town, nurturing it as a source of wealth while systematically robbing the residents blind.

Enter Spenser, called in to put the group out of business and establish a police force who can protect the town. Calling on his own cadre of cohorts, including Vinnie Morris, Bobby Horse, Chollo Bernard J. Fortunato, as well as the redoubtable Hawk, Spenser must find a way to beat the gang at their own dangerous game.

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction. His novels featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim, typified by R.W.B. Lewis’ comment, ‘We are witnessing one of the great series in the history of the American detective story’ (
The New York Times Book Review
).

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Parker attended Colby College in Maine, served with the Army in Korea, and then completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston University. He married his wife Joan in 1956; they raised two sons, David and Daniel. Together the Parkers founded Pearl Productions, a Boston-based independent film company named after their short-haired pointer, Pearl, who has also been featured in many of Parker’s novels.

Robert B. Parker died in 2010 at the age of 77.

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler… His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining… There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’

– Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’

– Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’

– Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’

– Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker…’

– Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’

– Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in
Night Passage
and continues with
Trouble in Paradise
, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’

–
Marilyn Stasio
,
New York Times

Available from No Exit Press

POTSHOT

for Joan:
somewhere around the twelfth of never.

She was wearing a straw hat, pulled down over her forehead, a short flowered dress, no stockings and white high heels. A lot of blond hair showed under the hat. Her face was nearly angelic and looked about 15, though the fact that she wore a wedding ring made me skeptical. She marched into my office like someone volunteering for active duty, and sat in one of my client chairs with her feet flat on the floor and her knees together. Nice knees.

‘You’re Mr Spenser.’

‘I am.’

‘Lieutenant Samuelson of the Los Angeles Police Department said I should talk to you.’

‘He’s right,’ I said.

‘You know about this already?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just think everybody should talk to me.’

‘Oh, yes… My name is Mary Lou Buckman.’

‘How do you do Mrs Buckman?’

‘Fine, thank you.’

She was quiet for a moment, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she should do next. I didn’t know either, so I sat and waited. Her bare legs were tan. Not tan as if she’d slathered them with oil and baked in the sun – tan as if she’d spent time outdoors in shorts. Her eyes were as big as Susan’s, and bright blue.

Finally she said, ‘I would like to hire you.’

‘Okay.’

‘Don’t you want to know more than that?’

‘I wanted to start on a positive note,’ I said.

‘I don’t know if you’re serious or if you’re laughing at me,’ she said.

‘I’m not always sure myself,’ I said. ‘What would you like me to do?’

She took a deep breath.

‘I live in a small town in the foothills of the Sawtooth Mountains, called Potshot. Once it was a rendezvous for mountain men, now it’s a western retreat for a lot of people, mostly from L.A., with money, who’ve moved there with the idea of getting their lives back into a more fundamental rhythm.’

‘Back out of all this now too much for us,’ I said.

‘That’s a poem or something,’ she said.

‘Frost,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘My husband and I came from Los Angeles. He was a football coach, Fairfax High. We got sick of the life and moved out here, there actually. We run, ran, a little tourist service, take people on horseback into the mountains and back – nothing fancy, day trips, maybe a picnic lunch.’

‘“We
ran
a service”?’ I said.

‘I still run it. My husband is dead.’

She said it as calmly as if I’d asked his name. No effect.

I nodded.

‘There was always an element to the town,’ she said. ‘I suppose you could call it a criminal element – they tended to congregate in the hills above town, a place called the Dell. There’s an old mine there that somebody started once, and they never found anything and abandoned it, along with the mine buildings. They are, I suppose, sort of contemporary mountain men, people who made a living from the mountains. You know, fur trapping, hunting, scavenging. I think there are people still looking for gold, or silver, or whatever they think is in there – I don’t know anything about mining. Some people have been laid off from the lumber companies, or the strip mines, there’s a few left over hippies, and a general assortment of panhandlers and drunks and potheads.’

‘Which probably interferes with the natural rhythm of it all,’ I said.

‘They were no more bothersome than any fringe people in any place,’ she said, ‘until about three years ago.’

‘What happened three years ago?’

‘They got organized,’ she said. ‘They became a gang.’

‘Who organized them?’

‘I don’t know his real name. He calls himself The Preacher.’

‘Is he a preacher?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. I don’t think he’s being ironic.’

‘And there’s a problem,’ I said.

‘The gang lives off the town. They require the businessmen to pay protection. They use the stores and the restaurants and bars and don’t pay. They acquire businesses in town for less than they’re worth by driving out the owners. They bully the men. Bother the women.’