A Penny for Your Thoughts…
Ex -con Patricia ‘Penny’ Hedgewood is a pixie cute, thirty-something, cocoa brown, black woman with an easy smile, a skip in her step and a kind word for all . She’s also-over the last eight years-emptied the bank accounts of more than a hundred senior citizens to the tune of three million dollars ($3,000,000) posing as a social worker, Certified Nursing Assistant, or food services worker in scores of nursing homes across the continental USA. She’s in the end stretch and sprinting toward her final goal, a ton of money in the bank and a beachside condo at the Jersey shore…but a past mistake might make this a violently short retirement …
A dual citizen (Mexico/USA), Isabella ‘Razor’ Garcia was raised by her grandmother, Jojo Hernandez, after her undocumented mother was swept up in an ICE raid while picking up an ice cream birthday cake for her soon to be 8-year -old daughter. She never made it back to the USA alive. Jojo kept the bad news from Isabella for years. But Isabella has a secret, too. Her ‘job’ as a flight attendant is a cover for her fifteen years’ service as a contract killer with fifty plus bodies buried across three continents courtesy of orders from her employer (and 1st cousin), Emmanuel Francisco of the Francisco/Marco cartel out of Jalisco, Mexico. The same man that just gave the enraged sicario a three-week vacation to take care of family matters after finding out their grandmother’s life savings had been ripped off.
A stevedore for Allegany Steel and Technologies out of Pittsburgh, PA, Noah Olson loaded, unloaded, and just plain manhandled supplies, steel, coal, oil, and anything else from an endless caravan of trucks, railcars, and riverboat regardless of weather, strikes or time of day for more than three decades without a whimper. A few smart investments, a decent pension and money put aside garnered him a better than decent living with a loft apartment in a beautiful retirement community, nice car, and spending cash aplenty for his golden years. Until Patricia ‘Penny’ Hedgewood swindled him out of $400,000. Pissed isn’t the word for the rage this one-time Merchant Marine and bare-knuckle brawler has been living with since Penny gave his bank book a beating, and-in the state he’s in-when he finds her, she better have a lot more for him than “let me explain”…
An autocrat of the worst kind, Emmanuel Francisco has fought, clawed, and killed his way to the top of the heap of the cartel his father started more than two decades past . With his even deadlier cousin – Sicario Isabella ‘Razor’ Garcia – they have been a force few opponents have survived as the Francisco/Marco cartel grew on the insatiable appetite for their drugs North of the border . Patricia ‘Penny’ Hedgewood is a bump in the road he does not need . With Isabella’s full attention on chasing down the elusive con -artist, Emmanuel’s anger grows at the distraction that is costing him his best enforcer’s time and efforts -and he does not appreciate it . And what Francisco doesn’t like usually dies screaming …