JANUS In Transit

“JANUS In Transit” is the sixth book in the series of “JANUS” detective adventures. In a previous incarnation, he was a detective working narcotics, which is about half a notch above being homeless. As a Narc, you don't have many friends and enemies are behind every door and his connection to the God of doors gave him no special license. Making a long sordid story short, some of his enemies wore badges like his, and when he blew the whistle on a partner taking payoff money from a mob boss the brass sided with his partner, and he was shoved into the gutter. Since then he's been a drunk, a drifter, and the guy on Powell Street holding the sign, “Will Work For Food.” With the help of a former policeman friend, Janus turned his life around and became a private detective. This latest tale takes him first to “Venice Beach” at the request of a hippy wingman from his past. A common friend is in trouble and Janus agrees to come to help. Bunny, an old love, is being harassed by a powerful newspaper columnist and grifter. He's got a group of racketeers hustling fabricated and illegally imported liquor and forcing her to sell the bad booze in her bar. Over the course of events, Janus is beaten up, boozed-up by gangsters, shot in the leg, mourns the death of his close friend who pays the price for helping Janus. He is able to unscramble the mess and frees Bunny to keep her bar free of pressure.

Janus comes close to death himself when he takes on a drug lord “Courting Mary Jane”. Janus is shanghaied and held captive by a drug pusher with delusions of grandeur. After he escapes he revisits the pusher and this stirs up a hornet's nest of bigger fish coming to the states from Mexico. The Mexican drug king is recruiting teenagers and getting them plugged into life on drugs. Janus hunts down the drug king but in the process, his partner Penny is killed during a night of a raucous, hyped-up drug orgy. Janus and the drug king fight and Janus kills him in a knock-down fight. Following that incident Janus descends into the depths of despair over the loss of Penny. For a month he returns to the scenes of his past life on the streets. In his drunken dispair he roams the streets with a gin bottle and coke dust in his beard. He is on the verge of killing himself with liquor and drugs when Gianni Mattioli who once had Janus on retainer rescues him and gets him rehabilitated. Janus finally sees a brighter future and settles in for whatever adventure might come his way.