Butchie Parmenter is in big trouble. A housing inspector for the city of Brockton, Massachusetts, he’ll turn a blind eye to some slumlord’s code violation now and then, but this is murder—and he’s in it up to his eyeballs. When he agreed to help Odraye Suggs, a so-so professional boxer and part-time drug dealer, look for some hidden cash rumored to be hidden in a building he condemned, he didn’t expect to find it so fast tucked in shoeboxes behind an old refrigerator. He certainly didn’t expect Odraye to bring a sledgehammer down on the head of an innocent man, a neighbor who witnessed the discovery. When Odraye forces him to go along with the crime, he feels he has no choice. But Butchie’s problems have just begun. First, the money is outdated—a quarter-million in obsolete bank notes can’t just be walked into the nearest bank and exchanged, especially not when half the town has heard the rumors about old Mrs. Bello’s hidden cash and her relatives are convinced the money exists. When the body is discovered, cops come calling on Butchie; he was seen by neighbors of the dead man on the premises when their neighbor was last seen alive. As if that were not pressure enough, a private investigator drops in on Butchie, says he’s been hired by the family—and he isn’t the only one not buying what Butchie is selling. Det. Forshey has his suspicions, too. Worse always comes to worst, and after a falling out with Odraye, Butchie had better start scrambling for his life—that is, he wants to keep it and the cash.