It was the week before Thanksgiving in 1989 when Niles Landry, formerly of the U.S. Army, called me for a job.

I’m a grifter, also known as a small-time con man. How I got into the game is easy. My dad was a grifter. How I got into grifting for the United States Government, that is a whole different story and not one I have room to tell here.

Landry wanted me to meet him in Sacramento for some reason, so I set us up at a seedy diner a few blocks from the State House. The menus were yellowed, the grease on the walls so thick you could butter bread with it, assuming you didn’t mind the decades of dirt caked in it. The metal chairs all had cracked, shiny red vinyl on the seats. But the tables and the dishes were clean. Usually.

I got there first and spotted Landry coming in. He was tall with white hair around a significant bald spot. But what really set him apart was his posture, which was straighter than an iron rod. He’d been a career Army officer. But the military hadn’t left him. I almost felt like standing up and saluting.

“Cobb and company,” he said as he slid into a chair across from me. “We’ve finally got them. All you need to do is get Cobb’s dirt file.”

I looked up from my burger and fries. “Are you out of your mind?”

“His protection is fed up. They just don’t want that dirt file out in the wild.”

“I can get it, but do I want Harlan Cobb coming after me? Let me think. No, I don’t.”

“I’ve got some help for you.” He paused, his lips moving but with no sound coming out of his mouth. “Uh… He’s an old friend of yours.”

“I don’t have any old friends.” This felt really weird.

“Yeah, you do, from, uh, uh, before the war.”

The Vietnam War was how Landry got his hooks into me. And, yeah, I’d had five guy friends from when I was in high school.

“There’s a little problem with that,” I said. “They all think I’m dead.”

“And won’t they be glad to see you’re alive.”

I would have walked out of there, but Landry was not someone I could say no to for a lot of reasons.

Getting the floppy discs and paper would not be that hard. Hiding them would be. But who among those five guys could I trust? They’d been pretty heavy drunks and stoners back in ’68. I had loosely watched them over the years. Stanley Ford was still a drunk. Tom Freeman had gotten sober. Sid Hackbirn wasn’t that into the drugs and booze, but was into sleeping around. I didn’t know about Wallace Merton and Bob Kinney. It looked like I was about to find out.

NECESSARY CHANCES – An “Operation Quickline” Mystery, Book 15
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: December 2025
Format: Digital, Print
Purchase Link

Christmas time is here. Not so much happiness and cheer.

The Christmas season may be Lisa Wycherly’s favorite time of the year, but December 1989 is shaping up to be the worst ever.

First, her husband, Sid Hackbirn, gets the shock of his life when an old high school buddy turns up unexpectedly, triggering Sid’s terrifying memories of fighting in the Vietnam War. Worse yet, the encounter pushes Sid and Lisa into investigating three crooked Federal agents while trying to hide their own top-secret work from their family and Sid’s other friends.

But there’s a family problem too. Lisa’s nephew Darby may be heading for trouble thanks to his exceptional talent as a violinist. A persistent agent is courting the 16-year-old, as are any number of girls. With Darby determined to stand on his own two feet, the rest of the family is worried that the boy is about to get himself into the kind of trouble adults can’t handle.

With Darby’s ego spinning out of control, and each attempt to capture the crooked Feds going ever more disastrously awry, Lisa’s merry little Christmas is turning into one deadly mess.

About the author
Anne Louise Bannon’s husband says that his wife kills magazines people for a living. Bannon does mostly write mysteries, including the Old Los Angeles Series, the Freddie and Kathy series, and the Operation Quickline series. She has worked as a freelance journalist for and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. She and her husband, Michael Holland, created a wine education blog, and she co-wrote a book on poisons. She and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. Visit her website at AnneLouiseBannon.com.