Welcome to California. Weed is legal. Grow it. Sell it. Smoke it. Eat it. But the money you make off it-there's the rub. Bank it, and the Feds will ask questions. Keep it around, and you'll get robbed. LaDon and Jessie-two hustlers who make selling primo weed a regular gig-hire a private security detail to move and hold their money. Ex-soldiers Glanson and Echo target the cash-they start a ripoff business. It's the wild, wild west. Except this time, everybody's high. With their guns and guts, Glanson and Echo don't expect much trouble from a mean son-of-a-gun like LaDon Charles. But that's exactly what they get. In this industry, no matter how much money there is for the taking-and no matter who gets it-there's always somebody counting backwards...to zero. From acclaimed pulp writer Matt Phillips, Countdown is a head-spinning hit of Southern California's lucrative and not-quite-regulated marijuana industry. Praise for COUNTDOWN: "A slab of rare pulp, served nice and bloody. Countdown reads like an homage to Elmore Leonard from one of the hottest new voices on the crime fiction scene." -Anthony Neil Smith, author of Yellow Medicine and All the Young Warriors Praise for the Books by Matt Phillips "Matt Phillips speaks fluently the language of the dispossessed... His whiskey-soaked prose can at times be as slick as a man slinging snake-oil, and other times as brutal as a baseball bat to the head." -Eryk Pruitt, author of Hashtag and Dirtbags "Phillips' writing is so multi-layered and deep... An author to watch out for." -Regular Guy Reading Noir