What do you do when an old friend looking like death with the warmed over part comes to your doorstep on a hung-over Saturday morning with two unsealed bottles of Wild Turkey and asks for your help? Well, you indulge your friends. You sit down and share the whiskey and prepare for what's to come, wary that it's not going to be good. The best thing is that your own troubles don't amount to much compared to your friend's, and the worst thing is your friend's troubles become your troubles. And the police come to haul your friend away and he begs for your help. This happens to Garland "Mesa" Tate when Rusty Squires is arrested in his front yard for the murder of his young wife and her younger lover. Rusty Squires has been a fixture in Garland's life, a pard to Garland's father. The lovers were shot with Rusty's pistol, his prints are on the gun and there was no one else in the house. Pretty cut and dried, but Rusty is baffled by the whole thing. He got home from a business trip and found them in bed. He got his pistol, took a drink and doesn't remember anything else until he woke up and found them dead. He asks Garland to find out what he can. You can't say no to a friend. And Garland Tate--ex-rodeo cowboy, small rancher and sometime investigator is drawn into a generations-old story of forbidden love and terrible buried secrets and finds himself trapped in a web of raging, deadly revenge. Just the kind of stuff that makes a man wish he was better at saying no.