Excerpt from The Plea by Steve Cavanagh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Whoever my intruder was that night, he'd been careful to replace the dime, but had missed the toothpick, which lay on the step.

Of the building's five offices, three were occupied: a travel agency that was in the throes of liquidation, a financial adviser whom I'd yet to see anywhere near the place, and a shady-looking hypnotist who liked to do home visits. They were mostly nine-to-five operations, or in the case of the travel agent and the hypnotist, eleven-to-three operations. No way they'd come in on a Sunday, and no way they'd bother to replace the dime. If it had been my neighbors, they'd pocket the coin and forget about it.

I dropped my newspaper and bent down to pick it up. While I was resting on my haunches, I decided to retie my shoelaces. No one on my left. Nothing on my right.

Shuffling around to get at my other shoe, I scanned the opposite side of the street. Again, nothing. A few cars way down the street on my left, but they were old imports and the windshields were misted up; no way were they surveillance cars. Across the street to my right, a couple walked arm in arm into the Hourglass Tavern, theater junkies grabbing a bite before the show. Since I'd moved here I'd been in the tavern twice, ate the lobster ravioli both times and managed to avoid the mystery beer and shot special, which changed with the turning of the large hourglass on the wall behind the bar. Abstinence was still a one-day-at-a-time deal for me.

After closing the front door, I retrieved my paper from the steps, hugged my collar around my neck against the lingering winter chill, and started walking. As a con artist I'd made plenty of enemies, and I'd even managed to make a few more in my law career. These days I figured it paid to be cautious. I did a three-block loop using every countersurveillance technique I knew: turning down random alleyways; bursting into a light jog before I turned a corner, then slowing way down once I was on the other side; picking up my rearview in car windows and Plexiglas bus-stop advertising; stopping short and making quick turns and then retracing my steps. I began to feel a little foolish. There was no tail. I figured either the hypnotist got lucky and brought a client back to his office, or maybe the financial adviser was finally showing up to either empty his overflowing mailbox or to shred his files.

As I caught sight of my building once again, I didn't feel quite so foolish. My office was on the third floor. The first two floors were in darkness.

A light shined from my window and it wasn't my desk lamp. The beam of light appeared small, muted, and it tilted and moved.

A flashlight.

My skin prickled and my breath left me in one long, misty exhalation. It crossed my mind that a normal person would call the cops. That wasn't how I was brought up. When you make your living as a hustler, the cops don't feature in your thought process. I handled all such business myself, and I needed to see who was in my office. I carried a tire iron in the Mustang's trunk, but there was no point in going back to the parking lot to fetch it, as I didn't feel like carrying that on the open street. I don't own a gun; I don't like them, but there were some home defense products that I didn't mind using.

I opened the front door quietly, caught the dime before it hit the tiles, and took off my shoes in the lobby to keep the noise down before moving to the column of mailboxes on the wall.

In the box labeled EDDIE FLYNN, ATTORNEY, I had all the backup I would ever need.

Excerpted from The Plea by Steve Cavanagh. Copyright © 2018 by Steve Cavanagh. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.