The Player

by Wick Downing

It's 1974, and Denver, Colorado, is no longer a cow town. She's been discovered by the land developers. The clean skies over the city often surrender to the exhaust of thousands of cars, and freeways slice through the mountains to the west. Canyons formed by buildings line the downtown streets, thrusting upward, like huge phallic symbols.
Joe Reddman, private investigator, watches with the bemused despair of an Indian who puzzles over ploughed ground.
From an old Denver family, Joe's widowed father gave Joe to BlueTree Woman, a Cheyenne Indian. She gave him his Nutaq, nha ewo-tsim-tsis. Man who plays games.
An old friend comes to Joe whose nephew Denny McLoughlen, a rookie on the police department, just had his picture on the front page. Denny is under investigation for a killing while on a robbery detail. He claims the robber shot at him. They why can't the DA investigators find the boy's gun, or some sign of the bullet?
Joe remembers Denny as fun-loving, but wild. He takes the case, on the condition that if he finds Denny to be a trigger-happy cop, then cut him out of the tribe.
Later that day, Dick Beeshord asks Reddman to look into the two-year-old robbery of his bank. It made headlines when an armored car, decked out to look like a stage-coach--and carrying $450,000 of the bank's money--was held up by the man who was riding shotgun! It had started as a real-estate promotion for "homesteads" twenty miles from town. And the young man riding shot-gun looked a whole lot like the picture of the rookie cop. Joe takes that case too. Who is Denny McLoughlen?
A string of murders go pop pop pop like a string of firecrackers. Joe follows the tracks with the code of a mythical warrior, joyfully risking his life to count coup.
The tracks lead him to a climactic, poignant, but totally satisfying conclusion in the rugged back country of the Rockies.

ebook

First published September 8, 2011

About the author

Wick Downing has been in the business of writing for a long time. His first novel was published in 1974, by Saturday Review Press, which at that time was a division of E. P. Dutton & Co. The hard-cover edition cost $5.95.
His early work was mystery and suspense and brought him some great press. Charles Willeford, a legendary reviewer for The Miami Herald, rated two of his first three novels as among the ten best mysteries of the year. Major newspapers everywhere, from California to Colorado (to be expected: Downing is from Denver) to the New York Times, wrote glowing reviews of his work. Foreign publication rights were sold to major publishing houses in France, Germany, Italy and Denmark, and the books sold abroad. He thought he was launched . . . .
But it didn't happen that way. No movie deals, no block-buster best-sellers, and the money that trickled in wasn't enough to feed him and his family. Fortunately, he had another occupation to fall back on: law. In the '90s, after a stint as District Attorney in rural Colorado, he turned to courtroom drama. Of those four novels, three won the Colorado Author's League Top Hand Award, and two were nominated for the Colorado Book Award. He also wrote a novel for young readers titled Kid Curry's Last Ride (Orchard Books), a Richard Jackson Imprint, published in paper-back by HarperCollins. Leonardo's Hand is also a book for young readers.
Downing continues to write. The one thing in his life about which he is deadly serious is the craft of fiction.