Former Broadway star Tommy Jump isn’t getting the roles he once did. As his final run as Sancho Ponza draws to a close, Tommy is getting ready to give up the stage, find a steady paycheck, and settle down with his fiancée.
Cue Special Agent Danny Ruiz. An old school friend of Tommy’s, now with the FBI, Ruiz makes Tommy an offer that sounds too good to refuse. All Tommy has to do is spend six months in prison, acting as failed bank robber ’Pete Goodrich’.
Inside, he must find and befriend Mitchell Dupree, who has hidden a secret cache of documents incriminating enough to take down New Colima, one of Mexico’s largest drug cartels. If Tommy can get Dupree and reveal where the documents are hidden, the FBI will give him $300,000, more than enough to jumpstart a new life. But does he have what it takes to pull off this one final role?
For at least the tenth time in the last twenty minutes, Amanda Porter looked at the clock that hung on the wall of the kitchen—which was also the living room, her studio, and the only room in this shabby, stifling, non- air- conditioned second- floor apartment that wasn’t a bedroom or a bathroom.
Five fifty- two. Were this an ordinary matinee, Tommy would have been back by now. He was obviously still saying his good- byes. The ceiling fan took another spin through the same hot air it had been futilely recycling all afternoon. She sighed, appraising the painting
she had been halfheartedly jabbing at, knowing she was too distracted to give it the kind of attention it demanded.Was this one headed for the trash? She tossed way more than she kept. For months now she had been sending photos of her completed work to Hudson van Buren, the proprietor of the Van Buren Gallery and one of the most influential voices in the business. He didn’t need
to see the bottom ninety- eight percent of her work. Only the top two, thank you very much.When people met Amanda Porter, they immediately underestimated her, because she had this cute southern twang; because she was five foot two, blue- eyed, and adorable, with her wavy strawberry- blond hair, her button nose, her freckles; because she was twenty-seven but could get carded buying a lottery ticket.
Those looks belied the fierceness with which she attacked her work. No one looked at her and thought scrappy, but that’s how she thought of herself. She was the scrappy girl who had made it from this little nowhere town in Mississippi to a scholarship at Cooper Union and now to the brink of artistic stardom by outworking everyone and refusing to compromise. She poured her drive for perfection into her art. It was excellence or nothing.
Life of Cri.me 