The police can only run a successful protection racket if everybody, protectors and protected, plays the game. One slip, one misjudgement, and the whole organization collapses when the heat comes on; as it came on Sheriff Buford and his deputy, Jack Marshall, when a man found his fifteen-year-old daughter a star attraction in Bigelow's leading brothel, the best-run, best-protected brothel in town.

Buford needed a scapegoat - quick; and Marshall had reasons of his own for offering his services. There were the three thousand dollars Buford offered him to disappear, there was the wife he hated and Doris he loved; and most of all there was Doris's husband, lashed to an outboard motor at the bottom of the lake.

All Marshall had to do was quietly disappear. They could think him drowned, or murdered; he was last seen gunning for trouble. He had only to cover his tracks and leave the State. For a man as methodical and careful as Marshall it was child's play, simple; just a matter of eliminating every possibility of his existence and starting a new life. Marshall's plan was perfect, foolproof.

Unless he came back to Bigelow, had to come back...