Criss Cross

When the State of Michigan let Milo “Meat” Pitts out of prison, they opened the door on a world of trouble. Eight years locked in a center of higher criminal learning has given Meat the outline of a plan to deplete the city of Grand Rapids by $300,000 in armored-car receipts, in just twenty minutes of violence and daring. It’s the score of a lifetime, an urgent help-wanted situation, and Meat’s former cellmate, Ducky, signs on with a devotedness that almost makes up for his shaky reliability.
Meat also lets in a veteran planner to work out the complicated logistics and assemble the paperwork for an international escape. But this addition-the gentlemanly “Doc” Kasperson, who knows how to quaterback an armed car robbery but is a con man to his very bones-starts the possiblities of double and triple crosses silently multiplying in everyone’s mind.
What they need is an inside man, and Meat forces his sexually irrestible ex-wife, Starla Hudek, to find one. Her catch, and just possibly her savior, is one Mitchell Morse, a former Detroit cop with a lot of history, now working security for the chain stores the group plans to hit on Christmas Eve.
As time grows short, Morse raises the stakes to nearly $3 million, as Ducky’s bungled try for walking-around money puts them on the most-wanted list, as Kasperson readies his ultimate con, and with Meat and Morse planning to cancel each other out at the crime scene, each man counting on Starla to help him do it, the crossing loyalties erupt into a falling-out among theives like nothing you’ve ever read.