Grifter's Game

Your names Joe Marlin, but you change it almost as often as you change your shirt. Its David Gavilan when you skip a hotel bill and head for Atlantic City. You left empty-handed, and you need luggage to check into a decent hotel, so you grab two checked bags before the owner turns up to claim them. Theyre monogrammed L.K.B.—so now your name is Leonard K. Blake.

But youre not the only L.K.B. in Atlantic City. L. Keith Brassard is the owner of those suitcases you picked up, and hes also the husband of the gorgeous blonde who picked you up. One suitcase is full of his clothes, and his pants are too big in the waist and too short in the leg and no good to you at all. But however different the two of you may be built, youve got the same neck size and the same sleeve length, so the mans shirts fit you just fine.

And so does his wife.

And when you open the second suitcase, youve got your hands full. Because its full of white powder, and its just what you think it is.

Uncut heroin.

Your names Joe Marlin, and youre used to playing the angles and working the short con—sleeping with married women and stealing their jewelry, beating checks in restaurants, making quick scores and disappearing, turning up miles away with a new name and the same old say of getting by. But you never met a woman like Mona Brassard, the kind of dame who gets in your blood like malaria germs. And you never had an opportunity handed to you like what you found in LKBs suitcase. Not the one with the shirts and cufflinks. The other suitcase, holding a fortune in pure skag.

Youre probably in way over your head. You should probably cut and run.

But you cant, can you?

Grifters Game was Lawrence Blocks first crime novel, the first book published under his own name. A lot has changed in the half century since it first appeared—but its still got one of the most shocking and powerful endings in all of noir fiction.

This ebook edition of Grifters Game contains as a bonus the first chapter of another Lawrence Block noir classic, The Girl with the Long Green Heart.