John Ramsey Miller - Upside Down

Contents

To my father, Rev. Rush Glenn Miller.
If a better man exists, I have yet to meet him.

Raves for John Ramsey Miller's spellbinding
novels of suspense

Inside Out

John Ramsey Miller's Inside Out needs to come with a warning label. To start the story is to put the rest of your life on hold as you obsessively turn one page after the other. With a story this taut, and characters this vivid, there's no putting the book down before you've consumed the final word. A thrilling read. John Gilstrap, author of Scott Free

Inside Out is a great read! John Ramsey Miller's tale of big-city mobsters, brilliant killers and a compellingly real U.S. marshal has as many twists and turns as running serpentine through a field of fire and keeps us turning pages as fast as a Blackhawk helicopter's rotors! Set aside an uninterrupted day for this one; you won't want to put it down. Jeffery Deaver, author of The Vanished Man and The Stone Monkey

[Full of] complications and surprises... Miller gifts [his characters] with an illuminating idiosyncrasy. This gives us great hope for future books as well as delight in this one. Drood Review of Mystery

Twists and turns on every page keep you in phenomenal suspense until the last page. Superb novel. Rendezvous

The Last Family

A relentless thriller. People

Fast-paced, original, and utterly terrifyingtrue, teeth-grinding tension. I lost sleep reading the novel, and then lost even more sleep thinking about it. Martin Fletcher is the most vividly drawn, most resourceful, most horrifying killer I have encountered. Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out. Michael Palmer

The best suspense novel I've read in years! Jack Olsen

Martin Fletcher is one of the most unspeakably evil characters in recent fiction.... A compelling read. Booklist

The author writes with a tough authority and knows how to generate suspense. Kirkus Reviews

Suspenseful... Keeps readers guessing with unexpected twists. Publishers Weekly

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my agent, Anne Hawkins of Hawkins & Associates, NYC, and my editor, Kate Miciak, who introduced me to Faith Ann Porter, and whose patient guidance and support have been crucial in the Winter Massey series. My thanks also to Nita Taublib and Irwyn Applebaum, and all of the people at Bantam Dell who worked to make sure Upside Down's best foot was put forward.

I apologize for any and all inaccuracies in this book. My wife and I lived in New Orleans for ten wonderful years, and it seems that my characters keep insisting I go back down there to refresh my memory and accuracy since the city changes things without consulting me. When practicable, I am faithful to actual locations, businesses and the street names, but sometimes accuracy is inconvenient and begs for alteration.

Thanks to my dear friends in New Orleans: Nathan Hoffman and his wife, author Erica Spindler, and to William, Stephanie and Garrett Greiner for their hospitality while Susie and I were doing research for this book.

I appreciate the help of NOPD's Captain Marlon Defilo, Homicide Lt. James Keen, Sgt. John Rice, the Assistant Commander of Homicide.

Thanks to the copilot and engineer on the Canal Street ferry, the USS Thomas Jefferson, for patiently answering my what if questions without calling Homeland Security.

To my friend, fellow author John Gilstrap, whose sense of humor never fails to cheer me up, and whose understanding and love of our craft always inspires me to try harder.

Heartfelt thanks to all of the doctors and staff at North East Medical Center's George A. Batte Cancer Center in Concord, N.C., who saved my wife Susan's life.

Thanks to childhood friends, Johnny Ward and Larry Levington, and to the revitalizing effects of their company. Thank God for the C.H.S. Memorial Gramling Art Class Wildlife Sanctuary & Gun Clubwhere the woodstove is hot, the conversation is easy, the wine plentiful, the cigars smooth, and the deer couldn't be safer.

I wish I could individually thank all of the people who inspire me and support me and those people who are my friends. I cherish every one of them. They know who they are, and I do too.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana Friday / 4:01 A.M.

From ground level, the automobile graveyard looked boundless. The moon was like an open eye that, when it peered through holes in the clouds, was reflected in thousands of bits of chrome and glass. After the four figures passed under a buzzing quartz-halogen lamp set on a pole, long shadows ran out from them, reaching across the oil-stained earth like the fingers of a glove.

The quartet entered a valley where rusting wrecks, stagger-stacked like bricks, formed walls twenty feet tall. One of the three men carried a lantern that squeaked as it swung back and forth.

The woman's tight leather pants showed the precise curve of her buttocks, the rock-hard thighs, and the sharply cut calf muscles. A dark woolen V-neck under her windbreaker kept the chill at a comfortable distance. The visor on her leather ball cap put her face in deeper shadow.

They stopped. When the man fired up his lantern, hard-edged white light illuminated the four as mercilessly as a flashbulb.

Marta Ruiz's hair fell down the center of her back like a horse's tail. In an evening gown she could become an exotic, breathtaking creature that made otherwise staid men stammer like idiots. How far now? she asked. Her accent had a slight Latin ring to it.

Not too far, Cecil Mahoney said, looking down at the much shorter woman. An extremely large and powerfully built man, Mahoney looked like a crazed Viking. His thick bloodred facial hair so completely covered his mouth that his words might have been supplied by a ventriloquist. He wore a black leather vest over a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, filthy jeans with pregnant knees, and engineer boots. His thick arms carried so many tattoos that it looked like he was wearing a brilliantly colored long-sleeved shirt. Silver rings adorned his fingers, the nails of which were dead ringers for walnut hulls.

The other two men were dull-eyed muscle without conscience or independent thought. Cecil Mahoney was the biggest crystal methamphetamine wholesaler in the South and the leader of the Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club. Stone-cold killers pissed their pants when a thought of Cecil Mahoney invaded their minds. Few people could muster the kind of rage required to use their bare hands like claws and literally rip people into pieces like Cecil could.

The three men didn't see Marta as a physical threat. How could such a small woman harm themkick them in the shins, bite and scratch? They had seen that she was unarmed when she stepped out of the car and put on a nylon jacket so lightweight that any one of them could have wadded up the garment, stuffed it into his mouth, and swallowed it like a tissue.

They turned a corner, moved deeper into the yard.

Over there, Cecil said.

They stopped at the sharply angled rear of a Cadillac Seville with its front end smashed into a mushroom of rusted steel. Marta's sensitive nose picked up the sickly sweet odor, folded somewhere in the oily stench of petroleum and mildewed fabric, of something else in decay. One of the henchmen lifted the trunk lid while the other held up the lantern so Marta could see inside.