April 1920. The Prohibition era has just begun, and the Wild West is a fading memory. Legendary lawman Wyatt Earp is spending his golden years in Los Angeles as a private detective—and sometime consultant on cowboy movies. Bored and restless, he jumps at the chance to go east to help the son of his late friend Doc Holliday. The young man's mother fears her gambler son will lose everything, including his life, in wild and woolly Manhattan, where Johnny Holliday has opened one of the first, and glitziest, speakeasy nightclubs.
Wyatt's onetime deputy, Bat Masterson, joins the defense of young Holliday against a new breed of badmen—mobsters led by Brooklyn's brash, brutal Alphonse Capone. Young Al and his sadistic boss Frankie Yale have targeted Holliday's nightspot, where jazz-baby diva Texas Guinan is welcoming suckers and money is flowing like bootleg beer. . . .
As the Twenties (and machine guns) start to roar, the lawless lawmen move through a glittering world of beautiful showgirls, ruthless gangsters, and high-rolling gamblers—taking one last glorious stand that makes the O.K. Corral shoot-out pale, signaling the end of their legend and the beginning of Scarface Al's.
Black Hats is a thrilling and colorful ride into a time and place where good guys and bad guys blur, and big-city dreams turn on a dime. In vivid detail, the enigmatic Earp's character draws into sharp focus, while Capone's young personality comes alive, foreshadowing the master criminal he would become. Wearing another hat, Patrick Culhane is one of suspense fiction's most respected writers, and his newest, most innovative blockbuster is grand, enormous fun.
The night those bastards shot Virgil, it was storming like this.
Sky darker than the inside of your fist, rain slanting in from the east, slashing at will, unseen till lightning gave it away.
Wyatt Earp, not in particular reflective, found his memory bestirred by weather, most often. And back in Tombstone, what? Almost forty years ago? That craven crowd had ambushed Virgil, a marshal making his midnight rounds, maimed him, ruined his left arm forever with their buckshot and cowardice.
Now Wyatt was doing the ambushing, and his nightly rounds were hardly marshal's work. He did have a badge in his wallet, a private detective's star courtesy of his friends at the Los Angeles Police Department, for whom he occasionally did jobs.
Not this job, though.
Lowman's Motor Court on North San Fernando Road consisted of a dozen pink adobe cabins, six facing six across a graveled courtyard, where tiny pools glimmered in the sky's occasional shouts of white. The other nighti>this was Wednesday, that had been Mondayi>when Wyatt had stopped here, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains had conspired with a blazing orange sunset to provide a majestic backdrop for this sordid little assignation village.
Tonight the hills were just shapes, dark shoulders that couldn't be bothered to shrug in this downpour. Wyatt knew how they felt.
A damned domestic case.
Wasn't exactly dignified work for a man, was it? City of Angels coppers, at least, always gave him real jobs to doi>hauling back wanted men from Mexico, sub rosa; putting the boot to claim-jumpers in the wilds of San Bernardino County. Hell, getting an investigative operator's license had been only to please Police Commissioner Lewis. Wyatt had never had no intention of hanging out a shingle and becoming a goddamned bedroom dick.
But word had gotten round that Wyatt Earp himself, the Grand Old (for Lord's sake!) Lion of Tombstone, was doing detective work; and the occasional client would find him at his rented bungalow on Seventeenth Street.
Not that this job came from the "occasional" client. This was the kind of thankless task that he would do only for a friend. He'd had very few real friends in his life, but when one came around asking a favor, Wyatt Earp was not the kind to say no.
He stood beneath a palm tree, the tree swaying, Wyatt not. He'd positioned himself between that tropical excuse for vegetation and the teal Model T that William S. had loaned himi>Wyatt had learned to drive ages ago but had never owned an autoi>hands in the pockets of a black rain slicker and wearing a wide-brimmed black Stetson that funneled the sluice nicely. Slender, six one, with Apache cheekbones, unblinking sky-blue eyes and snow-white hair with a well-trimmed matching mustache, Wyatt Earp might have been fifty-five. But he was seventy.
In this weather, a man like Earpi>legendary lawman, gambler, buffalo hunter, prospector, Indian fighter, survivor of more bloody encounters than even the Wild West might be expected to throw at a bodyi>should darn sure feel that moisture in his joints, be well and truly plagued by phantom pulsing pains from all those wounds.
Had he ever been wounded.
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earpi>who had shot it out with drunken cowboys and notorious outlaws, gone toe-to-toe with the Clantons and McLaurys at the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, been through countless Indian raids and rode posses against cattle rustlers and tracked stagecoach bandits, whose brothers Virgil and Morgan had been shot down in the streets of Tombstonei>had thus far in his lifetime suffered not a single bullet wound.
That time with Curly Bill Brocious, Wyatt wading across that stream with his damned fool cartridge belt slipping down...
“Collins fills his story with period detail, juicy mob stories and characters, but the best part...is its heart
