Crime Must Pay the Penalty #14

Shakes Pruett is a small-time crook with a chronic case of imaginary illnesses—every bump and bruise convinces him he's dying—but his real talent lies in violence and robbery. When a stray bullet grazes his arm during a holdup gone wrong, his desperate need for medical attention sets him on a collision course with the very doctors he'll later seek vengeance against. Years of obsessing over his perceived ailments and his grudges against those who wouldn't treat him finally push him toward a reckoning that won't end the way his hypochondria has always promised.

Two brothers—Joe Hammer, the brains, and his dim-witted but brutally strong younger sibling Louis—escape a botched 1924 bank robbery and reinvent themselves in New York, first as a boxing sensation, then as hold-up men terrorizing the city through a sweltering crime wave. But Joe's relentless cruelty and mockery of Louis plants a seed of resentment that threatens to destroy them both, forcing Louis into hiding and driving him toward a desperate, solitary act that will seal their fates.

When a small-time hood named Lard Nichols lands forty years in prison for a payroll heist gone wrong, he hatches a scheme to buy his freedom—by promising his former gang a cut of the $300,000 he buried before his arrest, if they'll tunnel under the prison wall to spring him. As Mousey and the boys begin their months-long dig from a nearby farm, Lard orchestrates a calculated prison break to lock himself in solitary directly above their target, setting in motion a plan that will leave no one untouched—least of all the innocent farmer who stands in their way.

Sullen and power-hungry, Floyd Olivet claws his way from small-time crook to boss of San Francisco's underworld rackets, but his ruthless climb and paranoid grip on control soon make him enemies on all sides. As both law and gangdom close in, the man who demanded absolute loyalty discovers that fear and brutality can't hold an empire together forever. Watch as Frisco Floyd's reign unravels, revealing the frightened two-bit crook hiding beneath all the swagger and threats.