Deadlock

Desmond Aloysius Limerick ('Dez' to his friends and close personal enemies) is a man with a shadowy past, certain useful hard-won skills, and, if one digs deep enough, a reputation as a good man to have at your back. Now retired from his previous life, Dez is just a bloke with a winning smile, a bass guitar, and bullet wounds that paint a road map of past lives.

Raziah Swann calls him with an urgent request for help. Jaleh, her sister, has been attacked and seriously injured and hospitalised, just one day after her apartment was ransacked. She's a business journalist who was working on a profile of an auditor who was himself mugged and killed. The firm he was auditing is Clockjack - a major multi-national technology company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Fearing that there was more coming, she asks Dez to come to Portland.

Her worst fears were right - and the sisters were both attacked in the hospital by a trio of hired thugs, a trio who weren't expecting to face Desmond Limerick. The two captured men (and one corpse) have now attracted the attention the U.S. Marshall's, the D.E.A., as well as the Portland police, with the only thin thread that connects them leading straight back to Clockjack, a massive corporation with ties and resources that dwarf most nations. And only Dez stands in the way of whatever comes next.